What are the different teams that come together for product launches at your company? as a % significance through the launches, how important is sales/field enablement?

Question

Mary (Shirley) Sheehan · Accepted Answer

At Adobe, it's been a pleasure so far to work with many cross-functional teams for a product launch. For my team, Adobe Advertising Cloud, which is on the B2B side, we work with the following teams:

- Product / eng

- Program management (which is the organizational arm and keeps eng timelines on track and helps with logistics)

- UI design

- Sales / AM teams

- Business Development

- Sales ops

- Broader Adobe B2B marketing team

For B2B, sales and field enablement is a major channel for us, so we put significant resources for this.

Polomi Batra · Answer

Oh, it takes a village to go to market with a new product launch! At Zendesk, there are many teams invovled in product launches with Product Marketing quarterbacking the entire effort. Here's a breakdown of the teams PMM works with at Zendesk for product launches:

1. Product: Product Managers, Product Strategy & Ops/Product Data team, Engineering, Advocacy, Pricing
 2. Core marketing: Campaigns & Events, Field / Regional, Customer Lifecycle Marketing, Web & SEO, SEM/Ads team, PR/AR/Comms, Social, Content, Brand, customer marketing
 3. GTM: Enablement, Sales, Pre-sales, Post-sales (e.g. CS), Partners, Premier Services

For the second part of the question - Sales enablement is extremely crucial for B2B product marketing launches because the sales team is the primary method for selling in B2B businesses. It's important for them to understand the product, articulate it's value, demo it and be able to defend it confidently with prospects and customers. I consider Sales to be just an important of a customer for product marketers as a prospect, or existing customer might be.

John Hurley · Answer

I think less about which teams since each organization is different, and more about the functional workstreams and then mapping people to workstreams. I also recommended some models like DACI and RACI.

* Positioning / Messaging
 * Business Case / Modeling
 * Campaigns
 * Field & Events
 * Content
 * Growth Channels
 * Comms / PR
 * AR
 * Brand
 * Web
 * Enablement
 * Packaging & Pricing
 * Customer Success (Services, Support, Education)
 * Partners
 * Customer Marketing
 * Technical Marketing (Enablement, Content)

Enablement scope really depends on your organization! If youre more product-led / bottoms-up, less important even for large launches. If sales-led, critical since that is your #1 channel and internal customer.

Aurelia Solomon · Answer

It's important to get cross-functional representation for every product launch. As product marketer, you lead the launch, and there will be more marketers on your team than other departments because they do most of the promotion (web, creative, content etc).

But for the rest, I like to get a DRI from every department: Sales, Marketing, Legal, Support, CS, Services, Operations, Enablement, Product, Eng, and Pricing & packaging (if they don't sit in PMM). It's also critical to share updates with your leadership team/c-suite on some regular cadence.

I think it's important to include sales and enablement as a DRI in your launch plan so that they know what is coming and can feel part of it. But it's also important that they don't discuss things too early with their teams so that sales doesn't get distracted. I like to kick off every product launch with a 'kick off' meeting where I outline the roles & responsibilities of being on this launch team. I ask every member to commit to them or assign a DRI from their team instead.

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