Product Launches

It certainly depends on the launch tier along with other market factors/customer dimensions, but typically I am looking at the data to inform next steps. Did we hit our product usage target? Is the narrative landing in sales calls (listening to gong recordings)? Is the pitch deck working (checking deal velocity in SFDC)? I am continually tweaking to ensure we are landing in a place of impact and not stagnation. Aside from this, the mission critical post-launch activity should be - the RETROSPECTIVE! Get your GTM teams together to chat about what you should "start, stop, continue" so you're even better next time. It's important to look in the rearview to inform where you're headed. 

I really like the story brand framework by Donald Miller. The narrative structure puts the customer as the hero of the story and your solution as the guide to their problem. The book also talks about picking a fight for your product with a focus on vilifying the issues your customers are having. This framework can be applied across stakeholders and performs very well from pitch decks to landing page copy. 

The first step is defining the customer journey and making sure your key functiona teams understand that journey. Then, recognizing that there may be stop gaps that need to be implemented to ensure customers can take advantage of the feature. What needs to happen on the delivery side of the house so CS and technical teams are enabled? How can we over communicate and document docs and materials for our teams and customers? What kinds of enablement efforts do we need to account for to make sure customers understand the benefits?

Welcome to the fun world of Enablement! And there are internal + external aspects of this. * External * Message x Value & benefits: What's in it for your users? Migration is a pain in the ass. Before you get to the logistics, you have to sell them on the why * Transition plan: What's the step-by-step guide? Is it one size fits all, or does it require different approaches for different types of users? These need to be documented and clearly laid out.  * Timing & cadence: Give your customers enough time to make the changes. I'll leave the communications format, channels, and cadence up to you (but this is never a one-and-done exercise). For example, don't expect one email to the entire database to yield good results or high customer satisfaction. * Internal * Is an Enablement team in place at your company? If so, great! Loop them in early on customer enablement plans and they'll be able to position that for your internal folks. If not... * Message x Value & benefits: Why is this change important to communicate and will it help your team sell more & better? Sell the change internally. * Transition plan: Leverage what's built for customers and share it widely internally so that every customer-facing team is aware. Roadshow it in team meetings, mention it at all hands, set up office hours to give your colleagues the opportunity to ask questions and poke holes. * Timing & cadenece: Keep internal teams updated on the customer comms plan. In B2B sales, give your CSM team the opportunity to send 1:1 messages while marking takes care of the 1:many.

Get positioning reps in early with your champion sellers. I like to create small collaborative pods with sales team members to test new positioning and messaging. I gather their feedback, weave their voice into my enablement materials - and then they train their team on the corresponding messaging so we GTM stronger and consistently.

The most important sales enablement activity that PMMs should being doing is meeting with the sales team regularly. Split it up into smaller groups that way you give everyone an opportunity to speak comfortably. Understand what's working, what's not, and where you should focus future enablement sessions or update materials based on feedback. In the enablement sessions (regardless of topic), it's important to frame it around your personas and messaging to help reinforce it.

Persona! If you're able to research your persona and develop their user cases, value drivers, motivations and goals - the rest (positioning, messaging and sales enablement) will follow. Customers are the ultimate aligner, prioritize actively listening to them, join insight sessions and fuel their voice within your programs.

When you are starting up a product marketing organization (even if it's an organization of one!), it's easy to get pulled in a lot of directions. It's hard to add the most value, though, without tackling the fundamentals: buyer personas, positioning and messaging, and understanding the buyer journey. The trick is to get this strategic work done in a way that it appears to be addressing your company's burning tactical needs.  Example: In Week 2 of one crazy job, I was tasked with building a sales kit for the financial services industry. The product's horizontal messaging was not very compelling. However, the financial services project gave me the opportunity to work with some of the most successful sellers, interview big customers, and get quick input from key company stakeholders. All of that work went into the horizontal product messaging work not long afterward. Some steps you could take to get started: 1. Engage with your sales team to learn about your buyers and buyer journeys. If you discover gaps in their sales tools, find 1-2 that you can fill quickly. 2. Offer to interview customers for case studies (and write them if no one else in the org is tasked with doing so). You'll get a lot of great messaging input and a valuable deliverable along the way. 3. Update web copy instead of writing messaging documents. Use the new copy to write the messaging documents later on.  4. Use your internal interactions to educate people about what PMM should and should not do, to guide future work. Good luck - I hope this sparks some inspiration!!

For me, the first focus would be understanding the buyer and building the personas; everything else will cascade from there. I'd start spending time with the sales to understand the deals we've won, what problems they were experiencing, why they needed a solution, and how we provided value. Work with the CS team to understand who the happy customers are and why they are still with us (how we continue to deliver value)--a bonus if you can work in a customer interview. Finally, work with the product to understand the product and how it solves the customer's problem.  From those interactions, you can start identifying trends to help you build out personas (you'll need other information sources). Once personas are created, you can take that info to influence the Messaging/Positioning and update content as needed. Finally, take the personas and messaging and use them for training your sales team.

The first priority is to reach out and engage those stakeholders. Let them know you're there and here to help. Discover what their immediate and medium terms goals are and the challenges they're having in achieving them. If you can help, commit to making their life easier and stick to your word. People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. So show them by helping them first.

Getting everyone on board after you're done is a lot harder if they haven't been involved from the start. Give the GTM plan an iterative process treatment. Start with a rough draft and shop it around. Get people to buy in on it. Ask for feedback and ask questions so they feel involved. Make suggested changes if it makes sense—and if it doesn't, work to reach a consensus.  Once you've gone through a couple of rounds with the primary stakeholders, the GTM plan should be fairly polished. Everyone will believe they had a hand in it and it's easier to work out minor kinks before implementation. 

This question is essentially "how to lead effectively without authority" - or in other words, how to lead your peers and others who aren't necessarily in your organization and/or who don't report to you directly.  Start early - before you plan on rolling out your new launch approach.  Talk with leaders and get their buy-in and then set up recurring meetings with different stakeholders on the Marketing teams, and come prepared to present your plans as well as to ask questions that spark contributions & brainstorming. Share the goals of your new strategy in advance so that stakeholders can come prepared with notes they might have on the different subjects and so forth. And then, for each actual launch also make sure to prepare teams in advance and get their opinions about the strategy you've built.  Remember these points:  * Develop long-term relationships and maintain regular and continuous communications with all stakeholders. * Do the same with senior leadership across the organization. * Know the team leads; know their challenges; know their plans and programs. * Remember that they have more than just product launch on their plates - make sure you're there to help them with their other projects so far as you can. * Communicate early and frequently for every planned launch.

I know this isn't tactical, but I would make sure to include them in the product launch kick off meeting (which happens ever before you have your entire plan built) because it helps them understand WHY you are launching what you are launching and enables them to feel part of the journey - part of the team - that will make this launch a success. Because ultimately, it is a team that makes launches happen. It can't be done alone. I know this isn't a tactic (quite yet) but I mention this step because it will help you get buy-in so you don't have to 'convince' anyone in marketing to launch this. They will be excited about the opportunity and feel empowered to share their POV on what acitivities/content they can create to support the launch (respsective to their function. So demand gen team comes up with their strategy and shares it with you to discuss, same ad content etc). Tactics -Set goals for the launch tied to quantitatve KPIs that impact the entire business and every function -Create a gantt chart (or Asana board) to track the key milestones (and every deliverable / to-do) of the launch -Schedule your weekly/biweekly meeting cadence -Hold each member accountable to getting their work done. And make sure you've empowered them to 'own' their workstream for the launch so they feel (and are) bought in.  -Celebrate their success! And celebrate little wins along the way. Make the launch process fun - and make sure to give credit to your teammates (at the exec and peer level) along the way. 

You need to get buy-in to the GTM strategy before you build it that includes: * involving the team in the strategy development process, as this can increase their ownership and commitment to the GTM plan * providing clear goals and objectives to ensure that everyone is working towards the same goals for the launch  Involving stakeholders early on can help to ensure that the GTM strategy aligns with the overall goals and objectives of the company and that it takes into account the needs and perspectives of all relevant parties. Once you have developed a go-to-market strategy, it is important to effectively communicate it to the marketing team the process of GTM execution via go-to-market project management, kick-off meetings, alignment docs (project briefs), etc.

Here are a few considerations and actions you can take to build support across the team: 1. Tie your launch goals to the greater Marketing team goals. It’s important to connect the dots on how your launch can help your marketing teammates accomplish their goals as well. For major initiatives, make sure your marketing leadership team is bought in and understand the potential impact. You have to PMM your product internally first :) 2. Make folks feel like thought partners. I love holding brainstorm sessions and pre-kick offs with content and channel owners. Not only does this get them bought in, but you get a bunch of creative ideas out of it. People are much more compelled to execute a plan if they've been brought in throughout the process.  3. Be organized and make folks feel recognized. As PMMs we often quarterback huge multi-channel launches, but we rely on others to execute much of the plan. Come to your kick off prepared with a clear GTM strategy, workback schedule, and customer journey & bill of materials (that you’ve already co-created with folks ahead of the meeting!). Create a great culture around launches, and folks will be more excited to work with you in the future.

Get buy in EARLY, and share "excitement" around WHY the strategy was decided on and the potential value/opportunity it brings for the company and that specific marketing team! Once I have my messaging, positioning, and overall vision, I like doing a "kickoff call" with the marketing team to go through the "Why, What, and How"--I find that explaining how each person plays a critical role in the success of the strategy is key to getting buy in. When I deliver a market strategy to the marketing team, I think about it through the lens of "What's In It For Me" (WIIFM)--speak their language and personalize the market strategy to what they care about and how it will improve their area of marketing. For example, if you are working with the Demand Gen team, how is this new market strategy going to improve their MQLs? For the content team, what might be some topics they can think about writing for related to this new strategy? And to continue driving success of the market strategy, I follow these steps: 1. Listen--reguarly check in with your marketing team. What do they feel like is working/what working? Set up regular check ins! I really enjoy using Slido as a way to collect feedback live during a meeting and even after. The questions in Slido can be upvoted and asked anonymously, so it's a great way to do effective and productive Q&A. 2. Stay organized--I use Asana to keep track of what initiatives are being done to support the market strategy and results. If you are looking to do a GTM plan, you can get more tactical for roles and responsibilties.  3. Course correct as needed--determine goals and KPIs up front (that are realistic and achievable), and make adjustments as needed. Do you need to add campaigns, or a webinar? Does messaging need to be tweaked? Do you need to find a customer story? For me, win rates is a massive focus for Product Marketing, so I keep a Salesforce dashboard that looks at win rates by sales teams, regions, and verticals. 4. Share wins--what new logos have been obtained as a result of the market strategy? What are website visitors looking like? How is the industry responding? I like doing QBRs focused on what market strategy, as well as sharing weekly/monthly wins in our Marketing All Hands Meeting related to that market strategy. I also like to share Gong calls to marketing and sales team for where that market strategy is working well.  Using a consistent and standiardized process and templates can really help teams stay streamlined, focused, and empowered to all move to the beat of the same drum!

I typically back up departmental asks with customer sentiment (qual) and data (quant). This makes it easier to rally team members around our why and cultivate influence towards a new GTM initiative. For example, recently we decided to issue a new survey that required cross-functional and leadership support. We created a charter for the initiative and documented why the program was necessary, then built a RACI (responsible, accountable, consulted, informed) to clearly outline responsibilities among stakeholders. The RACI framework helped to build trust, buy-in and accountability across teams while the charter rallied the group around one clear north star.

I've found in my career that when I create the strategy on my own, it's much harder to convince everyone else to buy into it. However, suppose I include those other marketing teams much earlier in the strategy, getting their input and setting goals/strategy/plans together. In that case, they're much more vested in the plan's success, and it takes little convincing.  In the absence of being able to do that, the next best option is to understand the goals of everyone else on the marketing team and how your market strategy helps them achieve their goals. When other people can picture executing your strategy and achieving their team's goals, it's easier to "convince" them. 

These are typically small launches with functionality that maintains market position, parity, and performance. Communication channels should include but are not limited to: internal - slack announcement with positioning brief, external - cs/sales outreach template, targeted email announcement, newsletter, help docs update.  For small piel updates, you can think of these as your soft/quiet launches that don’t require broad messaging/awareness. (Pixel changes). Communicaiton channels should include but are not limited to: internal - slack announcement with positioning brief, cs outreach comm if relevant, help doc update.

I've partnered with PM to assign a launch level to a release based on a grade (is it new/innovative, is it going to match the market, impact to customers, impact to the market, etc.). If something doesn't fall into the launch level threshold, it's an opportunity to release it, collect data, and see if it makes sense to package the feature announcement with future releases to help tell a bigger story.

I've been hiring entry-level (and higher) PMMs for 8 years, and beyond the typical things that are in the job description, here are the differentiators that separate the great candidates from the so-so candidates: * Comfort with ambiguity: The problems we deal with in product marketing are inherently ambiguous. There's no "right" answer, but there are answers that are "better" than others. If you're looking for a role that has step-by-step instructions or a checklist, PMM is not your job. * Have a point of view: Your job as a marketer is to articulate a story. You can't articulate a story if you don't have a point of view. * Demonstrate Impact and Influence regardless of your role in the organization: Ultimately marketing is a persuasive endeavor. We may not have authority over our audience but we still must influence them. This goes for internal and external stakeholders: Can you influence a product team to make certain roadmap decisions, even though you are not their boss? Can you influence sales enablement? Can you influence customers? Fortunately, these skills are transferable: Even if you are an entry-level product marketing candidate, you can still provide examples to show you have these attributes.

As a PMM leader, I am looking for the product marketer who has the following skills - curiosity, open and empathy.  Yes, disciplines and your signature skill in PMM - from positioning to launch to enablement are key, but having empathy for your customer, your team and yourself is critical to be a rockstar PMM. Sharing my experiences with PMM career path and job search https://divmanickam.substack.com/p/pmm-pm-career-path

Exciting that you're considering product marketing as a career! One good thing: you’re not competing with 100 graduates from Product Marketing University because no such school exists. I have seen successful transitions to product marketing from product management, sales engineering, consulting, corporate marketing, consumer brand management, and customer success. I have also seen people come straight from an MBA program. (occasionally directly from an undergraduate program, but IMHO it's better to gain experience in another discipline first.) Qualities I look for:  * An interest and ability to understand the product you’re marketing. You don’t have to know how to code it; you don’t always have to be able to use every capability; but you have to be able to demo it and deeply understand the problems it addresses. * Empathy, especially when it comes to being able to look at the world through a customer’s eyes. Product marketers also need to have empathy for their sales teams, development teams, and the rest of the marketing organization. * Strong communication skills, both written and verbal. No matter how big the organization is, product marketers are constantly having to win over customers and internal stakeholders, verbally and in writing. And they’re constantly having to align their stakeholders on competing priorities. * Perseverance: Success in product marketing depends on the success of others in the organization—sales, demand gen teams, product management, and engineering. You’re often fighting some strong headwinds. * Critical thinking: Product marketing has to be able to turn “what” into “so what.” It can be like solving a 3D puzzle with 10 people handing you pieces from different sections in random order.

So happy you found product marketing and it interests you! I actually wrote about this topic years ago: https://medium.com/projectproduct/10-skills-traits-youll-find-in-exceptional-product-marketers-12fccfd35e2a Now, today, I can narrow it down to just a few traits I look for as I find these skills very difficult to teach/train in the workplace. I can help and teach those early in their careers how to overcome public speaking fears, how to price and package a SaaS product, or how to go about competitive research, but I find these 3 traits difficult to teach: 1. Curiosity: If you're not a person who is curious, product marketing is not for you. A willingness to research, dive deep, and ask questions is critical. 2. Solid writer: Product marketing is all about communicating the value of what you're selling. If you cannot clearly articulate your message and the value, a career in PMM will be tough. And you might work at places where there are no other strong writers to lean on, so being able to clearly write is a key skill.  3. Project management: As with many professions, there is plenty to juggle and competing priorities. And a core responsibility for a PMM is launching products, which can be large, complicated projects with many stakeholders. All this requires the ability to manage projects, stay on top of deadlines, and remain organized. Hope this helps!

There are probably three major questions to answer when operationalizing a GTM plan: What is the governance? Meaning who is in charge? What is the division of labor? Who holds what decision rights (e.g., decide, influence, escalate)? When do you scale? There are two broad options: launch-and-learn or test-and-scale. In a launch-and-learn model, scaling happens first as the commercialization comes online across the enterprise at once. Learning then occurs after rollout and across the enterprise. This type of GTM implementation makes sense in a low-risk, high-resilience situation. In a test-and-scale model, the innovations come online in pockets and pilots. Pilot learnings inspire changes to the plan, and the finalized plan is rolled out in waves. The test-and-scale model makes sense for implementing a commercialization strategy when external and internal resilience is low. It also makes sense when resilience is high but risk is also high. And, last you need a framework. In either scaling framework, what is the cadence of activities over the course of the implementation? I've used a 4-step process successfully: 1) Act on the plan 2) Measure the actions’ results 3) Share and discuss the results 4) Adjust the plan

One of the biggest risks of operationalizing a GTM plan is the lack of a common understanding of the time it takes to do good marketing work, internally. Marketing shouldn't slow down product; but at the same time, the more time and advance notice marketing has, the more we're able to enrich, adapt, and customize a GTM plan appropriately. A GTM playbook is a best-case scenario and a guideline which has to be adapted rapidly and practically to the lead time available. The marketing team for WordPress.com is relatively new (around 5 years old for a product almost 15 years old), and speed is very important to product development and serving millions of existing customers. Our engineering teams are pushing to production several times or even dozens of times a day, and so we have to work together to make sure we give sufficient time to amplify the great work they're doing with existing and prospective customers. Ideally we're involved as soon as it's known the product team is preparing a feature or change for launch, so we can identify the channels, messaging, and timing needed to market the work as soon as it's ready to ship to production. We don't use formal documents like a market requirements document, but I've documented and communicated top elements of that process the engineering team should be thinking about when they're preparing a feature for development, and it's an exercise they can go through at kickoff instead of when the feature is ready to test or launch. We can partner with them to identify any gaps, or help answer those questions, and then come up with a realistic GTM strategy with the time available.  Here's an excerpt of the exercise I shared internally: We’re building a feature or product to solve a problem or do a job for customers, and then tell as many of the right customers as possible that we’ve solved it for them. - What product or feature is being developed? Focus on user perception and usage – features, needs, usability, methods of usage. How does it apply to customers of the entire family of Automattic products? - Who are the target customers? What user behavior, demographics, or other attributes do they have? How might they be different? Does this apply to current or prospective customers, or both? A subset of customers? - Why are customers likely to want this product/feature? (aka: what problem does this solve for the user? Why would they ‘hire’ it to do a job?) - When will the product be available? How much detail can you share about the timing? Can you include any ballpark dates or checkpoint dates which could be helpful for those involved to know about? - Any pricing-related information? Is the feature being added to a plan? Does it replace a paid feature, lower a plan price, or change the potential revenue from a sign-up?

I'll answer this from the aspect of a GTM plan for pricing and packaging changes. The top 3 areas to identify and mitigate risk around include: 1) RISK: Did you get the Price/Packaging right?   * Does the price and what's included in the packaging resonate with the buyer?  * Is the price point in the ball park of what the customer is looking for and relative to alternative solutions? MITIGATION PLAN: Get input from customers, prospects, analysts and advisors in advance of the change and GTM roll-out. 2) RISK: Are your revenue teams (sales, CS, renewals, etc.) properly enabled? MITIGATION PLAN: Make sure that you have all the mesasging, positioning and sales tools ready for the teams. Ensure that you have enablement/training time setup with all the teams. Certify them on the new packaging/pitch/pricing. Makes sure they are ready for objection handling and questions from customers and prospects. 3) RISK: Impact to existing customers (vs. net new) MITIGATION: Map all of your existing customers to new packaging and understand difference in existing pricing and new pricing. Ensure that you have a plan for the timing of when existing customers will go to the new packaging? Will they transition immediately, or wait for renewals? Will you let existing customers grandfather on the old packaging and/or pricing? Are there contractual limitations on what you can change?

Great question. There could be many reasons why a GTM plan is deemed risky. Perhaps because a lot is hinging on a product launch, or a risky marketing campaign and the riskiest of all - you as a PMM are not completely on board with the product. (The later should not happen but it has happened to many us, I assume) IMO, the key is to  1. Over-communicate: Define a DRI, make sure every stakeholder is involved, follow a decision-making model such as the one I mentioned above (RACI model).  2. Plan plan plan: Have a mitigation plan B ready if your original plan fails, or perhaps even a Plan C if Plan B fails. For a recent launch campaign we did on Indiegogo, we had Plan Bs for every major marketing activity. 

1. Making assumptions about pricing and not vetting them with sales VERY early in the process 2. Assuming that its a 'handoff' to sales enablement vs in reality its an ongoing partnership where PMM needs to lean in quite a bit to help 3. Not factoring in global requirements VERY early on and discovering late in the game that its not just a 'localization' issue that will handled by the 'local' teams 4. Not factoring in migration or EOL requirements and just focusing on the new, shiny products. Customers have more heartburn about migrations than marketers account for. Be ready for that, and factor that heavily into operationalization

This is a great question because, as every PMM knows, each launch holds a surprise hiccup. If you can mitigate as much risk as possible before that time comes, then you’ll be successful in solving those last minute snafus. Assuming your marketing brief and GTM plan are finalized and approved, a successful GTM execution comes down to organization, stakeholder alignment and (the hardest one!) seeing around corners. Here are the riskiest components in each of those categories and how to mitigate that risk: 1. Lack of organization: * Misaligned plans * Losing track of documents and creative files * Overly tight timelines * Rehashing previous conversations How to mitigate: Keep a source of truth document (or spreadsheet, my personal favorite) where you track every single launch component, including status and timeline, meeting notes, resources, channel plans and assets, launch day tick tock and more. 2. Missing stakeholder alignment: * Vague R&R * Lack of resourcing * Unclear expectation-setting How to mitigate: Bring your cross-functional and marketing partners along for the journey by pulling them in at key strategic milestones when you’re creating your plan, then holding regular status meetings up until launch through to a post-mortem. 3. Not seeing around corners: * Lack of familiarity with the deployment tech * Broken user journeys * 11th hour feedback How to mitigate: This one tends to be company-specific, so ask your colleagues about unexpected day-of discoveries on previous launches and then prepare for those specific scenarios. Also, it never hurts to build a buffer into your timeline and have an extra set of eyes on the creative before it goes out the door.

Operationalizing a go-to-market strategy is not for the faint of heart. There’s a lot that happens between writing the doc (see narrative above) or slides and executing the strategy in the market. Here’s my list of the riskiest elements and how I solve for them. First, team alignment. In my experience, aligning the team is the trickiest element because the amount of stakeholder voices expands seemingly exponentially the closer you are to launching your GTM activities. This is just as true for the early stage pre-product market fit startup as it is for the hyper-growth, more mature company. My solution for this is constant cascading communications. The job of the Product Marketer is often to ensure that everyone is rowing in the same direction, so make sure that you are communicating often and bringing people into the process early.  Like the above question about GTM plan fundamentals, I find that writing out the GTM plan in narrative form is extremely helpful, both for clarity of thought and as a handbook for new people joining the GTM process. I also find that consistent adoption of OKRs is a great way to help ensure the alignment of activities. Like many companies, we use OKRs at GitLab as a way to align our team activities with the company strategy and with each other. The process of creating, debating, calling out dependencies, and tracking progress is, itself, a way to create clarity on both what we are trying to achieve in our GTM strategy, how we will accomplish it, and who will take ownership of which roles and responsibilities. Second, data data data. A key success factor is ensuring that everyone on the go-to-market team (marketing, sales, customer success…everyone) is using the same data, is following the same KPIs, and is looking at the same dashboards.  Third, the market is not a constant – just as you are evolving and operationalizing your GTM, so are your competitors. It’s like when you look at a star in the sky, you are really seeing the light that emanated in the past. So too is the case with your GTM plan that was based on where your competition was at a previous point in time. My solution: tight feedback loops throughout the GTM team. This is an area that small companies have an advantage - since their teams are small, they can more easily have all the people in the room or zoom giving feedback on every aspect of the GTM process. While easier in a small company, tight feedback loops can work at scale if they are engineered into the process. I once rolled out a new positioning strategy in the market and learned that it was ineffective (see metrics answer above). While it was a bummer that the original positioning wasn’t effective, I was proud of the team for developing this insight quickly, rapidly rolling it back, and then iterating based on what we learned.

Almost every launch has something unexpected arise not matter how much you plan. To me, the riskiest items are the ones that might be harder to change or adjust post-launch. 1. Making sure there is product market fit is make or break. By that I mean, the buyer you've identified has a clear pain point and the product that was build addresses that pain point. I've seen launches across different companies struggle because a product was built before fully understanding the buyer need. 2. Lack of alignment on decision makers can derail a launch plan. If decisions makers and decisions that have been made aren't clearly communicated, you could accidentally move forward with the wrong GTM plan without even knowing. I've used the RACI matrix structure to define rolls as well as RAPID. It's not a very sexy topic, but can be highly effective. 3. Pricing is another risky item. If you don't properly research and test your pricing, your product could be underpriced (losing you money), overpriced (causing adoption issues), or could even have the wrong pricing model. 

The biggest risk I typically see in GTM strategies is that it doesnt work. Somewhere, something was missed, or the messaging, product, etc. doesnt resonate with prospects and customers. ' I have found that your webiste is a great place to experiment to ensure this doesnt happen. It has historical data to anaylze various aspects of your GTM strategy including verticals, personas, messaging, sales motions, customer marketing, etc. Training the org is another big risk. If there is a new revenue-driving feature that CS/CSMs/SEs dont know how to technically talk about or sell, that new feature will fall flat.

The most risky operationalizations in a GTM strategy to me are spray and pray (homogenous) campaigns, broad (not segmented nor sophisticated/suppressed, not segmented (targeted) and not timely (saturated). Basically, if you are not intentional with your outreach that is a huge risk and you'll end up as noise, spam, or worse - blacklisted (and that is a huge risk).

I don't actually use market research for that, is the short answer. If we believe that our solution is well suited for a particular vertical, we have the budget to invest in GTM to capture business in this vertical, and the vertical is fragmented / doesn't have a real clear winner, we will go for it.  Additionally, you should look at your own customer data and overlay it with your product. For example, if Square is has developed a number of features that are suited for Restaurants, we will prioritize this vertical. If after a couple of months we are not well penetrated here, we have a problem. 

There are a few questions you need to answer to determine if it's worth targeting this new vertical: - Do you have product-market fit? Are you solving a real problem for this vertical? - What is the size of the market opportunity for this vertical? How will it grow over time? (their industry growth and your product growth) How does it compare to markets you are doing well in? - How similar is the vertical to existing verticals where you have success? Would you have to do much to change your value proposition or messaging? - Are there known competitors targeting this vertical? How do you compare? If you know you have product-market fit, the next step is to identify the size of the opportunity in the potential verticals. Use research reports to find the size of the industry you are targeting, and it's CAGR compared to other industries. You also may find spending reports to know how much they are already spending or are predicted to spend in the coming years on a technology similar to yours - IT, advertising, etc. The information is out there. Another method is more of a "bottoms up" approach where you would determine the characteristics of the companies you are targeting (industry, employees, size of the marketing team, etc), and determine how many companies could be in your target market.

Ensure verticalization aligns well with core competencies, market perception, ability to deliver and differentiation. If you do not clearly understand the definition of the target vertical, the trends in that vertical’s consumer or enterprise user market as well as the size of the opportunity, it will cause internal and ultimately market confusion that hinders speed and success. Assuming that you've determined this is an attractive vertical to pursue, here is a list to consider at the onset of prioritizing verticals and viability of entrance:  - Current capabilities (such as how capable you to serve industry clients). - The resources you have to invest (such as skills, channels, ecosystem partners). - Market objectives (“to achieve X% market share,” for example, or “to be in the top three” in a given market). - The type of offering(s) (whether they are fundamentally “horizontal” in nature or developed from the outset for a specific industry process or issue). - Position in an ecosystem (owning and driving one or contributing; optimize or transform)). - Existing position in the industry (route to market, current client expansion, competitor dynamics, industry connections and relationships, including influencers, etc.).

When looking to identify target verticals, I always prefer a data driven approach. I'd work up a detailed analysis exercise and build a vertical based TAM. I have a go-to bubble chart that I like to develop which is based on the growth rate of each (CAGR, y axis) vs the revenue opportunity (x axis). It gives you an easy visual that shows where the optimal use cases/verticals will be - up and to the right.  Here are some other questions you can ask to focus your efforts: 1. Do we know how much revenue opportunity is out there in the key verticals? 2. What are the top five verticals based on revenue opportunity? 3. What does our customer concentration look like across verticals? 4. Do we have any strong differentiating features in certain verticals? If yes, which ones?

Market research is a pretty valuable data point in terms of prioritizing verticals (or any other segmentation slice), but so too is your product ownership point of view and your internal usage data. So you don't need to lean on external research, but it can certainly augment your other efforts. I think there's value in looking at 1p, 2p and 3p input sources in coordination with each other. Where we have used external research towards our segmentation processes is when we do message testing measured across different user groups and then review any consideration or preference gains we see across those persona types such that we can forecast where we may see impact and how we should talk to that specific group. In this style test, we're building a messaging hypothesis and then using it as a constant and the persona type as the variable, so that we could see impact to the segment. Depending on how you set up your study, you can also introduce nuances in your messaging to work through as well. You can also look at interest across verticals and map that back to your product differentiation to target industries where you have the best PMF.

Instead of a "vertical focus" go forward with a New Audience focus so you can leverage the 5A GTM framework , and ensure you're thinking through a consumers' need.  Also, if you focus on a new user, you can also employ the "Job to be done" framework, which can help narrow what the customer really wants to get done and how your product can satiate that need. After you establish those jobs (UXR) you can use market research and even analytics to scale out the size of these jobs and what could bring in the most users. Always put people first.  Market research, user research and analytics (data trends) are you sweet trio of fantastic insights that can help you figure out the new Audiences to expand your product.

Making the assumption here that vertical = industry. 1. Industry definition - which taxonomy are you using. NAICS, SIC, propietary, DUNS, Clearbit? This is important because there is a lot of nuance hidden in sub-verticals, so getting your language aligned is key 2. TAM - what is the actual addressable market for your product or portfolio or launch? This can be based on historical win rates by industry/sub industry for an existing product, or can be based on focus groups/survey data of your prospect base (how likely are you to buy X) 3. Product market fit - what are the core use cases for each vertical that you're thinking about? Can you actually satisfy them? How complex is the buyer? Is the cost to serve higher than the actual revenue you can make (bad margins)? You can figure this out again by looking at competitors (the good ones will showcase what matters via their websites), looking at analyst reports and again first-had research

I believe that market insights are the #1 core product marketing capability. Literally everything – from positioning and messaging to the products and capabilities you deliver to the market – flows from insights that you generate via smart, well-run market research. I’ve worked on dozens of products at every stage of maturity and, while most of these can be applied horizontally across several industries, it has been helpful to leverage market research to identify which verticals to target and how to tailor my positioning strategy. This type of insight has been beneficial as I move a product beyond early adopters and traverse the dangerous chasm to an early majority audience. Of course, market research can come in many forms. In my early days as a marketer, I leaned on traditional in-person focus groups (the ones with the double-paned glasses and the unlimited jelly beans for clients) for depth of insight and quantitative survey-based research to validate insights at scale. More recently, I’ve looked to other research techniques to help fine-tune my vertical strategy. One area to look at is your sales data to answer specific questions related to verticals. Are you seeing accentuated adoption, a faster deal cycle, and improved win rates in specific verticals? I also prioritize talking to my sales teammates to get deeper and richer insights. One cautionary note: make sure you are supplementing existing customer information with prospective customer insights. After all, if you only look at your existing customer base, you’re looking in the rearview mirror.  Another market research area to inform verticalization and all of GTM is the competitive landscape. Are you seeing competitors gravitate to a specific set of verticals? Or are they listing out verticals on their website, but the messaging is pretty much the same. (I call this fake verticalization). I also look at characteristics of the vertical, such as TAM or macro economic indicators of vertical health and appeal for the product. For example, at the outset of the pandemic, it was clear that certain industries such as Internet infrastructure were seeing a boom in adoption and other industries had the bottom fall out. In short, I make it a point to ensure that if I’m targeting a vertical, the addressable market is sizable enough and the vertical is poised to purchase. The end result of these market insights doesn’t just help me with a vertical strategy; it helps me formulate the Ideal Customer Profile and sets in motion a set of coordinated actions across the go-to-market and product organizations.

Market research is near and dear to my heart and at the core of any strong product and go-to-market plan. I have many examples of how you can use research to inform vertical strategy, but my first tip is to just get started. If you are on a small but mighty PMM team (or perhaps you're the only PMM), any data is better than none.   Verticals might mean prioritizing based on industry, company size, persona (or often a combination). I recommend trying to define what an early adopter looks like in your industry and prioritizing them early. My experience is primarily in B2B, but much of this can be generalized.  Market research - Review trends in your industry, new legislation that may drive new consumer/buyer behaviors, join all the relevant newsletters etc. Industry - Often times certain industries have more of an urgent need for your product than others, I've utilized tons of third party reports put our by industry groups to understand broadly which industries to do a deeper dive into. Consumer groups or industry groups are great and they host events, conferences, and trade-shows. engagement with certain industries in the past and if so, how did they convert?  Customer - To get insights on customers I've run focus groups, hosted 1:1 research calls, conducted surveys and worked with customer advocacy marketing teams to get feedback from customer councils. You can also take a look at your CRM system to mine for data based on past customer activities, feedback, and purchasing decisions. And of course, if all else fails (or is not an option) you can talk to your customer success team members, who talk to customers every day.  Prospects - Yes, users/buyers who have not purchased with you before may have a different perspective than your current customers, so it's important to understand their perspective. Joining sales calls, attending tradeshow/conferences, and trying to talk to as many prospects is important. If you have a tool like Gong, this is gold for learning about prospect needs and interest.  Competitive - Check out what your competitors are focused on from a vertical perspective. You can often tell based on their messaging, case studies, ads, landing pages, and content they are producing. Depending on your strategy (and the other data you collect), you may want to go after a different segment or choose to compete.  Once you've collected all your research, you need to synthesize it. One way to do this is to create a score-card and then prioritize each potential verticals into tiers based on most attractive to least attractive.

When we first started to verticalize our solution, we looked at: * TAM (total addressable market) and SAM (sellable addressable market--what is realistic that YOUR company can sell in to?) * CARR * Win Rate * Average Deal Size (ADS) * Sales Cycle (# of days) * Number of Curent Customers This gave us a good idea for where we were already winning and where we had the biggest opportunity. We have also been monitoring industries with high "digital maturity" based on reports from McKinsey and other analysts which has been helpful in planning for the next 3 years. We have since refined our strategy and doubled down on key verticals for the next year by looking at: * Pipeline (where do we have the most opportunity coming from?) * Product Gap Analysis - what are key product gaps that are leading to lost deals by vertical? And what is the low hanging fruit and level of effort to close some of those gaps * In addition to Total ARR and ADS This has led us to a 2023 plan to win in verticals based on these 3 things: *  SUCCESS: lean into what is already working (i.e. high ADS and win rates) and maintain success *  ALIGNMENT: with product vision and brand positioning (multi-channel, depth and scale of data, orchestrated journeys, content and automation needs) *  VELOCITY: lower win rates but higher (potential) speed to “success” by focusing on higher ADS verticals due to multiple channels, higher data fees, and need for premium features + higher opportunity (TAM)

We aim to diversify our revenue strategy with dynamic and compelling GTM campaigns. We use market research from internal and external sources to fuel decisions. Internal market research comes from our harvesting our own customer data to identify areas of penetration and greenfield. We couple these insights with analyst insights to invest in programming. When entering a new market, we test small segments and iterate our way to what good looks like (pricing, packaging, positioning).