Fiona Finn

Depending on the outcomes desired (360* view of competition, product knowledge, pricing, positioning, etc.) there are a lot of different way to stay on top of a lot of different data points. In addition to using Google/ RSS Alerts:

1. Integrate as much intel into your current processes as possible
- If your customers have to provide a cancellation notice, set a default checkbox to select if leaving to a competitor, and provide a text box to elaborate
- Track migrations or transitions from another product to yours during onboarding and offboarding
- Set keyword trackers on sales calls if using a tool like gong.io
- Track NPS comments that mention other tools or apps
- Set up alerts for reviews of other apps and sync to a Slack channel
The majority of the above can be synced to Slack channels using a variety of integrations to compliment that “set and forget” component of staying on top of things, and provide a lot of both qualitative and quantitative data.

2. Become a customer
- Gain access/ licences to your competitors apps to know when updates/ changes are made
- Get into their funnel; sign up for a trial, sign up to their newsletter
- Demo their product; learn about their product from their Sales team

3. Use people
- Survey your customers
- Conduct win/loss analysis
- Talk to your Sales team

I haven’t tried using tools, but have heard good things about klue.com

Not all relating directly to PMM's role in a release, but should always be on your radar:

Assigning clear ownership of metrics to move and stakeholders of activities/ business areas as early as possible. A key DRI (direct responsible individual; whether PMM, VP, GM or other) is integral to successfully bringing cross-functional teams together, with a PMO a great aid in maintaining visibility and keeping things on track. (This can also fall to the DRI.)

Test, track, tweak. Experience is a great thing when doing launches, but whether you’re first to market or taking on a market leader, establishing your product/market fit, unique or resonating value props, customer advocates, and competitive advantages all need tracking, testing and tweaking.

Be mindful of internal readiness as far in advance as possible. Support, sales, customer success, internal operations, and more—if teams are not set up for success for inbound interest at launch, your road to revenue (and customer retention) is going to be a long one.

General priorities should align with business goals, whether:
- Driving revenue
- Increasing market share
- Establishing brand equity
- Successfully bringing an MVP to market to test product/market fit

Priorities should be clear before a GTM is created.

As lawyers, you can imagine that our customers value referral and peer marketing as one of most genuine forms of selling and messaging. We're recently seeing the rewards of investing in solid customer narratives and segmentation of our customer base—and are learning more the entire time. https://www.clio.com/customers/ 

Side note: This content can be repurposed for a lot of different initiatives. 

• Sales use stories to validate adoption of the product by similar sized/ niche customers and as engagement tools
• Marketing uses videos for landing pages, Facebook (targeted) and YouTube ads, and more  
• PMM uses the b roll as fillers in product videos 
• PMM uses these videos in co-marketing intitiatives, in product advocates engagement and more.

We're starting to test more people v. product images and videos in the rest of our content, so investing in your customers and creating that content can have a lot of value! Far from perfect, but we're iterating on it all the time. 

Timeliness and accessiblity are also key to providing value to your team. 

• Providing a list of month-end/ quarter-end killshots speaking to the most up-to-date intel and positioning you have on focused competitors (maybe trending that month) is not only going to be acknowledged, but can boost morale and (product) confidence in your team. 
• Creating a Slack channel or Salesforce group for competitive intel can be a great way to get new intel in front of people as it appears—and can be contributed to by CX, Sales, etc. not just PMM. 
• Ensure you have one central location for battlecards, testimonials, interviews etc. so new Sales people (and PMMs!) can get up-to-speed easily, and can reference content at any time. 
• Involve Sales leadership when battlecards are created or switch campaigns are launched so that they mandate that their teams utilize content created. It's in their best interest and will leverage ROI. 

I wouldn't say pricing and packaging are overlooked, but monetization and associated growth opportunities are often under-utilized as a means of improving launch/ go-to-market success:

- Can you look at the pricing of a feature or product as a means of driving product-led growth e.g. a freemium version of a feature being leveraged to access top-of-funnel customers 

- Does launch timing align with the opportunity to run promotions e.g. promotion annual offerings for stickiness 

- Are you considering the creation of upgrade and upsell paths as part of the launch 

- Can you position this to current customer at churn risk to make their current package look more enticing with specific positioning and messaging 

- Can you continue to test for the optimal pricing and packaging of a feature during the launch, so you can optimize it afterwards

- Retros on strategic projects, especially those with cross-functional teams so you can identify previous learnings and opps for improvement, and quickly get up to speed on legacy experiences 

- Centralization of customer feedback; can you do some quick analysis and theming of it to start to form an objective opinion on customer experiences based on data 

- Pricing history; what has happened in the world of monetization before you to understand if there's revenue opportunities on the table as early wins 

• Don't do what hasn't worked in the past. Do a quick audit/ survey with teams and understand what are the most-utilized and successful assets available and training formats so you can automatically have the trust of the team. 
• Experiment with resources that you know your prospect will find value in, not just your sales team. e.g. "We need one-pagers". No one looks at PDFs anymore. Can you create a landing page that tells a story that they can tell, or a quick video that gets decision-maker buy-in without having to sit through a demo. 
• Iterate. Listen to feedback, track usage, and iterate post-launch until you see adoption and attributed sales revenue moving (or at least signals of associated success).  

Start with discovery and a series of questions that you can consistently ask your stakeholders. 

1. Understand them as humans: what motivates people, how they communicate, what they're passionate about, what parts of their job they feel best at.

2. Understand how they work: how they form strategy, how they build products, what data they trust, what data and strategy they lack and would love. 

3. Understand how they position your product, what the value prop is, who your best-fit customers are.  

Select 3 quick wins you can do that, depending on your organization, build trust through relationship building, data sourcing, or clarification of strategy, then lean into defining your role.