Katie Gerard

Building out a launch process is actually fairly simple in concept. The hardest part is definitely getting cross functional alignment. This process can easily take 6 months in a larger organization, but I recommend being quick and scrappy and then iterating. The steps I take: * Understand what's been done before. What works, what doesn't? How do the teams in place feel about past launch efforts? * Map out your launch goals, at a high level. Why are you doing product launches at all? Are they for customers, are they for prospects? Think carefully here about nuance, when do the goals shift? Often different types of products or sized products may have slightly different goals. * What teams need to be involved? Here again you may note some nuance. It's helpful to think about past examples. So for example, at Klaviyo, when we launched SMS, we needed all the marketing teams and all the customer facing teams involved in getting the word out while Product and R&D worked to ship the feature. * Start to lay out your tiers. There are many ways to set this up, but I typically think about tiering in terms of the size of the launch. Here again past examples will help you. What types of features will you pull out all the stops for? What features will you keep fairly quiet, maybe because they're not exciting or because all your competitors already have them? How will you measure success? * Align a bill of materials to your tiers. Typically speaking, what assets will you provide for each tier? Determining this is the first step in cross functional alignment as it involves getting a commitment from each team. Also keep in mind this will definitely change a bit from launch to launch. The idea here is to give everyone their marching orders ahead of time so you're able to execute faster once the launch process is live. * Socialize, socialize, socialize. This can't be overstated enough. Present your launch plan to product, to R&D, to sales, to CS, to marketing. Get everyone's feedback, answer all the questions. Put the launch process on your internal wiki and then present it to your entire company at an all hands. * Iterate, iterate, iterate. That's it, your launch process is live! Yay! Now it's time to tweak and evolve it. It needs to fluctuate as your goals and resources change. Ta da! Ok, maybe it's not THAT simple, but I promise it's fun!

The best way to get a handle on the success rate of your enablement program is to evaluate it both quantitatively and qualitatively. On the quant side, it's helpful to do some regular sales surveys around satisfaction, whether that's quarterly or after every launch. On a scale of 1-10, how confident do reps feel speaking about new features or going up against competitors? You should also pull metrics like competitive win rates to get a broader view of how sales is performing overall. Qualitatively, it's very important to build strong relationships with both Enablement and Sales teams to access more informal, just-in-time feedback.

This is a great question and a super common scenario within PMM. At Klaviyo, we've played around with a lot of different launch cadences and resourcing levels for launches. Product launches tend to be more about product adoption than any short term revenue gain. Yet, everyone agrees it's important to show a strong cadence of innovation to the market. This tension is especially acute if you're talking about new functionality that's important but isn't actually opening up new pockets of revenue for your company. So how to balance the two objectives, showcasing innovation while still prioritizing revenue? Like many things in PMM, the answer is, it depends. You're always going to have limited resources, and both launches and revenue generation can be "always on" activities. Here are some questions to ask yourself if you have this challenge: * Do you have a large team and/or budget? If so, you may be able to keep resources on both projects throughout the year. Or if you're the only PMM, you may need to make trade offs based on what seems critical. * How often are you shipping features? At Klaviyo, we do a ton of launches all the time so we actually need to have a monthly launch cadence. Some companies may do quarterly launches, meaning they can spend a lot of their time on other projects that drive more short term revenue. * Where are your metrics weak? I like to keep my eye on the marketing funnel to see where holes may be developing and then push to plug them. If you're not seeing enough MQL's, you may need to work closer with demand gen. If your features aren't being adopted, you may want to lean more into product launches and trainings. * What are your top company-wide priorities? Do you need to grow fast or do you want to cement your reputation as a tech-savvy, innovative org? If the answer is both, you may need more headcount. :-D

The easiest way to differentiate yourself is to have a really innovative product and solid marketing to back it up. My favorite example right now is a Klaviyo customer, Magic Spoon. They make low carb/keto diets for people on a diet but wish they weren't. On their website, they even have a tagline "Hold on to the dream." (The dream of eating sugary cereals guilt free.) They have lots of fun cereal flavors you'd associate with your childhood but they're grain free, low carb, etc. For a certain market, their differentiation just hits home with such clarity because it fills a need in such a unique way. Many people love cereal and many people are on keto diets=perfect example of strong differentiation in a niche market. You can find a competitive matrix on their website that compares them to some of the most popular cereal plans across attributes like how much sugar, protein, and carbs. This is a throw back but on the tech side the Apple "I'm a mac, I'm a PC" ads are a perfect example of this. Apple used actors to portray their mac as their target customer (young, laid back) and pc as how they wanted their competitor viewed (old, old fashioned, not that smart). The dialogue is basically an illustration of Apple's key differentiators. For example, in one ad PC sneezes and Apple asks him if he's ok. PC says "no, I've got that virus that's going around." It's a charming way of pointing out that PC's were more prone to viruses than macs.

It depends on where these requests are coming from! I'm always cautious with competitor specific one pagers because it's so easy for these to get back to the competitor. I've personally seen slides our competitors have made about us and this is a) legally risky b) detrimental to any partnership you might have with your competitor c) super easy to debunk when you see it neatly written down! We do come up with "battlecards" for all our major competitors that Sales can use to quickly respond to some of the most common competitive objections with key talking points. I'm more supportive on one pagers around specific topics/functionalities/industries that your product supports. These can be especially helpful in buying decsions with many diverse stakeholders, as they can be easily passed around while your buying committee works towards consensus. One last note on this is make sure to prioritize what you're producing. Some considerations include: 1. How many people will really use these materials? Is it just a couple loud sales reps asking for this or do you see a more general need? 2. Are you prepared to not just produce the material, but to actually update it regularly? 3. Every activity has an opportunity cost. Is this particular piece going to have the most impact vs. something else you could be doing? In order to know this, you'll need to track useage.

Competitive positioning is basically a zoomed in version of your overall positioning. If you think of a competitive matrix, your overall positioning puts you on the map. How you're positioned versus a specific competitor zooms into the matrix and describes your exact position relative to this one other specific data point. Also, all positioning is competitive in a world where you have competitors. Not everyone in your company will understand the difference and that's ok. When I think about enabling positioning for the company, I just want them to understand the concept and why it's so important. They don't need to get too deep into the PMM terminology.

I typically think of direct competitors as being other players in the same category of my org that are going after an overlapping share of wallet with an overlapping group of target customers. You may also spend time on your indirect competitors or even substitute products, but you're much less likely to hear about them from your sales team day to day. There are actually a few possible goals of competitor analysis, here are some common ones I've seen in my career so far: * Create battlecards and talking points for your sales team * Help product better understand how to compete with an existing product * Provide your board, executive team, or strategy org with context for decision-making * Inform company or product positioning

This is a tricky one and there are definitely some more above and also below board answers. I've known people who have made up fake identities in order to get demos from competitors. If you're not a great actor, here are some other approaches: * Ask your customers. You may have a customer you won over from that competitor. Maybe you have a customer who considered your competitor and remembers their pitch. * Ask your partners. Your partners often have a pretty good idea of how your shared customers feel about a competitive product. * Find an internal resource. A little more below-board, but maybe you have an employee who used to work for your competitor or has used their product in a past role. * Look online. You'll be amazed what you can find. Youtube videos are super handy. * Throw some money at it. Depending on what you want to know about the product, there are CI agencies who can help you out.

This will depend on your specific goals for the launch. I like to define tiers for product launches and then have a bill of materials for each tier. That makes the process easy to replicate and facilitates cross functional collaboration, because everyone knows what to expect. For example, you might define your tiers this way: * Tier 1: Large, brand new product that is opening a new market for your company. You're going to make a really big deal about this and activate all your channels, from web to PR and social. You'll train your sales and CS teams to be ready. * Tier 2: Significant update that will make your existing customers super happy. You may decide to do a blog post, social, and give sales and CS one slide. * Tier 3: Small update or bug fix. You're not going to tell the world about this, but customer support needs to know in case there are any tickets.

As a PMM, it can be frustrating to put a lot of work into something and have it sit unused. But I have a lot of empathy for my sales colleagues. Their lives are super busy and they're overwhelmed with information. It makes sense that it's hard to get their attention! When working on competitive intel for a new competitor, here are some action items that will help you to optimize sales engagement: * Prioritize the right competitor. Within PMM, we get a lot of one-off requests for comp intel and we don't have bandwidth to complete them all. I make sure I'm aggregating requests, both from sales directly and senior leadership, and picking the competitor that will have the most strategic impact. * Understand the push back sales is getting from their prospects. Can we do a win/loss analysis specific to that customer to better understand how we're currently viewed vs. the competitor? This will allow you to really tailor your positioning. * Make an enablement plan. I've definitely had the experience of making very in-depth battlecards only to discover that sales would have preferred three bullets of talking points. I figure out what works best for each team in terms of format and plan how to enable (training? recording? simple email?) ahead of time. * Iterate, iterate, iterate. Don't just make a battlecard and throw it over the fence. I like to listen to recordings of calls where sales has used my competitive positioning. Is it working? Does it need to be tweaked?