Quinn Hubbard

A thorough go to market (GTM) plan can provide incredible clarity for the many, many stakeholders who are involved in a launch. That’s why it’s so important for the GTM plan to be self-serve when you don’t have the luxury of walking your colleagues through it. The goal is to align your core team, plus answer the top questions for anyone else who needs to be looped in. I suggest using these 9 sections as your core elements:

1. Business context, goals and projected impact → why is this launching?
2. Product experience → what is launching?
3. Audience insights, definition and targeting strategy → who is this launching for and what need(s) are we solving?
4. Marketing brief → what are we saying and how?
5. Channel plan → where are we sharing this?
6. Campaign creative → how does it look, feel and sound?
7. Launch timeline → when is it launching and how is it being rolled out?
8. Measurement plan → how will we know what success looks like?
9. Roles & responsibilities → who owns bringing this to life?

There are plenty of times when this list expands or contracts, but as long as you are answering why, what, who, where, when and how, you’ll have a solid starting point to create a successful GTM plan.

As much as I would love to share a one-size-fits-all KPIs, I’ve found that no two launches are the same. Even if you’re launching a product again in a new market, you’ve probably learned something from the first launch that will lead you to optimize your approach the next time. Instead, I break it down into these four categories and choose the most important metric from each category:

• Business metrics: How will this launch help the business to meet its goals? Is it revenue, subscriptions, marketplace balance, users?
• Product metrics: What action(s) do we want our target audience to take? For example, trial, adoption, retention, increased usage.
• Channel metrics: Based on the way that the campaign is set up, what’s the most important way that our audience can engage with the marketing campaign? Do we want them to watch the video, click on the push notification, read the blog, ask a question or something else entirely?
• Top of funnel metrics: What do you want your audience to know, think or feel based on the launch? These are your awareness, perception and sentiment metrics.

It takes a lot of discipline to pick only the most important metrics and stay laser-focused on those. But I’ve found that when I’m able to do it, it gives the team a clearer mission and strengthens the impact.

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.

This comes down to strong relationships and a history of adding value. So if you take away nothing else, please remember to invest time upfront in building a great relationship with Product and in demonstrating the value that PMM brings to the table early on.

In terms of a framework, I break it down into two types of milestones: calendar milestones for higher level planning and project milestones for work-level alignment.

Calendar milestones:

• Product planning: Usually this happens two or four times each year. These roadmaps give you the information you need for creating your strategic marketing plans.
• Monthly product reviews: Listen in on regular product meetings to understand how the team is thinking about impact and how each of the product areas are progressing.
• Regular check-ins: Whether it’s monthly or weekly, plan to check in with your Product partners weekly to understand upcoming plans and how you can work with the team upstream or downstream to create breakthrough.

Project milestones:

• PRDs: As a general principle, I ask Product teams to loop PMM in at the PRD stage. That helps PMM to understand our opportunity for impact. This includes both upstream impact (e.g. research, design, naming) and downstream impact (e.g. marketing approach, campaign concept, breakthrough tactics).
• Brief stage: The marketing brief is like a handshake with PMM and all of our partner teams plus leadership. It aligns all relevant stakeholders on the strategy and resources required.
• A Round of Creative: I ask the working team for feedback on one round of creative—or two rounds, if it’s a bigger launch. I usually target the second to last round before launch to show high quality work, but still provide room for feedback.

We don’t always tick all of these boxes, and that’s expected, but it’s nice to aim for this to ensure that you’re aligned.

Definitely! I’m hugely passionate about getting inspiration through as many forums as possible. Outside influences lead to fresh ideas, so continuing to learn is crucial for maintaining marketing excellence. Here are some of my favorite sources of new inspiration:

• Podcasts: How I Built This, Something You Should Know, Unthinkable, Dare to Lead, and Sharebird’s Product Marketing Experts
• Newsletters: Marketing Brew, Direct to Consumer (DTC), Stacked Marketer and AdAge Alerts
• The casual focus group: Ask others about the marketing that they still remember to this day. Anyone works: your friends, siblings, target audience, colleagues or strangers who seem open to a conversation. You never know who is going to share a poignant insight that you can use in your next campaign.

As you can see, some of these aren’t even marketing-related. While marketing campaign case studies are the easiest to translate into action, it’s also helpful to hear smart people talk about how they solved problems because it can take you to a different starting place.

From there, you have your toolbox of what you can tinker with for your launches to feel fresh:

• Channels: How might you expand your channel mix by creating new owned channels or joining your audience’s existing conversations? How might you make your channels work better together for more efficient user journeys?
• Voices: Are there other people who can deliver your messages? Would those people be more authentic, influential or resonant?
• Content formats: Could you present your information in more compelling ways, whether it’s video, audio, the mix of copy and imagery or via new tech?

The more you can hear from your audience, the more you can understand what’s breaking through and why. That’ll give you the signal you need to iterate for impact.