What does the Go-to-Market process look like for a global product?

Like the answer to a previous question in this AMA, it is good to make a distinction between Go to Market process and Product Launch process, as there may be marketplace or cultural differences region-by-region that impact the long-term adoption of your product.

For Product Launches, we typically do global launches with as much simultaneous translation as possible. This simultaneous activity is harder to accomplish if the launch preparation runway is short. If that happens, you translate as quickly as possible.

For the broader Go-to-Market process, there is more nuance regionally, especially when you tune into messages (not just translation) that will resonate with a particular audience or when you’ve identified a different set of vertical industries to target based on regional demand. We tend to listen very closely to our regional sales and marketing teams as they are much closer to the customer insights than corporate headquarters. Regardless of the approach you take, the same steps of audience identification and understanding, messaging development, and so on, apply to regional launches. In fact, you’ll likely find (as I have) that the more regional and vertical you get, the more likely your message will breakthrough since you are focusing your message on specific audiences and needs.

At Zendesk, the vast majority of our functionality is global so almost every launch is a global launch. We’ve had some very specific regional launches like GDPR, certain voice partners, and messaging channels that are primarily concentrated in select regions, but those are pretty rare. When it is one of those more rare regional launches though, we definitely rely more on our regional teams to understand the nuances and important considerations for that area. For global launches, we determine the general approach and strategy that we think should work across all regions, but then partner with regional teams to understand how they may want to adjust specifically for their areas. Our regional teams localize pretty much everything, including campaigns and assets, so they’re determining what’s relevant for their markets and what isn’t. There are definitely times where they deem certain functionality isn’t relevant for their market. For example, one of the products my team owns only covered limited languages for a long time, so our APAC region in particular didn’t find much benefit from it. To address this, we worked with the APAC team to find ways to still promote the product where it made sense. For example, splitting their audience further to segments that did use the supported languages and therefore would still find that product relevant. We also would collaborate on how to address those gaps for the other segments through workarounds where we had them.

By design, major launches are global and they rely on the general availability of the product. I would treat the regional launches as tier two or three launches. And I spend a little bit of time talking about the tiers in another question here - please check it out.

Tier one is a new product or a new solution or an acquisition. You would do that once, twice, maybe three times a year.

Tier two is a significant product or customer momentum… same two, three times a year.

And then the Tier three is the seasonal release where you can do that as frequently as once a month if your product team happens to ship product that fast!

You would then have to allocate the resources to those tiers. For example, if it's a tier three, you're not going to do a press release, but you would do release note and a product newsletter to your install base.

Yes -- primarily because enablement needs to be cognizant of local conditions and selling paths. For example, in a large enterprise company, you might have a dedicated specialist sales team in AMER but in the regions, you have sellers that sell the entire portfolio. Getting a share of mind in that process is different than with your dedicated US-based sellers. Focusing on the seller mindset and process will help with global rollouts.

The framework itself for a global product launch doesn't differ from the standard, but the strategy for rollout will very much depend on what you are selling and how your buyer likes to buy. Many companies choose to do phased rollouts or more officially break a global launch down into a collection of smaller launches. This helps de-risk the launch and gives companies a chance to test things out. 

Here are some factor to keep in mind for a global rollout strategy:

• Consider how your buyer makes purchases today and how they want to make them in the future. For example, I've worked on products where historically buyers made purchasing decisions either from a regional perspective, or even at the individual country level, but the trend was to make more decisions at the global level. 
• Factor in where your existing customers are located globally and if there are any potential pilot or beta partners. It's always nice to have a friendly partner when launching globally so consider if this approach might work for you.
• Every country around the world has different language preferences, cultural norms, privacy and security regulations, health systems, and other considerations that are critical to fully understand before launching a global product. You might group launches by countries with similar privacy and security considerations for operational and technical reasons or you could group countries by another factor that's important to your buyer such as language. 

The big different to me is training, enablement and product localization. Make sure field teams are trained and enabled within geo-targets and materials are localized to support target markets. Ensure security, compliance and privacy regulations are considered given strict GDPR measures that impact marketing programming in Europe. 

It is important when thinking globally that you understand the nuances of each region/country. This typically impacts key teams including: Pricing (currency, rates, overall pricing), Product (localization, languages, support, data centers), Security, Legal (contracts and terms may be different)

You also need to consider the maturity of customers in those areas. I like to create a crawl, walk, run approach and enable sales in each region on how to speak to that process so that the product can always be seen as "applicable and approachable"