The pathway to product launch is full of pitfalls and detours. Whether you’re a leader in a small business with a new product idea, or an established enterprise with highly-evolved systems for product innovation, you’ve felt the pains that accompany bringing a new solution to market.
As CMOs and marketing leaders, we’ve traveled that road in partnership with founders, engineers, inventors, designers, go-to-market teams, and end-users. We’ve helped to shape and sell tangible and intangible solutions; consumer goods and enterprise solutions. And while the process of product development and marketing is never easy – there is nothing quite as rewarding as building something that works and that customers love.
There is a lot to be learned through shared experiences – so we brought a panel of marketing experts together to discuss some of the most common product marketing pitfalls, as well as strategies to avoid them.
Key Takeaways
- Marketing should be involved from the beginning of product development to ensure a successful launch.
- Marketing should be viewed as an investment, not a cost center.
- It’s important to have an understanding of customer needs and translate them across teams as you begin product launch preparations.
- Creating a space for customer and internal feedback is paramount in any product launch.
Links & Resources Mentioned
- The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen
- Marketing ROI: A Guide to The Big 3 Revenue Metrics
- Beachhead Market Concept
- The Buyer’s Journey: Optimize engagement to maximize revenue results
Full Webinar Transcription
Introduction
Jennifer Zick: Hello and welcome to the authentic growth webinar. We’re delighted that you’re here. I’m your host, Jennifer Zick. I’m the founder and CEO of Authentic® and today I’m joined by some of my favorite Authentic brandians. So three of our fractional CMOs. I don’t usually use that martian terminology. It just came to me just now, Authentic people, and we’ll get all of our panelists introduced real shortly. But first, I want to just offer a little bit of a welcome to our audience, a little bit of hosting and housekeeping for you, and set the stage for the conversation we’re going to have today. So first of all, if you’re new to Authentic, let me briefly discuss who you’re meeting with today.
We are a community of fractional CMOs that help companies growing businesses to Overcome Random Acts of Marketing® and confidently take the next step in their healthy growth for their business. We mostly work with small growing businesses who are between 5 million and 100 million in revenue across business models and industries. And in the seat that we sit in, we lead their marketing teams and programs and help them become more modern and mature marketing organizations.
So today we’re going to be talking about product marketing pitfalls and strategies to avoid them. I’ll be the moderator and I’m excited to learn some things today myself from these product marketing experts. A little bit about the audience today. Authentic generally sells to and serves executive leaders and revenue leaders over the small businesses we work with. So we know that there are some CEOs and founders and entrepreneurs and revenue leaders in the crowd today. We also collaborate and build teams of brilliant marketers and we work with ally network partners and agency partners.
So we know that there’s a mix of marketers and marketing talent in the room today. We welcome you and we know that there are marketers that work across enterprise level businesses and are here because they play a hands-on role in product marketing. There might even be product marketing engineers and innovators in the crowd. So it’s really a mixed audience. But the content that we’re going to share with you today will be speaking mostly into and through the lens of the clients that we generally serve and work with, which are those small businesses.
So we invite you to learn from all of that context and hopefully you’ll take away a few nuggets that are useful and practical and applicable in your role and in your business. All right, so my colleague Lia is behind the scenes today running the webinar. So for those of you in the audience, she’ll be paying attention to any questions that you’d like to submit through the live Q&A. So welcome that. We’ll try to leave some time at the end of the webinar to address some audience questions. So please throw your questions out and we’ll be watching for them. And then at the very end of the event, we hope you’ll stay right up till the end because we have a very quick little poll where we’d love to hear your feedback. Really helps us to know how we best serve you as we think about content for future events. Our next webinar event will be coming up on May 26, and registration for that will open soon, so more on that later.
But now let’s get to the fun stuff. I’m totally delighted to spend this hour with our teammates, Steve, Jeron, and Ruth, and I’d love to ask each of them to introduce themselves briefly before we dive in. So, Steve, do you want to start with a hello?
Steve Grady: Sure. Hi there, everybody. I’m Steve Grady, a fractional CMO at Authentic. My area is technology, so I work a lot with our technology clients, SaaS, software developers, solutions, integrators. So I love working with tech businesses and helping them grow, and that’s kind of my focus.
Jennifer Zick: Awesome. Thanks, Steve. Yeah.
Jeron Nanneman: Hi, I’m Jeron Nanneman, also a fractional CMO with Authentic. And my expertise has really been more on the retail side. So within consumer packaged goods, working a lot with companies that are developing products and driving through retail, both e-commerce and bricks and mortar, and going to market that route.
Jennifer Zick: Awesome. Thanks, Jeron. Hey, Ruth.
Ruth Glaser: Hi, Jen. I’m Ruth Glaser, and I am also a fractional CMO with Authentic, and I do a little mixture. I’ve got a B2B digital agency that I’m working with. I’ve also worked with a lot of B2C companies, multiple distribution channels. But the focus over the last couple of years has been in e-commerce. And I’m also an entrepreneur, so I’m really passionate about companies developing processes and operationalizing how they introduce new products and bring new products and services to market.
Jobs to Be Done and Marketing Involvement
Jennifer Zick: Great. Thank you. Nice to meet you all. Wonderful for you to be here with us today. We’re going to go ahead and jump right in. We’ve got a series of questions, and I’m going to just kind of tee them up as I go along to one of you to start with. But I invite you all to jump in and team together and keep the conversation rolling. So Steve, I’m going to pick on you first because I’ve heard you talk a lot about this concept of the jobs to be done. I think you’ve even abbreviated jobs to be done (JTBD) with a product. What does this mean? How does that concept help us answer the question of when is the right time to engage marketing in the product lifecycle.
Steve Grady: Sure. Thanks, Jen. And I know I always come up on these screens right next to you, it seems. So I always get the first question. So we’ll move across boxes on the screen here. Thanks. I’ll answer the second part first, and that is that the marketing organization needs to get involved at the very beginning of the product development, product creation process. They actually start the process because what we really need to understand are who are we going to serve, what challenges are we going to solve for them, and then begin to understand what they really are trying to do. And that’s where this kind of jobs to be done theory comes from. This was kind of developed. Clayton Christensen, who wrote the innovator’s dilemma, also explored this area a lot in a book called competing against luck.
And so, you know, Google that and take a look at that. It’s really interesting. And the premise is that people hire products and services to do a particular job. So they don’t buy the product to buy the product, they buy it to buy the outcome, which is the whole classical people want a hole they don’t want to drill. And so it’s about understanding what the results need to be. So you’re able to structurally dive in and kind of understand what is the job to be done then in terms of the product attributes, you decide how can we do it faster than the existing technology or the existing solution? How is it more accurate, higher quality or more accurate? And is it easy to use? And how easy is it to use?
And so just a super quick example: you never put technology in the jobs to be done category. In other words, you say, I want to listen to music. And that’s been a human ask for thousands and thousands of years. Started out with beating on rocks and drums, and then you had to get your own orchestra, and then finally the phonograph happened, and then finally the radio happened, and then finally streaming happened. Right. As you can see, the technologies all changed, but the job to be done was the same each time. So what you need to do is look at it holistically that way to understand the job. And then you can actually craft a solution that makes sense, that then you can take those as product requirements, if you will, and you can actually start developing the product server.
So the offering that you’re going to bring to the market, and we’ll talk later about, if you do this upfront, it’ll be super easy to market the result at the back end and we’ll talk about that a little bit later.
Jennifer Zick: Great. Well, I can imagine that in defining the job to be done, there is a specific value add that an experienced marketing leader brings to that conversation. How have you seen any of you, this is up, perhaps, but how have you seen that play out in a really collaborative way that gets to the answers on those questions really effectively? How do you bring teams around to do that definition? Jeron, did you have a thought there?
Jeron Nanneman: Yeah, I was just going to say, and when I see a good marketer come in and lay out how the customer sees something, and like you said, with the jobs to be done or that value proposition, it can change a whole conversation. And I think that’s where marketers often need to have the confidence to go into those meetings with a genius engineer and really kind of put forward that customer viewpoint because that is how people and value is created with the customer. So it’s just something like, I couldn’t agree more with Steve about being early in that process and being the start of that process from a marketing standpoint and having confidence to go in there and be in that conversation.
Jennifer Zick: Absolutely.
Steve Grady: You have to dovetail in just when you do that well, it gives you the why you want to do this project for the dev team. So a lot of times we’ll use a product example tech, but we’re going to build this cool technology and we want to do all this stuff and say, no, what we’re going to do is solve this challenge this way. And here’s the customer’s experience before and after. And if we do this right, they’re going to be thrilled and your product’s going to be well accepted. And it really gives them a reason to go out and say, we’re going to build this really great thing to solve these problems. And it puts a human wrapper around it.
And a way that this is going to help somebody creates kind of a cause in the project, which I’ve seen really work well, it accelerates development. People get jazzed. They really get behind the project because there’s a why.
Jennifer Zick: That’s right.
Ruth Glaser: You know, Steve, that’s been my experience as well. I have worked with a tech firm in the past where the developers do get really excited about a bunch of different acronyms that I don’t usually understand. And so I come to the table and ask them to explain what it means to the customer? Why is my customer going to care about this? And so it helped, just continually asking that why can really help change their, I guess, point of view or their mindset. And I love it when you start to convert developers or engineers into marketing advocates because they start to adopt that same language that we have of putting the customer at the center.
Creating Product Feedback Loops
Jennifer Zick: That’s right. I’ll interject a little piece of insight on this from my prior life before starting Authentic, I was in sales and then marketing leadership roles, usually in services around very technical solutions and SaaS products. And I always saw it as my superpower that I was non technical because I worked with brilliant technologists who assumed everybody in the world understood language the way they understood it, because they all spoke the same language, but the buyer spoke a completely different language. And so I always joked, but it was really true that I was the person who could translate the tech talk into human language for our executives and business buyers. And that’s a critical skill that some highly innovative and engineering driven businesses lack if they’re not valuing the role of strategic marketing in those conversations.
Well, we could stay on just that one topic, but I’m rolling onto the next one. And Jeron, I’m going to come at you first with this. You’ve talked about what you call a process of translation, or creating critical feedback loops that need to go on even after a product has launched. Can you elaborate on what that idea means? Translation?
Jeron Nanneman: Yeah, absolutely. It’s building on exactly what we’re just talking about is the fact that marketing is uniquely positioned to be the one who can come in and explain products to sales. And it’s our job to explain the product to the customer, but even internally, to tell what the customer means to the product team and tell what the customer means to the sales team, and to say what the customer means to the channel partners. So it really is an opportunity for us to translate and get everybody talking in one common language. And that’s why I think marketing needs to be in the process in the beginning and the middle and the end, because we see that whole big picture and we’re the ones that can bring that insight together.
And thinking about it after launch, it’s, we’re the ones that get the chance to see via reviews or via social media, how the customer’s reacting to that product. What, you know, did we miss on the value proposition? Are they really reacting to it well, and it’s our job to come back in and translate that reaction into what the next iteration of the product looks like and the next iteration of the go to market strategy looks like we have to take that and take it into the customer and the product and say this is what the customer wants next. And then we get to go to sales and say this is how to position what the customer wants next and what we’re delivering and how we pull all that together.
Obviously, then we also have to do it for the marketing as well and how we’re going to change that. But being able to translate those different pieces of the customer and the product internally is what I think gives marketing just an ability to be kind of the hub of that hub and spoke and being able to talk to the whole marketplace and actually get that go to market strategy to be really lined for superior value.
Jennifer Zick: Yeah, well, and I can imagine in a B2C context, a lot of those inputs come in pretty quickly as transactions and interactions happen. But in a B2B landscape, sometimes those feedback cycles take more time. And so Steve and Ruth, I know you’ve done a lot of B2B work. How do you help your clients remain attentive and still tuned in to the feedback loops? Because I think sometimes in a B2B context, you can feel like once the product is launched, you’ve done the work and you forget to listen for the feedback. That might be a little bit down the road. How do you help with that?
Steve Grady: Ruth?
Ruth Glaser: Well, I think Steve, you and a group of other CMOs at Authentic have been working recently on the bias journey and really looking at everything from initial contact through becoming a client or customer and then becoming an ambassador or an evangelist. So what often is missing is that piece from, okay, I’ve sent you my money. Now how do you make me thrilled with what I’ve purchased so marketing can play a role in that? We’ve often got access to systems and technology and processes to do things like net promoter scores, client surveys, even relying on some of our internal colleagues. So what are the client services teams experiencing upon implementation? What feedback are they getting? What is support dealing with?
Those are all things that we can really uncover and bring to the table as we look at innovation and new product development.
Steve Grady: Yeah, you’re exactly right. And to dovetail with Jeron’s explanation as we look at that whole unknown suspect to a raving fan, there’s people in our company who touch that person through the journey. And I like Jeron. What you said about you kind of have to translate what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, what the positive outcome is to folks. I’ve spent a lot of time on factory floors talking about the product they’re building, why they’re building it, and how it’s being used. And if you can get them, the manufacturing organization, to understand this is the job that’s being done by this product and this is why they love it and why they buy it, that really engages the workforce and so they’re not really touching the client. I say, yes, you are. You’re building what they’re going to use.
And so you’re actually the one giving the gift, if you will, and you should feel really good about that. To your point, the ability to translate the value and talk to everybody who touches a prospect all the way through a client is really important. And communicating it consistently and coherently is really important too. So people just don’t make it up along the way and that harmonizes and you get a synergy effect from that.
Jennifer Zick: I love this entire part of this conversation because I think too often executives and people who aren’t marketers themselves might think too much of marketing as content creation and communications. Right. The voice, the putting out of information. But really, the role of marketing requires a lot of very active listening and asking and then assimilating and translating all of these different voices and data points in order to help navigate the message forward and the offering forward. So it’s really limiting to an organization if marketing is only put in the role of creation of content and not given access to or permission and authority to listen well, across the organization and with all the stakeholder groups. Have you seen any examples of, I mean, I see you nodding your head, so that makes sense. Yes.
Jeron Nanneman: Well, you know, it is funny. It’s one of the things, you know, I’ve done multiple times in my career. I think just because I find it so interesting is trying to, you know, weasel my way into the product development teams, right.
Jennifer Zick: It feels that way, doesn’t it?
Jeron Nanneman: Even going and finding where they’re at and hanging out with them. It’s like, and people are always surprised that, oh, you’re the marketing guy, you know, but it helps me do my job so much better. And if I can impart even a small bit of what the customer is saying into that part of the process, it improves the overall product and it’s just a better back and forth to have that conversation being had in that time period versus all the way down at the end of the process.
Jennifer Zick: Yes, I agree. I once stepped into an interim CMO role in an organization that had a very robust product engineering software development team that had been accustomed to doing all of their development and their new release lifecycles completely separate from marketing. And marketing was just the brand communications department. So when I stepped into the role, nobody in marketing knew anybody really in product development or what was happening. We were just waiting for the trigger to say, push the campaign that the new release went live. And so the first thing I said is there needs to be connective tissue between product sales, service and marketing. And that was a new way of thinking for that business. But it’s critical. All right.
Steve Grady: Okay. Go to the next question. Some of the most successful projects and product launches I’ve ever been on are once you kick off, like we talked about so far in the session, you create an internal comms plan and an external comms plan that are all linked. But I, you have different audiences and so you’re really educating and getting the internal folks engaged because that has to happen even before the external folks get engaged. And so if they’re really engaged, then when you launch and you’re going to talk to your customers and bring them in, that flows all ties together, but you get that energy and everything, again, is consistent. And so I always have an internal comms plan that goes with my external comms plan. And that can’t happen at launch. It has to happen way up here.
And that’s why we talked about getting involved right at the outset. So you can do the internal comms and the external comms together.
Product Development and Go-to-Market Strategies
Jennifer Zick: That’s right. Well, a couple of little points of reflection on this little segment. First of all, I want to thank you, Ruth, for bringing up the topic of customer journey, because that is our next webinar. It’s going to dovetail really nicely into some really hot button conversations that have been talked about a lot here at Authentic recently and published about recently as well. So I’m excited for that, Ruth. We just, I just shared a little bit about how I stepped into a high tech engineering, you know, innovation kind of environment that was, in my opinion, over invested in development and underinvested in marketing. And they had to create some balance there.
In my experience, I’ve seen a lot of really smart product and solution companies founded by engineers, scientists and brilliant innovators who see what the job is to be done and they know they have the tools to build a solution for it. And then along the way, the team is really built with an engineering mindset, well, before there is an established marketing team or department. And so over time, the investment between those teams might be a little bit out of balance. So what advice, Ruth, would you give to an organization in understanding the right construct in a go to market team? What does that balance need to look like?
Ruth Glaser: Yeah, you know, my experience is really similar. I think it’s a really common situation that especially smaller, newer, younger organizations find their initial success with really quality products and services that they offer. And it’s through. I don’t want to feel like we’re picking on developers and engineers. I’ve seen artistic people who develop that kind of product. It’s the exact same mindset because they’re creators, whether it’s tangible product or service. And what happens, I think, and what motivates them often to bring in a marketer is that they’re continuing that product development and innovation in the ways that have historically worked for them, but their growth rate has slowed, or their growth is not what they’re expecting or not what it has historically been.
So I guess my advice to organizations like that would be, first to look at marketing as an investment in growth versus an expense or a cost center. Because again, if you’re only thinking about the marketing communication piece of it, you’re missing a ton of the value that marketing can bring to your organization. And then the next question is, well, how much should we be spending on marketing? And so a lot of times you see like a 10% rule of thumb. I know a lot of marketers who would give their oldest children to have 10% of company revenue as a marketing budget, but it’s going to vary. Unfortunately, there isn’t a nice, neat formula. It’s going to depend on your industry. It’s going to depend on the size and age of your organization.
I think that’s a really key point, especially for those younger or growth companies, because if you’re smaller, it’s going to probably require a larger percentage because you don’t have the scale that you can get with a larger organization, and there’s sort of a certain entry level you’re going to need to hit. So that may represent a larger percentage of your overall revenue. The age of your organization. If you’re new to a market, if you’ve got a challenging market, it’s also going to require more than an established, more mature market or company. And then finally, how quickly are you wanting to grow? Depending on your growth goals, that’s going to have a really big impact.
And then not to sound like a broken record here but once you have committed that marketing is an investment in your growth, involving it early and often, as we’ve been talking about throughout this conversation, is really how you’re going to derive the most value from that?
Jennifer Zick: Yes. I want to chime in by recognizing one of the comments from our friend Megan, who’s attending today, calling out CAC and LTV as important metrics in understanding your marketing investment. And I’m calling that out. CAC stands for customer acquisition cost. LTV stands for lifetime value. And I would add one I call TTC. Time to close or time to convert. I’m actually writing a blog right now on the big three revenue metrics. Those being the big three. And in a lot of the small businesses that we work with, we’re entering in as marketing leaders at a crawl, walk run scenario with these maturing organizations. Sometimes they don’t even have the baseline data in place to know what their LTV might be. Right. So helping navigate those conversations about budget, resource, marketing, investment, that’s no small thing.
Jeron or Steve, is there anything you would add to that conversation or the context to that?
Jeron Nanneman: Well, one thing that jumps to my mind is just that I think people get fearful of some of those metrics sometimes because they don’t have the data. And I think one of the key things that a marketer, especially in a small company, can do is, you know, throw their hat in the ring and make decisions based on less than complete data. Right. So, you know, at lifetime value, we just, I just did this with a client the other day. Wherever I just walked through a lifetime value calculation, then I’m almost positive it is wrong. But it gave us scope to understand exactly what some of the marketing activities that were doing probably didn’t have a chance to pay off, that the lifetime value probably wasn’t large enough for our efforts to even create a value stream that would pay off long term.
So I think that’s the thing that I think about when I hear those metrics, I always kind of feel like, oh, that’s serious marketing. Oh, now we’re doing that. It doesn’t have to be right. You can do those back of the envelope. You can do that with the data you have. And it’s really about scoping your marketing versus really kind of getting to a really financial metric measuring level. So that’s what I think of when I enter those metrics, is just don’t be afraid of them. Go ahead, learn them, act on them and see what it tells you.
Jennifer Zick: And I think I hear you saying progress over perfection, which we’re going to talk about a little bit later in today’s episode. Steve, did you want to throw one more comment in on that?
Steve Grady: Well, just super quick, if we go back, we started with the jobs to be done, and really understanding what people want to do is if you think about the terms you just talked about, customer acquisition cost, LTV, and what was the third one?
Jennifer Zick: Time to convert / Time to close.
Steve Grady: If you’re really solving a problem for them really well, they’ll go, Eureka. That’s it. I love that. And I’m going to buy it. And because it does the job so well, I’m going to buy it again and again. And Christensen in his book talks about some instances of that, you know, once you’re hooked and it makes your life so much better, you just keep doing it. Right. And so those are really interesting to tie those three key metrics, because you’re right, Jennifer, those are absolutely key. And understanding how to make them so achievable by making, just understanding right up front why and you’re building the product and why people want to buy it.
Jennifer Zick: So it’s really funny, Steve, because almost every prospect that our team meets with actually says Eureka. When they learn what we do and they just want it and they want more and more, it’s.
Steve Grady: Well, now you can go back to our pitch, right? We talk about, do you want a fractional CMO or do you want to fix all your random acts of marketing and finally go to market in a coherent way? That’s their job to be done, not to hire a CMO fraction. That’s not the job to be done. We’re just the means to the end.
Jennifer Zick: So that’s exactly right. All right, we could go on that one. There’s so many subtopics here. I’m taking notes for future webinars. But Jaren, I’m sticking to the script. And I’m coming back to you next. How can product teams know, or teams working around developing products, how can they know when the product’s good enough to go to market? And then how can they maintain a commitment to what we just talked about, progress over perfection, getting something to the market that’s good sooner to maintain competitive advantage and still building products that customers love. Yeah.
Jeron Nanneman: So just like from my last answer, you know that I am one of the people that like to get the information you have and make a decision and move forward. And I think that is the key part of product development. I think the one thing that I would say, the one thing I’m sure of in this answer is that you need to have a process. You need to have a process that requires people to provide inputs and it has a timeline against it.
And when you put that process in place, and marketing should be demanding, as Steve talked about earlier, demanding to be at the early part of that process so that you’re setting the customer value and that you’re part of the process that says and actually defines what the product will be based off of what the customer’s minimal requirements are to create value. So how do you go in there and you bring to that process the early part of it? And when all the add ons and the nice to haves and the engineering kind of cleverness comes in and gets added to the product, how do you go in and bring it back to the customer and what the customer needs from a value proposition and keep the product online so that you can launch on time.
Because I think one of the most important things you can do is be first to market and be first to market with a minimum value that the customer is excited about and then be able to iterate. And I think we all know that the further you are in the line of introduction on a product, the more expensive it becomes. From a marketing standpoint, you’re third in line. You have to spend so much more marketing to acquire a customer. So being first in line and being able to iterate and being lucky enough to be on your second or third iteration of a product when you’re competing against somebody else’s first iteration is the payoff. And it’s marketing’s job to keep the company and keep that process on focus so that when they get there, they’ve been able to get there first.
Jennifer Zick: Awesome. Ruth?
Ruth Glaser: Yeah, I agree completely. And have been recently reading of the beachhead market concept where establishing that first market where you want some early wins and it may not be the perfect product, but you’re learning and you’re generating acceptance in the marketplace is just so beneficial. And Jeron, spot on. Being there first is a big advantage. And we have an example of that where I had a client with a product that went to market really as early as it could and it wasn’t by any means perfect, but it established a bit of a leader position in that marketplace. And then we spent the next nine months developing the 2.0 version, which was spectacular. And then it has maintained its sales leadership position. It’s one of the top selling products for the organization. And that’s been over the last 18 months.
So by going to market with not the perfect end product gave us that foot in the door, then to build upon and really see some fantastic revenue.
Jennifer Zick: Results, that’s a perfect bridge for the question. I’m teeing up over to Steve, which is all about, let’s talk about minimum viable product. Steve, you already mentioned that you do a lot of work in the software and SaaS industry where MVP is an essential stage to bring a new or improved product to the market. Where do companies get MVP wrong and how can they make their MVP stronger and more relevant?
Steve Grady: Sure. Yeah. This is one of my favorite topics because a lot of people think I kind of want to solve these nine jobs on my platform. I’m going to build a software platform. I’m going to do these nine things. I’m going after HubSpot and I’m going to have sales and marketing and service and operations. I’m going to have all that to be successful. I’m going to build little pieces of it all to get it out there to see what people think. Of course, it doesn’t really work well at all in any of the areas. It’s like it’s so half baked. You can’t really get good feedback other than this thing doesn’t work. And so usually you have to go deep, not broad, with your MVP. Pick one and do it really well.
You know, now you’re not going to have everything in it, but you’re. But you’re going to have enough there. And there’s likens to what Ruth was talking about is that you can really do a job, but maybe there’s some things not quite ready yet. Because then what happens is you’re going to decide, I need these extra features here, or the next thing I need to do, I’m being told by everybody, is I got to have this. So it gives you immediate feedback in terms of what you build next as you’re moving through. To say, 98% of my users said I got to have this next. And so it just points you exactly where you need to go. So Tarut’s analogy about beachhead Jim Collins talks a lot more about bullets than cannonballs.
I kind of hate the military metaphor, but you know, you kind of shoot enough to really have an effect. You don’t want to use BB’s, but you want to use something that has some effect. And once you really find a, hey, this is really working, then you wheel out the cannonball and really focus and expand and grow that. So the takeaway message here is if you think of MVP, do something well so people go, I really like that. I respect what you gave me as a solution. It’s not all there yet, but it solved almost all my problems. Then go here. Versus just trying to kind of do little things and nobody wants it because it really doesn’t do a job well at all. So go deep. Not broad on MVP.
Jennifer Zick: That’s so wise. And I saw that story played out so brilliantly in the 15 years I spent in the salesforce.com ecosystem as a partner in that channel. Because Salesforce was the first CRM to take people into the cloud before we even called it the cloud. And they did it as the expert in CRM, cloud based CRM. And so the sales cloud was their first solution. And they went deep in that before they rolled out the appendages next to it for service, which was the next edition. And then they even let the market come around and develop some of the products that would become their next solution. Layers through acquisition into creating the marketing cloud, finance cloud, right. Until they had an entire platform that is world class and market leading. And so that’s exactly what they did. And they did it intentionally and they.
Steve Grady: Did it really well.
Jennifer Zick: They did it really well. It’s super sticky, that’s for sure. Any other thoughts on that one before we move on to the next?
Jeron Nanneman: Yeah, I’ll just say one thing. One of the things you talked about just then was about kind of creativity and how the customer will create as you go forward. I’m going to turn this a little bit on its ear. And I used to work a lot in the toy industry and you expect when you put out a toy that you don’t know how your customer is going to interact with it because kids are super creative and they’re going to go and take this weird left turn with whatever you do. And to Steve’s point, when you think about going deep on a value proposition, that’s what a good toy does. It’s a really cool area.
And I think you can see the same thing when you come in and you look at some technology, you’ve got people that are really creative and you don’t really know how they’re going to take your product and take it to the next step. And when you’ve gone deep and you’re really driving a really great value, you can watch how your customer interacts with your process product and realize what step two and step three should be. To Steve’s point, you’ve got eight different things you want to chase. You put a great value out there. For one, you watch where your customer takes you and you know what number two and three and four should be, and your customer has done that for you, and now all of a sudden, you know where to go.
And it’s, it’s one of those things that I think is really intriguing about how even though it’s drastically different industries, people are acting the same way and it can be basically applicable across multiple different industries.
Jennifer Zick: That’s right. Well, and I want to chime in as a company that is a professional services firm, Authentic doesn’t create a tangible product. Right. But in creating a fractional CMO practice, we’re creating a space that barely existed in the market five years ago and had been refining that footprint. And so I know some of my friends didn’t register for today’s webinar because they’re like, doesn’t seem applicable to professional services. But I just want to call out that services are a product. We’re not doing just anything people ask of us. We have a specific swim lane, and it’s very narrow and I speak a lot. And in fact, next week we’re republishing some content on my concept of strike zone marketing. Right.
That you’re marketing as a pitcher, your marketing department pitching to a very specific strike zone, purposefully positioning toward and pursuing healthy business. So I’m getting sidetracked a little. But I want to acknowledge for those of you in the room that are in services industries or product and service, tangible product and services are a product too. You need to know the box around your service and what the focus of it is and what the job to be done with your service is. Otherwise, people will tell you what to do with your service and take you in directions that you might not be aiming for.
Steve Grady: That’s right. You’re exactly right, Jennifer. Services are products, period. There’s no distinction. And the more tangible you can make your service to feel and talk about it as a product, the more successful you’ll be in selling it. So I got to help those folks who say, no, it’s not for me, it’s a no. Your services are products, and you need to sell them and develop them and support them just like any other product.
Go-to-Market Planning and Channel Marketing
Jennifer Zick: And having grown up in professional services around technology and then having a large group of professional services clients at Authentic, I can’t tell you how hard it is when you get into that first. I used to run our messaging workshops back in the day to try to get product companies to just say what they do. They use all these words like, we are the innovation of the implementation of the leverage of your. What? I’m like, stop with the words. What do you bill people for? What’s on the invoice? Like, what do you do? Just stop it. They make their lives so hard. So anyway, that’s a little side note. All right. And bringing it in. And bringing it in. I like to pretend I’m a panelist, too, not just the moderator. All right, Ruth. All right.
So many businesses are investing deeply in product development, and they’re perhaps getting to that launch date, but then they fail to go farther in bringing the product fully to market. What does going to market actually mean for a product organization? And how can companies rethink their processes to get the most juice out of their go to market squeeze? That was a long question.
Ruth Glaser: Yes, I’m ready for it. All right, so go to the market. I think the simplest way to think of a go to market is really the plan to convince people to buy your product or service. So how are you going to do that? And it is going to include tactics related to all the things we’ve been talking about, pricing, sales and distribution channels, the buyer’s journey and all the touch points along it, in addition to your marketing, advertising and PR plans. So that’s kind of go to market in a nutshell. From my perspective, I think to get more juice for the squeeze. I love that saying.
You know, it goes back to involving marketing early in the process, but also really important, and I have seen this over and over again, is allowing and recognizing that there is a lead time and resources required in order to have a successful product launch or to introduce a product into a new market. So oftentimes, what happens if you’re doing a tangible product? It’s like, okay, it’s off the line. Now go. You know, it’s ready to be sold. Where are all our customers? But I have an example of, you know, Amazon has a program called Born to Run that helps you establish that beachhead to trigger future sales.
So on Amazon, it can take about six weeks of lead time to do all the little tasks of getting all the assets set up, getting your product detail pages built, getting born to run inventory and stock, and getting your campaigns firing against that, to get all the algorithms, all the stuff working correctly and really firing on your launch day. It’s not the day that you can produce a tangible product. That should be your launch date. But really, when is it that you’ve got everything in place to support the sale of that product.
Jeron Nanneman: Yeah, I want to chime in here because I’ve got a soapbox I want to stand on for just a second, which is the channel marketing piece of it. I think way too many companies forget about marketing to the channel and how absolutely important that is as part of your go to market strategy. When I think about retail, where I spent most of my time, most of the big retailers now have agency level marketing groups that they want you to participate in. And if you’re leaving your channel marketing just to the sales team and this small promotional budget that you give them, you’re missing just a huge avenue for talking to your customer. And in a lot of instances, perhaps one of the most actually impactful ways to talk to your customer, which is through your channel.
So I think when you’re talking about going to marketing, especially when you’re talking about post launch, you have to be thinking about how I use channel marketing to my customer? What is that path and how many assets am I putting against it? Because it’s too often an afterthought. And I feel like it’s actually one of the strongest ways to convert to the customer on that market and go to market strategy.
Jennifer Zick: I love channel strategies and I’m going to speak again as a professional services marketer and business builder because I think too many businesses in the b two b, especially professional services, miss out on the opportunity for channel and strategic referral partnerships. And they haven’t stopped to think. They think that all of their growth needs to come through direct go to market and that more growth means more sales bodies. But what if you could take an ecosystem and turn them into your sales army on your behalf? Because they believe they have like Eureka, you have a job to be done for my audience and I already have the audience. I’d like to walk you through the door right into a qualified deal. Right.
It just takes a little bit of strategic thinking to say what is our solution and what job is to be done with it and who already owns the marketplace. For the people that need this job done, how then do we build relationships of trust and referral? And I speak a lot about the topic of trust equity because even at Authentic we don’t have formal channels and distributors of our solution. But we have an ecosystem that we nurture, that refer business to us, highly qualified business. And we treat that informal referral ecosystem formally. We nurture those relationships formally so that they understand what we do. So I think for any business listening to this call that hasn’t thought about channels as a strategy to accelerate growth. There’s almost no business that channels can’t apply to.
Steve Grady: Absolutely, go ahead, Jerry.
Jeron Nanneman: No, I was just going to say and it can be one of your actual cheaper ones because it’s more sweat equity. Right. It’s usually not dollars. It’s usually time and interaction in those relationships that are already developed already. So it’s really about really just bringing that yourself to those markets.
Jennifer Zick: That’s right, yeah.
Steve Grady: And just great comments. And I think especially when going to market, everybody sort of thinks about more downstream. If you take all the things we talked about and understand demand generation, if we want to have a ready market, you have to generate demand even while you’re building the product to satisfy that demand. So if we talk about goes way back to jobs to be done, if we’re going to solve this problem for this community of people, we start talking about that. And Jared, I had a role, I had 1500 vars in a PC company and you start talking to those folks about we’re going to solve this problem and they go, yeah, yeah. Talk about these things that are going to happen. Are you on board?
Ruth Glaser: Yeah.
Steve Grady: You don’t have to tell them what you’re going to give them quite yet because it’s still bacon in the shop. But as soon as he brings up, get all this pent up demand. Yes, we wanted to solve this problem and now we’re going to go. And you’ve already got that built up inertia and energy. So again, Jen, faster time to convert. Great easy acquisition because everybody’s lathered up. So the question is, how do you fold these factors into your demand generation plans that do have to happen upstream ahead of product release? And so that’s an important part too.
Jennifer Zick: Well, as we’re looking. Oh, go ahead, Ruth.
Ruth Glaser: Oh, I was just going to say I saw Megan’s comments in the chat about the process for nurturing those informal and formal relationships. So sometimes it’s not a formal var or a distribution channel, but especially in some of my B2C e-commerce clients, influencers play a huge role. And it’s very similar, I think, to those relationships that you’re talking about nurturing and building. And we treat them exactly as we would any other relationship prospect or customer relationship. So we’re tracking them in a CRM, we’re making notes, we’re sending emails, we’re building relationships. We do campaigns around those relationships. And it can be, I’ve seen some organizations do it by, you know, recognizing their company’s anniversaries or their company successes, you know, keeping abreast of them on LinkedIn, what’s going on in their organization.
So there’s all kinds of structure and process you can put around nurturing an informal channel relationship, if you will.
Jennifer Zick: Another way to do that, and what we do at Authentic is we’re pretty prolific content creators. We’re marketers by nature, so we’re turning out webinars and blogs and other avenues of content. And so we think critically about the backs we want to scratch and patent, help the people we want to elevate. We invite them into our content to help elevate their brands and give them a place for thought, leadership, and to demonstrate to the world outwardly that our brands are, we’re joined arms in bringing solutions to the world. So that’s another way to do it. And I do want to mention, as we’re looking at the last 1213 minutes of this webinar, there is the chat. Some of you have participated in the chat, but there is an actual q and a component in the webinar, too.
And if anybody wants to submit a question to the panel, we’ll be watching both the chat and the Q&A. But the Q&A is an easier way for us to make sure we don’t miss it. While we wait for anybody to submit additional questions, I have one last question for any and all of you panelists. Tales from the crypt here. What? Have you ever been part of a failed or flawed, significantly flawed product launch? And if so, what did you learn along the way? Or what advice could you give to attendees based on that experience? Or have you all been only part of the perfect product?
Steve Grady: I got nothing to say there. They’ve all worked just great.
Ruth Glaser: Yeah, sorry, next question.
Jeron Nanneman: So, Jen, the one that comes to mind for me the most, and it’s one that literally is twelve years old, 15 years old, but it still sticks in my mind, was one where I was so certain that this product had this super unique value proposition, and my entire marketing skillset was driven to telling the customer about this super unique value proposition. So much so that I forgot to tell them about the broader category value that we were trying to do. And it was a terrible failure because we forgot to tell them that it was fun and exciting and that they would enjoy it. Now, I think they probably got the fact that it had a lot of content in it, but I forgot the other part. Right.
And I think that’s one of the things that I’ve taken with me learning wise is just to say, you know, you get really excited about the new stuff you’re adding to a product. But don’t forget, you’re part of a broader category most often that you are actually bringing that job to do first. And to bring that back to what Steve was talking about. I wish I had known him 15 years ago when he could have told me that, you know, it had a job to do. I forgot about the job that I needed to do. I was really excited about how it was going to do the job, and it didn’t work very well. It’s still a great game, though.
Steve Grady: Technology du jour, you know, there’s always cool stuff happening, right? And especially the tech team. I’ve been technical guy all my life, and it’s like, oh, we’re going to add solar panels to the drill. This is going to be fantastic. And the motor is going to be 300 hp. Just think how fast the bit will go. And it’s like, no, it hasn’t improved the job at all. It turns the power tool into a, you know, a killer. If you don’t handle it right, you know, it’s just and or competitive response. That’s the other one that is usually, hey, our competitors just got this new feature, and we have to do it, too. Oh, my God, we’re falling behind and then we do it. I mean, it’s a classical story, like the iPod and the Microsoft Zune, right?
You know, it’s like, God, the iPod’s so fantastic. We got to do one, too. It was a horrible failure because it didn’t solve any of the jobs differently. And it actually was worse on speed, accuracy, and ease of use. And so those are the key areas of just doing things for technology sake and or reacting to competitors that oftentimes send you down the wrong path.
Ruth Glaser: Yeah, so that’s been my experience as well. I had a client who would introduce new designs on a regular basis, and they. They just didn’t drive sales. They didn’t drive a bump in anything. And so it goes back to the question of, why are we doing this? What’s the value to the customer in this? Have they asked for this? Are we solving any of their problems? And it wasn’t. It was driven by a very creative mind looking to innovate.
Steve Grady: So it also keeps the engineering team employed. They need to keep doing something, and if we’re not feeding them really new good stuff, they’re just going to keep the hamster wheel rolling, and that’s what you get.
Jennifer Zick: It is no small thing to be the head of marketing in a small growth business where you’re working directly with the entrepreneur, visionary, creator, founder person. I know even for myself as the founder of Authentic, I’m an experienced marketer and I know better. I know I should say no and not yet to most of my ideas create a lot of chaos and resource strain all around me because I have ideas and that means they need to move into action. Right. So all of you as fractional cmos are in a unique position of being an inside outsider. You’re sitting on the client leadership level, you’re at the leadership team, and often you are the first executive marketer that company has ever seen. Which means you’re the first person helping to say no and not yet. I, for good reasons.
To that creator mindset, how do you do that in a way that helps you stay in good graces with your clients?
Steve Grady: Sometimes you don’t.
Jennifer Zick: Sometimes you have to say yes.
Steve Grady: Yeah, I’ll go real quick. It’s all about intent and the reason for doing what you’re doing. You know, you know it’s the right thing. You know they need help. You know that they’re not going to want to hear no. They, you know, but I. If you really stay true to this is how it’s going to help and here’s how the outcome is going to better for understanding this and the spirit of sitting on the same side of the table, that usually works fine. It’s a hard discussion to have because you’re shifting opinions and shifting viewpoints and shooting at some sacred cows. But it’s done in the spirit of help and service. It usually comes together fine.
Ruth Glaser: I would say, too, you know, I use what I call the first grader approach. Right. So it’s not coming in with the answer to say not yet, not now. It’s coming in with the question of why this, why now, why before the other thing. So oftentimes I find it so effective to have a genuine curiosity and it can start people thinking a little bit differently about how they’re doing things. Yeah.
Jeron Nanneman: Just to tag onto that a little bit, I think one of the things you want to show is that you are thinking about their customer and that you’re as passionate about their customer and their product as they are. I think that’s the thing with so many entrepreneurs and creators, that passion is what’s driving that benefit, but it also can be what blinds them. And so once you show them that you’re on their side. I love Steve’s standpoint of sitting on the same side of the table, you know, then you can talk about the customer and you can talk about data and you can bring those two things in and say, here is where, you know, this looks like it should go to me and actually bring that.
And if it’s come from a place of honesty, and they know you’re passionate about it too, they often listen well.
Jennifer Zick: And I think you both are. All three of you summarized some attributes that are part of our value system under the word authenticity as CMOs that work with these growth companies, we speak the truth with love because we care. We really care about helping to build their business in a healthy direction, which means helping them to feel confident about where they place their bets, because ultimately it is their decision. Any marketer sitting in the room with us today wondering how to help your executive leaders place their bets in a way that is going to meet the market and avoid those product marketing pitfalls, it does absolutely have to come from a spirit of caring. Caring about the customer, caring about all the stakeholders involved.
And I think marketing is in a unique position to be the thread that binds it all together as the voice piece, but also the most active listeners across those stakeholder groups. Success really comes in caring. The caring about what you’re bringing to market and the job to be done. And I know we have a couple minutes left. There’s one other question from the internal audience, and it’s a good one. Is there a favorite product that you’ve brought to market? One that just hits your heartstrings and it’s okay if it was the business you built yourself? Ruth, because I loved your product, that.
Ruth Glaser: Was going to be my answer. Jen, please share the. I’m the. I’m like that guy. I’m not just the owner, I’m the customer, too. So I started Let’s Dish when I was a new mom. And for those who don’t know, it’s a meal preparation concept where you could go in and we had everything you needed to make a whole bunch of dinners to have them ready. So it was kind of, it was like, you know, Hello Fresh. But you did it yourself. And not quite as delivered to your doorstep, but similar kinds of concepts. And that definitely was my favorite for sure. Not only because I used it, but because it was just fun. It was a fun thing to do.
Jennifer Zick: Before I ever knew you, I was a raving fan. New mom, customer of let’s dish. And then I felt incredibly fortunate to hire Ruth to my team. I’m like the creator of Let’s Dish. She gave me sanity when my kids were little and meals had to be made. It was awesome. And going to a Let’s Dish location got me out of the house when I had toddlers at home, which was also wonderful. It’s like, sorry, honey, you got the kids. I have to go to Let’s Dish so everybody can eat. It’s great.
Ruth Glaser: Little did I know I was setting the, you know, the groundwork for my future career path when I started.
Jennifer Zick: So wonderful. What about you, Jaren and Steve? Any favorites? I product launches.
Steve Grady: Jeron, you got one?
Jeron Nanneman: Not offhand. The one I think is probably the. I would say maybe perhaps the silliest was I actually, I was working at 3M for a while, and I brought one that was called the scotch Brite clean rinse scrubber to the market, and it was a very purple little scrub sponge. And the one thing I remember the most about launching that product is doing all of the right marketing things. And it came with the tagline should be, even eggs and cheese don’t stick. And I don’t know that there’s ever been a worse marketing tagline. And I tried everything else, but I couldn’t. That was what the data told me to do, and so I launched it.
Jennifer Zick: Brilliant, because I’m always telling you don’t stick.
Jeron Nanneman: And for the rest of my life, one, it’s still on the marketplace today. It’s still selling like 12, 13, 15 years later, whatever it was. But also every time now I burn cheese or eggs, I think, even eggs and cheese don’t stick.
Jennifer Zick: Oh, it’s awesome.
Steve Grady: Mine was a fiber to the home system. I spent a lot of time in telecom, and this was one of the early breakthroughs in actually taking fiber optics out into the neighborhoods. And not only was the technology cool, but the job to be done was, how do we get broadband to the home when we only have telephone lines? And this is really for the telephone companies, not the coax from the cable companies. They were really, you know, telephone companies just had this little twisted pair of pieces of copper you couldn’t put much bandwidth on. And so really understanding that this whole wave of broadband was coming, and this is in the nineties, literally. Right. And so how are you going to get that in the early two thousands? How do we get fiber deeper?
And so it had kind of a social cause, along with solving a really important job to be done for two people. One is customers got broadband so they could run faster, and the telephone companies could put new infrastructure that could actually upgrade and compete with everybody else and provide a growth path for them, which has been significant, obviously, over the years. So that was a fun one.
Jennifer Zick: Well, thank God for those innovations, because how else would we have done our jobs to be done over Covid? Did we not have the Internet in our homes? That moved fast. Yeah. So that innovation is continuing. And, oh, we could talk at length about more product stories, successes, and tales from the crypt, but we’re really getting toward the top of the hour. So I want to take a moment to thank all of you so much for sharing your wisdom and your humor. It was so boring to spend this hour with you. You aren’t fun at all. Lia’s sitting next to me trying to stifle her giggles throughout. So they’re not recorded on this audio. So we’ve had a lot of fun here today. I hope our attendees have, too.
I hope they’ll come back again in May when we talk about the customer journey and we bring some other experts around that topic. I hope they’ll stay tuned, all of you, to upcoming authentic brand content and events. And I hope we’ve given you something today to take and make actionable in your world. So before we let you all go, Leah’s going to launch a quick live poll that we would just love to get your real time feedback on. Panelists, you’re welcome to take the poll if you.
Steve Grady: Oh, do we get to vote, too?
Jennifer Zick: What you feel about the content today, Meg?
Ruth Glaser: Well, can I single out other panelists?
Jennifer Zick: Host a panelist shoot, there’s red print.
Steve Grady: We can’t vote.
Ruth Glaser: Darn it.
Jennifer Zick: Dang it. All right, well, thank you all attendees, and a special round of applause to my colleagues, who I love and esteem so much. I feel really blessed that I’ve been able to hire people so much smarter than me and sit in a room with all of you and talk about things and learn from all of you. So now you can get back to all that important client work you’re going to be doing. But I appreciate your time. It was great to be with you, and we’ll see you soon. Thanks, everybody. Bye.
