As it relates to your sales channel and channel partner readiness, there are two things to consider when developing your own product launch time line. First is the size of your sales channel. The second is the complexity of the sales cycle. By focusing on the sales channel and channel partners you address what is typically the most time consuming and riskiest part of a successful product launch.

Size and of Your Sales Channel and Channel Partners

Get your sales channel and channel partners ready for product launch is often the most critical and time consuming part of product launch. You can deliver the best promotional programs on the planet but if the sales channel and your channel partners aren’t ready (or haven’t embraced the new offering) your success in the market could be severely impacted.

The size of the sales channel and channel partners has a direct relationship to the amount of time it takes to prepare it for launch. Let me illustrate.

When the sales channel is limited to 6 direct salespeople in one office, you can get them together over lunch. But when the sale channel is a combination of direct salespeople and channel partners scattered across three continents you have to plan ahead. Sometimes months in advance.

Let’s say that Acme Software has a direct sales channel of 300 salespeople in North America, EMEA, and Asia Pacific. They are in 15 countries and speak equally as many languages. Additionally there is an indirect sales channel in 10 other countries.

In the case of Acme Software you may need to start the product launch planning process of sales enablement training 6 months in advance of the target launch date just to coordinate training dates. If you have the added constraint of not being able to get everyone together in one place at one time, consider traveling to them or conducting sales enablement training online.

The Complexity of the Sales Cycle

The complexity of the sales cycle can introduce another dimension into your product launch planning. Products that are relatively simple to understand and sell, lend themselves to a much easier sales enablement training regiment and therefore a shorter planning horizon. On the other hand complex products take longer to understand and require much more involvement from buyers before a purchase decision can be made require a longer planning horizon.

Complex sales cycles require much more training about the problems addressed, who is impacted within the buyer’s organization, and what will they need to know in order to make a recommendation to buy.

Let’s build on our Acme Software example. Assume Acme is launching a new solution and for the first time will introduce to the channel a product with a complex sales cycle. Management is anticipating a 9 to 12 month sales cycle with no fewer than 8 to 10 people from the customer’s organization to be involved in making a decision to buy.

We’re presented not only with a new product to launch but a change in the way our sales channel will sell. This introduces risk. In order to minimize risk we may have to consider sales enablement training a year in advance by focusing on the problem, the market, buyers, and how they buy.

Another consideration here worth mentioning is sales culture. It’s not uncommon to see a sales culture where it’s OK to sell what’s not yet available. It’s another opportunity to introduce risk. Only this time the risk is about negatively affecting current sales before product launch. When we start sales enablement training we may run the risk that salespeople start talking about the new product immediately and inadvertently stop the deals they are working on today.

While I’m a strong advocate of a sales culture what sells what we have, I’m also a realist when it comes to long, complex sales cycles. If we wait until the product is announced we’re starting from scratch to build a pipeline. If we have a sales culture that sells futures, we start building a pipeline for the new product but run the risk of reducing the size of the pipeline for current products. Sometimes we’re in a no win situation. Err on the side of getting the sales channel and channel partners prepared to sell and leave the problem of selling futures to the VP of Sales and the CEO to resolve.

What are you struggling with?

Let me know by leaving me a comment below or sending me an email at ddaniels@pragmaticmarketing.com.

Content marketing campaigns are only online, the most effective are integrated across multiple online, IRL and print channels. See how folks are using different mediums to drive results across the following tactics:

• Blogs
• Webcasts
• Podcasts
• Magazines
• Websites
• Microsites
• Online Communities
• Social Media
• Events
• Customer Newsletters
• Videos
• Mobile Apps

Just like other shiny objects which have come before, the tech is out front in many of the discussions – social media is no different.  Tools, tactics and activities seem to rule the day and social strategy continues being infused into the discussion.

Social media strategy is a consistent theme of blog posts, twitter stream tidbits and infographics and it might not be the discussion most folks need.    I get the opportunity to work with a good deal of folks week in and week out from companies of all sizes and consistently I find that many organization’s are still trying to find the fit for social media into their activities.

While social tools and initiatives have been around for good bit of time, questions consistently arise around integrating social into marketing and operational efforts.    The Pragmatic Marketing Social Media survey from November 2011 validates this reality when implementing social with 32%% of respondents having no policy or are unaware of a company’s policies and only 1/3 of organizations have processes for addressing social interactions.

With the general ambiguity around policies and processes, social is still a open area for many marketers and organizations of all sizes and in all sectors.

Leverage Social to Achieve Business Goals

Start with the business.  The anchor for all social efforts should be the business and goals set forth.

To that end, how can an organization use social tactics to drive business benefits.    Depending on the business priorities, you may want to focus on different activities.  For example – improved service might require one set of tools and resources and changing perceptions and creating awareness another set of tools, tactics and resources.

Since I first looked at social media as a transactional platform it was clear that participating in communities, engaging your market and the overall process improvements present a great opportunities throughout the business (marketing, support, sales, education, fulfillment….).   So with this immense opportunity easily recognized through the business, social projects continue to be a key priority for 2012 and beyond for marketers, product types and operational teams -where do you start?

Be a Better Business

Jay Baer brought this post to the forefront of my thinking again with a post that challenged the concept in total of a developing a social media strategy, but I’m not sure he went far enough.  Nevertheless, he was willing to state:

The goal is not to be good at social media. The goal is to be good at business because of social media.

A pretty strong statement, it should be the spirit in which all social options are evaluated.

Case Studies: Goals of Business and Beyond

There are a handful of case studies which are always cited as successes in social media by bloggers and tweeters alike, some of them years old and still being used as rallying cries for the benefits of social.  Many of the examples are awesome, but didn’t these didn’t start with a social strategy, but a business need.

So I’ve decided to look at some case studies and gain some facts on what many of the showcase implementations in social were trying to achieve for their business.

Social Media is JUST part of the marketing mix and social media is anything but free, you are making a choice of how to invest your time and when you choose one approach over another, something gets dropped.  So if you choose social over other options it’s minimally opportunity costs.

Examining Success Stories and Goals

Dell Outlet:  The most visible success story online is the Dell Twitter Outlet account.  With over 1.5M followers is one heck of a broadcast channel which can improve awareness of the Dell outlet, which was the initial goal of the effort per Stephanie Nelson of Dell.

If you look at @delloutlet‘s stream, you will find that it isn’t conversational per se (they do respond to inquiries and service needs though – admittedly it was more engaging historically), the overall the account is providing awareness to promotions and alike which are designed to deliver on the goals set by business to achieve an overall goal – revenue!  In fact, the Dell story of $6.5 million in 18 months is only interesting because achieved results for the business via a set of tactics (content development + twitter) to provide access to a bigger part of the market than previously was aware that Dell even had an outlet.

Old Spice:  This is a social story writ large for marketers, but it started with a goal.  Change the image of the brand, in the language of the Brand Manager, James Moorhead:

…In some ways, the oldness of Old Spice was part of the problem. Every young man in America has a memory of his father or grandfather’s pungent aftershave—and young men don’t want to wear their father’s cologne…

While the online tactics gain the most chatter online, it is important to note the strategy and plan to achieve this goal started with TV commercials and overtime it prioritized social efforts from the brand team to achieve the business goals, but it was not a “social strategy”.  Social became the most effect tactic in an execution plan for the brand which included traditional media and IRL events.

Name Cheap – Name Cheap is a domain service which is competing in a really crowded and highly commoditized segment and have used social to differentiate in this crowded marketplace.  If you look @namecheap ‘s Twitter page, it becomes evident, that service is important with them.  Not just service as it relates to support, but to buying too.   Don’t take my word, take the CEO’s.  Here is what Richard Kirkendall says on his bio:

Our company culture is entirely dedicated to you, our clients and how we can help you buy and manage your domains in the most efficient and hassle-free way possible.

Name Cheap has not only leveraged social strategically, but they strategically chose that the customer is king and social is a main channel for engagement.  Effectively social has been integrated into their  DNA – operational processes, their products, systems and during the buying process.  So how has leveraging social tactics helped support this business tenant? Their use of twitter has had significant benefits, including as much as a 20% increase in domain registrations based on their Twitter contests and alike.

5 Common Elements of Social Success

There are cases studies all over the web, but there are some key themes:

1. Good Content
2. Good Service
3. Increased Awareness/Visibility of a product, company or promotion
4. Achieving Business results

Balancing the Marketing Mix with Social

Let’s be clear, social is real and valuable for all businesses and there isn’t an option to not participate, but the questions should be around the level of investment and what is the focus of the effort – awareness, revenue, service, other…?

So when thinking social – You have to start at the highest level as noted by J. Baer in the graphic below with strategy, not at social which is the essences of JB’s argument that social needs to support business:

While that makes a easy to digest drill down in a single slide, I take a little  issue with social strategy and the fact that the hierarchy starts with business strategy rather than goals.  So I spent a little time to think about it and while I’m clearly graphically challenged, here is my take on the flow to market execution.

While this shows a marketing view, there should be a support view, a sales view, a product view and alike to drive toward the goal of the business and any given department or program may or may not deploy social tactics.

Net-Net: Start with the goals/objectives of the business, understand the high level strategy and mission and align your marketing strategies – then pick the tactics.  Don’t let tools, tactics and other lower level items constrain your options.  If it’s social great.  If it’s thought leadership great.  If dancing bears at a trade show works – awesome.

So what’s your business’ strategy?

source:http://www.gapingvoidart.com/power-point-p-2243.html

Here’s the link: Jon Talking Stuff

Rich Mironov at Product Bytes weighs in with a thoughtful post about measuring product managers.  He had a recent experience in Sweden where the product executives he worked with shared the same concerns as product executives in the U.S., Europe and the rest of the World, namely: what is the right way to measure the performance of a product manager?

This is a really interesting and difficult question to answer.  Rich breaks it down into three areas: product-level metrics (product revenue, profit, customer sat), team-level metrics (are the other teams getting what they need from product management), and individual-level metrics.  The first two metrics are fairly well defined – there is a strong history of measuring products and teams with these criteria and there are MBA programs with entire curriculum defined about measuring product performance.  Unfortunately measuring individual product manager performance is more tricky as these metrics are not as clear.

Lacking traditional or clear metrics, most companies rely on product-level metrics such as product revenue, margin, or customer satisfaction to measure the performance of an individual product manager.  The thought process is defensible – you want the product manager to be motivated by metrics that lead the product toward success.  Unfortunately, product managers typically have very little control over the outcome of these metrics, or at best, indirect control.  For a product manager measured on product revenue, the product manager could spend months designing the perfect product, training the sales channel, and working with marketing to design a lead generation campaign – only to wake up one day and find that the executive team had made a strategic decision to make a large acquisition and change Sales resourcing.  That change would have a huge impact on the product manager’s metrics, at no fault of the product manager; effectively they would be penalized for doing the right things.  For a product manager measured on product margin, I always ask “Do you have the ability to outsource the development of your product to a 3rd party if your internal engineering team delivered an estimate that was too expensive?”  For most product managers, the answer is a resounding “no.”  Customer satisfaction suffers from a similar control issue – there are lots of reasons beyond the product that customer sat may suffer, and most of those reasons are not something a product manager can impact.

The other issue with measuring product managers on product-level metrics is an issue of timeliness.  If you are measuring your team on product revenue, you can make an argument that it may take up  to 18-24 months to know if the product manager is doing a good job.  Consider this – if you hire a new product manager, before he or she can impact product revenue, the following will need to occur:

• The new product manager will need to go into the market and research the market’s problems (up to 3 months)
• The product manager will then write what they have learned into a business plan, and get it approved (1-2 months)
• Then the product manager will write requirements for engineering (up to 3 months)
• Then engineering will build something (6-9 months)
• Then in most products there will be a Sales cycle (3-6 months)

Only then will we have the data to understand if the decisions made on the front-end of the process are “good.”  Hopefully we will be more agile and most faster, but the point remains – using product-level metrics to measure individual performance is insufficient.  We need a better way, and there is a better way.

What I have settled on for measuring individual performance is to measure the activities required for a product manager to be market-driven:

1. Setting a quota for market visits (10/quarter is a good start IMO),
2. Being able to defend an updated business plan in front of me and their peers every quarter, without using the phrases “I think,” or “In my opinion” (which requires higher order thought and research).
3. Keeping their finger on the pulse of the business by defining and measuring the right product level metrics and communicating them in the form of a dashboard report monthly.

I like these metrics because they require a product manager to get out from behind their desk and be outside-in focused, and the product manager can control them, as opposed to revenue, margin or CSAT which the product manager cannot control.

All things being equal, it would be preferable to measure outcomes as opposed to activities, but it is wicked hard to separate and quantify the inputs of a product manager vis-a-vi all the other variables that go into making a product fly.  Activities are a sufficient proxy to measure a market-driven product manager to supplement product-level metrics and understand if a product manager is doing their job – without having to wait two years to find out.

No amount of perfume can overcome the stench of a technology product that people don’t need.

via Stop Perfuming the Pig: Why “real” marketing is done before the product is created.

One of my most popular articles from The Pragmatic Marketer.

So you’ve attended Practical Product Management and gotten all fired up! You come back to the office ready to be market-driven. You’re anxiously awaiting the looks of joy and amazement at your newly found skills as a product manager. And then reality hits you… hard! Development couldn’t care less! They’re not listening!! How could this be??

You missed a step: you skipped the part where you earned credibility.

via Start with the ending.