Behind The Scenes of a Successful B2B Product Launch

If there's not a compelling offer, nobody's going to go to the website and the attribution issue gets solved by having a good offer. And so in this thing, it's like, Capsule is a perfect example because you're like, hey, we just launched this new, like, AI audio editor. By the way, it's completely free. Go to Capsule Video to sign up. People aren't dumb. They're going to go find the website and go sign up. They don't need the actual link to click on. You really got to think about what that offer is, right? If I say, hey, I created this amazing free guide about how to grow your career and B2B marketing and blah, blah, blah, I could just tell people, go to the Exit 5 website. It's there to remember. So you really got to think about the packaging and how the offer works there.

Exit 5.

I'm Dave. I'm the founder and CEO here at Exit 5. I think we're building the best community in the world for B2B marketing professionals. And I have two great people to do this webinar with me. Oh, damn it. I said webinar myself. To do this live session with me, myself, Zach Roberts and Natalie Taylor. This is a fun one because each of these folks that you see right here is also an Exit 5 member marketer in their own cry. You know, this is their craft, this is their job. A couple weeks ago, I hit up the Exit 5 community and I said, hey, which topics do you want us to hear? What you know, what do you want to talk about? So a little bit different than the podcast traditionally, where instead of doing interviews, we do these live sessions where we bring in subject matter experts, we do a little deep dive on a particular topic. Obviously, there was a bunch of popular ones, but I had to pick the one that I thought would be great, and that was product launches. Talked to Natalie, talked to Zach. We're going to talk about some product launch stuff that each of them has done at their companies in the past. Natalie recently did launch at Capsule, which is more on the startup side. Zach is going to talk about a launch he did a couple years ago in the cyber security space. Which company? More on the enterprise side. And then we're going to hang out, we're going to take all your questions. So if you came here because you have specific product launch questions, you want to talk Playbooks, processes, what to do, get advice for your next launch, we are going to help you out. Without further ado, I'm going to turn over to Zach. Zach, give us a quick intro to yourself. We'll get your slide, get your slides set up and we're going to dive into your whole launch.

All right, yo, thanks, Dave. So Dave, as you said earlier, my name is Zach Roberts, founder of Break Into Product Marketing. It's a fractional product marketing service. I am based in San Diego, but I decided to fly over to visit Natalie here in Minnesota about roughly an hour away while visiting family at the same time here. I am so excited about this conversation right now and to give a deeper dive on this. So as Dave mentioned, we're going to talk more about an enterprise security launch at Dropbox. For anyone that's in marketing, specifically in product marketing. You know, influence hinges upon the numbers that support the business. And these were the agreed upon metrics that we aligned on specifically for sales alignment and velocity. From meetings booked in the call blitz to the number of close opportunities that line from both the sales and marketing criteria and ARR from a six week time frame and by the end of the fiscal year. For context, this play was launched on April 12, 2022. These were the actual results and from what you see here, we blew it out the water from the lowest percentage of 105% of goal from the meetings, but from opportunities and from revenue from the six week period, from the period of April 12 to the actual date as of October 29, 2022. What most people don't know is that the campaign designed for the initial product release, the enterprise security product itself got delayed for several months. So with that in mind, the next question we're asking ourselves is like Zach, how the heck do you build a successful B2B for a sales led org without the product itself? Like, what are we doing here? So it's one part to better understand this question, I gotta take y' all back five years, like prior to this moment. And this is when I was an SDR at LinkedIn. They're in the photo here. I'm sitting down with our VP of sales at the time, Mike Darzen. He decided to take the day out of his schedule to better understand the sales processes that we see on the front lines when we're talking to prospects, trying to understand like why would I even buy from LinkedIn even even though I'm not really on LinkedIn, like what is the problem trying to solve similar to a product launch, B2B sales, no different. The best ones, either a conversation or launch itself don't lead on a product. They lean on your buyer. And for some of us here who said lead with the product with every launch. I agree with you. As long as you go in knowing your buyer first. There's a reason why there's no all vegan restaurants alongside the Highway 90 in rural Wisconsin. So with that context in mind, let's learn more about what we're going to get out this conversation in the next several minutes. We're going to talk about what to do first in a buyer focused launch. When a lot of the focus is on like content, collateral, tactics produced, take a step back to really hone in on what are the activities that are going to actually drive revenue.

I love. So it's funny, it's funny. A question that comes up all the time, a question that comes up all the time in the community is marketers and marketers that are here in the chat. You can feel free to let me know if this is you. But we, we feel like we create all this stuff for a launch and then it's like how do we get sales to pay attention to this? That is like the ultimate sales enablement question. I can't get them to pay attention. I got to do all this stuff. And so I'm interested to see where you take this.

Oh my, Dave, you're reading my mind right here. And, and to better enable sales and enable the organization, when you focus on the buyer, that makes it easier to get sellers on your side. So knowing that, better research, what are the questions you're going to ask yourself to better refine that? And when you do that, what do all successful launches sit on? And when you do build that foundation that makes it easier to implement this one simple fix of unused sales collaboration, which recently we had a conversation on a separate podcast, is that for Enterprises, that's about 1.2 million of unused sales clutter each year. Like how can we reduce that? And this is what we're going to do to help you out here today. And lastly, how much time does this all take to do all this? So for anyone that calls themselves a data backed product marketer and has taken a data analytics course, the first thing your instructor is going to tell you before you dive into the data set is to ask yourself a question, an open question of what you are looking to explore, what you're looking to uncover, what are the insights that you want to use to help refine your decision making. This is no different when we think about a product launch. And this was the same question I asked myself at the start of this campaign. Again with the context being we don't really have a product, new product to talk About. So what's really great about this one single sentence here of how can Dropbox users reduce cyber attack risk by upgrading their plans, is that it breaks it down to three components that you are going to use to help refine what to focus on within the buyer research here. First piece, who's our target audience? Who'd care about this most of reducing their cyber attack risk, that being the desired outcome. And then lastly, how does our product tie to that? Again, we're talking about Dropbox and cybersecurity. If anyone were to get hacked, no one's calling Dropbox to defend their security perimeter. So in the next few minutes, we're going to talk about how do you create an open space in the mind to make it relevant to said target audience of why Dropbox might be relevant to their cybersecurity needs. Before I go over, you're going to look at this and you're going to be like, well, this is sufficient. Some your leader might say this is sufficient. Like, we have enough to know what our audience, what we want to do to launch this campaign. Let's do that. But one thing for one insight I took from my sales experience is this lesson from David Hoffel, the science of selling is that when you're talking to a buyer, there are six implicit questions they're asking themselves to whether, hey, does this make sense for me to make this purchase? And if we flip the script and ask ourselves this question, this does a lot of the upfront work within your product launch planning to make it easier to win the sellers over. So taking this question, this really helped me refine where I want to put my attention. What are the insights that I want to uncover and to better strengthen the content and resources that you're going to build with this plan right here. So walking through this really quick here is that from the awareness standpoint, educating and selling on the problem. When we were talking about this campaign at the time, few things were going on Covid there was a rise in hybrid work and that meant asynchronous work, people sharing data from different areas that kind of gave Iot teams a little bit of heartburn because that could raise the risk of a cyber attack to then evaluation, like, what's the best alternative? I want to be a big fish in a small pond. So how do I position Dropbox to not be in cybersecurity, but in the space that we play well, which was remote collaboration and digital cloud storage, and show how our security capabilities stand out from the competitive alternatives? When we can answer those questions earlier on, it makes it a lot easier to then show why the product is the solution. And it takes a lot of that upfront burden away from the seller of justifying, hey, this is why we're having the conversation today.

This is great. I think it's easy to jump into the tactics and you're going to get to them and show us the actual launch stuff. But it is like, I really am a believer in this, in the what makes a great, like, how do you become a great copywriter? Oh, the way to become a great copywriter is to do good research. Right? And it's like if you rewind back and you really have to have something, have something that people want is the ultimate key to a successful product launch. It's not necessarily like, oh, we did this video with this influencer and we wrote this copy on LinkedIn. Those are all things that are going to come from strong positioning and the foundation for this launch.

And that's right. David, I'm glad you brought that up in that because that ties into what we're going to talk about next is that a few minutes ago I mentioned to you all that this question you see on the screen is that we're going to answer this question and the answer to this question is going to be a similar approach that we see in all campaigns and which is positioning. And we're going to talk about like how this, these two steps really help you create a unique point of view which we then use to partition the message across our entire campaign, across our collateral and created a narrative that really supported what sellers were saying in the field. Like the comment that was mentioned earlier, Zach, this is no different than what we're saying in the field. What's really great now is that now we have content, proof points and evidence to back our talking points. This is what positioning can do for you. Positioning can make you the big like the big fish in the small pond. And this is how we were able to pivot Dropbox from hey, this is a space where I store my grandmother's photos to oh, this is a space that's going to make it easier for me to protect our sensitive employee data because it's a tool that my employees use. The unique insight behind that that was uncovered in research is that for it, teams in small and medium business size space is that they don't want to be a blocker to business, they want to help businesses win. But sometimes they're seen as the big bad wolf because they're putting policies in place to ensure the security is Safe. If you and I like a tool that may not agree with it, we're going to still use it. And that was their number one challenge to protecting their security perimeter. And by showing like, hey, we know your employees love this tool. We know that you want to align with business outcomes. We have features that better enable you to protect that data and to better support your HR teams related to the rise of regulatory state by state privacy information. Are you interested? So this is an example here of how this positioning hinged upon all the research and helped enable the content that we're doing. Before I show you kind of that next fix, one question we're asking ourselves is that when we are being tasked with delivering a launch yesterday, how much time is this going to take? And again, this is just an example just from a larger enterprise here. This may be different from you, but these were the components that we looked at. Was that looking from industry reports to using to working with our internal sellers and interviews like, hey, deals that were related to the features that we're looking to launch, really knowing who the buyer was, like, why did they buy? What were they trying to solve to existing collateral. One of the pieces of feedback that we got from our sales team is that, hey, we really need an infographic to really set the stage, set the context here. So that was one way of creating content then that was used by the sales team. The last piece here I want to cover here is that when you think of collateral, don't think of it as we need to get stuff out the door just to talk about our product. But like we said before, flip the script. Think about it from the buyer's perspective. Ask yourself at what stage are you and what questions are you trying to help solve for the buyer? The example with the infographic that we spoke on was that it was really to show this, to educate and set context around the problem and set the stage and say, hey, from what you are feeling, here are some numbers to show you as to why you might be feeling this way. How does this resonate with you? It started a stronger conversation around the problem. Then better position the product as the solution here overall for your next launch, these are the five takeaways to take from it. Is that before you dive into the activities, really take a step back and ask yourself the question what are you trying to solve for? Similar to the approach that we take to exploring a data set, it's no different for a launch itself. The six whys flip the script. Instead of looking at it from a marketing funnel, let's sit down with the buyer and look at it from their lens when they are making decisions like this. When you can do that, it makes it a lot easier to craft a positioning statement without a complex framework to do so. And then from there, creating content, then that supports the positioning along the funnel and having questions to really assess, like, hey, are we really answering this for this buyer? If not, how do we get them on board? And then lastly, when you're doing buyer research like this, talk with your sales team. Talk like, look at existing collateral, like, what are the industry reports that you may tap into to kind of better inform yourself of the market and to see what your buyers see when they're evaluating solutions like yours. So I'm going to stop right here. I'm going to pass back over here to Dave.

Great job. Catherine says, I love that. Get out of the marketing mindset and channel your buyer. Alexander is in the Q and A saying, zach, this is brilliant. Will we be getting access to your slides post event? Absolutely. We'll make sure everybody gets those. Quick question for you before we flip over Natalie from Caitlin. When you've got two weeks to prep internally, where would you ruthlessly prioritize?

That is. So the clarifying question is two weeks to launch. Just two. It sounds like two weeks to launch the product. Right?

Let's just make up an answer, help her riff on this. Like, if you had two weeks to go, if you had two weeks into get a launch turnaround, how would you prioritize some of this stuff?

Yeah, my first thing would be like assuming that if it's like a sales like organization, I'll talk to my sellers. I would ask them, like, hey, like, what's working for you on the field? And it's just prior to.