Dave Daniels (Launch)

Speaker: Dave Daniels, VP, Product Marketing

Dave Daniels: Hey, this is Dave from product marketing community and I want to share with you the top 10 reasons why product launches failed. If you have any of these as I'm going through them, just write them down and think about coming back. Thio all of us that PMC and see if we can help you address these. Number one. You got the wrong product. But you and the right market You found the market. You found the problems you built a dud. It happens to you got the right product. Maybe you found the right market and you built the right product. But then somebody somewhere says, Oh, let's pointed in this direction Over here we'll be able to sell more because they have more moneys. But it's the right product in the wrong market. Three. You've got unclear launch objectives. Hey, launches a big project. All projects have objectives. If you don't have an objective for you launch How can you measure success? It's impossible. Four. Poor coordination and communication. Launching a product is a team sport. The team doesn't win because you have a few heroes. You win because the team is coordinated. They're talking to each other, and they're working in sync. Five lack of executive commitment very, very debilitating. When on one side of the house, the executives are saying, Wow, you got an awesome thing you're working on. This product is gonna be amazing. But yet their actions are contrary to that they don't release. The resource is they don't release the budget, which gets to our next 16 Lack of resource is and budget. You can't do this right without money and without people again. It's a team sport. So you got us. If you don't have enough team and you don't have enough budget, you got to scale back your launch and reset expectations. Seven No launch strategy. There's no strategically going on. It ties nicely with objectives. If you don't know where you're going, then anywhere will take you, you know, into that direction, which is, and any strategy, any path will dio. So you need to develop a strategy eight. Get my fingers right. Eight. So poor launch readiness. You've done all the work. You know what to do. Um, Or maybe you didn't plan for readiness or you didn't know areas that needed to be ready. But you plowed through nine one size fits all checklist. Hey, we've all done it right. Hey, this is just like laying bricks. Just check it all out. Build a wall here. The bricks. You need the mortar, You gotta level it. Check, check, check, check. Let's check. Lists have their place, but it but every launches a little bit different, so don't approach it as a one size fits all. And finally, 10. A failure to recognize obstacles and advantages. And here's the way I want you to think about it. Obstacles and advantages not through your eyes, but through the eyes of the people you're trying to influence, right? So notice I said, the people you're trying to influence, you have to influence people internally. So who in your organization do you need to get excited? What would prevent them from wanting to say, sell the product? But you know what? What are the obstacles? So you need to identify obstacles both internally and externally. Too many companies gloss over that. They just assume it's magically gonna happen, and we can overcome all obstacles. And that's just not the case. The other side of that coin, our advantages. You have advantages. You have uniqueness. You have certain capabilities that the market will value. What are those? Do you need to inventory those advantages and take advantage of them right to in order? In order to succeed? Don't assume that they're not advantages. You could You could very well have incredible market advantages. And you've been using them for so many years. You assume that they're not valuable anymore. I say bologna, go back and look at it. So there you go. There are my top 10 reasons for launch failure. Hope to see you soon.

Dave Daniels: Hey, this is Dave from product marketing community, and I wanna answer a very important question. One question that I get frequently and I get it frequently more from an executive community. And that is what does success look like for a product launch? How Doe. I know I was successful, and I get that from product marketing, uh, members to team members. So what? What is success? What is success look like? Well, success starts with the definition of success. Sounds kind of obvious, but stop and think about that for a minute. How do you define success in anything you dio? You have an objective. And with that objective, then you can use that as the standard of measure of success. Like so what does winning the game look like? How doe I know I passed the finish line. Enough of the sports metaphors. The key is it's going to boil down to just a few things. One for some. For some companies, it's all about establishing traction in the market place, and that traction could be defined as getting subscribers. It could be defined as sales right revenue eso. So how would you define traction? The second one is more specific, and that within traction is revenue growing at selling mawr of what we have. So if you're going to to measure the success of your launch on selling products, then define what that objective is third, sometimes it it's not growth and getting traction. Sometimes it's all about retention, right? So we've introduced the product. We've gotten traction. We've grown the product to to a very successful state. It's very profitable for us now. How do we make sure we keep that around? So a retention metrics sometimes gets in there. So now think about your objective as you're defining it. There are three elements I want you to look for. One is what is the measure of success? What is your metric than to? How much of that do you want to get? How much makes how much define success If it's retention? Is there a percentage of of of retention? You're looking for a reduction insurance. If it's revenue based, Are you looking at sales? Are you looking at annual recurring revenue? What is the number another metric connected with with selling, especially if you have a product that has a very long sales cycle is building up your pipeline. So if you're in B two b and you have sale cycle, it's a six months, 12 months, 18 months. Your measure of success could be building the pipeline for future sales. That's one way of doing it. So one what is the metric to How much do you want to get then the third one is the most critical. That ties it all together is the glue that ties it together. And that is, when do you want to achieve that number? So how is it going to be three years from now, or is it gonna be three months from now or three weeks from now? So what you're looking for is what's the metric? How much of it do you want to achieve? And that defines the success. But the last important piece and a lot of companies dropped this they forget to include it is when the time frame scopes it down, it creates focus. It creates a sense of urgency for your entire organization is certainly your launch team. So what is a product launch success look like? It's meeting your objectives