Mark Lewis

Maintaining alignment with all stakeholders can be a challenge in a large enterprise. Regular meetings serve as crucial platforms for discussion, feedback, and decision-making. However, without careful control, these meetings can expand with the wrong audience or become unproductive. To prevent this, it's essential to have a meeting owner who manages the discussions, tracks talking points, shares agendas in advance, records actions, and follows up on them. If this skill is lacking, consider hiring a project manager or executive assistant to enhance your effectiveness. Stakeholder Meetings: * Business Development: This team is a fantastic resource within large organizations, pooling together sales info to highlight trends and provide top-level guidance. They're a great go-to for insights into what's working and what's not in sales strategies, and for feedback from the field. * Sales Teams: Chatting with sales teams is one of the best ways to gather customer feedback. Building a relationship with them is all about follow-through—delivering on what you promise. Their feedback can really help shape your strategy and create content that benefits everyone in sales. * Product & Engineering: Working hand-in-hand with these teams, you can map out a plan for product and feature releases. Product Marketing can play a vital role here, providing feedback on what's working and what's not. * Product Marketing Leadership: Regular catch-ups ensure everyone's on the same page about strategic direction, upcoming launches, events, and initiatives. These calls are an opportunity to connect with leadership and have live discussions and decisions. * General Leadership: It’s beneficial for PMM’s to meet leaders from all teams regularly. Sharing agendas before meetings and sending notes/actions afterward is key. These calls can be a treasure trove of value, but it's important to keep them focused to get the most out of them. * Customers: A direct line to customers can reveal heaps of useful insights. It's important to have the sales team's trust and agree on a strategic direction for the account. User group meetings can be a perfect chance to update key customers on your plans and gain their feedback.

Every Go-to-Market plan differs slightly, but typically includes these steps: 1. Consider your customer: Understand who makes purchasing decisions and why. A buying center often incorporates multiple people, including the initiator, user, influencer, decision maker, buyer, and approver. 2. Understand your customer's journey: Recognize the stages a customer goes through when considering your product. These stages are awareness, consideration, and decision. Create content for each stage that captures attention, presents your product as a solution, and encourages a purchase, respectively. 3. Strategize: Determine your budget, target audience, and most effective channels, which could include digital marketing, public relations, content marketing, or social media marketing. 4. Write your content: Develop content for each stage of the buyer's journey. This might range from educational blog posts or social media content, to case studies or white papers, and product demos or free trials. 5. Measure success: Keep track of your results to identify what works and what doesn't. This might involve tracking website traffic, leads generated, or sales conversions. Adjust your GTM plan based on these findings. 6. Select marketing channels: Choose channels based on your target audience and budget. Options may include digital marketing, public relations, content marketing, or social media marketing. 7. Create a sales plan: Outline how you will sell your product to your target customers. This might involve developing sales materials, training your sales team, and creating a sales process.

First up, make sure you already have launch tiers in place. Evaluate against those criteria to ensure this really is a minor for your customers and not just your engineering team. Assuming you are indeed dealing with a minor release, the next steps depend on your specific situation, business rhythm, channels, and launch schedule. Here are some options: Keep it simple: Publish a blog post or update your release notes and move on. This requires the least effort and therefore has the lowest impact. Choose this option only after considering the alternatives below. Create a moment: Take a step back and consider your overall launch schedule. Are there other announcements that can be bundled together to create a larger story? By combining minor announcements into a single, more significant one, you can generate more attention and impact. You have control over the narrative, allowing you to shape it to align with your corporate objectives. Create a Cycle: Instead of making announcements based on product readiness, transition to a quarterly announcement cycle. Similar to the previous option, minor releases can be grouped into a larger announcement that has greater impact as a whole. The quarterly cycle builds anticipation from the market and internal stakeholders for your next release. This predictability enables you to plan customer communications, events, conferences, etc. around the launch cycle. Although it requires more initial work to achieve alignment, the payoff is substantial.

Coordinating the internal communication for product launches calls for thoughtful planning and straightforward messaging. It kicks off with crafting a comprehensive communication plan that depicts the principal messages, communication channels, timeline, and involved parties. This game plan should be disseminated amongst all related teams to ensure alignment. Crucial messages about the product launch, including its value to customers, features, and its alignment with the company's strategy, need to be unambiguously relayed to all team members. This can be achieved through a variety of communication means such as team huddles, internal email newsletters, slack broadcasts or posts on the intranet. Moreover, providing routine updates on the progress of the product launch is key to keeping everyone in the loop. This not only builds excitement but also helps to manage expectations and avert any unexpected surprises. Lastly, after the product launch, it's crucial to collect feedback from the team. This can aid in spotting any lapses in communication and honing future communication tactics.