This article originates from Natasha's presentation at the Product Marketing Summit in Chicago, 2022. Catch up on this presentation, and others, using our OnDemand service. For more exclusive content, visit your membership dashboard.

Hello! My name is Natasha Janic, and I lead product marketing for our Loyalty Management product at Salesforce. I've spent pretty much my whole career working in tech. I came to Salesforce about three years ago specifically to launch our new loyalty product.

It was an interesting journey, and while I don't feel qualified to talk about many things in this world, this is definitely something I do feel qualified to talk about, and I'm excited to share it with you.

I’ll break our topic up into three big chunks. We’ll look at:

  • How to resource and start planning for a launch
  • Tips and tricks that we learned from our go-to-market strategy
  • How to run effective enablement and drive evangelism

Let’s dive in.

Resourcing and planning for product launches

I want to start with a little story about our loyalty product launch. I was told that this was going to be a tier-one launch – the biggest launch you can possibly have – so I was super excited but very confused as to why they were letting me as a PMM be the one leading this. Still, I appreciated the confidence that leadership had in me.

The launch was going to be a big splash at Dreamforce, our flagship conference. If you’ve ever been to Dreamforce, you can imagine the scene: there’s Marc Benioff on the mainstage talking about this new product, plus a keynote, and all of that fun stuff.

The entire launch cycle typically culminates at Dreamforce, so I was picturing myself finishing my keynote and walking into a big party to celebrate all of the hard work we’d put into this launch over the past year.

Product launches: expectations, and then an image of people celebrating throwing money everwhere.
Image courtesy of Salesforce

This was all planned for September 2020. It became pretty obvious by April that it wasn’t going to happen that way.

Being a large company that loves to launch things all the time, we have playbooks and plenty of resources to guide us through the launch process. I remember sitting down with my executive sponsor, looking through the playbooks, and crossing out 50% of the things in there because we just couldn't do them.

This was the first tier-one launch at Salesforce during the pandemic, so I really had no guidance, and I felt like I was shooting from the hip most of the time. For the next eight-plus months, I tried to figure out how to make this exciting and bring the magic that Salesforce usually brings, despite being unable to interact with anyone in person.

Reworking that playbook and creating a launch process for this new world was a really interesting journey. Since then, we've revamped all of our playbooks. I went on a tour of the company afterward, telling everyone what I learned, what worked, and what didn't work because we were all trying to figure out how to navigate this new space.

What are you launching?

I like to break launches down into tiers based on what we're launching. Is it a feature, an add-on product, or a new product or category? Even within that last tier, there can be huge variations.

We've launched smaller products that weren’t meant to be huge disruptors, as well as bigger products like our loyalty cloud, which represents a new market for the company and requires a much bigger launch.

All of these launch tiers require different levels of investment, which is what I want to talk about today. I encourage you to think through what exactly you're launching. Sometimes we want a launch to be bigger than it is, so having an exec who can give you a reality check is helpful.

Lessons learned

Now I want to share with you the lessons I’ve learned when it comes to resourcing and planning a launch.

Lesson one: Have a work back plan on-hand before resourcing requests

It helped us to have a work back plan already done. We knew what we needed to get done, and we knew which teams needed to do those things, so we just needed to assign actual people to each task.

We went to the leadership for each team we needed to be involved in, and we asked them which team members had the bandwidth and might like a stretch opportunity to work on a big launch. That also helped us maintain accountability throughout the process.

Lesson two: Allow two to three weeks to coordinate resources for new product launches

Getting everyone aligned for this launch involved a lot of meetings with different leaders and a lot of moving people around before we finally got everyone assigned to what they were responsible for. I’d recommend allowing at least a few weeks, if not a month, to make this happen.

Helpful tips for your work back plan

  1. Set realistic timelines and give yourself more time than you think you need – I found myself editing a datasheet on Christmas Eve because I totally underestimated how long things were going to take. Don’t let this be you.
  2. Align your launch with an existing event – I've found that trying to drum up interest for your launch alone is a lot more difficult than piggybacking on a third-party conference or a suite of company announcements that’s already in motion and maybe already has press coverage.
  3. Schedule regular check-in cadences and tracking documents – As we got closer to our launch, I met twice a week with our cross-functional team and our marketing arm. All of this can get out of hand if you don’t regularly update tracking documents that show your progress.
  4. Leave room for additional tasks – Things will inevitably come up that you didn't think about as you were building your plan.
  5. Send weekly updates to leadership and stakeholders – This not only keeps everyone informed but also makes it possible for leaders to remove roadblocks.

    Plus, it gives visibility into the amazing work you’re doing. You’re leading a very important motion for the company, so take credit for it and make yourself stand out from those leaders.

Feature resourcing: Low investment

Unless it’s an especially large feature, you’ll need to pull in relatively few resources for feature releases. You’ll want to bring in the marketing part of the organization.

If you have a release team, they’ll be involved too. You’ll also be working with product and engineering to understand how the feature works and maybe create some demo videos.

Add-on product resourcing: Medium investment

If you’re launching an add-on product, you'll work with your pricing teams, go through T's and C's with your legal teams, go through technical demos, and make sure your documentation is up to date with your technical teams.

You’ll also see things start to grow on the marketing side. They’ll be working on campaigns, creative, and potentially PR, and social media if it's a big enough add-on.

New product/category resourcing: High investment

As we get into large product launches, things start to get hairy. You might want to bring in a project manager to coordinate the aspects of the launch that rely on other parts of the organization.

These are just some of the moving parts that you might be coordinating with:

And these are the teams that you might want to get your project manager to liaise with on your behalf, bringing you in when necessary:

Go-to-market

Coming back to our loyalty product launch, the industry we intended to go-to-market in was travel. That didn't really work out for us. We were in the thick of a pandemic and his product was going to reach general availability in February 2021. It was time to think about how we could pivot.

We had to strike a delicate balance. People all over the world were dealing with serious trauma. Businesses were starting to reopen and trying to figure out how to grow and recover. All this meant we had to undertake a pretty involved research process about how to message this product and go-to-market.

Working toward the North Star

We typically start working on large launches about a year out. We spend about six months planning, conducting market research, and figuring out our resourcing.

Then, three to six months out, we get into messaging and positioning and get creative. I’d highly recommend investing in messaging and positioning as early as possible because that's going to be the core of every other piece of your go-to-market strategy.

Usually, we work toward a North Star, but after we announced the launch in January 2021, we found that we just weren't able to capture the audience we were used to.

We quickly realized that we had to change the way we viewed our launch process. Instead of a straight line from planning to launch, it became cyclical. We continued to do market research and revamp our messaging and positioning.

A lot of things can kick this cycle off, including events, market trends, changing expectations, significant product developments, and new add-ons. We've gone through this cycle multiple times. When COVID first became a reality for us, we had to completely redo our messaging.

Then, as businesses started to reopen, we had to revamp the messaging again so it focused more on growth. Now, with the impending recession, we're pivoting once more.

Market trends and world events are triggering this new cycle, so we're refreshing everything, and it feels like we're relaunching the product. We’ve found that this cyclical approach with multiple shining moments that maintain the product’s momentum is a lot more effective than our traditional approach to go-to-market.

How to nail your messaging

Messaging and positioning can be tough. I feel like I'm going through some messaging gymnastics right now as I try to position a loyalty product during a recession. One piece of advice I got from a professor in grad school was, “Say it straight and then say it great.”

We can often get caught up in trying to figure out the perfect tagline that’s going to help us make a splash. However, especially on the B2B side, it’s important to say what you really mean. You can tweak it later to make it sound better, but always start with that core message, and then develop it over time.

Another piece of advice is to think about if your competitor could say the same thing. Anytime I put together a deck, I'm like, “could Oracle say this? If they did, would it make sense?”

I know they can't say they're the world's number one CRM. I know they can't claim to power the entire customer experience the way that we can. Plus, I know they don't have this really cute Astro character.

Have fun and try new things!

My last piece of advice on this go-to-market strategy is to have fun. We can get so caught up in our spreadsheets and to-do lists that we forget how important that is.

I remember having a jobs-to-be-done list that was 100 items long – just for marketing. A great way to bring the fun back to your day-to-day is to try new channels and mediums.

Right before we announced the product, we launched a YouTube series to signal to the market that Salesforce was moving into the loyalty space. I interviewed the GMs of every industry at Salesforce to talk about what loyalty means for that industry. That was a fun new method that we tested to start spreading the word about our product.

Have fun and try new things! New channels, new mediums, get creative.
Image courtesy of Salesforce

In the absence of an event to launch our product, I was asking myself what else we could do. I somehow convinced our creative team and our 3D team to create a whole new Astro costume for this product.

I'm not kidding, I sat through meetings picking out the fabrics for their jacket, and it was fun! I'd rather be doing that than sitting with legal any day. I have a little plushie of this and it's my prized possession.

Enablement and evangelism

The last piece I want to talk about is enablement and evangelism for your new product.

Get early buy-in through pilot customer stories

When you’re launching a new product, I’d encourage everyone to have pilot customers to help you get buy-in early. As you're onboarding these pilot customers, make sure you let them know that you would love for them to be pioneers of this product and thought leaders for it.

Have them inform your internal use cases and provide video testimonials and quotes for your website. If you're making a PR announcement, have them participate in that.

Do all of this as early as you can. We did our pilot the fall before we launched, and I wish we had started earlier. We didn't have customers going live on this product until about a year in, so all the testimonials we had came from our pilot customers.

Make advocates out of your teams

We did both sales and technical enablement for our new product. For our sales teams, we made sure they understood the pricing and packaging.

On top of that, we walked them through buyer personas and how to talk about what makes us different. We ran pitch competitions too between our account executives, with awards for the best.

On the technical side, we did days-long enablement sessions with our solution engineers and architects to make sure they understand how our data model works and how we integrate with external systems and the rest of our product suites. Plus, we went through what demo assets and tutorials are available.

Similar to the pitch competitions for account executives, it’s a great idea to do a demo jam in which you challenge your technical teams to demo the product back to you.

We found that this really helped because while these teams are excited when they're going through enablement, as time passes, they start to forget about it. These demo jams helped keep them engaged over time.

Bring the energy!

Finally, get your sales teams excited. If you're at an organization where they're selling multiple things, you want them to focus on this new product.

To make this happen, we did a video on the history of loyalty, which we broadcast to 50,000 employees during an all-hands call. I promised myself I’d never surface this image again, but this is me in a Marie Antoinette wig.

Bring the energy! Picture of Natasha in a big, white, Marie Antoinette wig with a painting of ships from the 1700s behind her.
Image courtesy of Salesforce

Bringing some type of fun is a great way to get your sales teams excited about new products. And if that doesn't work, money always does so that's always an option too.