A SUCCESSFUL PRODUCT LAUNCH supports the business objectives of a company: retaining a competitive advantage, revenue growth, increased market share, or time-to-market. The excitement that surrounds the launch of a new product is palpable, beginning months in advance and continuing through to the last article written or advertisement placed. However, it's the revenue it generates, not the execution of the marketing plan, that measures the success of the launch. To be successful, all deliverables must be focused on shortening the sales cycle and producing the maximum revenue.
ABT's Results Management Suite 5 provides an example of a successful launch. When planning a launch of your own, perhaps you can use our experience as a guide, gaining insight from our lessons learned.
A Cross-Functional Team. Launching a new product involves the entire organization at some point during the product launch life cycle. Each department gathers knowledge and provides input, which eventually impacts project plan development, execution and control. Sharing of knowledge is paramount for product development. Developing a central knowledge store ensures that valuable data is saved and accessible when needed.
Early external communication provides the building blocks of a successful product development project. Each part of the organization that interacts with customers must be able to gather information and feedback on earlier versions of the product or related products. This feedback can then be used to design the new components of the product. It is vital that the product management group, which will work with the development team to create the new features and improve existing ones, have access to this data. This initial phase of the launch sets the foundation for the remainder of the life cycle. If accurate data is collected and shared with the development team and product management, it will go a long way toward ensuring that the marketing plan is successful.
To facilitate this open communication, establish a launch team composed of members from each department involved in the development and launch of the product. Scope, time, resource, communication, and risk management issues will be major areas of discussion. Communication management is crucial and this team should agree upon a regular means for communicating, including the process by which to set regular meetings, develop the master plan, share project status and report the status to senior executives. ABT has learned from past experience that the number of team members should be minimal to facilitate the smooth running of the meetings, whether online, via conference call, or in person. Additional resources may be invited to specific calls as necessary to contribute. The communication of meeting notes and project status to all interested parties should be facilitated by established organizational infrastructures.
Bernie Cassidy ([email protected]) is the director of marketing for ABT Corp., and has worked within the software industry for seven years. He is a member of PMI as well as the American Marketing Association.
Launch Plan Gantt
Exhibit 1. The marketing team improved performance with the help of project management planning. Here's the launch plan Gantt chart, prepared with ABT's Workbench.
Sample Product Launch Timeline
Exhibit 2. This sample launch timeline gives you an idea of the tasks involved and when each should begin in order to ensure a successful new product launch.
Developing the Marketing Plan. The marketing department is an integral part of the launch team. While the master launch plan will have already begun within the product management and development teams, it also comprises multiple subprojects, developed by the individual departments involved in launching the new product. Each plan should be connected so that control remains within the department responsible and status reporting is simplified and extends out to all stakeholders. Effective communication is imperative to ensure there are no surprises at the last moment, causing a scramble or an unexpected delay in the launch.
Developing the marketing plan should begin about eight months before the anticipated launch date provided by product development. Reusing a previously completed successful project plan can improve the likelihood of success on the current project. Select a project plan that resembles the current requirements and then examine the work breakdown structure to see which tasks should remain and if additional ones should be added. For example, in this launch, we moved the press tour back by three weeks for the publishing of monthly press releases. This one change netted three hits in targeted publications in the issue we wanted. Also compare the planned versus actual durations. It is important to understand why variances occurred and determine if these variances will impact the current project. At this point, correct the duration on the tasks as needed. In addition, review the resources on the previous project and determine your current resource pool capacity—team member skills and availability—to determine their influence on the new project plan: Are these resources still with the company? Are they available for the current project? Are their skills the best for the task? Are additional skills needed; and if so, should we schedule training, outsource parts of the project, or recruit new members?
Once the project plan has been refined, submit it to the launch team for review and concurrence on the dates, deliverables, and connection of the interrelated tasks between the projects in other departments. For example, the development of key messaging is directly dependent upon the development of the key themes of the new product(s) by product marketing. What appears at first to be easy, actually becomes a major challenge. Effective communication between departments is vital to project success, especially if key groups within the project are not in the same location or if multiple groups are involved. Establishing interproject dependencies between related tasks, which will automatically update related tasks, greatly improves the likelihood of success. If you take advantage of this one feature, it will greatly reduce delays due to people being out of the office, in a meeting, or too busy to call back.
Effective Communication. Communication with all stakeholders is an integral part of a successful product launch. At the start, the launch team obtained executive support for the launch project. Each department obtained the department's senior executive's support and kept that individual updated. While many methods may be used to accomplish this, the most effective method is to build on an established corporate infrastructure that allows access to stored project data and delivery of status reports on current information to stakeholders in a manner they find useful. Keeping everyone involved throughout the project increases the chances that issues are addressed early.
Agreement on fundamental positioning must be reached before the marketing tasks get under way. This includes agreement by senior management, product management, and marketing on questions such as, What industry product category does the product fit into? Does a new category need to be created to distinguish the new launch (if so, early analysts meeting and positioning must be implemented)? How can we build on existing strategic relationships? How will our business strategies change? How can we capitalize on industry trends?
If these issues are not discussed and agreed upon, the marketing launch can have a poor start and produce ineffective deliverables. Even worse, poor industry positioning with analysts and the press could result.
Executive Report on Resource Availability. Our launch team used ABT Publisher, the reporting component of the suite, to send project status reports to the executives and provide access to the project data to a selected group of additional influencers. Weekly conference calls covered exceptions to the master project and any item that merited the attention of all departments involved. Calls were kept to a time limit in order to retain a focused agenda. We published the meeting notes and the project milestone report on our intranet site. By making this single report open for all company employees’ review we were able to improve ownership within each department.
Each employee had an improved vision of where the launch stood and how their roles would be impacted if there were any problems. Any suggested changes to the master plan were channeled through the launch team member of that department.
Since revenue generation is the main business objective of a new product launch, sales kickoff events should be scheduled early. For the Results Management Suite 5 launch, we ran two series of seminars; one utilizing an independent consultant who delivered research that supported one of our major themes, and the other a preview of the new suite. Both were successful when reviewed as the whole; however, specific markets did not perform to targets. We had contingency plans ready to implement, which got us back on target in the majority of cases. In those markets that still had poor performance, we examined our plan and then determined where improvements could be made.
Integrated Marketing. While planning the launch, keep in mind one of the basics of marketing theory: integration of marketing activities provides more awareness than any individual activity. This helps build on previous exposure and reinforces the message. This rule, when followed, shortens the sales cycle by freeing the sales manager from explaining basic positioning. Some of the most effective tactics for building a leadership position are speaking engagements at industry events, building press relations that establish a company as a thought leader within the industry, successful client relationship management to utilize for quotes and references for such uses as online and print advertising.
Measuring the Success. Refer back to the goals and objectives when it is time to measure your success. Keep in mind that there are both short-term and long-term goals, as well as event-specific and completed-launch goals that need to be examined. If at any point you do not realize a success factor, determine potential reasons why and how you can reapply this knowledge in the remaining activities of the launch and retain it for future launch project planning. When you reach or exceed a success factor, let the team know! Celebrations are needed along the way to keep the momentum going and are a wonderful way of boosting team morale.
Reader Service Number
