The B2B Product Launch Blueprint

Drew: Hello, Renegade Marketers! If this is your first time listening, welcome, and if you're a regular listener, welcome back. Before I present today's episode, I am beyond thrilled to announce that our second in-person CMO Super Huddle is happening November 6th and 7th, 2025. In Palo Alto last year, we brought together 101 marketing leaders for a day of sharing, caring, and daring each other to greatness, and we're doing it again! Same venue, same energy, same ambition to challenge convention, with an added half-day strategy lab exclusively for marketing leaders. We're also excited to have TrustRadius and Boomerang as founding sponsors for this event. Early Bird tickets are now available at cmohuddles.com. You can even see a video there of what we did last year. Grab yours before they're gone. I promise you we will sell out, and it's going to be flocking awesomer!

You're about to listen to a recording from CMO Huddles Studio, our live show featuring the flocking awesome B2B marketing leaders of CMO Huddles. The marketing leaders in this episode are Guy Yalif, Chris Pieper, and Ali McCarthy. They break down what goes into an effective product launch, from aligning teams early to pressure testing the story and building momentum that translates into pipeline. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to the podcast and leave a review. You'll be supporting our quest to be the number one B2B marketing podcast. All right, let's dive in.

Narrator: Welcome to Renegade Marketers Unite, possibly the best weekly podcast for CMOs and everyone else looking for innovative ways to transform their brand, drive demand, and just plain cut through, proving that B2B does not mean boring to business. Here's your host and Chief Marketing Renegade, Drew Neisser.

Drew: Welcome to CMO Huddle Studio, the live streaming show dedicated to inspiring B2B greatness. I'm your host, Drew Neisser, live from my home studio in New York City. You see behind me a product that I had the privilege of launching, and the way we launched it was at a show that doesn't exist anymore called COMDEX, and we ran a 6,000-pound machine called a Hummer over it on live TV. That was amazing. Anyway, the art of product launch is something that we're going to be talking about together. We've got three seasoned marketing leaders who will talk about the strategies, tactics, and hard-earned lessons behind launches that not only make noise but drive real business impact. Get ready to take notes. This one's a master class, so let's dive in with that. Let's bring on Guy Yalif, CMO of Webflow, also someone who built a company and sold it to Webflow, who is joining us, joining the show for the first time. Hello, Guy, welcome.

Guy: Hi Drew, thanks for having me on. I have my trusty little penguin with me.

Drew: Oh my gosh, I love that. And so how are you and where are you?

Guy: I am doing great after a holiday recharge. Thank you so much for putting on the CMO Super Huddle you did in the fall in Palo Alto. And that was local for me because I'm here in the San Francisco Bay Area in Burlingame, specifically.

Drew: I love it. Still riding high from the Super Huddle. So let's start broadly. What's the most successful product launch you've participated in, and perhaps you could provide a couple of lessons that you learned?

Guy: Happy to share. I'm not sure it's the one, but when my now co-founder, then engineering partner and I were running the largest web hosting service on the planet 20 years ago called Yahoo Web Hosting, easily the biggest lesson, and definitely career-level one, was to be really clear about the problem you're solving and that that's a problem your customers value. How did that lesson reveal itself? Well, when I first joined the team, the job was coming... The web hosting industry came out of telecom, and so we thought the job we were doing was fighting a feature function checkbox for, like, literally, how do you make 150 features findable in a product? Okay, we did that. We launched. It was not a huge deal. We then spent two weeks following customers home, obviously with their permission, watching them using our product. Sometimes we'd see them doing stuff on a yellow sticky on a monitor that was like right in front of them. We listened to a zillion calls. We read emails. Today those will be summarized by Gen AI. We'd run the surveys. This was the color commentary. This was the context, and it revealed a new truth for us, for everyone, not just marketing, not just product. Our customers did not aspire to learn what we aspired to teach them. We knew that 40% were sole proprietors, 85% were five employees or fewer, but back in '04, it was unclear that they needed to build a website and they were busy running their core business. Their ideal product was to stick money in one end and it leaves out the other. And so we actually did a 180. We took away features. We radically simplified the product to be much more opinionated, and in doing so, baked our expertise in. And seeing millions of websites being built, we built that right into the product. And the result: we were able to market this, grow it, simplify. The value prop grew from a few hundred thousand to a couple million paying customers, grew from $50 million to $115 million in revenue, all in about two and a half years. And I know today we talk about this a lot as product-market fit, but to say that the foundational premise of our product and our pitch was wrong was really a big learning, and neither was going to be challenged or overturned without real qualitative and quantitative customer insight.

Drew: Well, and I love that story for so many different reasons. But, you know, I always think when someone talks about, "Hey, we want to create an app," and one story I heard about great apps is that they do one magical thing initially, and what you're describing is you were talking about doing 150 things. Well, you can't sell 150 things at a time. And if you look at any great communication strategy or product strategy, there's really a simple thing. I mean, I love this story, and I love to go back to this story because it was a very simple promise. It's like, if you value what's in your computer, the name Toughbook tells you everything you need to know. It's a ruggedized computer. And that the promise was this. And so we didn't have to... All we had to do was continually demonstrate how tough it was. It's a Toughbook. How tough is it? Well, we're going to run a Hummer over it. We're going to shoot a bullet at it. I mean, we, you know, but the simplicity, because, by the way, it had a million other features, right, as every laptop does. So this is the hard part of this. And you learned it sort of in a pivot mode. You assumed 150 was great. You figured out through research there was a simpler story to behold.

Guy: Either way, as a consumer, I still remember those Toughbook ads. I still remember that value prop today.

Drew: It's a good one. It's funny. I haven't kept up with the business over the last 5-10 years, but I imagine, you know, everything was about protecting what's in the laptop. Well, if it's all in the cloud, do you need it? Do you care anymore? And the truth is, yes, there are applications where it does matter. If you're in the military, it matters. Anyway, this is not an opportunity to ad for that. But so I'm curious: those lessons and those... there's product lessons and then there's really marketing lessons. Have you applied any of those to your most recent venture with Webflow? And, you know, integrating Intellimize?

Guy: Yes. And there were new lessons learned, as there always are. As context, the launch of Webflow Optimize, which is Intellimize, the company I had the privilege of co-founding and being CEO of, integrated natively into Webflow. It happened less than six months after the acquisition, and a couple of the lessons applied and learned: One, this was a transformational launch for Webflow. It's a couple hundred million dollar plus, rapidly growing, enterprise-grade website company. Webflow moved from being a single product to a multi-product company with this launch, and that meant revamping a ton. I mean, the whole company storyline, from being a visual-first website builder to being this broader thing called, you know, website experience platform, and defining that and helping people understand what that means and how, you know, they can now build visually stunning websites and drive revenue from them, and finding like, as you said, there are 1,000 features in there. What's the storyline? The very simple storyline you want to tell. Additionally, we've been building Intellimize for eight and a half years prior to being acquired. There was a huge surface area that we could potentially cover. We could have talked about testing, personalization, ABM, AI optimization. With both of those as context, one of the lessons learned was that it's hard to over-invest in enabling the field and talking out in market. We've got an amazing field. The sales team is one of the best I've ever had the privilege of working with: great leadership, great team, well-run. And we had in-person and remote sessions. We had a sales overlay. We tried the repetition. We probably could have done more role-playing, more real-time problem-solving for real deals, because folks ended up, ultimately, not surprisingly, learning in actual situations more than theoretical ones. So we did office hours. Sometimes folks would show up. Sometimes they would. And internalize the manager follow-up ended up being the single most important thing. If the sales directors and managers knew their stuff, their teams tended to know their stuff. And one of the lessons that was in tension with the first one is that perfect is the enemy of good, which we all know. But like in a sales org where every minute spent training is a minute not closing deals, finding the right balance of training and delivering it's hard. And so, you know, I invite us all to be like gentle with ourselves and our leadership and our team, because this won't be perfect, and we told the whole team, "Hey, it's our first rodeo as a company, right? We've never, as a company, been a multi-product company before, and so we're going to get it wrong. Give ourselves some grace and learn as we go along." That's in context of having an excellent field team. There's still a bunch of learnings to do.

Drew: Yeah, all right. Well, there's... I have so many more questions I want to get to, because there are a lot of times when companies acquire things, they do the integration, and nobody's happy, and so I want to get back to that when we come back. But now we're going to bring on Chris Pieper, who is the VP of Enterprise Marketing at Ate. He's an industry expert who I've known for a long time and is joining this show for the first time. So hello Chris and welcome. How are you and where are you this fine day?

Chris: Thank you for having me, Drew. I'm doing very well. I'm in Orlando. It is not as warm as it should be, or at least in my mind, but no, things are going well. Thank you for having me again.

Drew: And obviously you are in a hotel room, which means you are at some kind of conference or company meeting, but I am so grateful that you're taking the time to join us now. So let's talk about it. It's funny, and you've been at ADP now. How long? Just over six years. Six years, which is amazing. And you guys just launched an enterprise platform called Lyric. Give us a little background on this, because it's a long and sordid story to get to market.

Chris: It's a good, interesting story. We'll need a couple days of a podcast to go through all of it. But we're happy with where we are. But yeah, we're very excited about Lyric. So what is it? What is Lyric, right? It is a full suite human capital management solution for large enterprise organizations, right? So think of your not just purely like mega tens of thousands of employees, but certainly designed more for those larger kind of more complex organizations. So a couple things make it different, right? This whole kind of notion of being truly global, which is just not something, you know, it's one of those words that everyone throws around. They may have kind of, not just in my space, but just generally, yeah, we're global, but that may not necessarily be fully global, right? So that's one thing that kind of sets us apart. So this combination of having this awesome tech that we developed, of like truly global HR capabilities, truly global payroll, and having truly global service, given our 65,000 people around the world, which is a big differentiator for us, and having that in-country presence. The flexibility aspect of the solution is probably, I would say, what is most exciting and differentiated. We know that work today doesn't happen in traditional hierarchies and cost center type structures. It's more team-based. It's more cross-functional. It's far more fluid than that. So it has a unique flexibility to really kind of capture and measure and really enable organizations to manage their people in the context of how they actually work versus what's in their accounting system, which is a very big difference, as you can imagine. And the other part that really makes it unique is just the, you know, everyone is talking about Gen AI in some way, shape, or form. We have a solution called ADP Assist that is deeply embedded in Lyric. And, you know, the differentiator here is really just our data. ADP pays over 1.1 million clients. We pay tens of millions of people around the world. And just kind of being able to take that data and plug that in into the LLMs that we have and solutions we have, it just creates a far more accurate, trustworthy approach with more actionable recommendations that you can trust. And the last thing I'll say quickly, just strategically, like, why is this so important? So in our space, we define our enterprise market as about $31 billion. So that is, you know, all of, you know, things that are included in human capital management for organizations with 1,000 or more employees. So in our space, $17 billion of the $31 billion market I just described, about 55% consists of organizations with about 10,000 or more employees. So that's been the space, you know, we played in in the past. Obviously, for sure, we have tons of large clients, but it's been more for payroll compliance and tax versus this kind of full suite, including benefits and talent management and time management and all of that. So strategically, it's incredibly important for us. There's a huge growth area in that kind of large upmarket space, but we're really excited.

Drew: So, you know, just thinking about some of these challenges, I mean, if you've never had to run payroll, you have no idea how complicated it is, and that's if you're in one state. If you are in 50 states in the US, you are dealing with 50 different local laws, tax programs and so forth, benefit requirements, and California is like another country. And now you say we're going to add another country. Tax laws are different. Processes are different. How do you deal with that? So being truly global essentially has to have, be able to be really freaking on the case all the time for just that alone is a big deal. Because you often think about this as like, I'm in Germany, I have a German payroll system. And if I have offices in London, I have a UK system, right? And that's almost, in that, in this, one of the challenges of this, and I even wonder is, is there an EU version of this, or do you have to have the Italy version and the France version and the German version?

Chris: I mean, that's kind of part of it. You nailed it, right? I think it's what does truly global mean. And, you know, everybody, of course, wants to just be more of a pure SaaS player. The margins are obviously incredibly attractive. It's sexy. The multiples are great. But in this space, for all the reasons you mentioned, and many others as well, this is really hard to do. It's not just about creating a cool experience and a UI. It's about compliance. It's about keeping up to speed. It's about what happens when there's privacy law changes or GDPR across the world. It is a lot. So again, it's not hyping of ADP, but just it needs to be tech and people. I kind of mentioned service before, but it's having that footprint of the experts on the ground, kind of influencing and interacting and having relationships with those local authorities and understanding before these new regulations come into place. Like it's really this marriage of now, the tech that is adaptable enough to kind of adjust to these wildly changing regulations across a variety of components, plus the people and the expertise and the relationships to really make it all work.

Drew: And it's not like you can do the normal software, we'll put it out there. It'll have some few bugs. And so you can't have bugs in your payroll system. And I know that you guys have been on a long journey here that you had tried some versions of this in the past that may or may not have made it successful. What do you think were the ingredients that got this one, if you will, to the finish line, and particularly from a marketing standpoint, whereas the earlier iterations didn't quite get there?

Chris: So I mean, just generally speaking, I think it's a good realization that, like I said, for all the reasons we just mentioned, it's a really hard thing to do. It's not just look at some, you know, really smart engineers and go build something cool. It's just hard to do. So that was just, I think, a good learning, just generally speaking. But from a marketing perspective, and certainly, obviously, that's what we're here to talk about more like what we kind of did, and I mentioned like this, we, it's interesting. We don't have an association problem. Like, as the vast majority of Fortune 500 companies kind of work with us, as I mentioned before, but it's, yeah, a little bit different. Payroll, tax compliance, other things incredibly valuable, but not this. Like Workday, SAP, Oracle, type of, again, full human capital management. We don't have, again, not an awareness problem, but an association problem for this space, and a lot of that is from our own success, of just being this market leader in payroll so strongly, it has such, like a such an umbrella, where it's like, oh, I didn't even know you did that. We heard that a lot. So, so in terms of addressing that, that's a hard thing to address, and it's not a one and done, and it's a journey. It's, you know, it's going to continue to evolve. But we had two objectives, really, for this time around. Two objectives for the launch. So number one, how do we broaden the enterprise market's perception of ADP beyond just payroll? And number two, more straightforward, like, how do we drive, how do we drive pipeline and market share growth for Lyric, for ADP in this, again, broader than payroll space? So yeah, branding-wise, we know it's a great brand. It is incredibly trusted, right? It has an established identity for over 75 years, ADP, but we also knew this needed to feel different, and not the same old song, right? You kind of see what I did there with Lyric, but not the same old song, something that feels like it's breakthrough, it feels fresh. And that was, you know, something that was really important. So tactically, we could talk about all the components of the launch. I mean, it was a... even come back to that.

Drew: I want to, because I know there's a whole musical rendition, and you're going to break out into song. And this will be our first, this will be our first musical version of CMO Huddle Studio. So, but we'll have to save that, because now we need to welcome Ali McCarthy, fractional CMO and founder of Amplify Your Voice Studio. She's a returning guest who has previously appeared on the show to discuss marketing as a business driver, SaaS marketing, and account-based marketing. Hello, Ali, how are you and where are you this fine day?

Ali: Hello, Drew. I'm very happy to be here. Thank you. And I am in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Drew: Philadelphia, where it's always sunny.

Ali: Exactly, it's still on. I love that show. Very funny.

Drew: I know, I know. I heard that they're going to, between, they're going to do a crossover between that and Abbott Elementary. It's just, the conceptually, it's, it's very funny, because one is sort of completely sincere and the other is completely cynical. And so the two cultures meshing. It's just, it's hard to imagine anyway, sidetracking. Let's talk, let's dive into your world. Talk about a new product launch or something that you've been involved with recently.

Ali: Absolutely. So I get the privilege of working with multiple clients, as Drew had mentioned with my work as a fractional CMO, and so that allows me to kind of thrive in a moment that might be uncertain or chaotic in a lot of organizations. So when you think about how many product launches do you actually do over the course of your time at a firm? Obviously, you continually enhance your product, but reinventing yourself or introducing yourself into a market isn't always common to do again and again, because once you get it right, you let it thrive. And so these past few years have been very busy with product launches on the various clients. Maybe that's one of the reasons they really need me, as someone who can be calm, help them, guide them through it.

Drew: So let's talk about you're called in because, you know, if they could do it on their own, they would do it on their own. But what are the sort of typical challenges that you're seeing in the roads to sort of how you're helping them get to success?

Ali: Yeah, I think when you know, what you typically see is you really understand what you do well, and you know you're building a technology or a service or a product or, you know, any type of feature to solve a client's problem. And what sometimes, I think, is we get a little close to that, and what you need is to be able to say, can I tell this story clearly? I think Guy was correct in saying that, you know, be thinking like your client, and really being able to demonstrate that throughout the organization is really where you might need to take a step back because you want—it's very natural to want to introduce jargon into the conversation, because things do go technical fast, and I understand that's part of the sales and vetting process. But if I need to demonstrate that you need what I have, I need to keep that language as simple and clear and crisp as possible, and using simple words that the client will understand that and why they need it. So I think that sometimes you do need someone to remind you of those things, Drew.

Drew: Right. Because everybody said you have the product development people, and they're talking technical and the sales people saying, "Okay, well, I can do feature, feature, feature," and meanwhile, the customer is saying, "I don't get it."

Ali: Yeah, it's complex, right? You know, we tend to see B2B to C a lot. Or it could be even more complex than that, if you're working through a distributor, and it's one of those situations where, if they can't carry that sticky story through end to end, someone else is going to tell your story for you, and it may not be to your benefit. So I think that's where you know you might be into a situation that it could do harm if you aren't being clear.

Drew: And how do you help? And I imagine some of this is it's like people don't want a flashlight. They want the light that it produces. You don't want to shovel—you want a hole. How do you help them sort of get to, first of all, they want light, not the flashlight. And second of all, they want that for why, and get it into language that people can understand. What's—is there a process there? Because obviously they're excited enough to say, "We got something really cool and new. Let me show it to you."

Ali: It's funny, because I think what I've found is the process actually works really well when you are using the team that is actually building the technology to see that. So what I mean by that is, let's start with the folks that are developing the software. Let's start with the people that are going to sell whatever it is you're producing, and let's lean in and get them to really talk about what it is in the conversations they're having. Because I found if it's just marketing led, it doesn't get received as well. If it isn't us, it has to be all of us coming together, and I think when it's facilitated by marketing, but at the end of the day, you start those sessions in one place, Drew, and where you end is a much different place than where you began. And that's the gold and the journey, if you will, because now you have product and marketing and sales all contributing to the conversation, and when you leave, you're all aligned, and you might not have wanted to be when you started the conversation. I can't say they've all not gone out with their fair share of friction, but at the end of the day, it's a healthy area for marketing to assert their authority in the process. Right? We have our own responsibility to the company and to the clients that we serve, and if we're doing our job well, that's the flag that we are going to hold so tight to and say that this is our contribution to the process. Because it matters. It really does. Words matter, and how you present that to the marketplace also matters, because if you can't demonstrate that purpose clearly, someone—you're going to lose them, and someone else will tell your story for you.

Drew: Well, it's so interesting, because I can imagine a lot of scenarios where product development people, the technologies, the engineers, or whatever have said, created this thing, and they go, "This is so cool." And they just so hand it over in the sake, "Okay, marketing, go market it." And what you're describing is a scenario where I like to think about it is, can we bake a marketing idea in from the get-go, because if you're doing it after the fact, you may or may not be sort of able to get to this unmet need. You, maybe just you, you the engineer got there because they could do it in so, you know, one is, "Hey, we made this, go find a market." The other is, "Let's develop—let's solve a problem that our customers are saying that they are having, and then we can market it, because we baked the sales opportunity into it."

Ali: And I think I would agree with that, and I think that it makes the process a lot easier throughout the journey, because then we're inherently working together as a stronger team on a go-forward basis, because we started that way from the beginning. So again, it's not easy, but I always say this to my team, zero to one is the hardest place to get to. So building that product, building that process, integrating that technology, whatever it is, that zero to one is a very hard time, but once you get to that part, one to 10 is just iterating on a good base. And so this is what I'm saying, is take that back, and let's say, "Okay, this is our zero to one moment. It is going to be us coming together, us leaning in, us bringing in, solving the problems for the client the right way, and then everything else is building on a strong foundation."

Drew: Well. And it's funny, because in your capacity as a consultant, you have a kind of advantage in that the political boundaries have not been set, and you get to become in and actually be the peacemaker and the collaborating agent in, in this, this force of, "Hey, let's, let's all hold hands and do this together." And that's kind of got to be a cool position to be in.

Ali: It's, it's what I love the most.

Drew: All right, I love, I love it. And, yeah, you are that by definition. You know, you're the person from out of town with a briefcase. You're the expert. So I love it, all right. Well, let's bring everybody back. It's time to take a second to talk about CMO Huddles. We launched in 2020. It's a community of flocking awesome B2B marketing leaders, and that has a logo featuring penguins. Wait, what? So why? Yes, these group of curious, adaptable and problem-solving birds is called a huddle, and the leaders of CMO Huddles are all that and more, huddling together to conquer the toughest job in the C-suite. There's a little pun there, just in case you want to pay attention. All right, Chris, Guy, Ali, and we'll start with you. Ali, you've been to the program the longest. I'm wondering, maybe you could share a specific example of how CMO Huddles has helped you.

Ali: I can. CMO Huddles has helped me specifically in areas where I maybe wasn't as proficient because I didn't have as much experience at prior firms or I had been dependent on other agencies or teams to help me with that, and there's such a wide range of talented marketing professionals that I'm telling you the invaluable feedback and support and knowledge that is shared and just camaraderie is very inspiring, and I would not be where I am today without them.

Drew: I love it. Thank you for thank you for huddling with us. And you know, Chris, I knew you've been a member a long time. You haven't joined as many Huddles as I know you wish you had. I'm just hoping, you know, don't—you're on the spot. But you know, any value you've been able to get from Huddles over the years?

Chris: I appreciate that. And I was actually going to touch on that as well. And that's, I think, one of the big selling points. And obviously it's more straightforward. The networking piece of it, the ability to network with your peers and gain external perspective, pressure test ideas, build relationships, fantastic. But even—yeah, I mean, we're all busy, and it's an excuse. It's not okay. I do have two young kids, so I'm making a—my life is hard, but even just the recaps of the Huddles on topics that are important and something on my mind, just kind of looking over that and being able to follow up after that, or just kind of get the cliff notes of the conversation. Even that alone is incredibly valuable, because, again, of the members of Huddles, like it's just they're all leaders different industries, that's invaluable to me.

Drew: I thank you for that. And Guy, you're a newest—one of our newest Huddles, but you were at the Super Huddle, which you've already mentioned. I don't know if you have any thoughts that you want to share.

Guy: I have found tremendous value in talking to fellow CMOs about the topics I'm wrestling with, like simply comparing notes with thoughtful, well-curated peers. Thank you. Drew is pure gold, like sometimes it's strategy, sometimes it's saving time with tool evaluation. Sometimes it's sharing what we're hearing in market. Specifically for me, I've been able to have conversations about like, what matters when Gen AI reaches steady state, aligning on what CMOs are talking about, and it makes me better at my job. Makes me more valuable to my company.

Drew: I love it. Well. Thank you. If you're a B2B marketing leader who wants to build a stronger peer network, gain recognition as a thought leader and get your very own stress penguin. They look like this, just in case. The guy showed me his earlier, but they look like this. Join us at CMOHuddles.com. Okay, so let's talk about organization around—I mean, I can say it depends on the size of the launch and so forth. But in general, as you're thinking about it, let's say tomorrow, somebody came to you and said, "We're launching a big product, and we're planning to do that in a year from now." Not that you ever get a year. But how would you want to organize your team, the marketing team, around this? And well, Guy, where would you start?

Guy: I agree strongly with where you and Ali were earlier. I think the organization for this should start at product ideation or inception. Ideally, marketing should be a regular source of customer and market insight into product. Of course, products should be doing that directly as well, but there are only so many hours in the day, and you know, maybe that's a quarterly "here's what we're hearing" or "here's what would help us position better and win more in market." So you're choosing the right problems to solve. Once product's decided what to build, we should huddle again. And that word pops up everywhere at inception time and about-to-build time to ideally write out the headline that we're going to be going to market with when it launches. What Ali was saying earlier. You know, this should help product make better trade-offs, because they're going to make a zillion of them, right? Of course, time will come short. At some point, if those trade-offs impair our go-to-market, we should all be eyes wide open about it. And then for launch, I think product marketing should be embedded with product. I want high trust, high mutual respect relationships, so that product marketing can then quarterback with the rest of marketing, lay out the value prop and positioning. And positioning, the messaging, the use case, visualize how this will work for the end user, and then train the rest of marketing, giving them the ammunition they need. So demand gen can go craft campaigns. Content can go craft content, you know, organic posts and so on. PR and comms have what they need, and brand can ensure everything's created on brand and field. Enablement either knows the depth of product or it can keep sessions for product marketing to go in. And as you said, depending on the size of launch, create a calendar to keep everybody in sync.

Drew: It's a lot. It's a lot. And it just occurred to me that wouldn't it be awesome if you all had customer advisory boards that were constantly part of this as well, so they were a source of, you know, real-time input as you're evolving this, in this trade-off. I think this is such an important thing. Because, yeah, you could put the kitchen sink into the thing, but the elegance of the product is designing it, pulling stuff out, which you pointed. Chris, from your standpoint in the launch of Lyric, what did that look like from your team, organizational standpoint?

Chris: Yeah, no, I think Guy really kind of nailed it. Just generally, I agree. Product ideation, what is the vision? What are we trying to accomplish? That's got to be the start of that. Product marketing kind of taking on the messaging and the positioning and many other teams in terms of content and working with alliances, because that's obviously a critical piece that informs our deals. But the big piece that and Guy also mentioned this as well, the alignment one. And I never used the word alignment when I was back in the startup world as nearly as much as I do now. But we had across marketing, product, sales operations, other groups, 250, 300 people involved in this. So it's just over-communication, over-communication, over-communication, that was really the key there, of just making sure. Because I've had, you know, I think we all probably lived through mistakes in the past where it feels like we're all aligned, it feels like we're on the same page, and all of a sudden it's like that is not how I wanted that to land. What was that about? So I think, you know, with this many people and this many functions, and frankly, how strategically important this is, as I mentioned before, for ADP's growth, that over-communication and alignment with not just the marketing stakeholders and shared services, but just the business and other people that are important, that have voices at the table, that was really the key. I think that that really kept it together.

Drew: I mean, you think about a 250 to 300 people working on the same launch, that's a big deal. It's a big investment. And somebody looked in said, this is a massive investment for the company. This is a future opportunity. It's almost like you needed a skunk works to sort of think about this differently. And I think, and it's, I feel like at some point in time we talked about that, is that, because otherwise you would just do the way ADP always did it.

Chris: Exactly. Otherwise it would be expected. You just, kind of, you know, it's rinse, repeat, it's, you know, big project plans. This is that, you know, any company of this size, rather, but you know, what are the, what is the essence? Back to what we were saying, the essence of what we're trying to accomplish, what's really going to move the needle? And, you know, I think one of the things I was kind of mentioning it before, I'm not going to belabor the point, but just the it had to be unexpected for us, kind of getting into what you were just saying, like it had to be something. We're attracting new buyers. We're going after an entirely new market with a different type of solution than in the past. And even just back to the Lyric kind of musical pieces, we were starting to talk about it was, we were concerned about having it feel a little bit too whimsical, because it is still enterprise HR software, right? It's different. It's not a consumer type of a product, but music just has such positive vibes and connotations and associations and really the ability to create emotional connection, which is, again, very, very hard, especially in enterprise software. So just this kind of unexpected feels different from ADP, you know, like just just monikers, like turning noise into harmony, the new rhythms of work, you know, helping, helping people perform better together, but in their own unique voices. These, these really ended, and you mentioned it also, I'll shut up in a second. But the testing, so the customer advisory boards, we actually we had one of our client advisory boards multiple sessions of iteration, as well as the industry analyst community getting their feedback. So it was very iterative, and how we approach that, but the unexpected nature, at least for us to kind of break out of what will be the mold that was critical.

Drew: And one last question on this, and we'll go to you, Ellyn in the second but who's the decider? I'll give an example that will feel way off. But so if you look at the iteration, the original pound cake at Sara Lee made 50 years ago. The recipe was very simple, and it was an incredible pound cake. Over the years, they changed one ingredient, then they changed another ingredient. Over the years, you know, it doesn't taste anywhere like it did at the beginning, because every single person who came along said, oh, let's tweak this and do this and one person and so, you know, you get too many cooks in the kitchen eventually, and you end up with disharmony in your language. So you need someone, some orchestra conductor, to make sure that this thing is still special. How did that work at your company?

Chris: I'm a big believer of single point accountability wherever possible. I mean, obviously, let's be as collaborative as we possibly can. And I mentioned how many people were involved, that was just kind of required. But if you don't have that kind of, it's not a nice way to say it, but a single throat to choke, kind of an approach, someone who is accountable, no one's responsible. Then, right? So that is, that is certainly the big risk. Now, yeah, this person was in charge of everything in terms of the various functions, marketing, orchestrating, however, we still, obviously are, you know, our executive committee. I mean, this went all the way up to our CEO, and all of her directs, and that's how important this product was so I think, you know, managing up and kind of making sure there's clarity their voices are heard, and all that is critically important, but that just single launch leader for the actual execution of everything that was critical, versus trying some kind of a shared responsibility model, which, in my opinion, just does not work.

Drew: Yeah. I mean, the old saying is, you know, nothing great was made by committee. You know, I'm not sure that's completely true, but it sounds good when, when you say it, and I certainly you can water things down pretty quickly. So Ali, as we're thinking about, go-to-market strategy for these products with your current clients or past clients. What would you say is, sort of the most critical part of this is not every... Most products don't. New products don't, I don't know, it's less than one in three for sure, but for the ones that you worked on that were successful, what do you think the critical components were?

Ali: Well, hands down, the most critical component was product market fit. Believe it or not, when I look at the ones that took off and the ones that were still working through to get to the point of takeoff. And it's really about going back to that, knowing your customer and speaking plainly. In a lot of ways, it's really going back to the basics, like, don't try to make this fancy. Don't try to go to AI to do something where you can, you can use it to optimize the voice, but don't make it the voice actually hear the voice of the client. Care enough to do that. That's another thing. And then you when it won't be scope creep. It won't be the product. You know, the cake tastes taste different over a year, it'll be the cake cakes different, because the clients wanted raspberry pound cake Drew, not vanilla pound cake. And now we know, and so and then you feel good about those changes. So it isn't always that change is bad or that the scope of the project's evolving because we needed to start somewhere, and then you want to continue to make it appropriate. But I do think that those are some of the non-negotiables that are just the basic blocking and tackling. You expect marketing to run the plays like Guy said, demand to be doing what they're doing, content to be doing what they're doing, sales to do what they do, and product to do what they do best. So those things are just people doing their job really well. The hidden variable in the landmine is just you put out something that they didn't want. And now you have to understand, take a step back and then go, Okay, now how are we going to launch this and make sure that it fits to exactly what they want? So that would be my takeaway.

Drew: Yes. I'm reminded of a Dell story where Dell polled all its customers and they said, Hey, we want a Linux laptop. That sounded great. There was no Linux laptop. They put it out in the market and nobody bought it, which is hilarious, I mean, because they did their homework on it. Fortunately, it's a laptop with an operating system, so it didn't break them in any way. So it is tricky, though, in this product market fit, because I don't think customers always know that's part of the thing that we have to do is sort of lead them a little bit and say you may not see this need today, but let's get a little ahead of you. So it's tricky. All right, speaking of tricky, KPIs, now I know we want to talk about revenue. And you know, you would say, Gee, the successful new product sells a lot. Well, we're in B2B and we're in B2B enterprise. And you know, Chris, you're not going to sell Lyric in a day, that's probably a 12 month sale. Maybe an 18 month sale. How do we look at this Guy from a tracking performance? And I know you're you're sort of, some of your customers are smaller companies, so that's a shorter sales cycle. But how are you looking at the success of like, the new product that you launched recently?

Guy: During the launch, it was a lot about execution. Like, did we, you know, just create the things we needed to create, get them out there? Do people understand it? Are we getting the message, pull through out in market that we wanted? Post to your point, Drew it is whatever the ultimate goal was for that release. You know, one of our products we're like. We want everyone to buy this. We want a lot of cross-sell another one of the products we're like, this is an enterprise product. We want drive total revenue off of this large revenue. And so we're counting how many customers above X revenue do we have? To your point? Yes, there is a long tail self-serve. But a lot of the businesses mid-market, enterprise, and for them, the color commentary of what sales is saying. What is sales saying? Is this helping them close deals? Is this helping them create opportunities? And then quantitatively, what's the pipe tied to it? How is that pipe moving through the funnel? And then ultimately, what was the closed won? And so to be able to say things like, Oh yeah, we're ahead on, on where we thought pipe would be or were ahead of the closed won goals. Those are really meaningful. But to your point, you need some precursor.

Drew: Yeah, I mean, because it could be 18 months before that. We've got some closed ones. I mean, Chris, you're... I mean, I think about changing payroll as a fundamental. That's you talk about the pain of change versus gain in change. And I know we're... you're talking about a bigger thing. You're talking about human capital management, which is even a bigger thing, because you're probably going to pull out payroll and possibly Workday, and then so you're talking about a big replacement plan. How are you initially, you know, on day one, you launch that unless you have existing customers who are going to market with you in beta. How do you... how do you measure? What are your KPIs look like?

Chris: That's a great question, absolutely great question. And you're right. Yeah, it could be a 12, 18, 24-month sales cycle. So just if I were to look at revenue right now, it wouldn't really be very helpful. But I also, again, like what Guy had to say before, but initially it's very qualitative. It's kind of what we see outside of just the tasks and getting it done and making sure we're executing, but the client feedback. Like I mentioned, we had a litany, a series of conversations, testing various things, getting feedback, iterating, coming back, the industry analysts. Those sessions were incredibly valuable, right? So the Gartners of the world, those companies, as well as other more independent ones that are influential in our space, but just even hearing what they had to say initially was huge. And then right after launch, the write-ups, right? So the articles and the coverage that we heard from the analysts, and just the excitement that was, you know, just made, you know, just kind of confirm that we were on the right track, and it was resonating, and it was welcome, and all that. And then obviously, longer-term pipeline created, ultimately, sales growth. That's, that's a, you know, that's just kind of self-explanatory, I guess. The one other piece, because, like you were saying, breaking from payroll, and this is just different, back to, and I was saying before, that were, this had to be unexpected. Just engagement of content. Like, very simple. Just, like, click-through rates. What are they clicking on? Like, is it... are we seeing engagement? Or are we seeing like we were saying before, about power? About product-market fit? Does nobody care about this? And we're so excited, and it's like, no, we're not buying that from ADP. So, so I think even that piece, and thankfully, that has not been the case, and it's been, you know, very well received and welcome. You know, very welcomed. But all those elements, I think, are important to just look at, like, initially, where we are, and then obviously, longer-term, just pipeline created, help the pipeline and the deals.

Drew: So it's interesting, because these are all the things that, you know, these soft measures. We're talking about anecdata and, you know, positive word of mouth among customers. You're talking about influencers and the role they play, and are they generally positive? So you're, you're now monitoring sort of sentiment. Those are such soft words in Silicon Valley, you know, because most of the time it's, let's just talk about pipeline and let's talk about closed won, but all of those. And then I also think there's another part of this, which is, if you're an ongoing company, some of this is defense, keep people from migrating away from you too, right? So this is, there's some of that, and I imagine that, particularly Guy, that there's a fair amount of... Did our current customers sort of raise their hand and say, "Gee, tell me more about this?" Would be an interesting and so that, obviously that becomes pipeline, but in it, but it's, it's less. It's not net new.

Guy: It is expansion. And to your point, and to your point about the qualitative, hearing the reaction on LinkedIn and to our sales team the day of the launch was a really meaningful signal, right? Folks will... Folks did raise their hand and they did want to know more about it, and that was a really meaningful signal. If it was crickets chirping to Chris's example, that's really different moment, and you're like, "Ooh, wait, did either, did we build the right thing, or are we framing it the right way?" Because to what you said about leaving folks just the way you talk about it can make it feel completely different to them.

Drew: I'm thinking about, I remember working on a new product in financial services, and the client was saying you only get to launch a new product once, and I'm wondering if that's true anymore. You only get... you get one shot at it, as I think about that, and that was probably 10 years ago. Think about it. Yeah, you know, Chris, I think you probably could make an argument that, no, you get chances. You keep going till you get it right.

Chris: Yeah. I think, I think a lot of it depends, frankly, on the brand. ADP has got to sit at the table because of the 75 years, because of the trust and the reliability, the stability, all of that is, is that really plays well where, if you're a brand new startup, and I've been in this position, and you're launching your product for the first time, trying to unhook like a Honeywell or somebody big back when my energy management days, you probably have one chance, maybe two, but this one like they're still there, especially because we have existing relationships in some way, shape or form, but there's always a kind of a warm handshake there.

Drew: So this really speaks to the power of having a strong, established brand and essentially doing a line extension versus starting from scratch. But I think if you are starting from scratch, the pressure is on to launch right? It either you sort of build momentum and snowball, or you just melt.

Ali: Well, and there is the benefit of marketing, right? I mean, you know, if you're a small firm, you need marketing more than you thought you did.

Drew: Yeah, because they can't buy you. If they can't, you know, they won't consider you if they haven't heard of you. All right? Real quickly, one common mistake you know, for marketers, when you know that you've seen when leading a product launch, go for it. Guy, common mistake.

Guy: We talked about it some, but thinking that every launch that's important to us is important to our customers.

Drew: Okay, so misalignment with we think it's important because we're doing it. Chris,

Chris: I think trying to please everybody, and then ultimately use the word—it's watered down before—I think that's perfect. That's what will happen. So I think it's just always think: if you're not taking any risks, what are you truly trying to accomplish?

Drew: Yeah, it's so funny that you say that, because I think about days I actually worked on packaged goods, and we would do focus groups. Those are those things where you actually talk to humans in a room in the old days. And I was listening for the most passionate people, not the ten out of ten. I didn't want consensus. I wanted to hear three people who were really excited about it, because then I knew there'd be some passion to sustain it. So I totally agree. Ali, one common mistake?

Ali: I would say our lists are long, and we have a lot of tasks that we have to execute flawlessly, but don't let that ever get in front of the purpose of why you're doing it. Be willing to walk away from certain tasks because it's not the right decision to actually drive the product forward.

Drew: There you go. Yeah. Get rid of the stuff that doesn't matter. Okay, we are now going to go for the final words of wisdom. So if you could give one piece of advice to B2B CMOs about leading their first major product launch, what would it be? And we'll do this in reverse order, starting with Ali.

Ali: Think like your client, everyone.

Drew: So you mean think like the customer in terms of their needs, their wants, their desires, their pain points, and make sure that you're starting from there. Those are good words of wisdom. Chris?

Chris: Yeah, I think piggybacking what we were just talking about with risk-taking, there's a T.S. Eliot quote: "Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go." And I really like that one a lot. I think it makes a lot of sense. So it's always hard to please everybody, and there will be risks. But I think when in doubt, be bold.

Drew: Wow. Well, you know what? No one has ever quoted T.S. Eliot on this show, so thank you for that. You know, I'm still a little disappointed we haven't broken into song yet, but I think what we'll do is we'll just take this script and we'll have ChatGPT turn it into a song. We'll publish that later.

Chris: With my voice, you can plug it in.

Drew: Yes, well, maybe we'll get a—yeah, maybe Ali, you can do the vocals for this. Okay, Guy, final words of wisdom.

Guy: Listen to that song. No, I'm kidding. I think many of us B2B CMOs don't do this as much as we think we should have in retrospect, but get to know the product itself enough to intimately understand the value prop. It's related to Ali's thing: like the customer, and keep asking questions about the product until the value prop makes sense to you, even to the point if you're annoying your team, because you really need that connection, and then you've got this strong foundation off of which everything is built.

Drew: And so we're talking about this value prop to help me understand: when do you know, based on your experience, that the value—I mean, it sounds good to you, but is it short? Is it sweet? It's like, "Oh, I never thought about it this way." What's the sort of signal for you that the value prop is a winner?

Guy: At least to me, it is more about the logic of it and that landing with some friends. You might talk to some customers. You might talk to the—distance between that and then short and pithy, that's another piece of work, and it's an important piece of work to do. But I think they are two very closely related but separate things.

Drew: Yeah, they really are, because if you can simplify it, you can occupy and own some piece. If we think about marketing as an epic battle for mindshare, the simpler the proposition, the closer to a pain point, or some way that it solves the value proposition goes, "God, I gotta have that," then your life is easy. But if it's a long, complicated story, your life is hard. One of the things—a common theme that we heard in this thing is in new products, and this is really, really hard—what's the essence of it? And that's what almost all of this boiled down to: what is the essence? I know what your business objectives are. You could say, "Gee, we want to generate a billion dollars in additional revenue from existing customers." Great. That's not a value prop. That's a growth goal. So you really, as a—and since most new products fail, or even line extensions fail—you really, you the marketer, are the one who holds the opportunity. The litmus test: say, "Not good enough. Not good enough." Now you don't have to say it. You can let your customers say it, but that's the job: keep raising the bar, and if you have a seat at the table, you get that opportunity. All right, thank you. Chris, Guy, Ali, you're all amazing sports. Thanks for staying with us.

To hear more conversations like this one and submit your questions while we're live, join us on the next CMO Huddles Studio. We stream to my LinkedIn profile—that's Drew Neisser—every other week.

Show Credits

Renegade Marketers Unite is written and directed by Drew Neisser. Hey, that's me! This show is produced by Melissa Caffrey, Laura Parkyn, and Ishar Cuevas. The music is by the amazing Burns Twins and the intro Voice Over is Linda Cornelius. To find the transcripts of all episodes, suggest future guests, or learn more about B2B branding, CMO Huddles, or my CMO coaching service, check out renegade.com. I'm your host, Drew Neisser. And until next time, keep those Renegade thinking caps on and strong!