Go for Launch: How CMOs Drive Market-Ready Products

   

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 live show featuring the flocking awesome B2B marketing leaders of CMO Huddles. In this episode, Melanie Marcus, Kevin Brooks, and John Hale share the prep work needed for a successful launch. That means locking in the story and brand fit, aligning sales, product, and customer success, equipping customer-facing teams with tools and training, and planning momentum beyond day one. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to the podcast. In Libra review, you'll be supporting our quest to be the number one marketing podcast. Make that the 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. Today, we're talking product launches, the high-stakes moment where marketing, sales, and product all say, "We've got this," only to discover on launch day that no one remembered to brief the consumer. From misaligned messaging to surprise bugs, it's shockingly easy to get it wrong, and somehow even easier for CMOs to take the blame. With that, let's bring on Melanie Marcus, Chief Marketing and Customer Experience Officer at Surescripts and a returning guest who previously appeared on the show to discuss customer advisory boards and the CMO Plus notion. Hello, Melanie, how are you and where are you this fine day?

Melanie: It's great to see you. I am right outside Washington, DC.

Drew: All right, which is an exciting place to be these days. Let's talk sort of just in general, like product launches and the challenges from a CMO perspective. I mean, how do you even approach these?

Melanie: Sure. Well, product launches are some of the most exciting things that you get to do in marketing, especially if they're of any size at all. There are lots of versions of product launch, but if we're talking about a larger product launch, some of the things that I think about are, you know, number one: Does our brand support the solution that we're launching? If it does, great. If it doesn't, what do we need to do to align this new product with our brand, or a brand with this new product? So there may be some brand work involved; regardless, there's probably some brand architecture involved. So where are we going to put this in our brand architecture? I mean, I know that sounds simple, but it makes a big difference to know where we are going to put this in our brand architecture. And then, of course, there's all that, you know, does the experience of the product that we're launching match the experience we're promising our customers? Does it match the message that we're promising in our message, and all of that which gets down into the actual launch logistics itself. But those are just some of the things that I think about.

Drew: Yeah, and I think, you know, the first two, I want to just sort of spend a little time on the brand alignment and the brand architecture, because it's easy to forget that there's a certain eagerness. We've got this product. Let's push it out to our current customers, and if not, like, do you have permission as a brand to launch, as a company, to launch this product? It's a problem.

Melanie: Yes. And so other companies try to stretch, right? Stretch to newer areas. And as you do that, if you can identify that you're going to be doing it early enough, which means that you've got to be aligned with the strategy of the company, you can lay tracks for stretching your brand. You can lay tracks by the way that you express your brand. You can lay tracks with the content that you're producing and the thought leadership and the things you're doing in the marketplace for what might be coming. So you can stretch the brand enough so you've got more permission when you actually launch.

Drew: Yeah, it's funny. You know, as you're talking about, I completely agree with all of that. I think of where the opposite happens, where someone relaunches a brand but doesn't introduce a new product that supports it. It's like a new brand is a perfect opportunity to introduce a new product because it says, "Hey, we're different," and see, here's the product that goes with it. And it feels like such a lost opportunity when you don't put those two things together.

Melanie: Definitely, yeah, you missed the opportunity to have a reason to launch a new brand. Otherwise, it's just a new look and feel and nothing really new.

Drew: So okay, that's the theoretical scenario for CMOs to think about. Let's get sort of into something you've done recently and how that fits in, and sort of go through the alignment, the architecture, and then the rest of it.

Melanie: Yeah. So most recently, I'm thinking about a solution that we have been offering multiple segments of our marketplace over the years, and we've revised it a little bit to bring it to a completely new segment for Surescripts, and we're very excited. It is a market entry. And so as we've done that, we've had to really think about how we message this solution into a new market space. In our case, we actually had to architect this new segment into our brand. So, you know, make space for it on our website, make space for it in our messaging, make space for it everywhere, and then consider what that did to the top of our brand message. And we have done that, and we have reconsidered what it means at the top of the brand and only launched that just last week, so that we have space to be in this newer market for it.

Drew: What kinds of things did you have to do to the website and to your overall story?

Melanie: Well, we had to add a new segment. So when you go like, "Who do we serve?" we had to add a new segment. And so that's a whole new section of the website. We had to bring this segment into our customer—our customers are the lifeblood of Surescripts, and we talk about that. So we had to add them to that whole story about how they fit into the ecosystem in healthcare and why they're so important to us as well. And then we had to just slightly but importantly evolve our top-line message so that it's more relevant and current for all of our markets, including this market.

Drew: Interesting, so it actually improved everything.

Melanie: Yeah, yes, we hope so, right? Well, and that sort of begs the question, how's it going so far?

Drew: So good, but we're early days, right? Okay, so we've just put it out there, but a lot of times the success of these programs is just making sure that employees and sales and everybody are aligned with the new story. And I'm assuming that that part happened beforehand, and that part is well on its way.

Melanie: Very, very well on its way. We have sales out in the field. Now we have account managers out in the field now. We have done all the enablement. We featured our new positioning in our town hall and so forth. So yes, well on its way.

Drew: Yeah. I do think it's funny from a rebranding standpoint. One of the things that I remember in research when I was doing it for my book, we talked to a bunch of CMOs about how important, you know, when you rebrand your internal target, yet folks left two weeks to do it sometimes. I mean, I'm imagining that you had to do retraining because if you're suddenly offering something to a different segment, there's a lot of education that goes in.

Melanie: That kind of training to go into. This new segment has been going on for months, if not, you know, years, so this was not done lightly or quickly at all.

Drew: Which gives it a much better chance of being successful. Yes, right, all right. Well, what's interesting about this show, and it's different because we haven't done this before, is we actually have your VP of strategic marketing, your product person. Is there anything you'd like to say to introduce Kevin to our audience?

Melanie: Sure. Well, Kevin came on last fall to lead our strategic marketing team. And to the extent that I was just talking about the overall brand and the experience and all those pieces, this all gets down to where you are just going, which is, how do you actually make a launch happen at the tactical and the message standpoint and the sales enablement and all of that? And that is the work that Kevin's team does. So when we talked about this webinar, I thought, well, it would be really great to have Kevin come too.

Drew: I love it. Well, let's bring on Kevin Brooks, VP of Strategic Marketing at Surescripts. Hello, Kevin.

Kevin: Hi. Thanks for having me.

Drew: Hey. So how are you and where are you?

Kevin: I'm great. I'm doing really well. I'm in Minneapolis right now, and our office is here, and it's a beautiful day. It's been a rainy week, so things are good heading into the Memorial Day weekend.

Drew: Awesome. I love it. All right. Well, you heard Melanie set you up, and maybe you can talk about the scope of your last launch, and, you know, talk a little bit about how you see your role and what you do relative to what the CMO does. And again, our show is for CMOs to help them understand these things. So I'd love to get some insights from you on, just in general, from a product launch standpoint, what's important to you?

Kevin: Yeah, well, I'm happy to do that. So, you know, I think one of the first things that we do is we look at the scope, we size our launches, right? So we've got to look at sort of a dual lens of strategic importance and then operational readiness. I think one of the things that I've seen throughout my career, just as a pitfall, is over-committing resources to a launch that hasn't been fully validated yet. That's something we're looking at right away. So we scope a launch. We identify where the sellers are in terms of their capabilities, and where do we need to do sales enablement the most? Have our sellers sold this type of product before? Have they sold it into this market segment? Is it a new market segment? As Melanie just described, that's a new market segment. Some sellers might have experience in the segment. Most might not. And so we've got to understand that. Do they know the personas very well that we're rolling out this new launch to? Those are questions we're asking. And then we're always thinking about, what's the tier of this launch? You know, a simple launch tier strategy can take away a lot of the guesswork on how you scope a launch, and I'd rather be arguing about what tier of launch are we talking about? Is this a new product in a new market with huge revenue goals? It's a tier one launch. Is this a tier two launch? It's an add-on module, an upsell, cross-sell kind of thing. Or there's a new solution packaging aspect of it. Or is this a feature launch? Maybe it's a tier three. And if you can kind of get aligned on that upfront, then you kind of have the blueprint for each of those tiers. So we really think about all those things, and then that helps us calibrate the launch, making sure we have the right content, the training, and the sales support that are in place.

Drew: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. I'm thinking about—you use the term operational readiness, and there's often this notion that, you know, product or the technology, the R&D team came up with this brilliant thing, and they say, "Here it is, bring it to market." But service, customer service, isn't ready to onboard it. Even accounting isn't ready to bill because it's a new thing. The market is ready. You know, the product is there. Whether or not there is demand is a whole other story. So talk a little bit about what operational readiness really should look like.

Kevin: I like to separate product readiness or operational readiness from launch readiness a little bit, and make sure that you're thinking about those as totally related things, but they are separate. Product readiness—you know, is your sales team ready to sell? Is your implementation team ready to implement? Those are really important things. But from a launch readiness standpoint, that's also got to factor in, what other things are you launching in that year? In that timeframe, can you combine a product launch with another product launch, or multiple products that you're launching and create a themed launch? Make a bigger launch out of it, less impact on sales training, less complicated for sales to understand the message overall, and you can tie it to one of your core brand messages as well. So Melanie talked about how important that brand is in the brand architecture. We've got to make sure each of these launches ladders up to that brand and that we're ready for it. So operational readiness can mean a number of things, but those are the core elements that we're thinking about.

Drew: Yeah, how do you, from a tier one through three standpoint, who makes that decision and what's that analysis look like when you're sort of figuring out, "Well, this is a big one," because, I mean, obviously anybody who develops a product thinks this is heroic, it should be tier one—everything's tier one. Sorry, but somebody has to decide. How does that decision get made? And talk a little bit more about the details of tier one versus tier three.

Kevin: So, you know, it is a collaboration between product, sales, account management, and marketing. It's really those—those are kind of the four legs of the go-to-market stool, and from my purview, they have to come together and agree on which level or which tier the launch really fits in. But there are criteria that we're looking at that, you know, are telling us, "Okay, this is where it belongs for this particular launch." So those, some of those criteria, you know—I say, you know, it kind of makes "walking around sense," sort of thing. There's a bit of an art and a science to how you decide. And I think there are, you know, some edge cases where you can go either way. It could be a tier one or a tier two, but it really matters, because it's all about the effort you're going to put into the launch that is determined by what tier it is. So tier one launch is kind of—I mean, you kind of know what they are when they come around, right? These are new offerings, new markets, new buyers, major offerings with revenue streams that are fundamentally addressing a compelling market need that you've got. And then your tier two, it's more of, you know, it's an add-on module. You're already selling something in the market, but this is an add-on module. It's important, but it's not the same level of importance as a tier one. So that's how you kind of think about it. And then lastly, on tier three, I mentioned a little bit before. You know, these are features to existing products. They may be important, but you know, you're not going to get behind it the same way you're going to get behind a tier one. And you know, you provide support for an offering that's already known to customers. So think of it that way.

Drew: And it feels like these are definitions that you can share and agree on long before you even think about a product launch, so that we all are on the same page, so that you don't have this "Oh, well, marketing isn't paying attention to this, because they think of this as a tier two and this, as far as product goes, is a tier one." Where do you find—so let's focus for a second on tier one, because that's the most exciting, and that's the one that requires the most alignment and the most energy, and, frankly, probably the most dollars. What are a couple of the problem areas that you can avoid when you're doing a tier one launch, from your experience?

Kevin: Yeah, I think one of the biggest things you have to do is really determine what the revenue waterfall looks like for a tier one launch. So you really have to align that to the business objectives and the revenue objectives and how revenue is going to flow through from a waterfall standpoint. Really important on that tier one to understand sales cycle time, conversion rates. You know, it's a new product, so you may not have good historical data on that, but you have to draw some parallels from other solutions and different markets and make sure you understand what to expect from a revenue perspective, and then build a framework around the campaigns. If they're demand gen oriented, they could be reputation oriented, and the mix could be different for each product. But however your strategy is to launch that product, you want to make sure it aligns to those revenue goals. I think it's one of the biggest things you have to do in a tier one kind of launch.

Drew: It would be easy to say, "I'm going to get an Excel spreadsheet out and I'm going to say we're going to make $50 million on this new product launch from zero," right? You could say, "Whoa, one customer, 10 customers, 20 customers, we're going to..." and then there's the reality of this. You know, did anybody ask the customer whether or not they were really ready to buy this? Just because you want to sell it doesn't mean they want to buy it. So, you know, you said it's hard because there isn't historical data. How do you sort of carefully manage expectations? Because every CEO or CFO is going to say, "Hey, this should be put a number on a page, and it should be huge."

Kevin: Yeah, that's right. I think we usually would have an early adopter phase, right? So this is maybe you're soft launching a little bit. You've got a narrower set of the market that you're talking to. It's not a full-fledged launch yet. You're learning, you're getting beta customers. You're hoping to get data from a customer with, you know, real-world experience. You can use that in your marketing to show ROI and proof points. So when you do launch it, you've got something to lean on from an ROI standpoint. So usually, before the launch, there's kind of a soft launch. There's obviously been research done with customers that we've been talking to customers about it. And, you know, one of the biggest things I think we try to do is define that ideal customer profile, and I think it's one of the most critical and often underdeveloped aspects of product launches, is really narrowing down that ideal customer profile, not just the firmographics, like "we're going for large health systems, groups that have a mix of Medicare and commercial." It's like you can get to the firmographics, but the behavioral science for that organization—what's that enterprise persona? Do they have a bias towards innovation, or are they biased towards service and operational excellence? Those may be factors just as much as their firmographics. So you have to really get the ideal customer profile right, which you're doing during that early phase, even before you do an early adopter or beta customer.

Drew: Got it? Okay? Those are all great things. Well, we're gonna come back, but now let's welcome John Hale, CMO of Consilio, who is joining the show for the first time. Hello. Great to be here. Hey, good to see you.

John: Good to see you. So how are you and where are you?

Drew: I'm doing great. I'm based in Dallas, Texas, and Consilio, our team is all over the world.

John: All right, so we are. We're covering the you know, we've got east coast here. We've got Midwest. It's great. All right, so you've heard what Melanie and Kevin had to say. I loved it, and you were waiting patiently to join us.

Drew: Debatable, debatable. Yeah.

John: All right. Well, chomping at the bit, I'm wondering, based on what you heard, what was sort of, you know, what resonated with you, and then, you know, in terms of what Consilio has been doing in product, in the product launch area.

Drew: I loved what Melanie said about having real client pain being solved by your launch message. Like, is there juice when you squeeze? I think it's so critical. And since this is a show for marketers, I'm going to go ahead and lean into what I think is a hot take on the topic, because most often we want to talk about, hey, I redid a brand. I launched a website. And I've actually gotten advice in the past, like, make sure you don't launch a new website in the first year. Make sure you're real careful about these things that are sort of kind of icing in some perspective, when you're thinking outside of marketing in your work. But I think that my hot take is it's actually you don't really need to worry about when you do those things. You need to be strategic and make the right decision on those—it's when you celebrate those things. So I think there's lots of great marketing that you do in a launch that you can't take credit for, and honestly shouldn't take credit for, because they're just going to see the magic that happens later and get really excited about that.

John: It's so interesting. I have to just put a couple punctuation points, because I do a lot of coaching, and I totally agree that oftentimes the CMO will invest a lot of political capital and time, revising, quote, updating the brand, and therefore updating the website. And while both of those may be really important and may be necessary, the problem is, when you redo your website, there's a good chance your site traffic is going to go down 50% while Google re-indexes your page. So you're going to go backwards before you go forward. And secondly, the comment I made earlier, it's one thing to rebrand. When you relaunch a product, that's right. It's another thing to just say, hey, we look different and sound different.

Drew: That's right. So is it a nothing burger? I think it's such an important question. So for me, it's like, well, website redesign, for example, or a launch of a new website. You're building a cash register. And I talk about that in those terms with the people outside of marketing, like, Hey, this is a revenue driver. That's why we have it. And we will celebrate. And I don't even try to make noise about it until, you know, until the cash register is ringing and we're seeing either deeper traffic that's driving more conversions, or, you know, you're able to track, measure kind of impact in bigger ways. Those are the things that you get excited about in those launches.

John: I love it. I'm sorry. I just have to—nothing burger. I mean, I just...

Drew: I'm sorry, I got too many of these things.

John: I know you do. I love them, but I love the nothing burger. You know, it's really important that marketers don't serve those up.

Drew: But I feel so many people get frustrated by why doesn't the business understand these impacts. So I think that is why, is because to them, they're looking for the—they're looking for the nickels to fill in the bathtub. So let's do that, do that. And this is obviously why you're here, and that's why you're launching a new website. So drive the car, just to mix nine analogies there to go.

John: The metaphors are flying.

Drew: I apologize. I apologize. Yeah, let's keep going.

John: It's okay. So let's talk. Let's get specific now. So share a launch that you've done, you're proud of, and how things came together.

Drew: Yeah, I love it. So we are actually just coming off of a launch, which I think we are universally considering a win, and I would just say it's probably still happening as once you launch, then you've got to land. And so like, how do you monetize the great kind of demand you create, or the excitement or the client interest. And so we're in that how do we, how do we kind of make hay from it and make sure our clients have a delightful experience in the thing that we brought to them? So I'd say we've launched in that initial moment. Feels like a win, but we've got a lot of work to do. And so essentially, we do legal AI, we do data services. We're a big provider around the world with humans and with kind of technology. And so we've wrapped that with a technology platform to give our clients freedom of choice, as they have all these new AI tools to deal with and all this data to deal with. And so you mentioned cross functional—I actually think a secret weapon for more impact in these things is deeply believing that launches aren't marketing—like not mine, not this is not mine. This is ours. This is a large group of people building something really cool. And whatever it is that you're selling that you believe your customers are going to want, like, how are we going to present that to them in a way that makes them all want to buy it with passion? So that's not a marketing effort. That's a cross-company effort. So yeah, so I think there are lots of places marketing can play, lots of impacts you can have throughout the launch, and Kevin brought up some great different places in that role, where there's a lot of structure and process needed, but I think at a core level, one thing that we often miss is, hey, are you going to arm this large group of people with deeply resonating truths and words they're going to believe in and therefore can get their clients excited about? And so you don't get there in a silo. You get there through a lot of humble listening and sifting and then kind of forcing prioritization of a message.

John: A lot to unpack there. I mean, the good news is, it's a product launch. It's not a marketing launch. So that's right. So from that standpoint, it's funny, because we were on a show a couple weeks ago. We were talking about ABM, and how, you know, by definition, it's Account Based Marketing. And if we just change the name to account-based sales, it'd be so much easier, right?

Drew: Easier to understand, at least.

John: It's joint ownership, right? And so because that's what it is. So the next thing that you really inspired me to sort of think about from a CMO standpoint, there are folks who advocate for this notion of Chief Market Officer, because you are responsible for the market. And in theory, as part of that, you have your eye on the market, and you're thinking forward, like 18 months. Yeah, and products are one of the ways that you know, it's funny, because in packaged goods, that's what a marketer does. You think about your line extensions, you think about, you know, you are doing the whole thing and thinking about products as much as you are just marketing existing things. So I wonder, in your case, how involved were you in the actual creation of, or at least identifying the need in the product.

Drew: You know, engineering drives our product decisions, like what we're going to build at our firm. And so I have not tried to own that. I do think as we get smart with insights, we bring it to them and we influence and say, Hey, this is something we care about. I love the chief market officer intent. I'll just say very practically, if you love and thrive in a sales-focused activity, it's not beneficial to jam marketing into one bucket with sales, because you're gonna steer toward just those sales activities in other orgs. If it's a very engineering-focused org, and you want to jam marketing into engineering, I think you also lose the light from that side as well. So I love the idea of a chief market officer if you're really bringing insights and driving activity. I actually don't hate the title of Chief Marketing Officer. So I actually think it's like it's a discrete activity, that if it gets eaten by a subgroup, it's less effective. So how do we make sure that we—so really, what I try to do is deeply support and listen to my partners. And I actually think marketing can kind of play in a middle ground where you are. You can be a good bridge for different groups, because you care about leads and you care about deep product truth and like you can, you can sort of, if you're effective in that communication, you can really bring a company together as just kind of a connective tissue.

Drew: Yeah, and I love it, and that goes right back to your notion of "ours." This is for our product launch, and we are going to be successful together. Was there anything that you did before the launch that you think really helped in terms of internal training or packaging of the product, or positioning, or whatever, that you think was helpful in getting the launch to where it could be successful?

John: Yeah, yeah. Well, there are kind of two moments in the launch that were most satisfying for me. One is when the deep, core value prop that I drove the team to align on—because there was lots of cool stuff, product was being built, lots of deep pain from clients that we were gonna address—how do you turn that into a core message that can then be the core of everything that you tell? So you tell 19 compelling messages with one core to them. The moment I heard clients and execs and salespeople all just resonating with that core thing—and again, that's not John working a work of genius, that's listening. The moment I found that thing they were all vibing around, that was deeply satisfying for me. And I did that six months before launch. And to be honest, a lot of people don't even remember that we had those meetings where I sort of forced prioritization and alignment through listening. And so that's one of those "don't celebrate it, just do it," and then you've got that alignment and excitement that you can then bring forward. And everybody says, "Oh yeah, of course, this is what we're selling." So that's one piece, and the other piece, at the other end of the launch that I was most excited about, is when people were walking by our booth taking photos, and I was like, "That's a moment where there's so much going on that people are actually like, 'What's going on over there?'" And so I think that magic—I mean, again, you're pulling it through with a large group of people. So you need 100 people to be excited about your story and be able to tell it to get there. But that pull-through moment, I was like—and then obviously the most exciting thing was the client response of documented interest. So that's sort of where you count the money and you get excited about that.

Drew: Yeah, exactly. Wait, it worked! Somebody bought it, yeah. Hey, I love it. All right. Well, that was great. We're gonna—it's a moment where we're going to talk about CMO Huddles. So launched in 2020, CMO Huddles is the only community of flocking awesome B2B marketing leaders, and that has a logo featuring penguins. Wait, what? Wait? Well, the group of these curious, adaptable, and problem-solving birds is called a huddle, and the leaders in CMO Huddles are all that and more, huddled together to conquer the toughest job in the C-Suite. So Melanie and John, you're incredibly busy. You're both members of CMO Huddles. I am wondering—and sorry Kevin, because you know you're a visitor here—wondering if either of you would want to share an example of how CMO Huddles has helped you.

John: Yeah, I'd love to. I mean, from my end, I think the peer community is really powerful because you're dealing with others that are strong in areas where you're not. So for example, you know, in my first year last year in this current role, I was trying to crack the nut of content and how to do effective content marketing. And I would still probably not give myself an A-plus grade on that—I'm working on how do I really have the most impact I can with it. But I'll tell you, there was a member that I met through one of the Huddles who spent a good hour with me, walking me through the genius of his [approach], and he just said, "Hey, here's how it's working. Here's the sort of things I do, here's how I decide what those things are. Here's how I find my content," and just that willingness to kind of just show—you know, just open CMO, "No, this is how you win"—is really powerful in these kinds of groups.

Drew: Amazing. I think you appreciate that story so much. Melanie?

Melanie: I mean, it's been great. Learned more about penguins than I thought I ever would know. Besides that, you know, a few things come to mind. One thing in particular—well, two things—is we've needed some help with some marketing metrics, and I've gotten some help from Huddles on that, and some examples, and those have been really, really useful. And then also in marketing dashboards, that kind of thing. And then also, we did do—though it wasn't like just launching, because I knew I was going to use this example—we did do a website renovation, but it was way after I joined. So there we go, and it was a specific goal, quite honestly, to get the underlying technology up to date so that we could do launches, because it was just way too hard to do a launch when you got—all of a sudden—anyway, I went to the Huddles and got, I don't know, five or six recommendations of organizations. And ultimately, the partner that we chose was a recommendation of a Huddler, and has been a tremendous partner.

Drew: I love it. I love it. Well, thank you both for that input. If you're a B2B marketing leader who wants to build a strong peer network, a stronger peer network, gain recognition as a thought leader, find all sorts of wonderful partners that we have vetted, and get your very own stress penguin, please join us at cmohuddles.com. Okay, so let's talk about this sort of—we've got this launch. And John, you talked about this a little bit, where we have a basic selling proposition early on, or value proposition—how do we keep everybody on the rails and not going off the rails? Because there's so many people involved, and it gets out to the sales folks, and suddenly they're telling a different story. And, you know, I mean, that's true in anything, but it's particularly important in product launches, because if a salesperson says one thing, and then they go back to the website and see something else—yeah, so how do you keep that alignment?

Melanie: Yeah, I want to pick up on a few things John said. I really loved the team sport, the "this is the whole organization." It's an amazing product that somebody and a group of people have developed, and we just get to put the message out in the market, which is amazing. And John, I wrote down the words "humble listening." Oh, that is key along the way, is to be the humble listeners in the room and trying to orchestrate the pieces. And if you do that right along the way, people are engaged along the way—they're not just seeing this land at the end. They're engaged along the way. Their fingerprints are on it, and they're not just learning it cold. That's one way. And of course, some serious project management, but I would just pick up on that—that is one way to stay aligned.

Drew: Kevin, thoughts on this launch alignment thing, and you've probably been at places, obviously not SureScript, where it didn't stay aligned. You know, what's your thinking on that?

Kevin: Yeah, I think a lot of it comes down to how you set the context for the why. Why are we launching this product? What are we launching to whom? And make sure that the teams understand the context from the beginning. You know you're going to connect in, as Melanie said, you've got to make sure that you've got your weekly launch meetings and windows, and you've got a cross-functional team, and you're all on the same page. And whenever you see things kind of get off the rails a little bit, I think you got to bring it back to the context. Get feedback, go out with your sales and account management team, listen to them make a pitch. Observe how things are progressing, what's happening through the funnel, what content is resonating. Continue to do audits of the buyer journey as it relates to that product launch. So you're seeing where is content resonating? Where is there friction? And it's really important just to have that connection with the field, so that you're always getting that feedback and making your tweaks along the way.

Drew: It feels very much like it's not "set it and forget it." And it makes me wonder again—there's often decisions are made arbitrarily, "We're going to launch on this date," right? Period. Someone says "We're launching on this date," and it's good to have a date. Has there been a situation where it was so obvious organizationally you weren't ready, where you were able to say, "Wait, we got to push this back"? And I'm curious how those conversations go.

John: From my end, I think I like to develop the reputation as the marketer who cares about telling the truth. Because they sort of all assume that we just want to car-sale and, you know, we just want to lie to get our metrics. And so I think building that reputation where I really want to sell what's true—I mean, it's critical. Because, I mean, as a marketer, you learn pretty quickly that if you promise lemonade and then you don't have any lemonade, like, nobody made any money. And that's what it's all about. And so I think just really being straightforward about like, "Hey, if people actually want to sign up, you have to capture that attention while it's there." And so I think it's a balance, you know, because also with large solutions, large technologies—you know, a runway for getting something implemented may be a number of months. So there's some flexibility in what you finally bring to market when. But I just think you need to sell something that you can sell, or it's not going to work. And so it's really just alignment around that. That's my take. I don't know, what do you think, Melanie and Kevin?

Melanie: Yeah, I would say, you know, I agree. I was early in my career—I had an experience being in an org where we'd have a big event coming up and there would be the vaporware press release, right? And it just really is devastating to customer and market trust and employee trust. It's devastating. It's not even a consideration. And so then you go to all the things, some of which Kevin was talking about, of "we need proof. We need proof." We can talk about a new product in market with customers before it's ready, under the guise of strategic discussion, but we can't go out publicly with a new product until you've got proof that it works. When you've got proof that it works, and you're ready and you're good, but if you don't, that makes it a no-go.

Drew: Not every product launch goes successfully. So I'm thinking about this—you go to your best customers, you say, "We've got this, would you mind testing it and seeing how it works for you so that we could do—you know, we get this beta and then you'll be our showcase customer." That part all makes sense. Are there ever scenarios where you simply can't do that, or you can't go to a customer in advance? I mean, because obviously, Melanie, that would be one way to make sure that you're not pre-launching something that's not ready—you've got somebody that's using it already.

John: Well, I think in a modern technology world where things are always evolving—so if you have sort of a platform that you're building on, there are gonna be new features. Like I was with a very large tech firm for a while that launched a dashboarding solution that was a minor piece when they first brought it, and they brought it to customers in a limited state, and grew it and grew it and grew it, and now it's heavily impactful. And so again, I just think it's about trust and connection. Because if you've promised lemonade, and then they drink the lemonade, and it's water, they're gonna know to be careful next time. And so I just think it's about—are you obsessed with the client experience in those moments? And then let that guide, like your best client that you want to dabble with—what are they going to say when you want to serve them what you want to serve?

Drew: Okay, let's talk about measurement. I mean, ultimately, obviously sales, but it can take a long time in enterprise sales and so forth. So how do you sort of look at it as a rollout over the course of a year? What are the indications that this thing is going well?

Melanie: Sales, I mean, there we can say all the marketing metrics that we want, right? And we got, well, we got our MQLs, and we've got our pipeline loaded, but sales...

Kevin: We have leading indicators that, you know, we're looking at out of the gate, you know, engagement, conversion rates. You know, we can compare launches to past launches, even if it's a new product in a new market segment, to get a sense for are we on track. And then there's an, you know, qualitative, sort of real-time market feedback from sales and account managers who are telling that story about this launch and about this new product, and you're getting that kind of informally qualitatively as well. But yeah, I mean, in the end, you're looking at the, you know, sales and what you know deals are in the pipeline. Are you moving those deals through? Are they getting stuck? And are we finding out that we launched a product that the market said they wanted, but it was priority 15 on their list of things that they had to do? So you have to kind of assess that and then look at that. But yeah, it's good. It's kind of like revenue is the ultimate.

Drew: Well, and but you know, it's revenue is always the ultimate measure, but it's always a lagging indicator. And what I liked about what you talked about there with the leading indicators. I mean, if you are not, we're not just looking at engagement rates and conversion rates, but we're looking at them compared to other launches, and that should be a pretty good leading indicator. And it just makes me wonder. So let's say if your engagement rates and your conversion rates are lower than they should be, or their last launch. Are there any things that you can do at that moment with those leading indicators? I mean, it could be just the product is not right for this time. But are there adjustments that you can make?

Kevin: You got to assess where that adjustment needs to be made. I mean, before you make a decision that this is not the product launch that you had hoped it would be, because the market isn't ready for it as much as you thought it was going to be, you got to find out if your messaging is off, or if your assessment of the ideal customer profile is off, or if there's something in the route to market that isn't working. If you are working through channel partners or direct sales, is there something off in your sales enablement and your seller's ability to sell it? You misjudged their ability to sell it, like all those things, you have to look at those and kind of knock them out one by one and determine it. And then testing is huge. You're going to be testing messaging, testing things in digital where you can get quick feedback on how things are performing.

Drew: I wonder. So Melanie, do you go out on sales calls just to hear it yourself, or listen in on Gong or whatever to make sure that that's happening?

Melanie: Absolutely. And I would say to any CMO, you have to spend time in the market. You just have to, you can't rely on research papers to be the voice of customer for yourself. You have to see it in action. I do it a lot. I will go on sales calls. The place that I find it the most valuable is to go to trade shows, because that's where we're doing it. You know, I can see it in rapid fire, right? And I can see the marketing message, I can see the marketing tactics, but I can also then sit in on customer or prospect conversations, and I can see it all in full, you know, in full motion. And I will tell you like, I mean, and this is the customer experience side of my job too, that comes into play. But if I am in the office, you know, it's not like I love to travel, like everyone, but if I'm in the office for two full weeks, I start to itch, and I'm like, I gotta get, I gotta get to market. I gotta get with customers again. I gotta be in, you know, and hearing this, I got to make sure what we're saying is, yeah.

Drew: It's so interesting and important. It's funny, because I'm connecting the dots from the trade show to John. You're sort of that validation where you see them taking photos of your booth. It's two sides of the same thing. And there is this anecdata part of all of this that it feels like you sort of get a general sense there's a buzz or there isn't. I don't think it's possible to have a conversation with marketers without at least talking about potential impact, or impact of generative AI. We have managed to talk for almost 50 minutes without using the term. I'm curious if for either of your recent launches, what role, if any, did generative AI play in all of the various aspects of or any of the aspects of the product launch?

John: I mean, we largely did things like we normally do. So I believe in smart, creative humans coming up with creative ideas, and so I have conversations with ChatGPT every day, as many, many folks do. So anyway, I think the, I'd say, embedded advisor has become a pretty normal state for us in terms of content generation. I think there's a lot of opportunity to scale those sorts of things for marketing. Honestly, for me, it's a matter of, if you're thinking about like, my audience in particular, is people that carry very high-trust matters for their clients. And so my clients like need everything to be perfect and sure and excellent. And so I aim for absolute excellence in a smaller set of outputs. And again, it's like, how do we make that client experience perfect? And so we are dabbling, but I'm using it more to learn and expand my awareness.

Melanie: I think the place that, you know, other than that, we've got opportunity to advance our use of generative AI, let's just face it, but the place that I think is most important right now, and we're doing some work, is how do we show up online in these AI-generated searches that don't actually ever let you click through? So that is a piece of work that's taken a little marketing tool away, unless we do it right.

Drew: Interesting, yeah, and that certainly will be a subject of another show coming up, because I don't, if you've cracked that nut, we need to talk.

John: Let's keep going. Melanie, I want to hear more. Let's do it.

Drew: Yeah exactly. I've talked to a number of SEO experts who are trying to claim, we'll call it GEO, for lack of a better term for it, but none yet, as far as I can tell, have actually proven that this combination of things do it, but it's certainly there are a lot of folks that are experimenting to try to get their brands to show up in the large language models and other ways of sort of compensating for the lack of traffic that you're getting right now. So anyway, that is definitely a topic for another day, and an important one, but let's sort of wrap up now with some final words of wisdom for other marketing leaders gearing up for a major launch. And I think we'll start with you, Kevin.

Kevin: Final word of wisdom, I just, we talked about it, power of alignment. Just don't assume it happens organically, and don't be afraid to use external partners to validate your strategy, to benchmark your readiness, fill capability gaps. Melanie talked about it, you know, some outside support for different launches. Just don't be afraid. Alignment, alignment, alignment with the organization.

Drew: I love it. Okay? I'm aligned with that idea.

John: Yeah, I'll just, I'll kind of round it out with a word I may have already said today, I don't know: magic. I think there's a bit of magic that happens when those client, you know, documented client responses wanting more ready to move the next stage come when people take photos of your booth, you know, when people are buzzing on that same core value prop and like, you're just like, "Man, this is the nerdiest marketing thing for me to love." But I'm excited about, you know, kind of the alignment that they've gotten around these things. But the magic comes from all the hard work of bringing that large group of people along the way together, and so that is humble listening, and but it's also being a force in terms of, like, let's really prioritize and be pointy in what we're doing. So I think that bold storytelling and all that kind of layers to build that magic. The launch is really about more than just, like, the launch activities.

Drew: Well, it's funny, and it's really important, and we didn't talk much about it, but when these things are, you're first seeing it, this new product, you just think in terms of feature, feature, feature, feature. We could talk about a lot of different features, and we all know as marketers that you can't, you have to have one sort of big value prop or pain point that you're solving, and keeping people aligned so that the magic can happen is so important. All right, Melanie, bring us home.

Melanie: Yeah, so I love all that was just said: collaboration, alignment. I really love this humble listening. And I would add to it market in, customer and problem in, right? Start with the market problem. Listen to your customers. Make sure you've got their language. Market in.

Drew: Market in, all right, we are going to market in. Moving forward, I want to thank you. Melanie, Kevin, John, you're all amazing sports. Thank you audience 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 Huddle 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!