For any new B2B SaaS company, the product launch is a critical moment in time. Done correctly, it gains you powerful traction and jumpstarts getting revenue in the door.
For mature companies, a product launch is a new opportunity to connect with the market, bring excitement to your product or product evolution and celebrate your users.
Either way, a successful launch requires planning, coordination, and focus.
In Episode 68 of the B2B SaaS Marketing Snacks Podcast, Brian and Stijn break the ideal SaaS product launch down for you so you can make the most of your next product launch. The launch window, brief as it is, sets the tone for your product's ability to be accepted and celebrated in the market.
B2B SaaS Marketing Snacks is one of the most respected voices in the SaaS industry. It is hosted by two leading marketing and revenue growth experts for software:
B2B SaaS companies move through predictable stages of marketing focus, cost and size (as described in the popular T2D3 book). With people cost being a majority of the cost involved, every hire needs to be well worth the investment!
The best founders, CFOs and COOs in B2B SaaS work at getting the best balance of marketing leadership, strategy and execution to produce the customer and revenue growth they require. Staying flexible and nimble is a key asset in a hard-charging B2B world.
Resources shared in this episode:
Brian Graf: Hi there, and welcome to episode 68 of B2B SaaS Marketing Snacks. I'm Brian Graf, I'm the CEO of Kalungi, and I'm here again with Kalungi's co-founder, Stijn Hendrikse, who's a serial SaaS marketing executive and ex Microsoft product marketing leader. In today's episode, we discuss how to maximize the impact of your product launch.
For new companies, this is a critical moment in time to gain traction and jumpstart getting revenue in the door. While for more mature companies, it is an invaluable opportunity to connect with the market, bring excitement to your new product or product evolution and celebrate your users. Either way, a successful launch requires planning, coordination, and focus.
But if one of those things fail, it can result in an underwhelming product entrance that can be difficult to come back from. So we break it down for you to give you a better view on what to look for. How to make the most of your next product launch. Let's get into it. Okay. Thank you again for joining me, Stijn.
Today's topic might be a little bit tactical for some, but it's such a big part of the infancy of a product's growth that I felt like it was worth covering. And that is: how to maximize your product launch's impact. This launch window is such a condensed amount of time, but really sets the tone for a product's ability to be effective in the market.
It sets the tone for the market's acceptance of the product. It sets the tone for the amount of revenue that the product can deliver. The growth trajectory that the product is on. It's really a lot of pressure, for the product, for the team to really make them maximize this moment in time.
And so I wanted to discuss it with you. What I've been able to see is that when it's executed well, it just slingshots the product into growth. And just against that's a really solid tone going forward, but when it's maybe not planned as well, or not thought through effectively or not coordinated across the team.
It can start really slow, can be really hard to recover from and can throw a lot of financial projections off or make a company adjust its run rate or things like that. So a lot of consequences associated with it.
Stijn, I know you have a ton of experience in this area across your many companies.
Do you have any examples that come to mind to set the stage where, maybe it worked really well, maybe you have one or two that it didn't work well I could follow up after you.
Stijn Hendrikse: One thing that I want to start with, Brian, is that a product launch means something really different in the days of SaaS.
So when I started my career in software, we launched a product once every certain period. Every couple of years, a new version or every couple of months, sometimes for more minor upgrades. And when you have a real SaaS solution, that doesn't really happen that much anymore.There's more of an ongoing constant improvement of the product. And sometimes there's a feature release that's meaningful. Where it's really important to educate the market, educate your clients, get some presence, some marketing momentum out of that. So I wanted to start with a software launch that is not always what it used to be.
Even 15 years, 20 years ago, I did my first product launches working at Microsoft. And before that, other software companies. So just as an aside. And so when you think of a product launch, of course, you first always ask the question, who's it for? And that is always a combination of your existing clients, your partners, the channel that you may be working with.
That's a new prospect, but also friends and family, stakeholders, shareholders, employees. And so being very clear on when you're launching something new, a new capability, a new product, a new version of something, a new name of something that you like, which audience do you really want to optimize for?
You asked about success stories and things that didn't go so well. One of the things that comes to mind is when we launched Office 365. The ability to do that, it was, we had 104 countries at that moment in time where you could buy Office 365. It didn't mean Microsoft had a presence in all of those.
I think we were present in 87. And in some of those, of course, consuming products in a cloud model was less prevalent than in others. Where they were already used to buying software in a subscription model from, which was good. The CRM systems from Salesforce or maybe Google Docs. So the way you launch is so sometimes a combination of how much is it just about creating awareness and driving momentum for product sales or product adoption versus how much are you actually doing something in a market that hasn't done that before.
Where it's maybe the first time they're able to use a certain type of product, et cetera. We use this term in marketing as well: generating the demand versus just fulfilling it. And your launch being more about adopting the need that's already in the market.
And like Office 365, of course, we launched it very differently in markets where Office had been a known product for many, many years. And we had many clients who bought something called BPOS Business Productivity Online Suite was the predecessor of the cloud version of Microsoft Office, where you could get Exchange and Microsoft SharePoint, those products in a cloud format.
There were markets where we had BPOS and there were markets where we didn't. So we were very good, being very sophisticated at that, like really understanding which markets needed what and then of course Microsoft had the scale where we could also do all those things in a more localized fashion.
Sometimes that meant different languages, but sometimes it also just meant different ways of going to market, different ways to provide people with different types of partnership, different types of retail emotions and things like that. So that was extremely successful.
But of course, that's not in the cards for every small software company.So when you think of something that didn't go so well, I launched Acumatica in its first iteration.We, it was called Acumatica 3.0, but it was really not 3.0. 3.0 was the first version that we had commercially available.
We launched something that didn't have great, great branding. The visuals were a little bit weird. There was really no clear positioning. We had partners selling it. We sold some of it direct. And so we got by for a year, my first year at Acumatica. And because we had great loyal partners, we were able to sell and we got 40, 50 clients or so in that first period.
But most of that was because we had all these relationships. And then Acumatica 4. 0, where we adopted the new logo that Acumatica still uses today. But it had a lot of art. We completely reimagined the way we positioned Acumatica, which included visual identity, but absolutely included how we talk. It became a channel first business model.
It became really focused on being the only cloud ERP. That was really the branding and the positioning that we embraced for the mid market. Really leaning into the partner and the channel as being the unique selling point.That is kind of, the way we sold was so different from all these direct ERP solution providers.
So that was a very successful launch, but It came off of Acumatica 3. 0 being, being a non event where we tried to do PR, et cetera, and it was all over the place. There was no consistency. It wasn't clear who we were really targeting. We did it in certain parts of the market because we happened to have some presence there, but then we forgot about other parts of the market.
We also started to white label the software. We didn't have a really good story on how to incorporate it and where we actually had Acumatica available itself versus it being sold under a different brand name. So we fixed it with Acumatica 4.0. And that's probably one of the reasons that the Acumatica branding hasn't really changed since.
So I'm talking about 2012, 13,, when we launched 4.0, yeah, late 2013. And it hasn't really changed in the last 10 years, maybe some minor tweaks, but no.
Brian Graf: What do you think on the, on your Acumatica 3.0 launch, what do you think was the, in hindsight, the driving factor behind the, the inner organization and the ineffectiveness?
Was it something where you guys were just trying to move really fast or just didn't understand the market quite as well?
Stijn Hendrikse: Yeah, we didn't have product markets. We didn't really understand who was going to be the core audience. So we hadn't answered who is it for? We knew what it was for. We know this was a really good piece of technology.
A cloud ERP suite that was designed from the ground up. This was not what a lot of our competitors were doing. They were hacking an on-premises perpetual ERP solution that they sold in a virtualized model or hosted and trying to convince the market it was a new cloud product.
But no, Acumatica was the first real cloud solution. Other than that, NetSuite was very much just accounting software. And Acumatica was a really full fledged cloud ERP suite. And that sort of, we knew what it was for. But positioning in a way that was clear, like who do we target the mid market versus enterprise versus the U.S. market versus clients in the Philippines.We were all over the place in that first 3.0 timeframe.
Brian Graf: it brings up a product launch that both of us were a part of for a medical kiosk company that really went well. And to your point, what you were talking about, right, that that is one of the areas that.
That we executed well. It's really understanding who. Who's it for and building the launch around that. We brought in this really amazing product marketer named Damon, shout out to Damon. And one of the first things that he did, even though we had already done it, was to demand to talk to a bunch of customers that the company had and really wouldn't take no for an answer.
Often we will do the exact same thing when we come into an engagement and it's almost inevitable. The CEO will roll their eyes a little bit and be like, okay, fine. You can have my list. But they're very cognizant of the tax that it puts on those customers, but the insights that are gained.
The messaging that was built in the positioning that was built, just really hit it out of the park. And it was the foundation of everything that we built for that launch. And it was a lot of the reason why the launch was so successful, but to your point. It did, it just started all with.
With who's it for the one thing that I, we couldn't do in that engagement, but that I would want to be able to do going forward is to be able to start that process even earlier and to, to push it even into like the product planning and development phase. Where you're creating. You are actively having those conversations and using that Intel and those ideas to actually build the product, not just launch the product.
I would have taken it a few steps further on the flip side. I've been a part of some launches that haven't worked out as well. Unfortunately, one was for a very small mobile service software. The biggest issue there, one was we didn't, we didn't know who it was for.
It was the first launch for the company. And we just hadn't had the time to do as much market research as we should have. But to understandably again, the CEO had really wanted to, they wanted to launch fast. They wanted to get out into the market to start testing and generating results.
Which makes sense. But as a result, he pushed marketing to almost skip the step of audience building and having those initial conversations to where we really just had to do a soft launch where the product was ready. We built a couple of pages and all of a sudden we were out into the marketplace, but there wasn't any buzz and we hadn't done what I would have liked to really maximize the demand that was generated by the product. I do think that answering who's it for is super important, but also just really making sure that that gets pushed into the product, into the product launch motions and everything really maximizes its effectiveness.
So what do you think about breaking down a launch? What do you think are the most important things to tackle? Who's it for? Happy to talk through that more, but anything else that is really worth focusing on?
Stijn Hendrikse: Yeah, it all starts with customers. So having great customer testimonials Is it so and to get that you need some a beta program.
You need to have early adopters that help you tell the story of the product to their peers to other clients to prospect so that's a really important pillar. That's always a lot of time and to get a lot of customers to adopt the software broadly globally. And then to write up those stories and of course use those for product feedback. Whether it's for a press release or to be able to have customers in specific countries that the software and the positioning and the messaging for that market or to just have a great set of quotes to put in all your marketing materials.
Getting that, that's one of the most important things to do early. The next thing you can do, you have an opportunity, but every time you, you release a new major version of your software to tweak the positioning a little bit, the packaging, the pricing, all the piece Ps, but the, they had the big M in marketing, the five Ps, the, maybe the place is this, maybe a product where you wanna be lean in more into a channel or versus maybe before.
If you make any of the big go to market changes in the positioning tracking parts and things like that, this is of course an important decision to make early and you're launching a major version that gives you an opportunity to do so. One best practice I found is to create a bill of materials: all the things you need to support a launch right from the start.
Getting the press release out, analyst briefings, all those things that you need to do to make a launch complete. What's really good is to pick a date. To pick a date that becomes your launch date. It also doesn't move. That is really something to rally the whole team around and to do your work back schedule, et cetera.
So picking a date early and planning a launch is really important and of course you try to pick a date that's a little bit meaningful. Have a couple of weeks of buffer to maybe do what you can feasibly easily do as a company, but then plan to date maybe that you publicly announced a little bit later than that, but have an internal date, of course earlier.
So you have a little bit of buffer there. There's also, thinking about the scope of the launch. Do you launch it for certain types of customers before you launch it for others, certain markets, certain geographies? Do you go to big clients first before you go down to smaller types of clients, which are usually a little.
Tricky scaling them, etc. You cannot, you don't have maybe custom success managers. You can help walk customers through new things, et cetera. So sometimes it's good to start with larger customers on the way down. Is there an opportunity for you to drive an upgrade push.If you have customers, if your product, which is most SaaS companies don't do this anymore, and it's not great to do this, but if you have customers on different versions of your product.
Is there an opportunity to push a lot of them to the newest version right and and the same if you have an opportunity to move competitive user use of competitive products over to your product do you want to integrate it into your launch offering? And those would be some things to think about Brian.
Brian Graf: It's almost like with Microsoft. With the Windows 7 push to Windows 10 they used that product launch to push a lot of people off of Windows 7, finally, who had really loved the software, but just didn't really want to switch off. That makes a lot of sense.
I think also just making sure that you have as much alignment between your sales marketing. product and CS teams for the launch and really trying to align them behind the same end goal. Like marketing shouldn't be focused purely on, generating buzz. They should gauge their success off of the revenue that is generated or the amount of, whatever the goal of the mark, the launch is, the number of beta users signed up, et cetera.
So that's really, really important as well. I would love to talk through. I'm skipping around a little bit, but I would love to talk through the pricing model. You've done a ton of pricing work in your day. What do you think about for product launches either in adjusting the price of a current, like an upgrade.
Or taking on the price of a new product. We've already done two episodes on this early in the podcast days. So you're, you're free to watch those. And I will link those. But how do you take a look at that for a product launch? Is there any, any intricacies there?
Or do you take the standard approach all over again?
Stijn Hendrikse: Yeah, a lot of the CEOs I've worked with and, and companies we work with, Brian, have a tendency to not reach prices enough. And so when you're behind that curve, you haven't maybe adjusted for inflation or adjusted for the amount of new capability that you've added to the product or the more credible that your company now is because it has more clients than it maybe had five years ago.
Just the amount of resources you've maybe added to the team that are servicing your clients, right, which in themselves have value. So these are reasons for your price to always go up over time. So a product launch sometimes is a great moment to do that and to make it part of a bigger story where you're adding some new capabilities with less of a just a price increase.
So that's why it's always important to do that.
Brian Graf: What do you think in terms of building the buzz around a product launch? How critical is that? How do you typically think about it at a high level? The tactics and the channels change according to the product and the market that you're entering.
But what are the things that you need to think about when? Planning for that in a product launch.
Stijn Hendrikse: Yeah, the days of using a product launch to get some pr Coverage and they are over. It's not really that important anymore and press releases are more spam than anything else.So when you have customer success functions and things like that, of course a product launch is more part of that ongoing relationship. So the main thing that you can do is when you want attention from analysts, from people who are really influencers in the market. This might be a great reason for them to give you an ability to brief them.
Or for them to dive into what you've been up to lately and have your, you have their ear. And so that would be the main thing when it comes to that launch momentum to really capitalize on.
Brian Graf: To your point on that one, similar to some of the conversations that we've had around content, but you really need to give them a reason to care.
You can't launch a vanilla product and have them.
Stijn Hendrikse: When you work with Forrester or Gartner, they either pay them with money or you pay them with content. Because they're, they're job is to basically have interesting things to say. So if you have something meaningful to share and a lot, it's one of those, you might get some free press through that.
Or free attention from them.
Brian Graf: And if you can, again, going all the way back to who's it for. If you can answer that question really well with your product and your product launch, then that road becomes much easier. Than having to pay out the nose just to have Gartner's name on, on a PR or a press release that you launch.
You mentioned it a little bit earlier, but generating beta users or, or building up a wait list or things like that. What do you think about that when going about a product launch?
Stijn Hendrikse: I would love to get your thoughts on this one.
Brian Graf: It all depends on what the purpose of the launch is. If you're in the situation of that company, that the company that I described earlier. That small software company that was just launching.I think in that scenario, it's critical. You can't just expect to soft launch into a market unless you have a very immature product.
In which case, why would you be launching and what would you expect? To have a lot of success without really generating the demand, as you were saying, right, demand generation versus demand capture in advance, you need to get people excited about it. You need to go out and have conversations with the market, understand what they want, tweak your product accordingly, all of that.
Is all part of that wait list and beta user motion.That honestly, in, in some of the prospects that I've talked to for Kalungi is a step that is tempting to skip for early stage B2B SaaS companies. They have the product, they've built it. They have an MVP and they're excited to get out into the market and they feel like they know the market.
But they're, they're, they built the product off of a set of assumptions that may or may not be true. And so that beta user motion and weightless motion, is really critical for understanding that and really building the right market for the product or the right product for the market that you are entering. So, I, it's really critical. I do think that especially with earlier stage companies who may not have the patience, it can be, they cannot give themselves the amount of time that they need to effectively build that. Especially because early stage B2B SaaS companies typically don't have the audience that may be more mature, like Microsoft does, or something like that.
Where it is much easier to just send a few requests. You know, this is oversimplifying, but send it, send a few messages to your current customer base. And get them excited about it, because you already have the captive audience.
Are there any other pitfalls that you can think of in terms of a product launch that a team should really be aware of? That, if they don't cover these areas or take these things into account, it can become a tricky situation for them.
Stijn Hendrikse: Well, print launches are just not that relevant anymore when you're a SaaS company, so just don't over expect.
That drives a ton of extra revenue unless you're combining it with something like a significant price increase and things like that. It's just not the moment in time that drives when people buy something right that that's really not the case anymore. So having a financial plan around it. It's a fact you have to be careful not to count on the portals to drive a ton of extra sales or something like that on that one.
Are you talking about a business? A brand new product going to market or a product upgrade or both?
That's of course a big difference. A brand new product is something completely different. Honestly, every product that I did was it out of its MVP stage and and most of the time out of its market fit stage and just kept launching your versions, a further iteration of the product
Brian Graf: That makes sense. Two more questions. One, what do you think about customer feedback? Maybe post-launch. We already talked about getting to know the market before the launch and using that to, to impact your product development and your. Your launch activities, but how do you think about customer feedback after the launch?
Where do you look to get that feedback? And how do you distribute it to the team?
Stijn Hendrikse: The customer success team, having a really close connection with the customers who are adopting the new product is really important quickly after you launch. So that would be the main source and then what do you think about?
We've touched on it a couple in general, but I'd love to hear your specific thoughts if you have them but around like measuring success on some of the launches that you've used. How have you focused on lining teams up behind the end target? What KPIs have you used and. How have you helped to align and hold teams accountable with those kpis?
Stijn Hendrikse: Getting customer references and testimonials for a new product is a great thing to count. That would be my first and probably the metric that trumps everything else And then usage of new capabilities would be a good following metric. Is this really valuable?
And then the revenue impact. If you're raising the price, for example, you're increasing the ACV by having a new packaging structure. How many customers are now on that new tier, for example, that those would be good metrics to track. That's interesting, and worth pointing out.
A distinction that you made is that the most important piece for you is to use the launch almost as a forcing function to gather feedback from the market. It's not necessarily a windfall of revenue. It's to get the product in front of the market.And gauge their engagement with the product almost and how much it actually solves their problems. It's much more of a research and education play than a revenue windfall, which I agree with completely Okay, that's it. Thank you for your time as always.
Stijn Hendrikse: Thank you Brian.
Brian Graf: Thank you to Adriano Valerio for producing this episode and the columbia team for helping us make this whole thing work. And of course you for choosing to spend your time with us. As a reminder all the links we mentioned in this episode can be found in the show notes. And if you want to submit or vote on a question you'd like us to answer, you can do that at Kalungi.com/podcast.
Every time we record and take one of the top three topics and jam on it. Thanks again.