Balancing sales and marketing priorities for a new product launch. How can you ensure success in both areas?

Sales and marketing alignment can make or break your revenue engine. Both teams have to be aligned to maximize productivity and results -- and that can only be accomplished when sales and marketing communicate regularly. Marketing teams should occasionally come to a customer sales meeting or demonstration. Sales teams need to have a say in what they need from marketing in terms of sales enablement content.

Here are some steps to ensure success in both areas: 1. Develop a Unified Strategy 2. Target the Right Audience 3. Create Consistent Messaging 4. Coordinate Campaigns and Activities 5. Leverage Data and Feedback 6. Incentivize Collaboration 7. Monitor and Adjust Regular Check-ins: Hold regular meetings between sales and marketing to discuss progress, challenges, and any necessary adjustments to the strategy. Adaptability: Be prepared to adjust strategies based on market conditions, customer feedback, and performance data. By fostering collaboration, ensuring clear communication, and aligning goals, you can effectively balance sales and marketing priorities to achieve a successful product launch.

To ensure success in both sales and marketing during the launch of a new product, it is crucial to have co-creation and continuous feedback to align needs and goals. Close collaboration between teams allows both perspectives to be considered and strategies to be adjusted in real-time, ensuring that the priorities of both areas are met and that the launch is successful.

Según mi experiencia, a parte de los esfuerzos en medios digitales, no tradicionales y masivos que servirán de sustento para el argumento de venta en los canales de distribución, también un hilo conductor entre las áreas de marketing y ventas es realizar una promoción al trade. De inicio no masiva al consumidor porque resta a la novedad del lanzamiento. Pero, desde los canales de venta y la fuerza de ventas propia como de distribuidores, podemos tener promociones dirigidas a cada uno (FFVV, Minorista y Mayorista), de esta forma marketing apoya a la mayor cobertura del lanzamiento y como complemento, la comunicación en punto punto de venta y los mencionados al inicio, harán que ayuden al sell out.

This might be the most important one - Create a consistent feedback loop with sales teams that allows the team to share feedback, but also allows you to complete the loop with updates on feature launches, bug fixes and more. It's a game changer.

You need strong value propositions that resonate with your audience to help get your numbers. If these are not already market validated by sales and marketing - then this is your first step. This is a two way process, so you absolutely can ask for sales and marketing to help inform your work.

I’ve often seen the mistake that marketers make of creating a marketing messaging that comes “corporation-serving”, as opposed to being customer focused. We need to speak to what’s in the customer’s heads. Which is why customer feedback is important, however what’s more vital is customer behaviour. People might believe and say one thing, but do something else. We need to understand customer behaviour. In the messaging we speak to what the customers want (as seen by their behaviour) and then give them what they really need. At same time we live in a VUCA world where the market and customer needs are forever changing. The corporation should therefore be agile enough to tweak and change the messaging to support that.

Sales and marketing alignment for launches is key. When PMMs provide training and resources, like FAQs or cheat sheets, the sales team is equipped with product knowledge and marketing collateral needed to go to market and effectively communicate the product’s value to potential customers. When the two teams are aligned, it shows a united front for existing and future customers and can make for smoother launches.

Una vez lanzado el producto es clave seguir los indicadores de gestión para que el trabajo del equipo de Marketing y Ventas esté alineado a las necesidades del negocio. Es importante la revisión y supervisión continua de los KPIs, para poder hacer correcciones rápidamente. Seguir el alcance del producto, las ventas logradas, las ventas caídas, la comparación de los resultados con los objetivos previamente pronosticados, etc.