This article derives from a presentation at the Product Marketing Trailblazers in 2021. Watch this presentation, and others, via our OnDemand service. For more exclusive content, visit your member dashboard.
Hello, everyone. I’m Vasudha Karanam, Product Marketing Director at SAP. Over the last 15 years, I've had the honor of working across many different IT companies, my biggest change being at SAP.
SAP has launched a lot of products, and in this article, I want to share my experience launching with them, including:
- The failures I’ve experienced throughout those launches,
- An integrated marketing plan framework you can use,
- Key elements for a successful product launch,
- Customer engagement across the buyer journey,
- Getting market ready, and
- A few best practices you can use to successfully launch a product.
There's a famous quote from Michael Dell, CEO and Chairman of Dell Technologies, that I really like:
“Ideas are a commodity. Execution of them is not.”
True. It’s easy to come up with an idea, and big companies especially are eager to try those ideas out, so they start building the product very quickly when you have an interesting one.
But then the onus rests on the product marketer to get the product out of the door so that customers are aware of this product and ready to buy. Internal teams have to learn all about this product too and speak about it to their customers or prospects.
It takes a lot to get that engine humming. For me, that’s the privilege of being a product marketer – we can be the execution engine that helps new products out the door.
