The Launch Doctor - Email Newsletter

The Launch Pad
December 2003

Be a Marketing “Internist”

The traditional definition of marketing is the study of the marketplace external to the company, in other words, looking at the external world from inside the company. With all of the pressure of preparing to launch a product into the external marketplace, a lot of attention is focused on the world outside. Very little attention is given to the world INSIDE the company. Yet it is internal marketing that is so essential to prepare your employees, sales force and partners to deliver that newly launched product to the external world. It is vitally important to spend the time and money necessary to be a good marketing internist, especially during product launch.

From the Inside, Looking In
Because the launch team is already part of the inside of the company, it’s hard to identify the other people inside the company to whom they need to market. You can’t see the forest for the trees, or the sales people for the programmers. Often a launch team will march along going about their chaotic business, and just ASSUME that everyone in the company knows all about the product being launched. Wrong! If the company is of any size, or launches many products in any given year, chances are that people inside the company are too busy doing their day-to-day jobs and monitoring their eBay auctions to keep up with all the launch teams carrying on about something or other.

So who need to be the targets of the internal marketing campaigns? Think about the business model and how the product gets to the customer. Who touches it along the way before, during and after the selling process? Everyone who touches the product on its way to the end customer needs to know the key elements of the launch and marketing plan for that product, and they need that information well before the launch date.

So Much Information, So Little Time
During the average product launch, there is a lot of marketing information generated. You may have lengthy marketing plans, competitive analyses, message hierarchies, product specifications, press information, and pricing analyses. For the purposes of internal marketing, you don’t need to provide everything on the list. Here is a checklist of what to provide for your internal audience:
-Basic description of the product being launched and its relationship to other products or product families
-Strategic objective for this product with respect to the company’s business and market goals
-Market strategy, including existing versus new customers being targeted and positioning relative to competitors, targeted geographies
-List of competing companies and products and your company’s differentiators
-Pricing for the product
-Key messages to be used during the selling process
-List and location of key sales collateral, documents or sales tools that can be used to help sell the product, including links to the company’s internal and external websites

Sometimes you can assemble this key information in a single document like a marketing plan or launch plan that is placed on the company’s internal network for access by employees, the sales force, or channel partners. Whether you have one document or several, it’s important to use “version control” so that people are assured that they have the most current version of the documents.

Make it Simple, Make it Quick, but Make it Company-confidential
Marketing programs for the inside of the company need to be streamlined, easy to understand, and should be delivered without fanfare or fancy packaging. People who access it don’t care if it looks pretty and shouldn’t, because it’s for company-internal use only. They need to understand the strategy behind the launch for the specific product, know the characteristics of the product, and how it stacks up against the competition. Sales people may need more specific information such as detailed specifications, pricing structures and specialized sales tools such as customer presentations or comparison charts. All the material should clearly be marked “company-confidential”, not for use outside the company. Internal marketing information delineates the company’s business strategy and goals as well as competitive selling points; you don’t want that information getting out to your competitors.

Timing is Everything
When should you put together and deliver these internal programs? For the sales force, any customer presentations, launch plans, marketing plans, key strategies and competitive analysis need to be finalized and in place at least two weeks before launch. For channel and other partners and employees, that’s also the case. If you can get everything ready and made available one month before launch, that’s even better. If you deliver the right level of marketing information internally ahead of time, everyone will be prepared and ready to sell when the product is released to the marketplace. This eliminates any lag time that might otherwise occur if people aren’t up to speed on the new products.

Quick and Quirky Example
You are a launch manager in a new division of CardIt Universal, a company that builds and distributes wireless credit card processing terminals. The new division is trying to improve a new processing device for airlines to use onboard to sell those nice, piping-hot, meals consisting of real food from real restaurants, for which the airlines are now charging an arm and a leg. The first version of SkyCardIt released this year did not do well mainly because the cardswipe part of the device was located along the side of the device, resulting in one too many cans of bright red cranberry juice being spilled on the laps of passengers in seats 14G, 14H, and somewhat in seat 14J. Your company’s tech support group is still in therapy trying to recover from all the stress.

The new version of the device was completely redesigned so that there is no swiping involved, and the processing time was also speeded up. It’s been tested for two months on three airlines, so it will be ready for launch in just 8 weeks. Your boss, the division manager, has made it clear that the external marketing is going to have to reassure the target customers (the airlines) that the previous problems are fixed, and he has increased the marketing budget so that the P.R. campaign will reinforce that message. That leaves you little or no budget to do internal marketing. However, in order to prepare the tech support and sales people, you decide you need to do something.

You decide to meet with the V.P. of sales and the Director of Tech Support to discuss the budget dilemma, and how best to communicate the new marketing plan and strategy to their groups. The Sales V.P. suggests that it would be best if he held a company-internal webcast to explain the new and improved SkyCardIt2 and the strategy being used to regain the trust of the customers. The Director of Tech Support said that she would need more detailed information about the product specifications, the list of targeted customers, and the key messages in order to prepare her staff to interact with customers properly. Because you have limited budget, you decide to prepare a brief launch plan that the Sales V.P. can read and address during his webcast, and that the Tech Support group can access via the company intranet. The document would include the following:

-Detailed product specifications, especially improvements made
-Key messages about the product improvements
-List of targeted customers, identifying those who had the previous device and those who would be new customers
-Overall strategy for this product relative to former and future releases in the product family

You complete and deliver the document four weeks before launch. The sales people are now prepared with their pitch. The tech support people are ready to pick up the phone and talk to happy customers. And most importantly, the passengers in seats 14G, 14H, and 14J have dropped their lawsuit against the airline.

Moral of the story: Be an internist, but be careful where you sit.

Happy launching!

Catherine Kitcho
The Launch Doctor