Mastering the Art of Product Launches in ManufacturingMastering the Art of Product Launches in Manufacturing

Mastering the Art of Product Launches in Manufacturing Transcript:

Jeff White: Welcome to The Kula Ring, a podcast for manufacturing marketers brought to you by Kula Partners. My name is Jeff White. Joining me today is Carman Pirie. Carman, how you doing, sir? 

Carman Pirie: I’m doing great and I’m excited for today’s conversation. I think it’s going to be an amazing opportunity to give marketers some really practical advice about how to think about that. Marketing kind of always gets charged with, but maybe sometimes hasn’t been done before. Like, I know some very senior marketers who are in roles for decades and then all of a sudden they’re like, you’re in charge of a product launch, and what do you do? It’s different, right? It’s a little sliver of marketing that I’m really interested in peeling back today. 

Jeff White: Yeah, no, I’m really interested in it as well, and you’re quite right. It’s, although manufacturers. Probably over-indexed in the frequency of new product launches. It is still an area that is not necessarily well understood or well optimized for a lot of marketers.

Carman Pirie: Yeah. And a lot of marketers working for a manufacturer may have 20 years of experience working in marketing, but maybe only a year of experience working on the manufacturing side or something. 

Jeff White: Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Joining us today is Stu Accola. Stu is the senior marketing manager at Marmon Holdings. Welcome to The Kula Ring, Stu. 

Stu Accola: Thanks, guys. Thanks for having me. 

Jeff White: Glad you could be here. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah, Stu, it’s awesome to have you on the show. And let’s kick things off with understanding a little bit more about who you are and maybe an introduction to Marmon Holdings along the way as well.

Stu Accola: Sure. Absolutely. Again, my name is Stu Accola, and I’m a B2B marketer who has been working for about 15 years now, solely in industrial marketing. And today I head up marketing for three companies. Cannon Equipment, LA Darling and Unarco Industries are all part of Marmon Holdings, which is a Berkshire Hathaway company with about 120 businesses across the world.

So for the companies that I lead marketing with today. We’re all about helping major retailers, thinking about brands like Walmart, Kroger, and Amazon, all about helping to streamline their operations and really elevate that customer experience. So when you think about the products, things like shopping carts, stocking carts, and really high-end product displays. So many of the things that. The average customer is not looking at during their weekly trip when they’re going in through a store. But they definitely would notice if they’re gone, and they’re really important for helping retailers do their operations day in, day out. So I’ve been with the company now for about seven years, and it’s been a really good stop for me.

Jeff White: Nice. And it’s one of those things, you’re quite right. If it wasn’t there every time, there would be chaos, but. You don’t notice it when it’s working well, and that’s what success looks like. 

Carman Pirie: Exactly. Pretty interesting product category that way. Yeah. 

Jeff White: Yeah. 

Carman Pirie: I find it always fascinating. How many conversations would B2B manufacturing marketers start with you seeing the impact of what we do every day, and you have no idea that we exist. It just, it’s a story almost as old as time at this point. It’s crazy. 

Stu Accola: Yeah, it’s funny and when I talk to colleagues in different industries, yeah. You go into certain places and you look at ’em completely differently than everybody else.

My wife, yeah, it’s painful for her to go into a store with me now ’cause I’m looking at all the displays and carts. It’s a sickness a lot of B2B marketers have. 

Carman Pirie: That’s a good way of getting outta that co-ed shopping duty. 

Jeff White: Yeah. Yeah. But it’s also the curse of the wife of a graphic designer.

Carman Pirie: Would you look at the kerning on that? It’s horrible. 

Jeff White: It’s terrible. I can’t enjoy this experience now for sure. 

Carman Pirie: Stu, we wanna peel back your approach to product launches because you’ve launched an awful lot of products in your career, and you’ve taken it on as a bit of a, I think a bit of a specialty and something that you’re really focused on. And I think there’s a lot for our listeners to learn. And frankly, a lot for me to learn today in this conversation. Jeff mentioned earlier, manufacturers certainly over-index in the introduction of new products. It’s largely what they do is develop and innovate new products and then launch them onto an unsuspecting public in some way, shape, or form.

What do you think? So it’s a playbook that’s been around a while, so what do you think it is that they get most wrong with it? Like when you kinda look at the product launch landscape, what’s the biggest gap that you’re seeing there? 

Stu Accola: Yeah. You’re exactly right. Industrial companies, when it comes to new product development, spend a significant amount of time, money, effort, and tears getting these products to market. And, so oftentimes these are, they get, bring great products to market, they still struggle to gain traction. And I think. Product launches can fall. We all know product launches can fall short for a large number of reasons, right? Poor product market fit, they lack differentiation. Maybe they get the cost wrong, whatever it may be. But what I don’t think is talked enough is just launching products. To begin with. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, is that having a great product today isn’t enough; you still have to have a great go-to-market plan that gets that product noticed. It gets in front of the right people that you need to jumpstart that conversation. And of course, ultimately communicating that product value effectively.

It’s not a set it and forget it activity, right? It’s an important process that is touched on, but I think. A lot of industrial companies can take the next step and go further. 

Jeff White: I think a lot of the marketers that we’ve spoken to on this show and manufacturers that we’ve worked with, it’s not uncommon for a marketer to be one of the people bringing new ideas to engineering about new products. Maybe they’ve heard from customers. Features that people are looking for. They’re involved sometimes in product development at a very early stage, but it feels to me like that then probably drops off until the product has actually been figured out and tested and launched and ready to go to launch.

And then they’re brought back in. How much earlier should somebody be part of that? Product lifecycle as it comes to launch. As a marketer, as a salesperson, how early do you need to bring them in? 

Stu Accola: Excellent. When I’m talking, I’m always thinking from a product marketer standpoint, and in the organizations I’ve been with today, there’s typically a product management team upfront, which is really leading the way, especially on the front end. Of a new product development project, and then I’m more on the backend, right? What we’re talking about with the actual product launch. I like to think of it this way, in that model that I just mentioned, product management is leading the way to get it on the shelf. And as a product marketer, I’m helping lead the way on getting it off the shelf. My involvement in the beginning of a new product development project is probably going to be more of a consultant or an influencer. I might be able to give bits of information about, hey, the last product launch we did, these were some things that we learned. Maybe, we can look a what is searched on our website often, or SEO, whatever it may be input for the product manager in developing that initial business case to justify bringing a product in.

Now as far as when my work takes place to actually start with product launch preparation activities, it’s probably going tobe about halfway through that project. And when I’m staying connected throughout, but I’m really going tostart, really ramp up my work once we start to really have confidence that this thing’s going to get to market because we know not every product is going tomake it to market.

So once we have that. We have that confidence that’s going to happen. That’s when I start inserting myself, and that’s when I’m going tostart beginning to start developing my go-to market plan and communicate to others the inputs that I’m going to need in order to make that product launch happen. This is also too, you start communicating the timeframe. That’s going to be required to really do this well because we know there’s going to be multiple inputs to make that thing happen. And lastly, sometimes you have a hard date that you wanna launch this thing like a trade show, right? The biggest industry trade show. You wanna talk about bringing stress into a marketer’s life when you put a hard date like that. And that can influence it too. Yeah, I think it’s important. On a marketing team to insert themselves if they aren’t already a part of it, insert themselves, be very clear about when this thing’s going to get to market, and then make the necessary planning and communication about what you’re going to need in order to do it well.

Carman Pirie: So as you talk about the importance of the go-to-market plan, I’m just wondering, do you have any secret sauce there? Of course, you people like easy to get behind the notion of planning, but is there one part of your GTM planning and a product launch that you point to, to say? This is something that we really get right or we spend extra time on because it’s critically important. 

Stu Accola: Yes. That’s great. Let me first, let me just step back for a moment because, so oftentimes when I talk with people about the go-to-market plan, oftentimes I think they get it mixed up with the business case, and those are different animals to me. So as I mentioned before, the business case is all about upfront justifying. Should we actually make investments to bring this thing to market? Whereas the go-to-market plan is a little bit later in the process. The go-to-market plan, to me, is ultimately the North Star for that product launch. And if you’re doing things right, that’s probably where you’re going to spend the most time is getting that honed in. Because once you do it makes your life a lot easier. And some of the things that, is going to be defined in that is, first off, I think about, for example, getting crystal clear on your target audience, because early on in the process, you might have a general market or, in general, you know what companies might want it.

But once you get further on with your go-to-market planning, you should have a much clearer focus on what specific companies, what specific job titles are probably going to be experiencing the most pain and might wanna reach out and stick their neck out for you and bring you in and be a champion. You talk about special sauce. One of the things I think it’s overlooked are proof points to the benefits that you list, or simply put, reasons to believe. We’re all getting hammered with a million marketing messages every day, going that extra step to get that third party validation. Testing, social proof, video, those sorts of things can be really important and certainly so many other things.

Your key messaging detailing your sales and marketing tools that you wanna develop. Again, ultimately, I think product launch is a team sport. You need a lot of people to make it happen. When you have that tool together too, it becomes an excellent communication tool not only with your colleagues, but also at the leadership level to give them a clear line of sight of what you’re doing and how you’re driving to get to the objectives of the project. And at the end of the daytoo, it just saves time and headaches, and you’re not reinventing the wheel each time you get the opportunity to launch a product. 

Jeff White: I’ve got a, I don’t know. I think it’s an interesting question. We’ll see. But a lot of times when you’re thinking about go-to-market for a particular product, you’re doing so either into an existing category or an existing customer base, as that is expecting something like this. Maybe you’re bringing some differentiated features or whatever. I’d like to know how you think about products that… Something we’ve encountered sometimes with manufacturers is products that are either ahead of their time or are solving a problem in a different way that maybe people aren’t searching for yet, or don’t necessarily know that this solves an issue that hasn’t necessarily been solved before.

I’m wondering. How do you talk about things when people don’t necessarily know that they’re looking for it, versus something that fits in a category that is relatively easy to explain? 

Stu Accola: You know what that makes me think is, I think I’ve had an example before where we were almost trying to create a category, and that can be so challenging, right? And I almost think for me personally, it’s almost a last resort to be honest, because there is a lot of leverage to try to piggyback on where, customers already have. An established understanding of, what different products do and all that. If I am in that situation where I have to create a category or really try to sell something that’s truly unique, we’d be doing a lot from an education standpoint. And certainly in an industrial world too. We have, oftentimes, physical things you can look at. So I’d like, I would certainly want to be leveraging video as much as I can. Also too, really tying back to not just here’s this thing and all of its features, but tying back to their jobs and what they’re trying to accomplish and trying to put it back in those terms. Those are the initial things that come to mind of what I would do in that situation. 

Carman Pirie: I think that that makes a ton of sense too, like the notion of at the time when you need some creative shorthand to communicate in a wider, like you say, there’s more education required doesn’t necessarily mean that you have more time to do it. So you need to find ways to be efficient there. When you mention video as a key tactic, that just resonated with me. That makes sense. I wonder, kind of its own similar note I suppose, but we’re knocking on the door of this when we talk about launching a product that kind of is in a new category, or maybe doesn’t have a pent-up existing demand in a space for it.

It speaks a little bit to the notion of how close customers or prospects were involved in the development of the product to begin with. So I guess as you reflect on the vast number of product launches that you’ve done. My guess is that because you do it for a number of different businesses over different times, they’ve had different levels of customer intimacy, if you will, in their product development.

Have you noticed any correlation between how easy it is to launch these things when based upon customer involvement in their development? Does it follow the of course pattern of the more you involve customers in it, the easier it is to launch, or is it maybe more nuanced than that? 

Stu Accola: It certainly helps to have customer involvement upfront, and I know for us, for sure it does. First off, I agree. When you have, maybe, a partner in the development that can absolutely increase the success. Not only because, of course, yes, you have a potential customer waiting, but then you may have, you can get a testimonial, a case study. You can get some photography, a use case that can go a long way in building credibility for your product launch. And I find, too, when you had those development partners, oftentimes these people are passionate about your product launch. They become invested, right? And they can’t wait to see this thing come to light. And they become huge advocates for you in these organizations. And of course, too, I think when you have that customer input along the way, too, that can really just decrease risk across the board. The messaging, you’re able to actually maybe get some hours of it. Use in an actual application. So it builds confidence that way.

Regardless, if you’re getting it, it’s best practice across the board, of course, in new product development to have customer involvement in new product development. No doubt. And if they don’t necessarily become customers. That’s okay. But having them involved, no matter what, is going to help both on the product side and the marketing side.

Carman Pirie: Changing gears a little bit, Stu, I wonder because most of the people listening to this podcast are manufacturing marketers. So you’re working on the marketing side and you serve the entire organization. Yes. But you certainly serve sales in a product launch capacity. It’s one of your key stakeholders.

In your experience, what is it that sales is needing from marketing that they may not be getting in a product launch scenario? Or how are you thinking about what sales really needs in order to make this successful? 

Stu Accola: Yes. Sales teams, of course, are so critical for a product launch. And in my experience, I think an opportunity for industrial marketing teams is oftentimes training. With a sales team so centered solely on the product itself, and no doubt need to know that thing inside and out. I think about so many product trainings, in-person product trainings with sales teams.

You bring in your engineering, new product development, and product management. These people have passion and know these things inside and out, and do a great job of explaining that to sales teams. But it can’t stop there. When I lead a product training, I’m really thinking about three components.

The first one is, yes, the product training itself. You want ’em to know this thing inside and out. The second thing though, is the actual sales training. So how do we actually help them, for example, identify an ideal customer for this product. A lot of these sales guys, they’re going to have huge territories. They’re time stretched. Help them identify who’s going to be most likely to really benefit from this. Also help them overcome anticipated objections. We already know a couple of those things that are come up, help them with a clear message on what we wanna say to overcome that. Also too help them understand how to really leverage sales tools effectively. And that’s the third component of a good product training, not just saying, Hey guys, here’s a bunch of stuff go sell, but really give the rationale behind, okay. How did you go about developing that sell sheet and the messaging? Talk about the video and the types of things you were looking to accomplish there.

That white paper that’s maybe available for that technical buyer. Walk through that and explain it step by step. I think those three components are important. Product training, sales training, and explaining the sales and marketing tool can really go a long way because. Ultimately you want the sales team to leave with a lot of confidence that, because anybody that has to sell something has to have that. And especially when you’re giving them something new, we’re not very confident at first to go talk to these items. Their key to relationships that they have with their key customers. We wanna leave them there with that confidence. They need to sell. 

Jeff White: Is there anything that’s unique about situations? A lot of manufacturers have large banks of existing customers, and much of their ongoing revenue is selling new products into that same customer base versus finding new prospects. Is there anything that is unique about selling a new product launch into more of an existing customer base than looking for net new prospects? Are you ever breaking it down in that way? 

Stu Accola: Yeah. For every product launch I’m doing, step one is you want to try to sell your existing customers. We all know that’s the greatest opportunity to begin with. So right when we were talking about trying to find. For example, testing partners. That’s, those are the folks I’m probably going to be looking to first. That’s where our sales team partnerships are. And, things like for example, email, right? Hopefully if we’ve done our homework, they’re in our CRM. So I’m hopeful that we’re going to have the best likelihood to reach those folks. With the introduction of our products. And then right then there are times and a vast majority of products is we gotta go acquire new customers too, thinking about demand generation, which can be more challenging. And that’s where your programs of maybe things that you’re doing from a digital marketing standpoint, paid ads, maybe your trade shows, whatever it may be to go get those customers.

So yeah, I am thinking about ’em as two separate groups for sure. And when I’m going down the list of sales and marketing tools and tactics we’re going to do, I’m thinking about how am I going to attract both those audiences. 

Carman Pirie: As you’re talking about the sales and marketing tools and the sales tools in particular, I guess I’m… It feels to me like a product launch requires marketers to maybe be a little bit more in tune with selling a little more in tune with sales than maybe some other versions of marketing, if you will. If you’re developing a piece of sales collateral that’s going to be actually used by a sales team and not just put on a shelf, and they roll their eyes because it’s all marketing speak. What’s any guess, any tips of the trade, if you will, to really making that sing? It feels to me like that might be an area where some marketers could use some help. 

Stu Accola: I agree. And you’re right, unfortunately, there can be a bit of a divide, you said the marketing speak, which is true. Where, yeah, for the sales team is why you are making this. There’s two things that come to mind for me. One is in my career, I’ve done a lot of ride-alongs with sales teams. And man, there is nothing that can give you a better view of their day-to-day job than being next to ’em. And there are all those hours of windshield time when you’re getting to know folks and you’re asking questions. Right , it’s about building a relationship. I think, to start with, which is really important. I think the second thing, is having spent all that time being in those conversations with customers helps me develop better tools for sure.

But even before then, before I go about spending a bunch of time, energy, and money, I connect with my sales team and say. Hey guys, this is what I have coming, this is what I’m developing here based on A, B, C. I can also give some rationale. We’re developing this because we need to explain this to our customer base. Maybe it’s complicated, whatever it may be. So I think building that relationship as well as giving them a heads up ahead of time on what’s coming. And also just asking honestly. Are you going to use this thing? Because I know we all, sales teams might nod their heads and go, yeah, that’s cool.

But, ask, are how often do you see yourself using this? Are you going to be using this often? Is this more of a nice-to-have? Is it, eh, I can’t quite know. But it’d be nice. I think it’s important to just get to those questions.

Carman Pirie: Stu, that’s an amazing bit of advice. I think that it’s one thing people will nod, this sounds great. I will take more stuff than less stuff, more tools to help me sell versus fewer tools. I’ll take more. But then, when you ask the pointed question, do you see yourself using this? And how, and would you be comfortable and enthusiastic to use this with your best customer? Yeah. Now, all of a sudden, my guess is they’re going to be a bit more honest with you. 

Stu Accola: Yeah. I think, so too, one of the last things I’ll mention as well is, what I typically do is before a product launch you start with one piece. It’s maybe the product page, sell sheet, sales deck, whatever it is, get that super tight and then you can cascade out into the rest of the pieces that you’re doing.

So when you spend time on that initial piece and show it around, not only the sales folks, engineering, et cetera, now you got some buy-in, you know what’s coming and then you can start running and things get more efficient that way too. So once again, another way to give them buy-in and feel like yeah, that’s something that’s right on track. That makes sense to tell customers. 

Jeff White: How long are you typically running a new product launch? Is it a multi-quarter thing? What do you see as, okay, now that thing is working, and we move on to the next? Is there a cadence to that? 

Stu Accola: Yeah. For the three companies that I’m managing, they all have different product roadmaps. Products are getting to market at all different times, so there’s not a perfect rhyme or reason that way. But once they do come to market, I think. Especially when it just comes to B2B, you gotta play the long game when it comes to product launches. We’ve all seen the bits of research that in B2B marketing, your target audience, maybe 5% are actually in immediate buy mode for your solution. And we know sales cycles can be really long in B2B marketing too, it’s six, 12 months, gosh, even longer in some of the businesses here at Marmon. So yeah, I think you have to play the long game there in trying to stay in front of your audience to build that awareness, hopefully build some trust and begin that sales cycle.

Carman Pirie: It strikes me that when we think about that notion of 5% of B2B buyers being in market at any given time, long sales cycles, it seems like it might be a recipe that you… It might be pretty easy to spend too much on the big splash at launch. Do you see people doing that? Is it better to spend the money on… Eight months of mini splashes, if you will, versus…

Jeff White: It’s better to burnout, then fade away. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah. I don’t know, like you mentioned before, about this notion of okay, we’re pushing towards the deadline, the big trade show, the biggest one, all that seems like it’s a one-and-done type of thing. It’s probably a recipe for inefficiency.

Stu Accola: That’s a good question. I think, man, on one hand, I think, you know what you wanna make a lot of noise out of the gates to have people listen up about what it is about your product, but at the same time you don’t wanna trickle off in a couple months and now you’ve used up all your budgets or you don’t know how to keep the momentum going. Now, there are a lot of ways to get creative that way. We can take our messaging, we can recycle it, we can approach things differently. We can get creative with it for sure. But you know, I have to say my answer is both. I wanna try to make an impact outta the gate, but don’t get lost over time. It’s tough. No doubt. 

Carman Pirie: That’s the marketer who just wants more budget, right? Yeah. 

Jeff White: Oh, but when you’re launching a product that has a 12-month average sales cycle, it. It’s hard to show sometimes those initial metrics of the impact of the launch when most people are going to vote with their wallet in a year.

Stu Accola: Yeah. And I think that’s true, and having done this long enough, is to set that expectation too with teams and explaining, just like I said, hey, we may not get, we may not come quick out of the gates in the first several weeks. Explaining, like I just mentioned, that it’s going to take some time. We have to play the long game. And I think too, when a product launch happens, I’m always trying to stay engaged with my commercial team or typically the sales team as well as let’s get those tidbits of progress that we’re seeing and hopefully we’re marking those conversations that are set. Hopefully, there are some demos, there are reach outs, all the different metrics that we’re looking for, which are signals that we’re headed in the right direction. But of course, ultimately we’re gearing towards our revenue. 

Carman Pirie: Stu, this has been a great conversation. Really enjoyed having you on the show.

And I’m just, as we bring the discussion to a close, I guess I’m… I don’t wanna date myself too much, but I’ve been in this business now for a few decades, and there are things that, when you learn them like three-quarters of the way along or something, right? You’re like, really? It took me that long to figure this thing out. So I wonder, you’ve been doing product launches for a while. Was there anything that jumps out to you as wow man, I was 60% of my way through my product launch career before I found out X, but, that’s really important. I was curious, is it one of those things that sticks out in your mind that is a key learning about product launches that you wish maybe didn’t take you as long to learn?

Stu Accola: Geez. I think for me, as I said, I just had this natural interest in product launch, and I dove into it. But what I realized after I was learning so much about this, it applies to so many things in marketing, so many campaigns, not just new products, but there’s always so many opportunities to relaunch existing products or campaigns or just anything where you’re trying to get attention. This toolbox, this process of a go-to-market plan and all the things that I mentioned can be applied in so many different ways. And I, again, we’re always so excited about new product launches all the time, but I think we lose sight that not everybody is waking up each day thinking about our entire portfolio of products. So we know that there’s products in our catalog that maybe launched a couple of years ago. Okay, let’s set up a new campaign to get attention on it and maybe go at it at a different angle or just use the learnings that you may have had during the initial push. And now we can do a new campaign from some different perspectives. I learning to launch products effectively. Yes, it’s good for new product launch, but man is it works across in a lot of different ways. 

Carman Pirie: Fantastic. Stu, thanks so much for joining us on The Kula Ring today. It’s been great.

Stu Accola: Absolutely. Thanks guys. 

Jeff White: Thank you.