Launch Clinic

How to prevent your whitepaper from being read

You spent a lot of time and effort to create a new whitepaper. Assuming the goal of a whitepaper is to build thought leadership and help drive sales velocity, would you put a big fence in front of it and force people to provide a bunch of information that isn’t needed at this stage? How many people would just skip it and move along?

If the goal of a whitepaper is to build thought leadership shouldn’t you make it easy for people to read it and share it?

Running the whitepaper gauntlet

I know why you put a registration form in front of your whitepaper. You think that visitors will place so much value on what you published they will gladly hand over their contact information. And you will assume those are leads.

Now that’s funny.

I also know what happens next. Those “leads” you hand over to your sales team are ripped to shreds as being worthless.

Ditch the registration form

Do yourself a favor and remove the registration form. Let as many people as possible download and read it. If it’s good they’ll pass it along to other people. Hopefully that will prompt some of them to contact your company to learn about how you can solve their problem. If you’re not giving away state secrets there’s little risk. And if you’re worried your competitors will get it, fear not. They’ll get it using the same means you would if you wanted a copy of a competitor’s whitepaper.

Learn from a bad example

I’m going to call out TradePub.com because they are doing exactly what you shouldn’t be doing. It’s obvious that this document is probably not a whitepaper. It’s marketing collateral printed on white paper.  Enjoy…

 

FUTURELAB: Why Thought Leadership is Your Most Valuable Asset

Jon Miller posted on his blog about thought leadership over at Futurelab and he really nailed it. Many marketers focus so much on doing “stuff” (my technical description for deliverables) from a menu item of tactics when they should be focusing much, much more attention on (my term for this is “obsess over”) thought leadership. Why?

“In down economies, prospects conduct even more research leading up to the purchase. This means B2B marketing professionals must help educate prospects in the early stages of the buying cycle; doing this well can help frame their buying process and establish your brand as a trusted advisor that understands their problems and knows how to solve them.”

At Pragmatic Marketing we work very hard to maintain the thought leadership position we have earned from our customers.

What are you doing to build or fortify your thought leadership position?

Don't forget about internal communications

One of the things we talk about in our Effective Product Marketing seminar is how to roll out a new message. We recommend starting out internally first before rolling it out to the market.

In your rush to get the product launched are you failing to roll it out internally first?

I caught a post that talks about internal communication over at BrandCentralStation in a blog post titled Why internal communications may provide the highest marketing R.O.I. of them all

Internal communications programs that get employees on board when it comes to spotting new business opportunities can also result in bumps in top-line sales gains, too – although of all the employee-directed campaigns, this appears to be the most difficult to implement.

Are you frustrated to discover that people in your organization “don’t get it”?

Sales velocity webinar – October 16

I’m delivering a webinar on Friday, October 16 at 10am Pacific time titled “Product Launch Readiness: Planning for Sales Velocity”. Click here to register. Hope you can make it – I’m expecting lots of good questions!

PDFs are great but not a substitute for content

I find it really annoying when companies put minimal content on their web sites but feel like they’re doing visitors a favor by providing links to PDF documents. This is lazy, pure and simple. Even worse is when they’re too lazy to optimize the PDF for online use and I have to endure downloading a 10MB 1-page brochure. Bad form. We’re in the 21st century now and this kind of stuff should be outlawed.

The real question I have is “Is all that wonderful content you have in those PDFs may getting indexed by the search engines?” After getting some conflicting answers to this question I went on my own search to find an answer. I see that some PDFs are clearly indexed. Use this Google search command on your web site to see which PDFs are indexed:

site:yourwebsite.com filetype:pdf

I stumbled on this great post about PDFs and SEO by Gary Pool (@garypool) over at the Search Engine Optimizician blog, titled SEO to the Max – Search Engine Optimization for a PDF. Read this post and end the arguments you're having about whether your PDFs are getting indexed or not. Normally we just rip a PDF from an existing document and link to it. 

Did you know there are things you should be doing to make sure PDFs are properly indexed?

PDFs are great, as long as they are an option. Because, hey, some guy might need to print something out to take to a meeting. But for goodness sake, make sure the content is available in HTML too. And if you want to make sure that Google, Bing and Yahoo will actually index it, follow Gary Pool’s advice.

Product launch and the project management office (PMO)

A topic covered in the Product Launch Essentials seminar is cross-functional launch teams. In particular we address how to organize the teams and how to drive results. Most of you know how big a problem it is to get launch team members to participate and to be accountable for their deliverables. We provide tools to help launch owners in this effort.

Is your PMO working for you or against you?

In the seminar we advocate the role of Launch Owner, the person tasked with the responsibility for achieving your product launch goals. Some organizations utilize a project management office (PMO) to facilitate product launch activities and I wanted to explore that with you in more detail. For some of you the PMO is working just fine, but for many of you it can be a frustrating process that doesn’t seem to be in sync with what you’re trying to accomplish with your product launch.

So why is there a PMO in the first place?

Before talking about the role of the PMO in product launch, let me ask a question. Why would you have a PMO to start with? What problem does the PMO solve?

The most likely reason your organization would consider introducing a PMO is because of a lack of launch readiness to market, sell and support your product, and this was occurring with a frequency at a level that management finds unacceptable.

The primary reason for poor launch readiness are many. Let me suggest two, just for discussion purposes. First, the person generally recognized as being responsible for launch lacks important project management skills. She may be stellar in other areas but not very good with coordinating schedules and getting things done. I know this is harsh but it can be true. Just because you’re good at identifying unsolved market problems or shepherding product design and development through engineering doesn’t automatically mean you’re good at driving the launch readiness of your organization across many functional boundaries.

Second, it’s because the person responsible for launch (perhaps you) doesn’t have enough time and needs the extra resource to get things done. They’re responsible for cross functional readiness but time demands in other areas prevent them for dedicating the time needed for a successful launch. Granted this reason is the most plausible.

What’s the role of the PMO in product launch?

The role of an effective PMO is to help us get stuff done. They herd cats and they identify bottlenecks. They are enormously valuable when functioning in this capacity. But, they shouldn’t be accountable for achieving launch goals. They’re responsible for getting things done and that’s the role we value.

They free up time for us to focus on more strategic issues and help us achieve the best possible product launch outcome.

Clarifying roles and responsibilities

In organizations where there a PMO exists it’s important to establish clear lines of authority and responsibility between the Launch Owner and the Project Manager. I advocate the Launch Owner as the individual accountable for achieving the launch goals. In this role he acts as the commander-in-chief of the launch. The Project Manager role acts as the chief-of-staff to the Launch Owner, driving completion of deliverables and activities, advising the Launch Owner of issues, proposing alternative actions and providing project status.

Where things go wrong

Problems arise when too much control is transferred from the Launch Owner to the Project Manager – or maybe there isn’t a Launch Owner at all. The Launch Owner must have a big picture view of the go-to-market strategy and often makes ad-hoc trade-offs to ensure the best possible launch outcome. The Project Manager on the other hand may not have a big picture perspective, focusing (rightly) on getting things done according to a schedule of deliverables (product launch checklist). As attendees of my Product Launch Essentials seminar learn, a completed checklist doesn’t guarantee launch success, especially if it’s not anchored in a launch strategy.

Are you expecting too much from your PMO?

Have you established clear lines of responsibility between the PMO and the Launch Owner?

Is the Project Manager becoming the de facto Launch Owner?

A product launch lesson learned

I learned something important during the launch of the Product Launch Essentials seminar. Included in the launch activities were 3 webinars I conducted to help generate awareness, and to encourage viewers to download my new ebook.

Too hot, too cold or just right?

The challenge I encountered with the webinars is content. There is a delicate balance between engaging the audience while not giving away content that we typically sell. I had a belief that it was not good etiquette for me to overtly sell the seminar. I didn’t have any evidence to support that belief, but I had it just the same.

In the first webinar – 10 Ways to identify an Impending Product Launch Disaster – I had one slide that provided upcoming locations and dates for Product Launch Essentials and a URL to the launch landing page on the Pragmatic Marketing web site. It should be OK to mention the seminar and let viewers go learn for themselves, I thought. In the second webinar – Tips for Product Launch Marketing Success – I followed the same pattern. It was really more of an “oh by the way we have this new seminar” mention.

Apparently too cold

Then a funny thing happened. I received requests from viewers wanting more information about Product Launch Essentials. Some were even perturbed I didn’t discuss it more. The situation embarrassed me. I was so afraid of offending my audience that I glossed over the whole point of the webinar series – to sell the audience on attending Product Launch Essentials. It was about SELLING. I just didn’t want to be seen as the Sham-Wow guy.

At this point I was wondering if I was doing my audience and Product Launch Essentials a disservice by not discussing it in more detail. Did I blow it? Would they be back to watch the third installment in the series?

Going for it

I had one more chance. For the third webinar – Launch Owner: Superhero of a Product Launch – I shifted gears. I set my fear of offending my audience aside and added content that provided more context about Product Launch Essentials and even a little sample from the seminar content itself.

You can be the judge. Too hot, too cold or just right?

Are you limiting your product launch marketing efforts with unfounded beliefs?