How much time and money does your company spend launching new products or sales campaigns? So much effort goes into a successful launch… the planning, the collaborative brainstorming, the creative energy, the detailed follow-through and the big launch training event. There’s nothing like an immovable date on the calendar to drive action and agreement to move forward.
What happens the day after the launch? Time to take a nap? Well yes, but then what? Some of the most successful campaigns I’ve seen had one common characteristic; someone to drive, not just watch, results from the campaign. This means setting up immediate feedback loops with Sales, including quick surveys and phone calls to see what’s working and what’s not. Nothing is perfect the first time out, and if you make the effort to find out what’s really going on in the first 2 weeks, you can make adjustments before its too late.
I’ve found that email is not enough, and have had some success with scheduling best practices WebEx sessions with key sales team leaders and reps. These are talented “verbal” people after all, so I ask for dialogue and capture the results in a WebEx recording. We review pipeline, talk about what’s resonating with customers and what’s not. And if an opportunity is stuck, we recruit experts to swoop in and unstick them.
This is what I call the driving phase of a campaign and it is a key to gaining momentum. If you are so busy with launches that you do not have time to drive, then you might consider more human resources or less launches.
Launches create excitement and attention from media, analysts and customers. But just like using too many exclamation points in the same paragraph, they can start to lose their effectiveness.
I’ve never met a farmer who just plants seeds and comes back in a few months to harvest. There are usually lots of field visits in between.
What are your best practices for driving campaigns?
