Let’s get one thing straight: Product Marketing does not own product launches.

Sure, PMMs handle the launch plan, messaging, GTM strategy, and enablement, but if a launch is treated as just a marketing exercise, it’s already doomed. A successful product launch is a full-company initiative.

Too many PMMs get stuck in the “feature launch” grind, pushing out blog posts, crafting sales decks, and running internal enablement. They’re optimizing for activity, not impact. A true product launch isn’t just a bigger feature release; it’s a business-level event that requires company-wide alignment and execution.

Product launches need more than PMM hustle. They require leadership, influence, and cross-functional ownership. So how do you make that happen?

Feature launches vs. true product launches

PMMs often focus on shipping feature updates, launching one-off marketing campaigns, and moving on to the next thing. But feature launches aren’t the same as full-scale product launches. This cycle creates tunnel vision: ship a feature, make a marketing splash, move on.

A successful product launch is not just about announcing a new feature, though that’s part of it. It’s about creating market impact. Without a strategic approach, a launch fails to gain traction, teams operate in silos, and the product struggles to achieve its business goals.

What makes a product launch different?

A true product launch is a business event that drives adoption, revenue, and strategic positioning. It requires:

• Product readiness and differentiation: The product must be both technically sound and positioned in a way that clearly sets it apart in the market
• Pricing and packaging strategy: Clearly defined pricing tiers, upgrade paths, and value-based messaging must be finalized before launch
• Operational readiness: Finance, legal, and RevOps need scalable pricing models, CRM configurations, and compliance reviews completed ahead of launch
• Sales enablement: Sales teams must understand the product’s value, competitive differentiation, and how to confidently sell it
• Customer success preparation: Onboarding materials, training sessions, and proactive engagement plans must be in place to drive retention
• Coordinated marketing execution: Multi-channel campaigns must align with sales efforts, market timing, and customer needs

If these foundational elements aren’t in place, the launch is just another announcement.

Leading a product launch without authority

Influence is more important than control when leading a successful product launch. You won’t always have direct authority over every team, but you can drive alignment, accountability, and momentum by setting clear expectations and ensuring everyone is rowing in the same direction.

Define what success looks like

Every team must understand what a successful launch looks like beyond just launch day. Success isn’t just about press coverage or website visits; it’s about customer adoption, sales impact, and long-term retention.

• Set clear objectives tied to business goals, whether that’s revenue targets, customer activation rates, or pipeline generation
• Weigh trade-offs between short-term wins and long-term growth. Should the focus be on user adoption now, or is revenue the key metric?
• Link these objectives back to your GTM strategy and the key bets you’re making with this launch

Clarify roles and responsibilities

A launch quickly derails when teams aren’t clear on who owns what. Assign ownership early: who is responsible for sales enablement, pricing approvals, customer support training, and marketing execution? When ownership is clear, accountability follows.

• As a PMM, act as a program manager, not just a project manager
• Identify a Directly Responsible Individual (DRI) for each workstream and ensure they have the authority and capacity to execute
• Work with leadership to ensure the launch is a priority for each DRI, not just another task on their list
• Set clear expectations: each DRI owns their workstream, communicates progress up/down/across, and manages their project plan
• Rather than micromanaging, empower all DRIs to take responsibility

Create urgency and sustained momentum

Without urgency, launches stall. Set milestones leading up to launch, communicate progress frequently, and remove blockers early. Build internal excitement, celebrate wins along the way, and maintain post-launch energy by reinforcing the impact of the launch.

• Plan internal communications as carefully as external ones. A product launch is also a change management initiative; teams need to understand what’s coming, why it matters, and how it affects them
• Set clear expectations across the business, outlining what to expect during the launch and what role each team plays in making it successful
• Ensure department leaders are aligned and communicating the right message, so the entire company moves in sync
• Use execs to drive alignment: when they reinforce priorities, teams listen

Proactively manage dependencies

Product launches involve multiple moving parts across teams. Mapping dependencies early prevents last-minute chaos. One of the most critical aspects of program management is forcing teams to talk to each other.

• Encourage workstream DRIs to take ownership of their needs rather than waiting for others to anticipate blockers
• Set up a weekly sync where DRIs align on interdependencies, track them in the project plan, and flag concerns before they escalate
• Reinforce that asking for help or resources early is a strength, not a weakness. Transparency is key (and expected)

Schedule pre-mortems and post-mortems

Expect iterations; don’t be surprised by them. When you make iteration part of the plan, you’ll get better feedback without last-minute chaos.

• Schedule pre-mortems before launch to anticipate roadblocks, identify risks, and ensure teams are aligned on what success looks like
• After launch, hold post-mortems to gather sales insights, analyze customer feedback, and assess real-world performance
• Build in time to refine positioning, update enablement materials, and tweak the launch strategy based on learnings

Sustaining momentum after launch

Too many teams treat launch as the finish line when, in reality, it’s just the start.

• Track adoption metrics and customer feedback to identify areas for improvement
• Reinforce sales enablement with updated objection handling and refined messaging
• Keep the product integrated into marketing and sales motions to sustain awareness and pipeline growth
• Ensure product and customer success teams are working together, not just for adoption, but to help users thrive

If you treat launch day as the end, you’ll miss the real opportunity: long-term impact and sustained success.

Keeping momentum after launch separates the products that thrive from the ones that fade…. and how you execute post-launch is what ultimately determines your long-term success.

Bringing it all together

Treating a product launch as just a marketing event is a mistake.

A great product launch is a business initiative, not just a marketing campaign.

The best PMMs don’t just market launches; they lead them.

A launch isn’t successful when you ship, it’s successful when your product wins.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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The post The big misconception about product launches appeared first on Building Momentum.

I’ll start by saying I’m no pricing expert. But I have, as a product marketer at various companies of different stages, both been involved in and led pricing conversations… usually because nobody else has the experience. And you probably will (or have been) in the same situation.

I think it’s important that PMMs can work on pricing projects because of the obvious impact that it has on revenue.

But for those who haven’t had sight of pricing before, it’s a minefield. What, when, how, where, why?

In this post I’m going to walk through what a typical pricing project might look like for a standard B2B SaaS product. I don’t have a proper, academic approach – but I do focus on what I think is right, and what I’ve found works. As always, your mileage may vary – and if you’re following this process, remember that I write to give you inspiration, not instructions.

Principles

Here are some principles I’ve tried to internalise that guide my approach and thinking around pricing.

Price before product

If you’ve built your product and THEN decide what to charge for it, you’re wasting time and energy.

• Most startups will focus on the product first – the features it’s going to have, what it’s going to do
• Then, they’ll think about the cost – it’s taken us $X amount to build, or costs $Y to service
• They then use a cost-plus approach to set a price by adding an extra 50% – 80% margin
• They then look at the value that the product delivers, before working out what customers would be most interested

See how much riskier that is?!

Instead, smart startups will:

• Examine the market and select a group of customers to service
• Define the value those customers want to achieve
• Determine how much customers will pay to access a product that delivers that value
• Depending on the price customers will pay, plan how much they can spend to build/service, and set their own costs
• Finally, use the cost guidelines to develop the product

See how much more straightforward and rational that is? You’re more likely to hit gold earlier, rather than struggling to find traction.

Price problems are probably a positioning problem

“It’s not the price that people don’t like, but what they understand they are – or are not – getting for that price.”

That was the motto of a pricing consultant we worked with in a previous business and it’s stuck with me ever since.

All commerce is an exchange – value, for money.

• If your customers don’t understand the value your product delivers them, they’re unlikely to pay more money for it.
• If your customers believe your product delivers the value they need at a reasonable price, they’ll buy.
• If your customers think your product delivers more than the value they need at a bargain price, they’ll probably rip your hand off for it.

Pricing goes hand-in-hand with positioning.

Margin matters

In recent years gone by, how much profit you make when providing a product or service is usually here nor there – it was all about growth!

Not any more. Showing sustainable growth is crucial for sanity, let alone fundraising.

Analysing the COGS – cost of goods sold – means you can consider where pricing should be set so that it at least covers costs, if not deliver a 40% – 80% margin.

Process

Here’s what a typical pricing project might look like.

Set pricing objectives

Getting alignment on pricing objectives was actually one of the first posts I wrote about product marketing.

Your pricing is not going to exist in a vacuum. It does not exist for its own sake. It exists to support your business goals – so you should move forward with a clear understanding of what job the pricing is intended to do.

Pricing can be used to achieve many different objectives, from maximizing profit and growing market share, to reducing churn or discouraging new entrants.

You can download my pricing objectives process and template here.

Define your pricing strategy

Once you’ve agreed and discussed what pricing is expected to support, you can define your pricing strategy to support your objectives.

Your strategy should contain a review of the situation so far, the objectives set out, and then offer principles that will guide how you move forward.

There are a number of potential price strategies that you can choose from:

• Value-based pricing – determined by what customers will pay
• Competitive pricing – based on what competitors charge
• Price skimming – setting high pricing to capture demand from big spenders, then reducing pricing to capture lower layers of the market
• Cost-plus pricing – adding a margin on top of your costs
• Penetration pricing – offering attractive low prices to gain a foothold in the market
• Economy pricing – pricing low to build volume, so you can drive down costs through economies of scale
• Dynamic pricing – changing prices depending on demand

For example, you may build a strategy that is 70% penetration pricing and 30% cost-plus, with the intention of striking a balance between setting pricing low enough to be competitive – but enough to cover costs and contribute margin.

Note: we’re not talking about specific numbers yet.

Keep on customer research

Hopefully, you’re already working in lockstep with research underway to understand the market, segment them, identify the buying journey, buying group, personas, understand the value they desire, and more! This will help you to hit the ground running with strong inputs. Here’s my post on 19 customer development questions you should be asking.

The personas that you discover (don’t create them!) are going to be super useful to analyse the results from other research in this project. Understanding the value that they desire – and where they’re coming from, in the form of a value story – matters much more than the features they like.

Carry out specific pricing research

Once you’ve understood the personas that you want to sell to, now you can find people who fit those guidelines to three things:

• The ‘value metric’ they prefer to be charged by – seats, numbers of landing pages, number of customers, etc.
• Understand what features they value the most – to help you design the packages and pricing tiers you’ll offer
• Uncover how much they’ll be willing to pay for your product.

For context, I recommend reading the PriceIntelligently SaaS Pricing Strategy ebook and their blog post on value metrics here.

You’ll want to run a survey with four sections:

• Questions: Qualification info about them and their company – so you can match them against personas
• Questions: Value metrics – asking what is most important when it comes to pricing
• Questions: Feature preference analysis – asking which features are most and least important, so you can match up against personas to design packaging
• Description: Showcase your product with a landing page, product screenshots, or a demo video so your respondents can understand how your product is positioned and the value it delievrs
• Questions: Willingness to pay – asking for price points the respondent feels is too expensive, high but would consider, a bargain, too cheap

Here’s an example survey I captured in my Swipe File from Hiten Shah that walks through qualification, feature preference analysis, and WTP questions.

When it comes to the WTP analysis, you’ll need to carry out a Van Westerndorp analysis. Sounds complicated, right? It’s really not. Here’s a template – complete with walkthrough video! – that you can copy and follow.

The output is a graph like this that tells you the highest and lowest acceptable prices, and the optimal price point – where the most people think pricing is neither too cheap or too expensive.

Competitor research

At the same time, you’ll want to be understanding how your competitors… compare on pricing. You’ll want to look at a broad range of alternative solutions that customers can use to accomplish the same outcome and achieve the same value – because your biggest competitors are not who you think they are.

You’ll want to carry out general competitor research on their pricing tiers, positioning, product features – but don’t over-rotate on what competitors are doing. Rather than compete against competitors, we want to compete for customers – to be the ones who understand and service them best.

Draft and first review

If you’ve got this far, you’ve now acquired a ton of insight and understand what pricing needs to achieve for your business and the principles that will guide your pricing implementation, what your competitors are charging, plus:

• Your personas, the value they desire, etc.
• What customers think they should be charged against
• What features they think are most and least important
• The price points they think are too expensive, too cheap, and just right.
• All of the above, by specific segments and personas

Unfortunately there’s no quick and easy tips at this stage, except to say that it all has to go in the melting pot that is your consciousness to be considered, evaluated, analyzed, until you’ve come up with an initial perspective.

Your first draft is not going to be perfect, so don’t try too hard. Instead it should be a first checkpoint – a sanity check that you’re on the right path. If you’re in a typical SaaS business, you’ll probably create good/better/best pricing tiers.

Review it with the core stakeholders invested in pricing and ask for feedback and input. What works, what doesn’t work? What might be challenging?

Margin review and iterations

Once you have specific feedback on the direction, it’s time to check your margins and make sure you’re working towards something that will be long-term profitable for the business. You can find my post on creating a revenue model here to start working out your COGS.

With your finance team, understand what good margins look like for your business. A typical SaaS business will push for 70% margin, but this may be lower if you’re in an aggressive growth phase or higher if you’re moving into profit mode.

With these margins in mind, you’ll be able to iterate on your pricing draft and work in conjunction with the stakeholder group to improve. This might take one or two rounds… or might take more. What’s important is to continually revisit the pricing objectives that you have agreed at the start of the project. There’s nothing worse than the goalposts changing the game, or stress caused by misalignment.

Testing

I don’t mean A/B testing pricing on the website – you probably don’t have enough traffic to be statistically-significant, it’s difficult to track and follow through to purchase, and it may upset customers who bought at a higher price if you’re also testing a lower one.

Instead, test pricing in a similar way to how you might test positioning – alpha-test it with internal teams, beta-test it with friendly customers or in a cross-functional ‘tiger team’ to present pricing to real customers.

Generally, your pricing is going to exist in its form for around 6 months – long enough to get valid signals on effectiveness, and short-enough that it’s not going to create huge compounding problems. You’ll also want to think about the second-order effects of pricing: it may reduce the number of closed-won deals to begin with, but the customers that do buy may expand at faster rates to cover the gap and more.

Get approval

With all of this insight and feedback in mind, work with your stakeholders to get approval and final sign-off. Make it clear that pricing is an iterative process – it’s never one-and-done. You’ll want to build a plan to revisit and re-evaluate every three or six months to make sure you’re reacting to the market and setting yourselves up for success.

Implement

Depending on how your business is organized, this can be super easy… or super difficult. There’s no way to tell until you’re in the process either. Sorry!

Bringing it all together

Pricing is a beast. I highly recommend breaking it down into stages that work for your business, whether that means using the process outlined above, or adapting into whatever makes sense.

The principles, objectives, and strategy that you define will have a huge impact on the effectiveness of your pricing in action – so don’t skip the crucial conversations that need to happen to build alignment and level up your thinking.

Good luck!

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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The post How to define pricing for brand new products appeared first on Building Momentum.

Every so often, I’ll see a Twitter or LinkedIn post go viral in the SaaS community and the topic is nearly always the same:

I decided not to request a demo from a SaaS company because they didn’t publish pricing on their website! Imagine how many leads they’re missing out on!!!

And honestly, it grinds my gears a little. And usually, these complainers have something in common: they’re all individual ‘makers’ or from early-stage, pre-PMF startups trying to buy from established SaaS companies that are usually targeted to more mature businesses.

Quite simply, if you (as a buyer) need to know pricing before requesting a demo or getting more information and the company doesn’t publish pricing, they are sending you a message: you are not their target customer.

Why SaaS companies don’t publish pricing

Good go-to-market strategy should discriminate.

Being something for everyone is a waste of time, effort, and focus. Most companies are focused on attracting up to 10% or maybe 20% share of the total market.

As startups mature they are often naturally pulled upmarket, away from serving very small businesses and SMBs who traditionally have lower average contract values (ACV) and higher churn. SMBs can also be expensive to acquire through paid performance marketing, and then still require an inside sales journey.

As companies are pulled upmarket, they win bigger, more mature companies as customers. These traditionally come with larger ACVs and more concrete growth prospects.

The effort to win a $10k customer is about the same as a $30k customer. From there, it’s only a period of experimentation and hiring the right people to get to $100k ACVs. These customers also cost less on the paid performance side, but can still be tended to and won by inside sales teams.

This whole process does leave a gap at the bottom of the market – which is usually quickly filled by other early-stage startups, and the same thing happens.

So as those companies mature, should they craft propositions and a buying experience that works for the 100%? No. They will focus on bigger ICPs, and adapt their marketing, sales, and product strategy accordingly.

It then makes less sense for these companies to publish pricing on their website for a number of reasons.

1. The buyer may not require pricing before getting more information. Larger businesses have more flexible budgets, and if the challenge to solve is important enough, budget can be created.
2. It leaves revenue on the table. Understanding a buyer’s problems before discussing pricing means you can size the proposal as required. A customer with a $1m problem will gladly pay $100k a year to solve, but if you’re setting public pricing at $50k, you’re missing out.
3. For perception. I don’t know about you, but I often feel companies without public pricing are going to take a more custom, solution-oriented approach to my problem. Not publishing pricing can help build perception as a higher-quality service.

What you can do instead

As a product marketer, you might be instructed to hide pricing on the pricing page – regardless of whether it’s the right thing or not – and you want to hedge against it.

And in some cases, you may want to offer hints on your pricing page, especially if you’re working through that transition period.

Here are two different ways you can bridge the gap.

Create an anchor with ‘good, best’ packaging

Defining a reference point on your pricing page can help your customers to understand how your product and value – and therefore, pricing – is likely to compare.

This might be a very low-touch plan that you offer with zero customization capabilities, or very cut down features. You can attach a per-user price, a platform fee, or whatever other value metric makes sense.

Usually, you won’t actually sell this to users – but it’s priced high enough that it’s an easy upsell to the minimum pricing for a basic offer for your ‘best’ plan, the one you actually want to sell.

This creates a anchor in your customer’s mind. If the first plan with not many features is priced at $x, then the recommended package must be higher.

Create an anchor with a competitor comparison

When you’re competing against low-value competitors but have clear, high-value differentiators, you can use this to your advantage.

You can group your competitors together as ‘Alternatives’ and present them in a comparison table, along with the primary features – and include your differentiators. For pricing, enter a range for the alternatives – and for your product, just use ‘Contact sales’ or ‘Request pricing’ or whatever works for your customers.

This format helps separate you from the crowd, set yourselves apart in terms of features and value, and offer a pricing anchor too. Your potential customers visit the page and instantly expect you to be higher priced, but have some point of reference.

Be very clear who your product is for

This one is contentious because for some reason, it’s considered a little gauche to say exactly who your target customer is.

But if you can push through, there’s no harm in stating something like

• Our product is best suited to customers with 500 to 5000 employees and spend an average of $1m per month on performance marketing
• We serve Enterprise customers who handle 50k transactions per day
• Customers typically invest $1m per year across their cybersecurity stack

And you have all of these guidelines already – your sales reps are using these in qualification calls. Could you experiment being upfront and transparent on your website? Would this help your SDRs be more productive?

Understand your customer, iterate

When it comes down to it, the companies that win will be the ones that best understand their customers – and support their buyer’s experience with the right information, at the right time.

Ultimately, the impact of transparent pricing on the website or not is unlikely to be the needle-mover you (or your execs) think it will be.

Give it a try, or don’t. But definitely get out there and understand what your customers want, then do that.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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Your pricing page is the second most important page of your entire website (after the homepage). It’s probably your second most highly-trafficked page, it can make or break someone’s decision to sign up for your trial or request a demo.

And unless you work at a large company with pricing analysts or deep pockets for expensive pricing consultancy projects, the design of your pricing page is probably going to fall down to two groups: product marketing, and brand design.

If there are no product marketers involved in your pricing page design, then what are you still doing here? Go and start collaborating on it now!

In an absence of direction, it can be difficult to know how you should think about the pricing page, let alone what should go on it.

Here are some of the core considerations that I’d think about when crafting a compelling pricing page.

What’s your pricing page hero heading?

Don’t just put ‘Pricing’ at the top of your pricing page. It’s a wasted opportunity to frame the rest of the page and set the scene for how you want potential prospects to interpret the dollar amounts that follow.

Take a look at these random samples from a selection of SaaS companies.

What do you notice?

Some are focused on their pricing being straightforward, simple, transparent. Start for free. No credit card required.

Others reiterate the value of the product. Build stronger relationships, organize your work, make teamwork more productive.

Others choose to highlight a combination of pricing and product value: everything you need, always know what you’ll pay.

Takeaway: Reiterate value

Hopefully, at this stage of your buyers journey, you know that buyers have questions they need to answer before they can move forward.

For some types of product, this might be something straightforward like “Is there a free trial?”, or “What’s included in the price?”, or “Is the product worth this price?”. It might be more complex, requiring your hero heading to elaborate on the specifics of your product, pricing, and value prop.

What should you call your product packages?

Most SaaS products will use a three-plan Good/Better/Best packaging structure, all increasing in price. Sometimes you’ll have a freemium entry tier too.

When developing these packages, we’ll stress for days on the dollar amounts but give little thought about the descriptive names that we’ll use internally and externally that almost everyone who engages with your brand will encounter at some point.

Generally, there a few options.

A ‘Good/Better/Best analogy’ approach will see you name plans in increasing levels of specialness, like:

• Silver, Gold, Platinum
• You can even get creative, like Freshdesk did with a nature-themed Sprout / Blossom / Garden / Estate / Forest

You may want to help users self-select a plan that’s right for them, like:

• Starter / Professional / Expert
• Team / Growth / Enterprise

Or maybe it’s about product capabilities:

• Support / Engage / Convert
• Inbox / Chat / Integrate

Takeaway: It depends (start with the customer-centric approach first)

Ultimately the names of your product packages will depend on the way your product is architected, whether compartmentalised by capabilities or if features can be accessed by different tiers of customers.

I recommend starting with the customer approach first – what will resonate with customers as they scan your site? What phrasing will they self-select as?

What plan should we highlight?

This isn’t even a question – the real question is, which plan to highlight?

Adding a border, additional coloring, or badges can help a plan stand out. Usually, you’d use this to highlight the plan that most customers will select – the one that should catch their eye.

But it doesn’t have to be. You can experiment with placement, and depending on the intention of your design, highlight other plans that impact the perception of others.

Take Zendesk’s pricing page for example. They’ve highlighted their Suite Professional plan as an anchor, their highest page. Your eye is drawn there first. £79! Does that mean the £39 plan or the £65 plan is actually a great deal? I think so.

And now Asana: their £9.49 plan feels like an absolute steal compared to the £20.99 plan.

Takeaway: It’s all about perception

Unless your TAM is extremely small, we’re thinking about visitors in groups of thousands. What is going to have the biggest impact on the majority of visitors? Not edge-cases; the broad strokes of normal folk that visit your site.

All you can do is create multiple variations, and test in-house to see how they feel. Pricing is just as much as art as it is science.

The big one: to price, or not to price?

It really annoys me when I see Twitter and LinkedIn influencers trashing companies for not publishing pricing on their pricing page.

In my opinion, it’s 100% acceptable to have ‘by application only’ pricing on your website. If your customers are comfortable with that.

In an oft-quoted trope, customers that have small budgets will sweat the small stuff, bargaining over $5 discounts. Smaller customers are more likely to want – NEED – pricing on your website to decide whether they continue to evaluate or not.

More mature businesses usually move slower. They don’t make rash decisions. Budgets are larger (but not unlimited) … but everything can be negotiated. There’s a process for that. If the product says it does the right thing, we’re potentially interested. And so exact pricing is not necessarily required at the point in their journey in which they visit your pricing page (but they may want a ballpark figure in the discovery call).

Takeaway: It depends (on your pricepoint)

If your product is primarily self-service, then show pricing. If it’s mostly inbound-sales under $20k a year, show pricing. If it’s over $50k you’ll probably need to sell the value as well as the pricing structure, so don’t show pricing.

Of course you can always experiment. If you do show pricing, try ‘Pricing on request’ in place of a $ amount for your highest plan and see if you can eek out higher ACVs. Or if you’re already hiding pricing, try showing a ‘Starts at’ $ figure as a benchmark to set expectations.

Build, measure, learn

The last tip I can leave you with, is pricing is never done in a vacuum. Your product progress, sales skills, market landscape, the macro-economic environment, and whether Mercury is in retrograde can have a huge impact on how your pricing page is perceived by potential prospects.

Make sure you have a strong cadence to iterating. Put something out there, build a hypothesis for it. Measure the numbers, review the metrics. Make inferences, get feedback. Try again. Good luck!

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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The post Four pricing page considerations appeared first on Building Momentum.

I was working remotely for two weeks when we launched the new Kayako. The launch – a huge deal for the 110 employees that had been working on the new product for the last two years – happened over Google Hangouts and Slack. Everyone joined a video call, with champagne and cake ready in the offices in London and Gurgaon, India.

Everyone had a part to play – it would only happen if everyone had typed a custom command in our Slackbot to take the old marketing website down, push the new one live, and remove the restrictions, finally opening up the new product to the world.

We were confident. The new Kayako was really different from anything else out there: a new customer service and live chat platform for companies that obsessed over their customer experience. It killed the concept of ‘tickets’, and instead promoted a single, effortless customer relationship across contact channels.

Our target market away from IT helpdesks and technical support teams to a new ‘customer-service-as-growth’ persona. With this, we released a new brand, pricing, and positioning. Gone was the dark blue, corporate feel that was a hangover from the 00’s; we created a brand that felt comfortable, personal, and effortless.

A few months in, that confidence had been chipped away by the reality we were facing. Low trial conversions. Product stability issues and bugs. Negative feedback. Revenue was falling. Accounts were cancelling after a few months.

We’d gone from adding thousands of dollars in new contracted monthly recurring revenue (CMRR) from the old product every month, to just hundreds.

It was bad. We got together in a war-room scenario: what was happening, and how do we fix it?

Aside from product issues, we identified areas of our go-to-market strategy that were seriously problematic. Although we had followed best practice, sought expert advice, and carried out research, we failed in three key areas: pricing, positioning, and onboarding.

How we failed at pricing strategy, and how we fixed it

In the run-up to the launch, we had worked with a pricing consultant who’d developed best practices and frameworks from his time at Microsoft. We learnt a lot; the engagements were helpful, productive, and we felt assured and confident in the strategy.

The process involved carrying out a survey to understand the value that customers gained from our product. There was a big spreadsheet, listing each features with a dollar value against them, depending on how big of a draw it was.We drilled into competitor pricing, looking at how we compared on features and value.

In hindsight, we should have known that a pricing process developed for billion dollar corporate organizations like Microsoft could never have worked for our ~$5m ARR startup.

Our launch pricing strategy was simple enough. Three plans – good, better, best. Similar to our biggest competitor, although a few dollars cheaper.

We knew it was failing.

1. Free trial signups dropped, because they were put off by the pricing page

2. Conversions to paid accounts were falling, because they couldn’t experience the value they were expecting

3. First month cancellations were high, because customers didn’t experience the value they expected for the price they were paying

We had followed pricing best practices as instructions, not inspiration.

Immediately, we stepped up our research. We were already doing win/loss calls, which gave us a head start into the challenges we were facing. We began to call customers, prospects, and anyone that had signed up to get their feedback.

Our suspicions were correct. The pricing wasn’t working because people couldn’t see the right plan for them, at a reasonable price, that represented good value for them.

So we went back to the drawing board, starting with our target market. Who were our customers?

We created a spectrum of customers, from individual users that just wanted a simple live chat tool, to large teams that wanted an enterprise-level customer service platform. By mapping them out, we could see where our focus should be in the short term: building revenue from mid-sized accounts, and building volume.

We then followed a value-based pricing process from Profitwell, with three stages.

Firstly, we quantified our personas. Who were they? How profitable were they? We could do this with the data we already had.

Secondly, survey customers and people in the target market to understand the features they value the most.

Then, ask those people for four price points with a willingness-to-pay survey:

1. How much would be too expensive? 

2. How much would be expensive, but not out of the question? 

3. What price would be a bargain? 

4. How much would be so cheap that you would question the quality?.

After analysing the results, we found that everything aligned with our customer spectrum. People who wanted a live chat tool wanted something very cheap or free. And those companies that wanted a full platform would be willing to pay significantly more. 

This was a big milestone. We had turned our innate understanding of our customers into quantified, evidenced results as the basis of our strategy. We were being led by our customers.

Our original plan had been to evaluate pricing every six months. If we had waited that long, we would have been in serious trouble. After implementing the new pricing structure, we constantly gathered feedback. We analysed, cohorted, pivot-tabled the fuck out of the performance numbers to see what was going on.

Over the coming months, we adapted and tested pricing multiple times. Sometimes we offered a free plan, sometimes without. We changed the numbers, the layout of the plan, the plan names, the features included or excluded, based on what we were hearing and seeing.

We forced ourselves to iterate. And that wasn’t easy; every change took at least a day’s worth of effort from three people just to implement, let alone plan, agree, and announce.

But our ability to react quickly was the difference between success and failure.

Getting positioning wrong, and turning it around

A common best practice is to lead with aspirational, ‘world change’ messaging; and to create a category that you can own.

As part of the product launch, we wanted to set ourselves apart from competitors. We thought the most effective way to do this was by creating a narrative, using Andy Raskin’s Medium posts as a guide.

His key to creating a narrative is to define the promised land, the world that your customers can achieve when they have your product.

Naively, we used this format as instruction again, not inspiration. We tried to build a category and narrative around ‘effortless customer experience’. It was really human: no more having to repeat yourself across departments, the end of being treated like a ticket number.

When we showed this to customers and prospects, it really resonated. So we went big. The messaging united our website, collateral, and sales deck.

But after the launch, we discovered it wasn’t actually working. We found we had focused almost exclusively on this aspirational world change so much that we hadn’t covered the functional benefits that our customers expected to see (and in some cases, prioritized more).

We were alienating our customers with high-level messaging. Although we had done research and testing, we had biased ourselves towards executives and decision-makers in more mature businesses, without realising that in most cases, that wasn’t our customer.

Armed with the knowledge we had from our pricing research, we were able to pick up interviews and calls with those people that were actually interested, and were actually the correct stakeholder at different stages of the buying process.

Often, those people were at smaller companies: like co-founders that needed something they could set up easily and forget about, or an ambitious customer service professional who was looking to make big changes to the way their orgs approached customer service.

We created a single Slack channel that automatically posted every bit of good, bad, and neutral feedback we received from customers and prospects across every feedback channel. This gave us a real-time pulse check, helping us refine our mental model of who our customers were and what they cared about. We also used this to create a regular Voice of the Customer report that helped communicate this across the rest of the business.

It reduced the distance between us and our customers: a direct feed into what they cared about, and what they didn’t. We had to forget our bias, removing our impression of what we thought they wanted – and actually listened to what they were saying. We let our customers lead us.

So it was time to flex that iteration muscle again. We could test, rollout, and update new messaging really quickly. Sometimes we’d change it every day by rewriting headlines, making small tweaks, or trying something completely different.

We were lucky enough to have instant access to making website changes, along with a fantastic in-house designers and marketing developers to help. We forced ourselves to iterate and experiment – everything could be reversed if it didn’t work out, with hardly any lasting risk.

Strong relationships with our sales and success teams were crucial too, allowing us to try out new messaging, test new demo structures, and try different ways of presenting our value.

From a broken onboarding process to a smooth welcome

In the run up to launching the product, we’d researched best practices for SaaS onboarding.

The majority follow a simple rule, called time-to-value. Your product’s goal is get your customers to experience value as soon as possible, for best chance of success. It’s pretty good; it means you don’t have to focus on helping users set your product up for use, and instead you can focus on getting them to a point of satisfaction.

Our product, however, needed a lot of setup to experience value. You had to set up your support email address, connect social accounts, invite your team, set up workflows, and much more.

This was way too much to do for someone just trialling the product. But there was no substitute: you had to commit completely. But we had still followed those rules as prescribed, instead of using it as inspiration. Our first onboarding process was set up around helping users set up the account. Obviously, this was not going to be effective.

The results were disappointing. Leads were signing up for trials, looking around for a few minutes, then leaving straight away.

We couldn’t let this go on. All the work we were putting in from the marketing side to get visitors to the website… the work we had put in to iterate our messaging… the huge strides we had made with pricing… were all for nothing. We were falling down at the last hurdle.

To understand what was happening, we used Fullstory to review what users were doing in their first experience. We found that the majority of people went straight to the worst place in the product. The place where nothing looks good, where no attention was paid during development, and where things got confusing, quickly. They were going to the admin area.

We really had no idea that users would go there within the first few minutes of signing up. We had to understand why, so following this line of investigation in our calls and interviews.

We tried to find out what it was that prospects were trying to discover that they couldn’t find elsewhere. The results were interesting – users were saying they wanted to learn what features we had, and how flexible the configuration options were.

They had been interested by the website, and now we realised the first experience needed to show not just the product, but it’s potential.

So we dialled up our product education efforts. As soon as someone signed up, we showed a two minute intro video, then we hit them again with three key points to drive the message home.

We added better information in the admin menu, not just describing the technical detail, but making it clear what the potential usage of each feature could be. We carried out research to understand the most logical grouping of admin features.

We added empty stages and dummy data that demonstrated the full range of capability, without requiring any setup. Our goal was to get to a place where users could see what working in the product was like from the moment they signed up.

We didn’t get this right first time. We tried to get a balance between providing education, and getting out of the way and letting users learn and explore for themselves.

We worked with our designers and frontend developers to iterate together. As we made progress, some users weren’t happy as we tried something weird. Generally, feedback was positive. We tried to distill complexity into more simple, logical areas.

Fullstory was really useful to instantly see results, and whether users were being successful with each version we tried. When we looked at cohort data, we found a clear connection between the educational onboarding experience, and higher trial conversions.

Reacting well

It took us about six months to right these wrongs. Over that time, we had increased the new CMRR we were adding each month by other 80%. Within 18 months of launch, the new product had become a $2m ARR product, and Kayako was then acquired on the strength of it’s growth.

In each of these three examples we were able to turn around a struggling product launch, and put it back on track. Three guidelines determined our reaction.

Best practices are inspiration, not instruction

The same goes for any advice, any tips, recommendations, talks, and blog posts. There are simply too many variables, too many unknowns, and too many inherent biases at play to use a best practice or process from one situation, and expect it to perform well.

That’s not to say we can’t take inspiration from them. So long as we are applying some critical analysis to assess how we should interpret that advice.

Let your customers lead you

Doing this can feel pretty strange, however obvious. Especially if, like this product launch, you’re moving towards a new audience, a new type of customer that you don’t fully understand yet.

It’s tempting to put something out that you think will work, because you don’t know enough yet. Positioning that’s created in an internal vacuum, or pricing that’s based on your competitors.

It’s really crucial to continually build an understanding of customers all the time. Continual research over one-off projects. We have to listen, set aside our own biases, get out of our heads, and really get into theirs.

Flex your iteration muscle

I’ve called it a muscle because unless you don’t do it often, it will be hard, it will hurt, and it is going to be uncomfortable.

As marketers, I think we’re conditioned to prefer one-off, big bang launches. We do the work, launch, move onto the next thing… with plans to revisit at some point in the future.

But we’re in 2020. Nothing lasts six months anymore. Your customer’s goals, gains, pains, and jobs change much more often than we think. And so does your business strategy. What was true, and worked well yesterday, might not be true tomorrow.

We found it extremely useful to implement pulse checks: small polls, real-time feeds, and regular evaluations to keep on top of what’s happening. The goal is to test two things: if your understanding is still correct, and if your execution is still effective.

Bringing it all together

I hope this gives you a few ideas on how we approached a failing product launch, and how we turned it around by really listening to our customers, constantly iterating, and using best practices as inspiration.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought: find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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The post From failed product launch to $2m ARR appeared first on Building Momentum.

Everybody has a reasoned and valid opinion on how pricing should be set, from experience with past companies, watching competitors, ‘best practices’ articles, or even individuals influenced by the ‘IKEA effect’ bias. Rarely is there any alignment on the pricing objectives: the goal that pricing should help you achieve.

Here are some fictional examples that you might recognize from real life:

• The CEO, who wants low prices to win more customers

• Your head of product, who wants to charge more to reflect the product quality

• A CMO who wants to use pricing to position for the mid-market

• The CFO whose team put much effort into calculating COGs and wants to ensure a healthy profit margin

As a product marketer or person in charge of coordinating pricing, you might be tempted to lock stakeholders in a room and wait with baited breath for them to walk out, smiles and handshakes all around as they celebrate their new-found alignment.

Except… that doesn’t happen! You may appear to have a grasp of loose objectives, only to discover everyone else still has a different understanding. You can still be dealing with fallout from decisions that didn’t have full buy-in months after implementing.

So what should you do to keep your pricing process on track, and gain the confidence you need to move forward?

Gain clarity and alignment

At Kayako – for our failed product launch – we were introduced to the concept of pricing objectives by Chris Hopf, a pricing consultant, and iterated to find a regular, repeatable process of setting and revisiting pricing objectives that works for us.

We find this process helpful to:

• get everyone on the same page

• set direction

• make decisions

• define success

• (occasionally) defend our approach against new, off-piste initiatives

Before any discussion, the leadership team receive individual spreadsheets, where each row is a pricing objective — you can find the list we use at the bottom of this article.

Each person is given 100 points and must divide this amongst the objectives they think are most important: the bigger the share, the higher priority. There’s just one other rule — no single objective can be allocated less than 20 points. With this approach, you’re forced to consider which objectives are truly the most important and make tradeoffs.

When evaluating the objectives, your leadership team need to consider how they will affect:

• strategic company objectives

• tactical objectives

• your customer’s perception of your brand and product

• your organization’s resources

When all the responses are in, we bring them together in one spreadsheet. If necessary to rid the sheet of “noise”, discard all 20-point awards: if the objective was given the minimum score, then it’s a minimum priority.

We share the results with the leadership team in a structured discussion. The goal? Leave the room with confidence on what pricing should achieve for your business.

Your agenda might look like something this:

• What is the top objective, and does that align with business goals?

• Are there any outliers or anomalies?

• Which objectives are most surprising?

• Can we agree that the two priorities with the highest scores are the most important moving forward?

• What impact will focusing on these two priorities have on the wider business?

Often, within 90 minutes we’ve got the alignment and direction necessary to continue along the pricing process with confidence and clarity at all levels.

Example pricing objectives

This is an incomplete list of pricing objectives you could use for your business. These are from a variety of sources, so make sure they are relevant before using them in your process.

• Target return on investment

• Target market share

• Increase or accelerate market share (e.g. number of customers)

• Maximize long-run profit (over a year or longer)

• Maximize short-run profit (over the next quarter)

• Grow sales revenue

• Maximize customer lifetime value (encourage upgrades and expansion)

• Maximize customer retention and reduce churn

• Reduce new business pricing objections or reduce sales cycle length

• Simplify for internal/operational reasons

• Stabilize the market / compete on non-price considerations

• Convey a particular image

• Desensitize customers to price

• Be the price leader

• Discourage entry by new competitors

• Match competitor pricing

• Avoid regulation

• Maintain distribution channel support and loyalty (e.g. partners)

• Be regarded as “fair” by customers

• Create interest and excitement

• Use price of one product to upsell other products

• Discourage others from lowering prices

• Quickly recover investment specifically in product development

• Generate volume in order to drive down costs

• Prepare for sale of the business (harvesting)

• Business survival

• Encourage the exit of marginal firms from the industry

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