Building Go-To-Market Capabilities
New Product Introduction
Overview
The client is a computer software company based in California, with a development center in Colorado. The company’s products are used for data science and analytics and their software is designed to make advanced analytics accessible to any data worker.
Challenge
When ViTL was engaged, the client was gearing up to launch a new product. Most of the development of the product had been complete, but the majority of the cross-functional efforts required to launch the product had not yet been initiated. ViTL was brought in to establish a GTM team that would successfully execute the launch of this new product. From the outset, the ViTL team was faced with the challenge of an organizational misalignment of vision, goals, and timeline across different functional teams as well as between the executive leadership and product delivery teams. There was a lack of clarity about what needed to be done from a programmatic perspective and the right stakeholders across the organization had not yet been involved.
Strategy
ViTL approached this misalignment from an organizational readiness perspective.
Execution
ViTL immediately established a governance team – a GTM core team with cross-functional representation – and a steering team consisting of key executive leaders to bridge the gap in the current state of understanding around the targeted launch date and GTM scope. Based on these initial discussions, we adjusted expectations regarding the launch plan (most specifically to understanding the client’s target audiences and timing).
To gain insight and buy-in, we held more than 20 stakeholder awareness interviews to establish a baseline understanding of the plan.
We then formed multiple workstreams to deliver on different GTM aspects, including enablement (customer, sales, and technical), marketing and product naming, pricing/SKU/rev rec development, legal and compliance (EULA and GDPR), distribution channels (partner outreach and engagement), and alpha/beta programs.
ViTL helped facilitate the documentation of the GTM strategy, including defining the strategic launch objectives, product overview, product requirements, market opportunities and problem solution messaging, market and competitive intelligence, market insights and trends, target market and customer segmentation, user and buyer personas, product naming, and pricing/packaging.
Each of the workstreams was supported by execution plans and ViTL oversaw the program management across all the different workstreams, GTM core, and steering teams.
Outcome
Within 10 months, the team successfully launched its first product in over a decade. This led the organization to realize that they needed to establish a new product introduction process and GTM operations framework, for which ViTL is currently leading the build-out.