The Truth About Product Launches with Julien Savauge, CMO at Cordial | Ep. 357

0:00Hey besties, welcome back to another episode of the Marketing Millennials. I'm Tamara Griminski, stepping in as your guest host while Daniel's out on paternity leave. I'm a longtime product marketing leader and the founder of PMM Camp, a newslettering community for product marketing leaders. While Daniel's off doing dad things, I'll be here bringing you convos with some of the smartest marketers I know. I'm joined today by Julien Savauge, a product marketer turned CMO with a track record of shaping go-to-market at some of tech's most respected companies. He's held senior roles at Salesforce, Gong, and Clary, and he now serves as a chief marketing officer at Cordial.

0:36Julian brings a rare blend of strategic thinking and in the trenches launch experience. That's why we talk about why most launches fail, how to pressure test your narrative before launch day, and why every great launch should feel at least a little risky. We also get into what healthy cross-functional collaboration looks like across marketing, how to build momentum before and after launch, and the real difference between a launch and a go-to-market. Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the No BS Marketing Podcast. I'm Daniel Murray, and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies.

1:20The one request I tell our guests, stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the f*** up. Julian, welcome to the show. Thank you, Tamara. And hi, everybody. So excited to have you here. Before we get into the topic at hand, which is why product launches fail, I want to align on some key definitions because I think the term launch in general is very ambiguous. So when you say product launch, what do you mean by that? It's a great question. I love to kind of level set. Everybody has a different definition. I bet you if we were to talk to 10 different people, we would get 10 different answers.

2:03To me, a launch is not a release. It's not a date on the calendar or like a what's new page on the website. A launch is a coordinated campaign. It's often owned by PMM, but it really brings in everybody in good market. And that campaign aims at changing the perception in the market, generating demand and creating momentum really across the funnel. So it's bigger than a PMM owned product launch in a way. I try to make it bigger anyway. I like your nuance around changing perception, because I think it also underlines something that like something large enough has happened that there is a change in perception or we want there to be a change in perception.

2:48it's almost a good qualifier actually yeah i mean at the end of the day everybody's like so inside out and like we're obsessed with our little company and products and whatnot but like the rest of the world kind of doesn't care and so it has to be less about you and it's more about the others and what has changed in the market and what what can you do to kind of like help your buyers and that way you get to them changing their perception on the market and on you but as we you know, never lead with like the inside out POV that that's recipe for failure. Yeah, we actually I had Emma Stratton on the show and we talked about that exact thing of why outside in just resonates in general.

3:30One other question before we get into the meat of today is if that is how you define product launch, what do you think is the difference between a launch and a go to market? Because I also hear people use them interchangeably. Like, do you think they're the same? Do they overlap? If so, where? Yeah. First thing I'll say is like good market is used by everybody for all the things right now, a little bit like revenue. So it's good, but it's annoying at the same time, I guess. I think product launch or launch and good market are like siblings in a way. A good market plan, in my mind, is like a little broader.

4:09It's a broader commercial strategy, which includes things that can be addressed via a product launch, but not necessarily. Things like packaging, pricing, ICP, segmentation, partner go to market, right? So it's just a little bigger in a way, a little broader. And then a launch is, as the name says, it still is a specific moment. Now, as everybody knows, and maybe as we will discuss, There's a lead up to that event and there's the post event, but it still is an event based approach and motion. Right. So to me, a launch is a specific moment in that go to market strategy that, as we said, kind of creates urgency and attention for the buyer.

4:56Yeah, I buy into that. And I think I would agree that I view those two as similar. a launch, particularly a product launch, which is often what I'm thinking about. There's like, there is probably a new capability that is now available that I want to bring to market. It's going to change perception and it's going to happen at a moment in time. Often connected to, but not exactly tied to the release date. Very important. And I think we'll get to that later as well. A go to market, also important, but it is more about introducing maybe something new, but not always necessarily connected to the product functionality itself.

5:29Exactly. Yeah, maybe an example of that would be like back then at Salesforce. I'll try to weave in as many real-life examples as possible. Please do. The one last thing that differentiates us humans with AI, by the way, the real-life examples. So I'll try to weave that in. I remember like back in the days I was at Salesforce 2015 to 2020 and on the Einstein team, the AI, before Gen AI team, and we had a product called Einstein Builder, which was like a way for Salesforce admins to build predictions and add like a custom field on a custom object, blah, blah, blah, blah. And like we had the whole go-to-market plan ready to go.

6:08And it was a multi-quarter plan. But then the launch moment was very specifically done at Dreamforce, which is where you have all that captive audience and they're craving for the news and the innovation. And that kind of like give it name recognition and it kind of helped the market really understand and like get what Einstein Builder would be ahead, would be about even ahead of GA-ing it. So I know Salesforce has a bad rap of like they launch products too early. I do think that they do that sometimes. But if you launch early on, even before GA, it just helps kind of plant the seed and educate the market and create that demand by the time the product actually gets ready.

6:49No, I love that. And I think we've mentioned this a few times, so it's worth just maybe calling out that like, I think both of us believe that there is a before and after to a launch. So why don't we just get into that and think about like, how do you view building momentum before launch and after launch? And is there a right timeline? Like I often hear three months being thrown out, but like that feels arbitrary as well. Like, how do you think about that? And maybe back to the example piece, like do you have examples of where you've finessed this time or done a good job before and after? Yeah.

7:25Yeah. I don't think it's three months. I think it really is one of these annoying it depends answer to the question. Right. Like it really depends on your product readiness, your market readiness, what else is happening outside in the world and in your ICP's world. So I don't think we can hard code three months as the ideal duration before or after. So yeah, I think I love launching early as we just discussed. I think you seed the market. You can create the expectation. You build the demand. You can do that in even non-productive ways. I love when my PMMs work with the content team and drive thought leadership POVs and pieces of content and collaterals to kind of start educating the market before we even talk about products.

8:19Of course, as you start getting some traction and some demand, that's where you can do beta programs and limited access to your product or your feature. You can start doing early demos and whatnot. So I love the pre-launch phase. I think it's kind of like a Hollywood movie, right? You create that anticipation, that Brent Crump approach, and then bam, the day off is just pure bliss because it's all the work that you've done, all the anticipation that you've helped build in the market, and then it's just like, oh, that thing we've been talking about is now available for everybody. So I love the pre-launch stuff even more than the day of the launch itself.

8:59And then, of course, one of the classic mistakes, I would say, for everybody is like tech marketers have the shiny object syndrome, like to just go after the next big thing. And then people like half the marketers I've worked with would think that the day of the launch is the last day when it kind of is the first day. And And so that's where you start seeing some customer traction. You turn that into customer proof points, peer validations, stories, use cases, like the whole thing. It becomes an always on campaign after the fact. I love that you mentioned that because I agree. Obviously, I think launch is day zero, really.

9:44What I always tell my teams is what we're looking to do in like the week to month post launch is we're looking to learn. And we're looking to learn as fast as possible. So who is adopting? Who is coming to the website and converting better? And what I'm trying to do with my teams is identify these ideal customer segments. Because we have hypotheses. Hopefully, they're somewhat validated before launch through things like alpha and beta. But we never really know what happens until something's out in the wild. You don't really can you try. And at scale. Exactly. So then what I'm doing is not just always on, but I'm going back and I'm almost relaunching to specific segments with now more tailored messaging, maybe to a specific channel that I know they're more likely to show up on.

10:28And yes, incorporating those things that you mentioned, like the proof points. But it's almost like you're driving kind of like one eye open until launch day. And then on launch day, you're like two eyes wide open. Now I can make really good informed decisions. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like ideally, well, that seminal piece of content or POV or whatever would still have to come out the day of the launch because that's like the peak of the mountain. But then you kind of like, as you said, Tamara, you start kind of like waterfalling that into like, you know, like small bite pieces of content broken down by, as you said, persona, use case, segment, geo, channels, and what have you.

11:07So the day of the launch is like the accumulation of all the work, but hopefully you get to reuse and repurpose a lot of that content into like more specific pieces of content that would follow. So completely agree. And I think so we've mentioned that that is kind of one area where launches fall short. What are a few other reasons you've seen? You've worked at some pretty incredible companies. So maybe you've seen mostly good launches. But what are some of the reasons where you feel like launches do fall short that we can kind of avoid? Yeah, I mean, there's so many reasons why launches go go wrong in a way.

11:43I think there's a you would this you would know this better than I do. but like the old McKinsey stat is half the launches fail, right? I think it's in that order. Like it's a massive number, which is kind of wild. I think there's so many reasons. I think one of them is not controlling the timeline or the timing as well. I'll explain what I mean. What I mean is I have examples in the past. I think it was at Gong, where we, a little bit back to like the inside out, outside in thing, like we knew we wanted to launch that thing that month because that was really good for our own go to market calendar and whatnot.

12:25But we ended up competing with a lot of like other communications and trends in the market and things like that. And then the launch kind of flopped in a way. And so it's really important to kind of know what else is going on within your ICP, even in the world. And ideally, you can kind of, you know, trend jack, as people say, like a bigger topic happening where, you know, reporters and media and your audience are spending time on. So that's I think that's one big mistake I've seen. It's see the launch and the timing of the launch as, again, something that serves more internal purposes rather than external ones in that kind of trend-jacking strategy and mindset.

13:09Maybe another one I can throw is enablement. It feels like because launches are owned oftentimes by marketers and PMMs, if you're at a big enough company, typically enablement would be somehow a separate function from PMM. and then PMM does their thing and they're like, oh yeah, everything's ready. And oh shoot, we forgot to enable everybody on it. And it's like three days before launch, you scramble, get a quick FAQ together, enable the reps on it, and then you launch and everybody's pissed because they feel like they were not ready. There is demand that they can't really quite convert because they haven't been trained on it.

13:51So I think enablement is always kind of an afterthought when it comes to your launch timeline and process. I think you're right. Enablement is usually the last thing on the list, first of all, when we're thinking about a launch checklist, but often an afterthought. And I think it is so important to get not just enabled, but buy-in. So I had an experience with a bad launch that I was involved in. That's totally my fault because other teams across the company did not get as bought into the vision as the product and product marketing team were. And honestly, I kind of said, well, it doesn't matter.

14:25I know that sounds rude. And I didn't say that to their face. But in my mind, I was like, I don't need everyone to be on board. Let's do this. I had enabled sales. I had tried to enable CS, the support team. But there was just a lot of hesitancy. And then what happened was we launched. And the teams were not wanting to support it, not wanting to sell it. When the support tickets were coming in, there wasn't confidence. And so it would have been better for me to just push back launch by a few weeks to have a come to Jesus moment of like, let's understand what would need to be true for everyone to be bought in on this.

15:00Maybe to have the product team walk through some of the research and the actual experience. But that was a big lesson learning for me. Yeah, no, for sure. I've had bad examples that are like horror stories as well. I do think that that's a healthy tension type of thing as well, because there's also a case in which you wait for a complete buy-in and complete alignment across everybody. And then the launch moment is just gone, like, and you've lost that time and that momentum. So it's a really hard balance to strike, like getting enough internal buy-in alignment, but also continuing to, like, push the pace externally with external facing stuff.

15:39Right. That's a that's a that's a hard one to strike, I think. Yeah, it's true. Hindsight's 20-20. It's so hard. We're harder on ourselves often, right? We've talked about launch failures a few times here, but I want to even dig into that word failure because to you, what does that even mean within the context of a launch? What are the outcomes we should be measuring which would indicate whether something is good or bad? Yeah, it's I think there's failure to me. Well, first off, there's never. I mean, there's always failure or mistakes, but there's always a learning and an opportunity to get better next time.

16:19So I try to stay positive and like infuse that positivity with my team all the time. And I think we have to embrace failure. and I forgot who said that if you, mistakes are a sign that you're trying. No mistakes means you haven't tried hard enough type thing. So that's just the high level. But I think if we were to describe or give example or definition of like a failure, it's going to be a little basic, but it's like you didn't hit your KPIs, your targets. And those targets, as we know, can really vary from one launch to another from one product to another, from one company to another. It could be pipeline.

17:01It could be awareness. It could be product adoption. But at the end of the day, even if everybody's super happy about your launch, but your product adoption target was 10 ,000 MAUs, monthly active users, and you're at 5 ,000, you failed. So it's a little hard, but at the end of the day, like not. I still believe in hard KPIs for everything we do in marketing and in PMM as well. And so to me, Felder is not hitting the target that we defined for ourselves. I want to double click on that because I think you mentioned something important, but we almost breeze past it, which is that every launch needs a unique KPI.

17:44Because one of the things, the misconceptions I see a lot from even experienced marketers, but definitely from CEOs and executives is, well, every launch needs to drive acquisition. It needs to drive retention. It needs to drive winbacks, upsells. And that's not true. It's like, yes, we want every product to be good for the business. But I think one of the most important things to get right before even bringing anything to market is understanding what is the main goal? Is this meant to drive more market share for us? Is this meant to help us convert higher deals? Is this meant for just a retention play?

18:19Because I'm going to build my launch campaign completely different if I'm aiming for retention versus top of funnel acquisition. I've even done campaign or launch campaigns where literally the point of the launch was to get press and word of mouth. And that was actually more important to that launch than even product adoption. That's rare, but I have seen it. And so it's important to actually have that moment and that understanding before the launch. 100%. Yeah, I love it. I salute and I respect the person you worked with who said, this launch is only about share of voice or awareness metrics.

18:54Yes, that is the way I think. I've always said the curse and the blessing of PMM is we are torn apart and own multiple things, but don't own one single thing. And as such, because we want to be successful and we want to show influence and impact across the org and across departments, the tendency I've seen from PMM is to have that big list of KPIs that they will own for the launch. And as you said, it's just not realistic. You can't do 10 things right. You can do maybe two things right. So pick your battles would be my basic advice. is know what's the one KPI you're optimizing for with your launch.

19:38As you said, it could be awareness, AR, pipeline, product adoption, retention, what have you. And that's the kind of driving or the guiding principle that you will keep in mind for the whole time of the launch. A good example of that, again, trying to find examples would be, I remember back then at Gong, we knew that we'd track launch success by looking at rep usage of the deck, of the new messaging in the deck, because we were struggling with a certain type of messaging, more like use case type level messaging. And so we actually used Gong to track adoption of the Gong messaging. It's a little meta.

20:20And then we could see a lift in not just adoption, but also meeting conversion and then more downstream metrics, right? So that was cool. But the end goal of that one launch was less revenue. And it was really just more like rep adoption of new messaging because we knew that that would unlock a lot of downstream revenue metrics. I love that. That's a great example. I also think what comes to mind for me is this idea that like, it doesn't always have to be about the product metrics. Like when we're launching products, we tend to skew that way, especially since typically a product marketer will lead the launch.

20:54But there's so many other players in a launch that are equally as important, if not more important sometimes to the launch, like all of those other marketing teams, like the sales team. And we do need to think more holistically about what is the actual KPI that reflects all of our work, not just the product component of it. Yeah. Yeah. I completely agree. And I also sometimes say that there's one kind of like intangible launch metric that people tend to forget sometimes. It might not be your primary target. It could be like a secondary target. It's kind of like employee morale. It's a little city when you think about it.

21:32But like, man, a well-orchestrated, multifunctional, multidepartmental launch is just like an amazing morale booster for the entire company. And then everybody feels like they're, you know, contributing and they're going to, of course, promote on LinkedIn. And even if you're in HR and you're in like non-customer facing functions, like you feel like you've contributed to the launch and it's just becomes like a company moment. And I think that like almost measuring employee engagement before and after a big launch moment is also another way to kind of like track success at a more intangible and more human level.

22:06I think that's a great one. So as we mentioned, like you've been a senior leader at a ton of different marketing teams. How has your thinking around launches evolved over time? Like what would you today do differently than maybe you would have done five years ago? Yeah, I love that question. I think a lot of things have changed, to be honest. I come from PMM, right, which is why you and I have known each other for a few years, I guess, now. and then I've evolved and owned the function. So for sure, the fact that I don't own only PMM today has really morphed my POV on what a good launch should be.

22:47I think I used to think that, I'm going to try to be a little dramatic here, maybe. I used to think, because PMMs were taught that benefits comes before features. And it's like future benefit, future benefit. Like that's the left and right brain thing that every good PMM would have. So I used to think that story came after feature. And now I believe story is the feature. Like I almost don't even care about the feature anymore. It's a little sad, but like you got to shape your launch before the roadmap is even locked. Like remove that heavy dependency you might have on product because a launch is a story.

23:31And if you have supporting product proof points and whatnot, it's even better. But even if you don't, you can still tell that story as long as it comes from a competing POV and it's timed well, as we said, with that kind of trend jack-in mindset. So I think that's the thing that maybe as I've moved away further, little by little, from more of a product mindset, now I almost don't care about product roadmap as much. and I'm more like owning my destiny and I kind of launch POVs and things when I think they should be launched. I love that so much. And I actually think it's a really interesting perspective for marketers to think about because so many marketers in all kinds of different roles will come to me and say, how can I have more influence over the product roadmap?

24:23How can I have a better relationship with the product team? And my advice is understand the market and understand the story that needs to be told to win that market. And when you're able to do that, and you're going to need to do that across a longer time horizon. So not just the next quarter, but like, what story do you need to tell 12 months from now? What story do you need to tell 24 months from now to be like the undeniable winner, to be so attractive to everyone? Now, reverse engineer that to say, great, what are the little marketable moments along the way to get there? And I bet you, A, there's probably already features and things that you have today that you could repackage and relaunch to tell some of those stories.

25:09And then B, now you have compelling market evidence to bring to the product team to say, hey, how can we work together to tell this story? um so i i think not enough people do that but i've seen it be done and it is the most effective way product teams want us to bring that they do yeah for sure but i think they don't know like many people they don't understand right really the pmm function in general right and they're everybody is like within their little lane and we can't blame anybody ever anyway so but like if you come to them with less like hey when's that feature going to be ready but it's more like yo i analyzed my gong calls and I read a bunch of reports and whatnot, and I used LLMs and deep research to find out that these three topics are very top of mind for our buyers, I can see a few things that are in the product today.

26:00What else can you do in the roadmap to serve those use cases? And that's just a better way to kind of like make yourself as a PMM available as a partner to your product people and less so like, you know, what's the ETA for my feature? Totally, totally. So we're talking about story here. Story makes me think about messaging as well. And so I want to make sure we have time to talk about this today, which is, I guess, what's your perspective on how to pressure test your messaging or even the story itself before launch day? Yeah, it's paramount. I think it's the thing that it's a part that sometimes people rush through, to be honest, or don't do so well.

26:45I remember pre-Gen AI days. I get it. It would take you, you know, 40K and eight weeks to go find some good market research data, work with like GLG or whomever and like find those things. and then you would do focus group testing and you would show them option A and B, whatever. I get it, but now in that age of AI, there's no excuse. You just have to go fast. Even if you're not a big company, you can be really scrappy about this. You can literally go to, even if you don't have a gong or a clary, you can go to your Zoom recorded calls, download that as CSV, run that through an LLM, see what the major themes are, and then you come up with your option A, option B of messaging.