This article is based on Natasha's presentation at the Product Marketing Summit in Chicago, 2022.
Hello! My name is Natasha Janic, and I lead product marketing for our Loyalty Management product at Salesforce. I've spent pretty much my whole career working in tech. I came to Salesforce about three years ago specifically to launch our new loyalty product.
It was an interesting journey, and while I don't feel qualified to talk about many things in this world, this is definitely something I do feel qualified to talk about, and I'm excited to share it with you.
I’ll break our topic up into three big chunks. We’ll look at:
- How to resource and start planning for a launch
- Tips and tricks that we learned from our go-to-market strategy
- How to run effective enablement and drive evangelism
Let’s dive in.
Resourcing and planning for product launches
I want to start with a little story about our loyalty product launch. I was told that this was going to be a tier-one launch – the biggest launch you can possibly have – so I was super excited but very confused as to why they were letting me as a PMM be the one leading this. Still, I appreciated the confidence that leadership had in me.
The launch was going to be a big splash at Dreamforce, our flagship conference. If you’ve ever been to Dreamforce, you can imagine the scene: there’s Marc Benioff on the mainstage talking about this new product, plus a keynote, and all of that fun stuff.
The entire launch cycle typically culminates at Dreamforce, so I was picturing myself finishing my keynote and walking into a big party to celebrate all of the hard work we’d put into this launch over the past year.
This was all planned for September 2020. It became pretty obvious by April that it wasn’t going to happen that way.
