The similarities of playing goalie and commercializing a product

Caveat: There is no one size fits all go-to-market (GTM) plan, so I’ll do my best to provide a framework that can be used as a foundation for companies in growth stage from Series A-D.

Goal: review major go-to-market and commercialization principles while providing a platform to hear from others who have been responsible for commercializing products or solutions.

In my formative years, I played soccer and often begrudgingly played goalie even though all I wanted to do was play offense and score goals. I thought playing goalie was thankless and stressful. However, in due time I learned that it was one of the most influential positions on the field.

For those of you who have played competitive sports, you would probably understand that all team sports require strategy, tactics and execution.

Hope Solo, the famous U.S. female goalie once said “I couldn’t have been a great goalkeeper without power, agility and quickness.”

That quote holds true whether you’re coming up for a game plan on the soccer field or when you’re trying to create a go-to-market and commercialization strategy for a product.

Why am I talking about soccer? Well, playing goalie is eerily similar to the way Product Marketing and Commercialization functions within a growth stage company.

The goalie sees where the ball is on the field at all times, how plays are fought and won, and must step up and defend the goal from attack whenever a competitor gets too close. The game smacks of many similarities that companies can relate to in bringing a product to market.

The goalie is often a leader, and should create and communicate a strategy for the team in order to move that soccer ball down the field and score a goal. While the team is a collective unit, the goalie’s visibility on the field at all times makes them one of the most valuable providers of insight for the team. A goalie’s reach is so powerful in that it can ensure that everyone on the team is equipped with the knowledge of team dynamics, foster alignment across different functions, share insights on competition and provide real time feedback around risks, opportunities or how new players change the existing strategy.

When a goal is scored.

A team is only mature when it can recognize that it is not the goalies fault when a goal is scored. An attack on goal is a breakdown in team communication among the offense, midfield and defense who may be prone to certain individual bias. What results is a lack of coordination and understanding of the greater mission and strategy. Sometimes, teams have a great offensive strategy and not a great defensive one. An attack on goal just means that the team needs to regroup and realign themselves with a common objective and mission.

Now let’s get talk about what goes into a Go-To-Market plan.

While Commercialization and Go-To-Market are different concepts for a company based on size, industry and product, the core themes are fairly consistent namely: discovery, validation, prioritization, qualification, development, execution and ongoing support and feedback.

Having created go-to-market plans and operationalized hundreds of software products as a Commercialization Manager and Product Marketer at a couple of early stage companies in the technology industry, the same few questions kept resurfacing: “What is commercialization?” or “What does it take to commercialize a product?” or “I can’t seem to get customers to use or purchase my product and can’t understand why”, and “How do I enter new markets?” and the list continues.

Go-to-market refers to the entire framework and launch plan for the product which includes identifying target customers, running beta programs, creating the value proposition, creating internal and external announcements and collateral. Commercialization is the art of operationalizing the product and creating a support process around the definitions of go-to-market which includes customer enablement, training, and support.

Admittedly, I cannot answer questions on GTM or commercialization without understanding the greater goals of a company and researching their industry and market. I can, however, walk you through a go-to-market and commercialization journey and share what I’ve personally seen over the last few years at a high level. Go-to-market and commercialization are the most exciting and fascinating disciplines in growing a business. It’s the stuff that keeps me up at night.

So let’s begin.

Operationalizing a product and bringing it to market requires a number of critical steps to take place and an end to end process is one of the those critical steps. Many companies decide to operationalize a product either right before or when their product is considered “GA” or Generally Available. However, the best commercialization plans start well before that — with the qualification and validation of a product at the earliest stage, and sometimes that means, before a final and agreed upon PRD is even written.

Before you start. Identify a revenue or growth owner.

During the discovery and research phase, a few individuals may state that customers will buy only if specific product features are created. Oftentimes, these same product features fall short in the market when launched. Since this is the case, companies should identify a person or team to be accountable for the projected revenue and growth of a new product or feature. That person should track revenue drivers like price times volume along with specific growth and margin drivers as well. Oftentimes, Product Managers are focused on the build of their product rather than how that product fits in alongside other products and the greater business goals. Therefore, it’s important that someone in the company be held accountable for revenue and growth, so that clearly defined and agreed to metrics are transparent and teams can easily iterate on what is not working.

In my past life, I worked for public companies, which is why I like to stay laser focused on revenue. Although user growth is the metric many early stage companies track while revenue takes a back seat (This is rapidly changing now with SaaS companies) , I’m more excited about profitability as companies can make better decisions when they do not have to rely on the whims of a cyclical investor market.

The early days: Discovery and prioritization.

In the first stage, teams enter what is known as a discovery or research phase, where product and all cross-functional teams in an organization ideate on products with a rough idea of associated features sets. Afterwards, the ideas are prioritized based on the following characteristics: time to market, customer impact, implementation, resources, customer or business pain point, value proposition, and alignment with company goals and mission.

Once the products and feature sets are prioritized, we begin the phase of qualification and validation of the prioritized list of products.

The qualification phase. “Does this product or feature set make sense?”

Qualification can be as light or as heavy as a company desires. In this phase, the business or consumer must be an active participant in conjunction with the internal teams. Both the business and product teams should test ideas out together with a focus group, and run qualitative and quantitative research studies with a sample set. Listen to the data that you have and dig deeper if you can’t correlate it back to your future goals and vision.

Sync with as diverse an audience as possible in beta, as your initial insights may not make sense until they are tried and tested.

Understanding the emotional insights of customers and what drives them to purchase your product will allow you to create a strategy and story when creating a viable strategic commercialization and GTM plan.

Validation.

After qualifying and validating ideas based on external and internal feedback, the most important next step is to categorize that feedback into central themes (usability, functionality, speed, value, market impact, scale of consumer/business pain points to name a few), and understand the importance of each theme in relation to the end user. This is where many companies fall short. They receive feedback from the customer and then do very little with that feedback and how it translates into the product roadmap. All feedback should be captured using a system that is the single source of truth and addressed in some manner back to the customer.

Internal teams and key stakeholders should qualify feedback in order to weight each feature in a PRD and align that feedback with the agreed upon revenue and growth metrics. In a number of cases, I’ve seen small to medium product features removed and a PRD de-scoped unceremoniously with one person or one team deciding the fate of the product. This is an incredibly dangerous practice, as sometimes one or even two small features could impact the entire value proposition of the product itself.

Communication during this stage is usually critical to the survival of the product. Without proper communication channels, a lot of misinterpretation can happen.

Here’s an example of what happens with miscommunication.

I cannot stress communication enough. One person, like a Product Marketer, or Revenue owner should be in charge of generating market interest and internal excitement around the product launch. In parallel, the Product Marketer should manage this entire end-to-end process and point out risks, opportunities, market feedback, competitive insights, industry insights and any potential roadblocks along the way. If any partners are involved, the business and product team should be aligned throughout the process. There is no “static” go-to-market plan, as external factors are constantly in flux and we have to think through the implications of new information.

If you have a good Product Marketer and similar if you have a good Goalie, you can avoid many pitfalls, but eventually, you will have to face some sort of defeat.

Development of the go-to-market plan.

The go-to-market plan answers the how, the what, the why, when and the who. In summary, it’s massively important that Product Marketing work cross-functionally and communicate the strategy and plan across all functions.

Executing a GTM strategy and creating assets takes time and requires buy in with key company stakeholders and leadership. A delay or bottleneck in decision making when executing against the plan can defeat any good GTM, so be aware of individual or team bottlenecks.

While there is far more that goes into launching a proper go-to-market and commercialization plan, I’ve put together a list of what should be completed and agreed upon before a launch:

• Qualitative and quantitative feedback in alpha, beta and early access programs to understand how customer pain points are addressed
• An understanding of the positioning, messaging, and the value proposition for the product. This should (if done well) align with company goals, and mission.
• Internal teams from Account Management, Customer Support, Brand Marketing, Sales, Finance, Business Development, Engineering, and Product should all be trained on the how, the what, and the why so that everyone understands the POV from a customer. Create a support process so that each team understand their roles and responsibilities and how their role align with the product value proposition. Training is not just for customers. Internal teams should all be aligned on what the company is offering and the process around that offering.
• An understanding of what success looks like and what metrics and drivers are important beyond just Revenue. A KPI dashboard is usually the best tool for this but if you can create your own internal reporting tool, that works best as you can manipulate categories of data in real time as you see fit.
• Identify the core market through focus groups and user feedback. Identify the sales channels that make the most sense to target. Creating the necessary deliverables like case studies, online campaigns, SEO campaign, sales collateral and material for sales team.
• External Training. Video tutorials or demos. If a customer has to use your FAQs or rely heavily on support, then you have not built the product well enough for use. It’s costly and inefficient to rely on this methodology.
• An update to the website on the new offering and where to find additional resources
• A thought-leadership strategy (for leadership teams with a vision for the future in an industry)
• A PR / Communication strategy for the product (as part of a larger initiative) that includes conferences and speaking engagements
• An analyst & investor program. The best time to raise money is when you don’t need to. Speaking directly with investors and educating them on the company within the greater context of the industry on a regular cadence is good practice.
• Any partnership communication that might take place and alignment on messaging.
• Customer Success teams should be able to measure qualitative and quantitative feedback in order to add new features to the product or understand major pain points. These teams should ensure that support tickets are categorized under major themes and are digestible for product and engineering teams.

Ongoing

Communication and cross-functional alignment is important. Whether that is done in a weekly meeting or a dashboard communication does not necessarily matter but making sure that all teams understand the what, the how, the who and the why is central to commercializing a product and bringing it to market.

If you create a process that works, it will be transparent and you will score those highly coveted goals and more importantly, you won’t leave your goalie feeling vulnerable and open.

Once you’ve walked through all of these steps, and your metrics are tracking green, you can sit back in your chair and relax. But not for too long because then of course, there are always additional features and partnerships to explore and new products and features to operationalize.

There is always another game that awaits, and success goes to the prepared.

Stay in touch!

We have only just scratched the surface in commercializing a product, so I plan on writing more in depth articles on what I’ve learned, best practices and the signs of a broken process.

And to reiterate, I would love to hear from anyone that has commercialized products and how they navigated through this process or created a new one.

My book “Product Marketing Debunked. The Essential Go-To-Market Guide” is available on Amazon!