Michael FertmanFor business software, data and fintech companies
Product Marketing and GTM Launch Leader
Your product team launches the new product on time. I make sure your sales team is ready to sell it.
I work with venture-backed and private equity-backed companies with $50M to $500M in revenue and a new or second product launching in the next six months.
I'm a former chief marketing officer who has also led teams in product management, pricing, product marketing and sales enablement.
At Dun & Bradstreet, I more than doubled the growth rate of four product lines.
One was a $500M subscription business whose annual growth went from $14M to $30M.
Where I have worked
- Dun & Bradstreet
- Guidepoint
- Apex Fintech Solutions
- Apifiny
- Booz & Company
Why do new products launch on time and then not sell?
Product managers
They often run the go-to-market launch while they are still delivering the product.
Product marketers
They rarely get time to test the deck with customers before it goes to sales.
Sellers
They know they will be the first to test that deck on real buyers, so the smart ones wait for someone else to go first.
Nobody
Product, marketing and sales each own a piece of the new product's number.
Everybody owns it, so nobody owns it.
“I can go out and sell one of these [new products] or I can sell two [of our core products] and meet my number.”
I interviewed launch leaders at 15 B2B software companies with $600M to $20B in revenue. More than half named sales compensation as a launch risk.
What is ready on launch day
The go-to-market launch decides who buys the new product, at what price, from which seller, and why now.
I run one launch with your product, marketing, sales and customer success teams, from the approved business case through the first quarter of sales. The work starts about four months before your first customers. I make sure each part gets done and do some of the work myself.
With your first customers
Positioning, packaging and pricing
Your teams agree on who the new product is for, how it is packaged and what it costs.
- The customers to sell to first
- The reason they buy now
- Packages and prices sellers can quote
Before launch day
A sales team equipped to win
Sellers have what they need before the first call.
- A pitch and value propositions for each segment
- Case studies and customer stories
- Training a month ahead, with the accounts to call first
- A pay plan that makes the new product worth selling
After the first quarter of sales
A launch process your teams keep
Your teams run this launch from one plan, then use the same process for every launch after it.
- One owner and one number for the launch
- The key decisions made in order
- Support, onboarding and billing ready on launch day
Is a portfolio company's new product behind its sales plan?
My Dun & Bradstreet results came from products already in market. Tell me the sales plan and where sales are today.
Talk about a portfolio companyFilling a full-time role?
Some companies need one executive who owns whether new products make money, from the price to the way sellers are trained to sell them. At Guidepoint, revenue grew from $30M to $50M in a flat market while I was chief marketing officer.
Read my backgroundWhere I have done this
Positioning and pricing
Dun & Bradstreet, then an S&P 500 company
I repositioned a risk decisioning product as premium and priced it by industry, which tripled the transaction price. The first sellers to close presented their deals to the rest of the team, and the product's revenue grew 44% that year.
Sales enablement
Guidepoint
I built the sales materials for four products across five customer segments: value propositions, case studies and testimonials.
Launch process
A $750M fintech
I redesigned how new products go to market, working directly with the senior executive team, and I am now working with its teams to put the new process into practice.
Brand and pipeline
Apifiny
I built marketing from scratch for an institutional crypto trading platform and generated $2B in monthly trading pipeline within one year. Coverage included Reuters, CNBC and Yahoo Finance.
Inbound demand
A venture-backed business software company
With no marketing team in place, I took inbound leads from 5 a month to 5 a week, and marketing's share of new pipeline from near zero to 25%.
Bring your launch date and the number it has to hit
In 30 minutes, we'll go through your launch plan, and I'll tell you where I would start.