Assess what worked well and what did not in 2020, to help you frame your 2021 product marketing plan

With 2020 behind us, this is a good time to assess how well your 2020 product marketing plan worked and where the gaps were – for messaging/positioning, pricing, sales/partner enablement, and content. It will help you identify where are the biggest opportunities for improvement in 2021. For example:

• Can you significantly reduce the sales onboarding timeline with better content such as improved company, segment (space) and product overview; industry-specific (vertical) positioning and content; case studies; ROI models; easy-to-digest competitive analysis; better sales decks. etc.?   Do you need to revise your field sales guide to incorporate some of the elements listed above? This is important, as your company is likely to hire a fair number of new salespeople in 2021 because analysts are predicting economic recovery/boom once the vaccine is widely distributed.  By improving sales onboarding, you can make a significant dent in time-to-revenue metric for new sales hires.
• Is there an opportunity to simplify pricing, so it not only makes your solution more valuable in the eyes of the customer (through creative packaging), but also reduces the complexity during the sales cycle?  Such changes can improve win rates and increase sales velocity.
• Can you bring both - the voice of customer, as well as the sales organization into your win-loss analysis this year, so you have better context of why you are winning/losing deals (rather than just the analysis from your CRM system)? It will help you create a better actionable plan to improve your win rate against your top competitors.
• Is it time to verticalize your messaging with some industry specific value proposition?  It will also help you with your Account Based Marketing (ABM) initiatives.
• Perhaps you have not invested enough in channel partner enablement in the past and you can significantly move the needle in channel-sourced revenue by creating some partner specific enablement content.  
• Perhaps it is time to shift from feature-based product marketing to story-based product marketing, so your value proposition comes out more clearly.

Unless you can take the first couple of weeks to clearly assess what worked and what did not and where the gaps are, you are likely to repeat the same plan again in 2021, with only some marginal improvement in outcomes.