Product Launch and Marketing Glossary

The moment in time when a product is available to the public.

See also General Availability-(GA) and Limited-Availability-(LA)

A battle card is a powerful tool for your sales team. It does two key things: captures detailed knowledge of your competitors and equips salespeople with strategies to win competitive deals. A well-made battle card outlines your product, competitors, target buyers, strengths, weaknesses, and gives clear talking points for engaging prospects, backed by proof of why your solution is superior.

Defines a testing phase for a product when the product is stable enough to share with a limited audience. Beta can also be used to validate Positioning, Unique Value Propositions, and stress-test operations. 

Beta is a milestone when real users get to use a product in the real world and provide feedback about their experience. A beta test program is typically offered to a limited number of customers, who are more likely to test a product more thoroughly and provide constructive feedback. 

The Beta program isn't just for product testing. It's also a time to refine positioning and discover which features customers value the most, which feeds into value-based pricing.

A Buyer Persona is a fictional representation of the people who are involved in a decision to buy a product or service. A Buyer Persona is developed from factual information about people through interviews and observation. Buyer Personas are the atomic element in a buyer's journey. Their needs, desires, and requirements factor into buying criteria, which form the acceptance criteria of a buying decision.

On the other hand, an Ideal Customer Profile helps identify dream customers at a company level where Buyer Personas provide a foundation for how to communicate with the people in an Ideal Customer Profile. 

A Buyer's Journey documents the typical steps buyers (see Buyer Persona) take to purchase a product or service is a Buyer's Journey. It is much more detailed than a sales process and more expressive of what buyers actually do. It can also be referred to as the Buying Process. 

A Buyer's Journey maps the path different buyer personas take along the way to making a buying decision. There are typically different buying roles, including the economic buyer, technical evaluator, user buyer (sometimes called a functional buyer), and researcher. 

A sales team often equates the economic buyer with the decision maker. Technical evaluators look at a product or service through the lens of compliance. It either matches or it doesn't. The user (functional) buyer views a product or service through the lens of functionality. That is, will it help us to do our job better? And the researcher is the Buyer Persona tasked with finding a solution to a problem.

A Buying Center is a group of Buyer Personas involved in a decision to buy a product or service. 

A Buying Center is rarely an organized group with a common agenda. Often the Buyer Personas in a Buying Center operate independently and provide their feedback as they engage in their part of their Buyer's Journey.