Rebranding for Sub-scale SaaS: What / Whether / When / How (3 of 2)

No, that title is not a typo…this really is the third installment of what had originally been planned as a two-part post on the topic of rebranding. In follow-up to those initial posts, a question arose about the following line that appears in Part 2: “Create a plan for all the items to be updated in follow-up to the brand launch…This may well be the most often overlooked aspect of rebrands – don’t sleep on the Post-Launch Check-list!”

In an effort to spotlight the value of the Post-Launch Checklist, I’ve included a sample of one here. I hope this spreadsheet will be a useful resource for anyone who is considering, or actively engaged in, a rebranding initiative. I believe the artifact speaks for itself and requires little explanation. Nevertheless, below are a few explanatory comments to share how / why it was set-up and to assist in unlocking the value of this sample Post-Launch Checklist:

• General Intro: This is a redacted version of an actual checklist that was used in a recent rebranding / renaming initiative at a sub-scale B2B SaaS business. It includes nearly 80 tasks, which gives a sense for the enormity of rebranding / renaming a business. For anyone who uses this as a template, please take what applies, delete what doesn’t, and add your own tasks to the spreadsheet. Finally, to protect the innocent, identifying names have been removed wherever possible. Instead, the terms NEW NAME and OLD NAME have been used as placeholders for the business; and individuals’ names have been removed altogether from the columns “Requestor” and “Responsible.”
• Set-up: Critically important to the overall construction of the Checklist is the use of drop-down pick-lists. In addition to playing a large role in increasing data hygiene, these pick-lists play another valuable function -- sorting. These allow a user of the checklist to easily sort / filter on whatever variable is most important at that moment. Whether I want to view the tasks by Department, Workstream, Risk Level, Status, or another variable…it’s easily done. The table below provides a high-level legend of the overall topography of this Checklist, with pick-list items where applicable:

• Timeline: We recommend converting the task list to a “Timeline View.” This is quite handy for those who want to see a GANTT Chart of the project and / or for those responsible for managing a finite set of resources through the busy periods of the rebranding initiative. Enabling such a view is the primary function of the Start Date and End Date columns of the spreadsheet template above.
• It’s Never Over: While the intensity of the post-launch period will taper down, it is never over. Rather, we’ve observed that it’s helpful to conduct an audit of the rebrand / rename initiative at the one-year anniversary of the launch (and annually thereafter). This offers an opportunity to assess where maintenance is required and / or to address the (inevitable) areas where brand guidelines have been improperly executed since the initial launch. For this effort, it's helpful simply to re-purpose this same artifact and to populate it with the newly relevant tasks.

That’s it, other than for me to thank the Lock 8 portfolio company executives who have generously shared their work here – you know who you are! With that, please go forth and use this artifact to great effect.