Brief · July 2021 · Relaunch plan · Payments
Brief set by the company as part of a senior hiring process. Unpaid, using public information.
Worldline: a relaunch into one market, and the vertical I told them to drop
SECTOR
Payments and digital commerce
MARKET
Russia
BRIEF SET BY
Worldline
FORMAT
Vertical growth marketing case
DATE
July 2021
COMPANY
worldline.comStages covered
01
Research
02
Competition
03
Segment & position
04
Message
05
Launch & enable
06
Measure & maintain
The same six stages as the PMM Operating System.
What they asked
Our Russian payment solution launched in 2019 and has been upgraded for simpler client integrations and better operational efficiency. Build the relaunch.
Brief set by Worldline
July 2021
Vertical growth marketing case
The product
Worldline Digital Commerce's Russian payment solution. Launched in 2019, upgraded to enable simpler and easier client integrations and drive better operational efficiency. Scaling is now possible and onboarding is faster.
The task
Build the relaunch: audience, objectives, KPIs, pre-launch activity, launch phasing and content.
Reconstructed from the deck I presented. The original brief document is missing from my archive — only its filename survives, which is where the format above comes from. I would rather say that than quote a brief I can't produce.
What I had to work with
1
Market
2
Motions
2019
Already launched once
Not givenA relaunch spends its credibility once. The audience had already seen this product go live and had not bought it.
The situation
Worldline's Russian payment solution had been live since 2019 and had just been upgraded for simpler integration and faster onboarding.
The relaunch was to sell it to European online businesses operating in Russia.
The commercial problem underneath it was technical. Russian consumers were split between global card schemes and the domestic one. Foreign sellers were routing transactions as cross-border rather than local, which lowered authorisation rates — a routing decision showing up as lost revenue. Add a volatile currency and a rule requiring personal data to be stored inside the country, and the product is not selling convenience. It is selling approved transactions and a compliant footprint.
The call
Drop travel. Take retail e-commerce.
Travel was the obvious vertical for a cross-border payments product and it was the one I argued against, in the deck rather than in the room: Covid uncertainty, stagnant domestic tourism, and domestic business travel that the deck called dead. E-commerce had the opposite profile — a pandemic boost on top of a long-term growth forecast, and brand value that mattered most in exactly the categories where European sellers were strong.
1
Market
2
Motions: new and upsell
10 + 20
Customers, not leads
The objectives I set, in three numbers.
What I proposed
Five moves, one market.
01
01 Research
State the problem as an authorisation rate
- Russian consumers split between global card schemes and the domestic one
- Foreign sellers routing transactions as cross-border rather than local, which lowered authorisation rates — a routing decision surfacing as lost revenue
- A volatile currency, and a data-localisation rule requiring personal data to be stored in country
- Which reframes the product: it is not selling convenience, it is selling approved transactions and a compliant footprint
02
03 Segment & position
Choose the vertical, and record the rejection
- Target: large international, mostly European, online businesses entering or operating in the Russian market and selling to domestic consumers
- Travel assessed and rejected, with the reasoning left on the slide rather than deleted
- Retail e-commerce chosen and named down to category: general retail, fashion, electronics, e-grocery, home improvement
- Positioning line: a simple yet comprehensive and integrated payment solution to safely launch and scale your Russian operations
03
06 Measure & maintain
Put the conversion rates in writing
- Objectives set as ten new customers and twenty upsells rather than as a lead volume
- A funnel from visitors and leads through marketing-qualified to sales-qualified, with a benchmark conversion rate named per source
- And the rate that decides whether any of it pays: sales-qualified to won at 15% on referrals and 5% on new business
- This is the part most interview decks leave out, because it is the part that can be checked
The numbers that could be wrong
Marketing-qualified to sales-qualified, by source
Website
30%
Referral
25%
Webinar
15%
Events
5%
Lead-generation campaigns
2%
And sales-qualified to won: 15% on referrals, 5% on new business. Benchmarks rather than results — but they were in the deck, which is what makes them checkable.
04
05 Launch & enable
Pre-launch is where a relaunch is won
- A cross-functional kickoff with decision rights assigned before any asset was built
- Segmentation of new and existing customers, with different targeting and different positioning statements for each
- Competitive analysis, personas and lead-generation strategy scheduled as pre-launch work, not as a later phase
- Sales enablement training booked before launch day rather than after it
05
04 Message · 05 Launch & enable
Phase it, and write for the market not the product
- A dated calendar: product video and platform first, then press, media and vendor briefings, then launch day with internal and external comms and a customer event, then field marketing and lead generation
- A learning centre on launching an e-commerce business in Russia — step-by-step guides, launch costs, long-term benefits
- SEO built around that question rather than the product name, because a European retailer searches how to enter the market long before it searches for a payment provider
- Assets split by media type: sales and off-media, owned and paid, shared, earned
Where I pushed back
I cut the vertical the product was built for.
Travel was the natural fit and the expected answer. The case for keeping it was that the market would reopen. The case against it was that nobody could say when, and a relaunch only gets one credible run at an audience that has already ignored the product once.
I'd make the same call again on the evidence available. The thing that actually ended the plan came from a direction neither argument had considered.
The judgment call
Objectives in customers, not leads.
The target was ten new customers and twenty upsells. Not a lead volume, not an MQL number — customers, split across two motions that need different machinery. New business runs on outbound and inbound with a learning centre behind it. The twenty upsells run on reactivation calls, product-update newsletters and booked catch-ups, with sales doing the closing.
Setting the objective in customers forces the funnel maths to be written down, and writing it down is what makes it checkable. That is why the conversion benchmarks are in the deck rather than left implicit.
What I'd do differently
I'd have put a scenario against the currency. The whole plan was denominated in a market whose exchange rate and regulatory footing were both moving, and there was no version of it that said what we do if either moves sharply. As it turned out the thing that ended the plan was bigger than a currency move, but the habit of writing the downside case is the one I was missing.
How it aged
Eight months later, the market closed.
Jul 2021
I presented this relaunch plan.
Mar 2022
Following the invasion of Ukraine, Worldline stated it had immediately enforced all applicable international sanctions and suspended services related to Russian and Belarusian rouble transactions with immediate effect. Worldline investor release
Mar 2022
The company disclosed Russia at approximately 1.5% of its 2021 estimated proforma annual revenue on continuing operations, mainly online acceptance operated from outside Russia. Worldline investor release
There is no version of this plan that survives. The segmentation call was right for the market that existed, the funnel benchmarks were reasonable, and none of it matters now.
It stays on this site for one reason. Go-to-market planning has a boundary, and pretending it doesn't is how people end up defending a strategy against a fact. The useful skill was never predicting this. It is noticing quickly that a plan is dead, saying so out loud, and moving the budget.