Taking Your New Product to Market the Right Way

PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT EXPERTS

Successfully Taking Your New Product or Service to Market. Let Our Experts Help You Get It Right

Aug 16, 2024
The Big Innovations Team
Kansas City, Kansas

New Product or Service launch marketing done right

Prior to taking a product or service to market, a number of smart, pre-launch steps should maximize your upside potential while minimizing downside risk. Your #1 goal is to make as much money as you can. Planning & executing a genius launch is crucial to that. Our experts are exceptionally skilled at thoroughly doing all of this kind of work.

NEW PRODUCT OR SERVICE PRE-LAUNCH CHECKLIST

The product or service should be fully fleshed out as a clear way to fill a predetermined market want or need. Those go together: fully fleshed out AND clearly-defined need:

Your product should reflect buyer input because you (or we in service to you) have formally listened to many prospective customers to help shape it.
It should also incorporate much from quality competitive analysis because you (or again we) have thoroughly reviewed competitor offerings to incorporate anything that might woo buyers away from your offering.
It should include a few unique innovations all your own, built upon the foundations of objective learnings culled from deep customer & competitor analysis. Innovating on that market intelligence is where it most clearly rises ABOVE the competition.

The product or service should be best-in-class WOW!.. the OBVIOUS choice for buyers wanting anything like it.

it should be ready for delivery to customers, meaning packaging and any supporting elements should be fully in place. If it's still mostly just an idea in your head, you need to take steps to turn a dream into reality (and/or engage us to help you do that). Don't be misled by fantasy in movies in which an entrepreneur sells a bunch of something first and THEN scrambles on figuring out how to actually make, package & deliver it. That's movies, where a wondrous woman can block machine gun fire with super-speed and magic bracelets... and an away team can be converted to atoms on a planet, instantly transfer those atoms to their orbiting ship and re-assembled back into people hundreds-to-thousands of miles away.

Unless you are Amazonian with magical powers or posses 24th-century technologies, it's generally very bad practice to sell first, have only a few weeks to deliver and all you tangibly have today is the IDEA for the product or service customers expect to receive. A quirky thing about passage time that would befuddle even Einstein: in THIS scenario, it mysteriously accelerates. Those weeks can seem like days or minutes. You can find yourself at the delivery deadline, still closer to idea than deliverable. DON'T MAKE THIS COMMON MISTAKE!

A timely, effective process for developing a fantastic new product or service

The product or service should be objectively tested with a small group of customers to be sure you got it right. Use this as a last chance to fix any outstanding issues prior to going to market in a big way. Massive global companies (the biggest names you know) with the resources to launch a big flop and not really feel much pain rely on test marketing as a way to minimize downside risk. It's a simple, effective tool used by smart marketing teams. Along with the obvious benefit of mitigating expensive flops, this is a great way to:

solicit an initial batch of real testimonials to help sell the product or service, and
gather any objections or customer issues to proactively prepare your sales & service teams for similar interactions when the rollout goes wide.

You should have a target market for the product or service clearly defined in writing, including specific details (beyond just a few demographics) that help distinguish a likely buyer from everyone else. If a good job has been done here, you should leverage this definition to nail down the most cost-efficient sources of relevant prospects so that your marketing budget can be lean... but very effective. These will likely be your very first buyers, so it is vitally important to get this right. The cash inflows they deliver can fund campaign #2+.

Put much effort into presenting your product or service like it is the very best thing in the world

A website or an area of your business website should be FULLY developed to showcase the quality of the product or service. Polish. Polish. Polish this creative. It may play up to the DOMINANT role in success or failure.

This is where the investments made in the prior bullets are presented to the world… where you showcase the "best-of" and "on-target" benefits of your product so that it stands out from the crowd.

In many cases, this is the generic focal point where you might ask for the sale. If it is slammed together in a few hours or only a pass or two, you've shot yourself in the foot. In some ways, your sales creative may be more important than the product itself, so it should get that level of care, attention, scrutiny and, again, polish. It's possibly making the very FIRST impression of your offering AND influencing a lasting impression. Better make BOTH be GOOD ones!

Present your product or service like it's the most important thing in the world, both to you and to your prospects. Make them believe it because this marketing creative makes it so obvious that you do.

Be sure your Ecommerce functionality is fully refined and ready to sell your product in intuitive ways. Does it pass "for dummies" tests (yes, tests IS plural) without any human help from you? You can't be there in person with hundreds, thousands or millions of buyers you want to sell to help them through any hiccups. Kinks, clogs and any confusion must be 100% mitigated.

If a prospect decides NOT to buy today, you should also have other embedded hooks in this content to try to capture their contact information, transforming each visitor from unknown prospect into another hot (known) lead, who you can efficiently promote in the future to try to bring them around.

There is a classic adage about maximizing sales: "it takes 5 NOs to get a YES." It means the BEST sales models tend to work through FIVE rejections/objections to close as much business as possible. Do you have that well applied in your sales model? If you convert a "NO" into a lead, you can keep working on them through a few more rejections to get to that "YES."

If you are giving up on prospects after only a few rejections, you are leaving MUCH revenue on the table... much more than you are capturing now. If you want to multiply your close opportunities, let our experts help you.

DO NOT set yourself up in a "sell in one try or bust" proposition. That's the opposite of modern, wide funnel, best practices... but also a very, VERY common mistake made by startups and young companies with still-unrefined marketing models... especially DIYers. If you are taking only ONE shot at selling each prospect, you are leaving FARRRRRRRRRRRRRRR more money on the table than you are harvesting. Let's fix that!

Professional models work the adage, seeing rejections #3, #4 and #5 as one step closer to winning the sale instead of assuming this prospect is never going to buy... and giving up on them. A well-crafted sales model ASSUMES the adage... building in objection/rejection opportunities to make progress against the FIVE. Does your model do that well?

Sales and Service teams should be FULLY briefed BEFORE the new product or service launch... ready for anything

All customer touch-points should be thoroughly briefed on the product or service. Sales teams should be FULLY equipped with everything they need to motivate interested prospects to buy now. Service teams should be fully equipped with everything they need to make new customers happy with the purchase. Etc. Don't leave this for post-launch, "catch up" tasks. Ideally, there should be no catching up. BE PROACTIVE ABOUT BEING COMPLETELY READY TO SELL the product en masse. Leave words like "scramble" as only a breakfast option.
A written launch marketing plan should lay out exactly how the product or service will go to market, the exact costs involved, tactics to be used, etc. This is the guide you approve and back to pursue all initial sales. Again, it should lean on the above to balance the drive for maximum revenue with always-constrained budgetary limitations.

The best marketing plan is the one that delivers big with cost-efficient spend. It's a simple formula for maximizing marketing ROI

All of the supporting marketing & sales creative should be complete, polished and approved for use. The marketing plan uses this creative to proactively showcase the product or service to the target market(s). Most of this time, this creative is asking up to total strangers to open their wallets... to choose THIS one instead of many alternatives. IT MUST BE GREAT!

Rushed, cheap or poorly-conceived creative can undermine even the finest product or service launch. Build in sufficient time to get this right. It IS the "sizzle" and not the steak. And it can singlehandedly make or break the success of the launch, regardless of how well all of the other items in this list are done.
Etc. There are a number of others we can share with you in an engagement.

fast product or service launches usually come with lots of problems and issues that could be completely avoided by some good proactive decisions and actions

One of the most common mistakes in new product launches is enthusiastic leaders so focused on the WHEN (monetization), they rush the WHO, WHAT, WHY, HOW and HOW MANY parts. The leaders are already completely sold on their "baby." That conviction is why they are bothering to try to monetize it at all. However, it is so, SOOOOO important to remember that up to all buyers haven't even had a first peek at it yet. And all of the talented professionals who contribute to making those first... early... and lasting impressions should have the time to contribute their parts as fully and polished as possible.

This is the BEST, most proven formula for maximizing launch results

The alternative launch cycle- and how it is usually done- is a rush to market ASAP and then try to panic scramble, repair, hone and clean up fires and messes post-launch. Just about every professional with at least some work experience has some sense of how this feels. The most common adjective to describe it? MISERY!

It doesn't HAVE to be that way: panic scrambling is NOT a requirement of success. Creating raging fires all over the place is not a prerequisite to a big haul. What would Smokey the Bear say? The best business schools in the world do NOT encourage chaos culture.

So WHY does it often go that way? It comes down to only some simple choices made to set up that very situation. Recall the lesson of a classic Aesop fable: "The Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs." In the hurry to fully monetize this lucrative source of revenue, they kill the magical goose to try to get ALL of the gold RIGHT NOW... only to discover that their impatience sacrificed their true upside.

Do You Recall a Timeless Moral of That Story?

click the button at right to see it

PATIENCE IS A VIRTUE!

In the context of this article, we might leap a few thousand years from Aesop to consider the smooth jazz lesson in a Dina Washington classic: What a Difference a Day Makes. If you don't know the song, crank up your speakers and have a good listen. This page will wait for you.

Both point to the same core concept: give anything the RIGHT amount of time to make the most of your opportunities. Overly rushing may get you some quick gold but sacrifice so much more in that haste. Ms. Washington is singing about the joys resulting from having a little patience.

Why do wine connoisseurs reference vintage so much? Why not consume wine as soon as it enters the bottle? Why do coffee plantations sort & select, pulp the cherries, ferment, etc instead of rushing those beans to market picked right off the bush? Why did Apple bother making that first iPhone function as "an iPod, a phone AND an internet device" instead of rolling out only a phone and just promising to add other features later?

Launching your baby a few days or weeks later than "soonest possible" means getting all of your golden geese in a row. There are no buyers who covet buying something "half baked." Do you? There should be no sellers putting their carts before their horse.

Yes, Ms. Washington, what a difference a day (or three or thirty) CAN make!

Make more money by getting your product or service launch marketing right

In case you are wondering, yes, we have reached our business cliché cap for this page. 😉 So let's turn the page for the balance of this article in which we will cover some OTHER major contributors in a successful launch campaign: