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Making your new product launch a success
| Guest post by: John Brennan |
Article Overview: For many companies, the success of a new product launch is a life or death event and they usually take pains to see that the sales reps have detailed information about the product features. To this end, marketing produces slick and expensive videos and brochures, while impressing on the reps the importance of pushing the product on anyone they can to attain sales goals and win sales competitions.
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Free Download - Adapting to Technology and the Internet By John Brennan |
Making your new product launch a success
But this is not what their sales reps needs to make the product launch and themselves a success. While generally enthused about the launch of a new product, foremost on the sales rep's mind is "how am I going to sell this?" Unfortunately, the product engineers can tell them only about - you guessed it - product features. Marketing offers information about benefits but not within the context of a sales call which, of course, is where the sales reps will apply the knowledge.
Your reps really need to learn how to sell the product; how to ask the right questions to uncover needs that the product might fill and how to position the product as a solution to a client problem. After your reps have a good grasp of the products features and benefits, and have enjoyed all the hoopla around the product launch, lead a discussion about the kinds of problems the product will solve for customers. Get them to think through actual questions they should use to determine if a customer is qualified for the product solution. Then run some role plays so that they have an opportunity to practice the skills before using them on a real customer.
You may also think about training the product technical experts to help during the early stages of the product launch. We have learned a couple of things here. Yes, you should train techies to sell. God knows they need it. One IT genius told me that he sells upgrades by telling the customer, "Now that you've screwed up this program, you going to have to buy our upgrade. Take it or leave it." We have found that it is equally important to train sales reps to manage the tech expert during the sales call. If the tech expert (or senior executive for that matter) is not managed on a sales call, they can become a loose cannon and wreak havoc on progress towards the sale.
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Article Tags: brochures, marketing, product features, product launch, sales goals
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Related Forum Posts
Re: Can you outsource your product launch?
- [quote="ideasuniversity":i1rccw4s]I am thinking if it is possble to outsource ones product launch to an expert if you don't know how. If it is possible who among us here are good in this aspect[/quote:i1rccw4s]
If you are talking about the promotion to launch a new product or service, most definitely. I do that with authors and am working with other business people to create an online buzz to launch their products or services.
If that's not what you're thinking - can you give more details?
Shri
Launch of Social networking software package...Needs input
- Hello Everybody,
Note-Its not a launch of another SN site like the other sites, its more like a SN software package launched by RapidSoft Technologies on 7th April, 2008.
I am very excited to announce that you can own a social net site for yourself as we are launching our SN software package on 7th April, wherein we will provide you with the API..which gives complete control and flexibility to make any changes as per your requirement. You can also add any third party application to this site and you can easily customize it as you feel.
Our customers will have 90 days to experiment with this package integrated with all the basic features as we are releasing it in a trial mode, during this time we will be expecting lot of feedback from our customers.
I am also hopeful from all the members out here to receive some suggestions and feedback on what more can be done before the launch and after the launch of this product. I will also be eager to know from all those members who has huge network and had been using social net for long time- How does it sounds to them as they have been using different SN sites for long time. Suggestions and your time is highly appreciated.
As everyone out here has been using different SN sites....with the launch of this product or an opportunity to own such site with complete control, What would be the general reaction of people? Do you have some great ideas for a product launch like this?? or someone thinks their is another way to do this...
I will be happy to see lot of inputs from you. You can also enroll yourself for the free trial version of this package and experiment with it.
--Ashish
Re: Are You Selling Globally?
- [quote="Evan":2izjaedg]Great news Trent! I'm looking forward to seeing the Trent Brownrigg product launch!
What is the new product?[/quote:2izjaedg]
I am actually working with Barry Sarner (another mod of this forum) to launch a "positive messages apparel" company.
Re: Startup blogs
- I agree with David blogging is a good way to get a feel for the market and discover whether your product is something that will be in demand or not. You can also begin to brand yourself or your product and warm your market up so that they will be more receptive when you launch.
MichelleJ
Re: Are You Selling Globally?
- Great news Trent! I'm looking forward to seeing the Trent Brownrigg product launch!
What is the new product?
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