Every year, thirty thousand products are launched, with 90% of them failing. As a result, businesses risk wasting time and money if they don’t get their new product right.
To win big, you must define your target market, analyse risks, and guarantee that your product is a good fit. Then, with a marketing and sales strategy in place, you can sell more effectively, close more deals, and increase conversion rates.
This post explains how to sell a new product. Follow these simple and practical suggestions to prepare your business for a successful launch.
1. Conduct new and existing consumer research to define your target market.
Find out if there is a huge market for a new product before developing it and figuring out how to sell it.
Talk to your existing customers as part of your study to find out how new product ideas can help them solve existing or adjacent challenges related to why they’re already investing in you.
Then, consider who you’ll be marketing the goods to. Determine your target audience by specifying:
- Your ideal client (e.g. occupation, age, location, company worth, etc.)
- Their requirements (for example, what difficulties do they have that your new solution can solve?)
- Product fit (for example, will your new business ideas genuinely benefit them?)
If you do not specify these fundamental target audience requirements, you risk squandering your time and resources creating a product that no one wants or needs.
Next, evaluate your product’s potential in your target market:
- Competition. Determine if competitors are already selling a similar product and your unique selling proposition (USP). For example, you may want to emphasise whether it is more efficient or was created by a purpose-driven brand.
- Size. Decide whether there are enough potential customers in your target market who fulfil your ideal customer profile (ICP) to meet revenue targets and profit margins.
- Future sales. Determine whether the expenses and hazards of marketing and selling the product outweigh the benefit from projected sales. The size of your target market will determine this. Determine your total addressable market (TAM), serviceable addressable market (SAM), and serviceable addressable market (SAM) (SOM).
This market research and strategic thinking will provide you with a realistic assessment of whether your new product is worth the risk in your target market.
2. Consider the operational challenges of marketing products.
One of the most difficult operational challenges you’ll face is your team’s time demand. For example, when selling a new product or line, you must account for the increased time spent selling.
Innovative items will necessitate more sophisticated marketing. More training will be required for reps to comprehend and effectively market them. They will also spend more time with customers, demonstrating how it works. In addition, your sales agents may need to spend more time building trust and reinforcing the product’s value with use cases and demonstrations.
Your marketing team will also be involved in this. For example, creating and publishing helpful how-to entries on the company blog and organising webinars are both effective strategies to educate potential consumers and make them feel at ease with your new product.
So, let’s go through how you can train and prepare your reps to sell new products effectively.
Finally, automating as many menial jobs as possible is a great approach to saving time. Workflow automation can save a lot of time that would otherwise be spent on low-level chores like updating lead ratings or deal stages. In addition, by delegating duties to automation assistants, you may free up your employees’ time to focus on more vital responsibilities, such as relationship building.
3. Create a marketing strategy and a sales process map.
An effective marketing and sales plan entails outlining the goals of the new product and the activities you will take to attain them.
A sales plan outlining how to promote new items should include the following elements:
Positioning and mission statement Explain why your product or solution exists, its market position, and the challenges it answers. This component of the plan will include thorough information about your rivals and your value proposition (the features and benefits of your product).
- Structure of a sales team: Plan out your sales force and organisational structure if you’re selling to a completely new market in a new territory. This will cover roles, duties, and compensation for each sales team member. If you’re selling a new product to the same target market and audience, especially if it’s a technically difficult product, establish who will be engaged in the sale (e.g., a sales engineer) and when to bring them in.
- Goals. Set revenue targets and sales targets based on previous sales activity and performance. This section should be used to break down pipeline phases and rep activities along the client journey. Include specifics on sales targets (such as quotas and metrics), revenue goals, and the number of sales reps required to meet them.
- KPIs and performance monitoring: The measurements and key performance indicators (KPIs) by which your team will be judged after they begin selling the new product. Include how success will be monitored, key performance indicators (KPIs) for each sales stage, and whether you’ll use sales monitoring spreadsheets or software (such as a CRM) to track victories.
After you’ve produced a basic sales plan, you should consider your sales strategy. Your sales strategy will link your team’s activity-based goals, results-based goals, and positioning to the methodology, they will use to offer the new product.
For example, you might want your sales team to make X number of cold calls per week to potential leads and prospects or achieve a lead-to-appointment rate in the first year.
Whatever your precise objectives, map them to your current sales process to verify they correspond with your existing workflows and sales pipeline stages. If not, you’ll need to fill in the blanks to guarantee your strategy for marketing your new product or solution is as efficient and successful as possible.
Consider when you’ll be ready to offer a minimal viable product after you’ve developed your sales plan and approach (MVP). This is the first version of your product that contains fundamental functionality that you may distribute to clients.
Your MVP isn’t a finalised product since investing in product features without first gathering feedback and surveying early adopters can be hazardous and costly. However, once you have this knowledge, you may change the solution to make it more appealing to your clients.
When creating your MVP, keep the following points in mind:
- Cost. When will your MVP be completed, and how much will it cost to create?
- The price point for newcomers. Set pricing for your MVP that is competitive with the rest of the market.
- BETA or not BETA that is the question. Determine whether you will offer the MVP for BETA testing to your existing client base. This allows you to collect thorough feedback before releasing it to the general audience.
After drawing out your sales strategy and procedure, you’ll need to create a sales and marketing budget.
4. Set an accurate sales and marketing budget.
Before you begin selling your product directly to end customers, you must determine how much money your organisation is willing to invest in sales and marketing.
These expenses should include all aspects of the new product’s introduction, from marketing and promotion through MVP testing and any initial sign-up discounts or product offers.
Let’s begin with the advertising and marketing plan.
According to an Experian research, new businesses typically spend between 12% and 20% of their gross revenue on marketing. This is divided into two categories: brand development costs (for example, promotional channels such as your website, social media accounts, blogs, and sales collateral) and direct marketing campaign costs such as advertising campaigns, SEO, and trade shows.
Consider your sales budget next.
Use your existing sales data to get an approximate estimate of prices and deadlines. For example, a typical sales budget may account for sales cycle lengths and employee costs and cover weeks, months, or quarters.
Using previous sales data, you should get a ballpark estimate of revenue and cost. The budget should also break down estimated sales, product pricing, and total overall income within a specific timeframe. Calculating these statistics can better understand how much your sales efforts will cost and how much money you have to work with.
Include any actual operating expenditures related to marketing and selling the goods. These are some examples:
- Operational. What it will cost to make and ship your product.
- Staff. You’ll spend the amount of money on the team, including bonuses and sales rep salary.
- Typical business expenses: The cost of software/hardware, facility rent, and utilities should all be covered.
Remember that your staff will be marketing a new product; therefore, you must educate them on its features and use cases.
5. Provide in-depth training to your team.
Selling a new product will be successful only if your salespeople are well-versed in it.
Determine what training your sales representatives will require to promote the new product based on its complexity, features, and price. Then, please work with your product teams to understand the problem it solves, why it is beneficial, and how to best present it to customers.
It’s critical to get your sales staff passionate about the product and its differentiators, as this will allow them to market it to clients early in the sales cycle confidently. This will also necessitate the sales representative to comprehend the product’s features and how they may assist the customer in overcoming their challenges and pain spots.
Your comprehensive training should include the following topics:
- Making use of the product. A detailed description of how the new product works in practice. Show your sales representatives how to use it as if they were customers.
- Benefits and implications of the product: This section of the training should emphasize the product’s immediate and long-term benefits and how it will improve the lives of the target population.
- Knowledge of the past. Provide your team with as much information on the product’s development and use cases as possible. Assume the new item is email marketing software. In that situation, your representatives must understand the fundamentals of email marketing and be able to employ industry-specific terms and phrases in client dialogues comfortably.
6. Track success and build feedback loops in sales and marketing to improve.
Track the success of your sales and marketing activities once your team is ready and your product has been released to the public.
Product surveys and feedback forms, for example, will assist you in fine-tuning the product after its original release. It would help if you also collected testimonials from early adopters to make continuous changes and leverage success stories as social proof in your marketing efforts.
Some metrics will help determine the success of your new product. The following are some basic KPIs to consider measuring:
- Customer lifetime value on average
- Net promoter score (NPS)
- Deals that were won versus those that were lost
- Revenue from new consumers versus income from current customers
- Selling expenses versus revenue earned.
- permeation of the market
- Evolution across time
Furthermore, specific measures such as the number of new product trials and engagement rates are very relevant for determining the success of a new product:
- New tests. It’s critical to understand how many individuals sign up for your new product and how many convert to paying customers after the trial period. A lower conversion rate may suggest that clients are unhappy with the product or that it is overpriced. Customer surveys, for example, can assist you in determining why.
- Product engagement rates. New trial numbers do not always tell the whole story, so it’s equally crucial to monitor how customers interact with your new product. If involvement is poor, it could suggest a lack of functionality or a UX issue affecting their experience and needs to be addressed.
- Obtaining leads. Tracking lead sources and close rates are an excellent approach to assessing your lead acquisition and marketing channels’ effectiveness and determining whether you need to reallocate resources elsewhere. If your marketing team learns that Twitter is bringing in most of your new clients, it may opt to shift some advertising budget from another channel that isn’t doing well to improve income.
Use a CRM platform, and your team can also track activities that directly influence the sales targets you’ve set for your new product.
Managers, for example, can monitor how efficiently their salespeople are performing compared to the targets set in the sales strategy. Likewise, individual reps’ efforts can be compared to the original goals if they are supposed to make 100 cold calls per week or arrange ten meetings per month.
Final thoughts
With the odds stacked against you, getting your company ready for launch is critical.
You can accomplish this by devoting time to researching your new market, analysing your target clients, and developing a sales strategy that links your revenue targets to your product. Then, with the right training, your sales and marketing teams will be able to pitch new items to new customers confidently. If you require expert council, consider reading a sales book written by an experienced seller.
Measure your efforts and solicit client feedback to ensure that your product continually improves. Tweaking your product early on and adding appealing features might help your launch succeed and increase your bottom line.