Product Launch and Business Growth Blog » Product Launch

Startup Launch Marketing Process

Rick Braddy — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 01:31:07 +0000

I read a great post on the Rocket Watcher blog today on launch marketing for startups by product marketing expert and blogger April Dunford.

In her post on startup launch marketing, she put forth this great sketch that really puts the product release process in perspective:

In particular, this perspective on the launch marketing and product release process shows how the pre-release (aka. pre-launch) phase continues and flows into the release/launch phase; i.e., the activities begun in earlier phase of the release cycle should continue and expand into each subsequent phase (they aren’t discrete steps that just stop after each phase). Of course, in practice, startups may not have sufficient resources to continue this all in parallel, so we must carefully choose the activities that do receive continuity across each launch phase.

I think you’ll like April’s blog, which contains a wealth of pragmatic product marketing insights and advice.

How to Finish Your Launch Plan in an Hour

Rick Braddy — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 22:50:23 +0000

If you have a new product or website to launch, then the first thing you need is a “launch plan”.

But how can you create a launch plan if:

1. You don’t have the time to allocate to launch planning

2. You don’t have a lot of launch experience

3. You lack certain skills or expertise to handle aspects of the launch process?

I created a video explaining how you can save time and plan a launch quickly and painlessly. In this video, you will discover how to plan your launch, whether you have experience or not – and all you need is about an hour (or less) to create a professional-quality launch plan.

Launch planning video

3 Pillars of Online Sales Success

Rick Braddy — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 17:17:25 +0000

Making sales is what makes a business a business – without sales, there is no business, no matter whether you’re doing business offline, online or both.

Yet getting our “sales machine” working, so that it’s hitting on all cylinders and producing enough sales to reach profitability can be quite challenging, especially when you’re introducing a new product or entering a new market.

When you do get the sales engine properly tuned, it creates a “flywheel” effect, known as “sales momentum”. Sales momentum leads to even more sales, happy customers, testimonials, word of mouth and growth.

Great – we all know that! But what are the keys to creating a profitable, growing sales process then?

The keys to online sales success, whether you’re selling online or generating online leads that get passed to inside sales, resellers or a traditional account team are always the same. You have to get the “3 Pillars of Sales Success” right, and then grow them in balance over time.

The 3 pillars are shown in the diagram below. Let’s have a closer look at each one.

The keys to a successful online sales and lead-generation process are:

Traffic - attracting enough of the right visitors to your website
Product - having the right “product” with the “Right 5 P’s”
Conversions - converting traffic into leads, then sales.

If you’re having difficulties getting any online business to generate sales, leads or profits, all three of the above areas must be “in balance”. I’ll talk more about what I mean by “balanced” in a moment.

Now these 3 pillars may seem simple or even obvious enough (now that you seem them clearly). But it’s amazing how such simple concepts can be so challenging to get right, especially when: a) you’re launching something new, b) you’re entering a new market, or c) you’re moving from an offline world into the online world.

Let’s talk about each one of these critical online sales success pillars briefly.

TRAFFIC

Traffic is the lifeblood of every online business. Without it, you can have the greatest website and product in the world, and nobody’s going to ever know about it or see it. With it, you can: a) refine your product (messaging, pricing, positioning, etc.) and b) put a lead-capture and online sales process in place that converts visitors into leads, then leads into sales.

PRODUCT

You can have all the traffic in the world from great advertising, but it you get any of the “5 P’s” of product marketing wrong (product, positioning, pricing, packaging, promotion), you’re going to struggle to make sales. When you get the 5 P’s right, you’ll be “in the zone” for making sales, and can tune and optimize the 5 p’s over time.

CONVERSIONS

You can have the greatest product in the world, with loads of traffic coming to your website, but if you don’t convert those visitors into leads and then sales, it’s all for naught – a waste of time, effort and money. You might even “do okay”, making some sales without a well-oiled conversion engine, but chances are your competitors will outperform you, outspend you on traffic, and you’re business will suffer from lower profit margins, reduced market share and lost opportunity.

When you get all three of these areas right, your business will grow and outperform the competition. To do this, you need an online sales process that’s “balanced”, like this:

A balanced sales process generates superior cash flow, providing your business with the ability to expand (in terms of advertising to generate more traffic). It converts more visitors into leads, growing your list and market influence. It also attracts more resellers and affiliates, who want to get in on the action, to get their piece of the pie.

A balanced online sales process also provides you with the ability to invest more into R&D, developing (or acquiring) more products, increasing your average value per customer. And it solidifies your position in the market as a leader – and market leaders garner the most market share, customer loyalty and virtually unstoppable market momentum.

So, if we just have to get those three areas into balance,

why is it that many online sales processes look more like this?

Many businesses have online sales processes that are “out of balance”, where they have one or more of the 3 pillars of online success either underdeveloped or outright “broken”. As shown in the above diagram, for example, it’s common to see: a) businesses who haven’t invested properly in testing, tracking and optimization – so they don’t convert visitors into leads and then sales like they should, and b) because they’re not converting enough leads into sales, they can’t afford to advertise like they should, so they don’t have the traffic required to run and grow properly.

It’s also common to see business where one or more of the 5 P’s haven’t been properly vetted (or even tested), so the product part of the success equation just doesn’t work for the majority of potential buyers.

As a result, the unbalanced online business produces much smaller profits, can’t compete effectively and loses ground (or goes out of business completely):

Worse yet, businesses with unbalanced sales processes typically can’t afford to get the help they actually need to:

1. Identify what’s broken

2. Come up with a plan to fix or replace the broken parts

3. Bring the right people into the mix to get things fixed and operating smoothly.

Now, having said all that, many business are doing okay, rocking along or doing well making some sales. That’s because they have a balanced (or partially-balanced) online sales process in place. The key for these businesses is to optimize sales conversions, then take as much traffic away from competitors as possible to grow market share and profits over time.

I hope this 3 pillars model helps you identify the areas of your business where you need to focus to succeed and grow…and find your rightful place in Sales Paradise!

About the Author

Rick Braddy is CEO of WinningWare, helping clients launch, grow and optimize their online sales processes. WinningWare provides do-it-yourself product launch software and sales optimization solutions and professional services that address the 3 pillars of sales success, for launching new products and sites and growing existing businesses.

How to Launch a Product

Rick Braddy — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 19:25:31 +0000

Over the past several years, I have written a lot about launching products, websites and becoming successful at defining, developing and selling new products online.

It’s been distilled down into a launch white paper you can download here: “How to Successfully Launch Your Product or Website Online”

This 22 page, step-by-step guide contains strategies and best practices to create buzz and drive sales using the power of the Web and social networking. In it, you will learn:

The 4 Phases of a successful launch process
10 Steps you must take before your launch
5 Strategies your launch must apply
A Step-by-step process to launch your product or website successfully

Increase launch sales and profits

A properly structured launch creates increased buzz, anticipation and desire for what you have to say and what you sell. This translates to increased sales – a LOT more sales. It’s very important to know and apply best practices and techniques to boost sales results and market penetration with a properly executed launch. Let us share our fifty-five years of marketing and launch experience with you…

Register now and get instant access to this 22-page report that’s full of task-specific information you can apply today to successfully launch your product or website online!

Happy Launching!

B2C Launch is LIVE! Plus Long-form Direct Response Sales Letters

Rick Braddy — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 16:29:30 +0000

As promised, I’m continuing coverage of the B2C launch that’s underway. Just a reminder that this particular launch is aimed at consumers (not business people), so we’re taking a traditional online selling approach that’s most effective with a consumer audience.

If you sell to a B2B audience instead of consumers, this stuff is not for you (or your B2B audience)…

In particular, we are using a long form sales letter.

Why is that? Simple. Because it works!

Unlike Business-to-Business selling, where you’re dealing with a professional who is relatively sophisticated about their business and buying and who already understand the reasons to buy, selling to consumers is completely different.

You can’t assume anything about the buyer’s level of knowledge, so you must “take them on a journey” through the sales cycle – and you often have one opportunity to sell them, so you had better take your best shot, and the long form sales letter still outperforms a product catalog page for anything that’s not a commodity item – by far.

Why is that? Because when you’re selling anything people aren’t familiar with, there’s a lot of information that must be transferred to make a sale. And you’re typically selling in a very competitive environment with consumers, so you must position your offer favorably and give people enough information to make an informed decision, along with reasons to take action now. Otherwise, people’s natural tendencies to procrastinate, delay and not make a decision will prevail.

I know. I know. You probably hate these sales letters and “bonuses”. The truth of the matter is, they’re used when selling to consumers for a reason – they work. Hey – I didn’t invent this stuff…

Long form sales letters have been around and proven themselves as direct-response advertising and selling tools for many decades. And if it was good enough for Claude Hopkins and the other direct mail / direct-response gurus, it’s certainly good enough for me.

So why do the long form sales letters work so well? They work because they take a prospect through the various stages they must experience in order to buy – awareness, interest, desire, decision and action.

When we’re selling “asynchronously” (via the Internet or direct mail), we can’t actually be there to help a prospect through the sales process. So, the direct response selling process, in the form of a long form sales letter, engages the prospect, educates them and takes them through the sales cycle – in just a few pages.

And in order to make any sale, you must answer people’s questions to two fundamental questions:

1) Why should I buy from you? (versus all my other alternatives)

2) Why should I buy today? (versus doing nothing at all and just waiting)

The sales letter must answer both of these questions convincingly.

Additionally, it must satisfy the most common Questions and Objections that a typical buyer has, or they won’t buy.

Lastly, like any good sales person would, it must “close the deal” – by asking for the order and making a convincing argument that the buyer should buy from you and do so right now – because if that prospect leaves your website, 90+% of them will never be back.

So you’d better take your best shot at closing the sale and helping your new customer enjoy the benefits of your product while they’re still on your site.

In a nutshell, that’s why long form sales letters still work and will always outperform a product catalog style site for B2C selling of items which are not commodities (jewelry, books, DVD’s, etc.)

One other thing I would like to point out about this sales page is the “Belcher Button” – that bright orange “Add To Cart” button that looks like this:

This order button makes it easy to see where to place the order, what the item costs and what methods of payment are accepted. Believe it or not, this structure has been tested over and over again and is proven to generate the highest conversions on long form sales pages with consumers.

Everything on that sales page is there for a reason. It’s a proven structure for selling information products, subscriptions, software, services and many other complex, non-commodity items on the Internet.

Live Launch Process Underway Right Now

Rick Braddy — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 02:03:08 +0000

I am underway with a live launch right now for one of my niche businesses – in this case, Texas Hold’em poker training with a membership site that was originally launched in Feb. 2008. We are “launching” a new poker pro who has joined our “Poker Underground” site – we’re dubbing it “Poker Underground 2.0″.

I just realized this would provide a nice example of the final stages of the pre-launch sequence and launch sequence that’s coming up. Launch day is this Friday, October 15th at 10 a.m. Eastern time. You can check out our Launch Landing page here. If you register, you’ll receive the balance of pre-launch and launch emails, so you can watch the launch as it rolls out.

One of the interesting things we did with this particular launch is to align our money magnets and bonuses. Let me explain. We are giving away 300 of our Advanced Tournaments DVD’s as bonus items for those who subscribe during the launch. So, we decided to do a “mini-giveaway” of a Poker Underground 1-year membership and three DVD’s ahead of the launch as part of a “contest” (it’s called a “freeroll” in poker parlance).

This is pretty darned ingenious (an affiliate partner suggested it), so pay close attention to this…

By giving away a very small quantity of the bonus items in conjunction with a separate, distinct event (in our case, a freeroll contest – it could be a drawing, a raffle, whatever else makes sense), it allows us to extol the benefits of these items while we are clearly not selling anything (and before we’ve even announced the launch itself).

This is a great way to create awareness, interest and desire for these bonuses ahead of launch day, so when you do open the doors on launch day, there’s increased demand for these bonus items – which in turn, makes them much more valuable to both you and the buyer on launch day!

I told you this was ingenious, didn’t I?

So, here’s the magic formula for using this in your own launch:

1. Decide what bonuses you will offer as extra incentives to buyers on launch day

2. Make a small quantity (1 to 3) available the week or more prior to the launch, in conjunction with some kind of contest, then explain the value and benefit of these items BEFORE you announce your launch.

3. Announce the winners, then remind everyone what was won and what it was worth to the winners.

4. Include these same bonuses in your launch.

5. Make more sales!

Happy launching. I will provide another update as this launch progresses.

The all-important Launch Blog – Some tips for your success

Rick Braddy — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 19:03:05 +0000

Your “Launch Blog” serves as a publishing portal and the information hub for the launch – this is the place your prospects will go to find out the latest information. It’s also the place for discussions and information exchange.

Note that the launch blog may be dedicated to news about your product and may not necessarily be the same as your personal blog, which addresses a much wider audience and topics well beyond the launch, so let’s be careful not to get the two confused.

So what should be in your Launch Blog, and for what purpose?

Your launch blog should deliver useful information

The Launch Blog is a great place to deliver all forms of information to your launch audience.

Today, blogs make it very easy to publish all types of information, including:

Videos
Text articles
Images and Illustrations

Your launch blog should be a place for “2-way” conversation

Dispensing information is only one purpose of the Launch Blog – it’s the “starting point” for creating a conversation within your marketplace.

A more important purpose is to have 2-way conversations with people in your marketplace, as well as providing a venue for those involved in your launch to connect with each other and have meaningful conversations among themselves.

Do you agree so far? (please post comments below)

Your blog should provide transparency

Blogs also provide something else – a place for transparency.

Transparency creates trust. And trust is the foundation for building a relationship with buyers who may not know you or your company well or at all. The social proof and transparency provided via the Launch Blog can be extremely powerful. Of course, this transparency works both ways…

If your product or service isn’t quality, has flaws or doesn’t meet your market’s needs for some reason, it will become apparent. Quality issues aren’t something you can possibly hide or avoid being publicized anyway, so why not just be up front with people in the first place?

And how you respond publicly to shortcomings that are pointed out is quite telling – about you, your values and what working with you is going to be like.

So when issues do arise (they will), it’s important to remain positive and demonstrate how effective you are going to be at providing excellent support, fix the issues you can, and provide reasonable reasons for your actions (or plans to address the issues). This is all any reasonable person can expect.

Your blog is the place where people often first find out about your launch
The Launch Blog is also a great place for people to learn about your launch for the first time and then join your Launch List. The Launch List is a focused set of prospects who have expressed a specific interest in what you are launching and what you have to say about it. They are your “core” launch audience (in addition to existing customers and partners).

As you post interesting content, the search engines will index your posts. Search engines love blogs, so keep good SEO fundamentals (like keyword selection) in mind as you choose titles for your posts.

Recommendations for your launch blog

Opt-in Form – include a simple opt-in form on upper-right or left side of blog during a launch so newcomers can join your Launch List (or at least a place for them to click through to your Launch Landing Page).
Authenticity – use straight talk with people about yourself, your company, what you’re up to and why – and what’s in it for your audience
Transparency – the more you can reveal about yourself, your values and what you and your company stands for in your blog entries, the more you will be trusted and respected
Conversational – engaging in a “conversation” with your Launch Community provides many benefits, so it is important to stimulate comments (e.g., by asking for comments with an email to your Launch List or via Twitter^(TM), Facebook^(TM), etc.) and encourage conversations
Video, video, video – people will take the time to watch a video when they won’t take time to read copy. Post your videos on YouTube^(TM), then add them to your blog so you get double the exposure. Be sure to include your domain name and a copyright notice at the end of each video.
Tweet Counter – one way people can easily see social proof is by how many Tweets your blog posts get via Twitter. Be sure to use a Tweet counter and make it easy for people to Retweet your posts
Social Bookmarking – another way your blog gets noticed, brings you additional traffic and establishes more social proof is through social bookmarking sites like Digg.com, Mixx.com, Del-icio.us, StumbleUpon, FriendFeed, etc.
LinkedIn – be sure to post an update to your status on LinkedIn each time you make a blog post so your followers can track your activity
Facebook – similarly, post a link in Facebook to your blog posts to keep people abreast of your activities; e.g., on your Facebook fan page / account
Twitter – be sure to post links to your blog entries occasionally in Twitter (no more often than once per 8 to 10 tweets)

Implement these tips and make you Launch Blog “the place to be” for your launch community.

Coming soon, we’ll discuss your Launch Blog’s content sequencing – what to blog about, and when, during your launch process.

To your success,

Rick Braddy/CEO
WinningWare.com

To learn more about how to get the maximum leverage from Web-based marketing methods when launching a product, website or business, visit us and see how you can plan, organize and execute your launch faster and more profitably. Also, be sure to check out our free launch report.

P.S. If you found this post helpful, please ReTweet it.

Step-by-step Launch Plan for Web Sites

Rick Braddy — Tue, 04 May 2010 16:58:08 +0000

There are many ways to launch a website. However, if you plan on selling something on your site, here’s ten recommended steps to take that will make your launch more successful and profitable. This step-by-step process will help you launch:

E-commerce websites
Membership and subscription sites
Software as a service sites
Single product sales page sites

Step-by-Step Launch Plan Process

1. Set your launch goals and a launch date

Setting your sales goals is the critical first step to actually achieving them, yet it’s surprising how often this step gets glossed over. Begin by choosing a realistic, achievable revenue target for the launch. For example, let’s say we want to generate $100,000 with our launch. Our average sale is estimated to be around $200 per customer order. This means we’ll have to sell 500 units to reach our goal ($100,000 / $200).

This unit sales volume can be used to calculate how much traffic is needed for the launch.

It is also important to choose a realistic launch date that’s at least 30 to 60 days in the future (to provide an adequate ramp through the preparation, planning and pre-launch phases).

2. Pick your launch team members

Getting the right people on your launch team is one of the most critical things you will do. The people on this team must work together toward achieving a common goal – getting your site and product ready and launched properly. Key people you need on your team include:

Executive / Leader – the person responsible for the outcome of the launch (and funding decisions)
Launch Manager – the person who is the final decision-maker for launch-related decisions and staying on schedule
Webmaster – the person responsible for the website infrastructure and web security
Web Designer – the person responsible for website design
Graphics / Video Designer – responsible for graphics design and videos
Copywriter – responsible for the website copy
Outbound Marketing Manager – responsible for advertising, PR and outbound marketing
Inbound Marketing Manager – responsible for social media and inbound marketing (e.g., bloggers, SEO)
Buisness Development Manager – responsible for recruiting affiliates, JV partners and other partners

Now, if you are a small company or entrepreneur, you’re probably wearing a lot of hats. The reality is, you cannot do all of these jobs well, so do yourself a favor and make your launch much more successful by outsourcing each of the above areas that you aren’t 100% qualified and capable (time-wise) of doing a great job on. Getting right team in place with the skills required for success is half the battle of a having a top-notch launch.

3. Choose a target audience – finalize messaging and positioning

It’s important to choose a target audience – as in “one, single” target audience for your launch. This is one of the single biggest pitfalls of launching anything new – not choosing (or knowing, as the case may be) who you must target and reach, and how you can motivate them to take action. For example, if your target audience is small business owners, do not try to also accommodate the Fortune 1000, or you will make the wrong decisions about design, copywriting, offers and your sales process will fall flat and appeal to virtually nobody.

Once you are clear about who your “ideal customer” is, then craft your messaging for that buyer. Consider carefully why this buyer will choose your product over the competition and position yourself favorably as the obvious best choice for your buyer.

4. Identify traffic sources and promotions that will fuel the launch

In step 1, you set launch financial goals that resulted in a unit volume target; e.g., 500 units. To reach this goal, your launch must bring enough qualified traffic to website (i.e., enough of your target buyers). As a rough rule of thumb, you can expect your sales conversion rates to be no more than 2% of your traffic. This means you’ll need approximately 50 times your unit sales volume in traffic.

In the example, we said we wanted to sell 500 units, so we’ll need 25,000 visitors to the website during the launch to reach that sales goal. Keep in mind that these are just approximations designed to get you in the “ballpark”. Depending on many factors, you could require many more visitors (or fewer if you have an established relationship with your visitors on a blog, email list, JV partners with lists, etc.).

It is important to be realistic and conservative when establishing your traffic goals, and ensure you have adequately planned and budgeted for bring this traffic, which is the responsibility of the outbound and inbound marketing managers and business development manager to achieve through their launch programs.

5. Develop your lead-capture and sales processes and related offers

You will developing landing pages and sales pages designed to capture leads and close sales, respectively. These processes must be developed using best-practices and solid design principles so they convert visitors first into leads and then into buyers.

Your offers must entice qualified visitors to opt-in and become a lead in your system during the pre-launch phase. You will most likely need to offer something useful and of value for free in order to attract visitors to register for your launch and site.

6. Design the site specifically for your target audience

Your site must be designed to appeal to your target buyers. If your buyers are consumers, then design for them. If they are enterprises, then a different (more conservative) design is required. Again, you can’t appeal to everyone, so optimize the design of your site for your ideal buyer, at the expense of everyone else so your site is optimized for appealing to your buyers.

7. Implement and test site instrumentation (e.g., Google Analytics)

Ensure you have good instrumentation in place so you can track and optimize everything as your pre-launch and launch progresses. You will not have a lot of time to do split-testing and optimization, so it’s important that you have all of these tests and instrumentation in place and ready to go ahead of time.

8. Verify your product is ready for market

I highly recommend some form of early adopter program be used to prove that your site and product are actually ready to be launched, ahead of your main launch. This seems to take extra time and effort, but in reality it doesn’t. You need customer feedback to ensure your product is ready for market and if it’s a new product, you need testimonials and social proof to use during your launch. Limit early access to around 100 or so people – just enough to ensure you are on the right track and actually ready to launch more broadly.

9. Test and validate all e-commerce and user-facing site features are working

After investing so much time, money and effort to prepare for your launch, ensuring that what your website visitors actually experience is of the highest possible quality is paramount. This means you must fully test each and every possible path a visitor can go through to ensure everything is in top working order, is free of typos and ready to go. Be sure to test:

Lead-capture and auto-responder follow-up messages
Checkout and shopping cart for each product that’s available for sale
Affiliate-tracking to ensure affiliates get credited properly
Merchant accounts (and ensure your merchant processor knows when you’re launching)
Website visitor tracking
Website optimization (if any)
Support systems

10. Execute a professional-grade pre-launch and launch sequence

Now that you’ve completed the first nine steps, you’re ready to begin your formal pre-launch and launch sequence, about 10 days to 2 weeks ahead of your grand opening date.

Launching websites and products isn’t rocket science, but it does require proper planning and following a proven, step-by-step process to achieve best results. Like anything, using the best tools makes all the difference in the results you get, as well as how fast (or hard) it’s going to be to launch your site and product right.

Want to take the guesswork out of launching?
Try WinningWare QuickLaunch free for 30-days and launch it faster and more profitably.

Product Launch Manager Interview with Jeffrey Pezzella

Rick Braddy — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 18:05:24 +0000

Product Launch Manager Group blog owner and product launch manager Jeffrey Pezzella interviewed me yesterday. Jeffrey asked a lot of good questions and it ended up being a content-packed interview that lasted almost a hour.

Download the MP3

(this is a 36MB file, so it takes a little time to download and buffer up, so please be patient)

We ended up talking about all kinds of things related to product launches, including corporate style launches vs. online launches, the importance of relationships, the “numbers game” that goes into planning for revenue success and a lot more.

I also discussed WinningWare QuickLaunch briefly, why we developed it and what’s coming next.

Learn more about WinningWare QuickLaunch

5 Product Launch Success Factors

Rick Braddy — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 03:52:37 +0000

After managing and participating in so many product launches throughout my career, I’ve come to realize that most new product launches fall short of management’s original expectations.

After thinking about the most successful launches I’ve been involved in (which generated tens of millions in early sales and went on to generate billions in sales over a couple of years) vs. the biggest launch failures, I realized some things…

Whether launching a new product or a major new version of an existing product, the biggest factors determining success actually take shape way before the product gets launched. As with any product in a market, to find big success (or any success at all), a number of things must all happen right and come together on launch day:

1. The product must meet a market’s needs better than the competition and customer alternatives (your product strategy needs to be right)

2. The product must be taken to market through high-volume, competitive routes to market (you need a viable, volume go-to-market strategy and ability to execute in a way that drives sales growth fast)

3. The product must be rock-solid, high-quality and actually deliver the value promised so customers actually get the benefits they’re seeking (and that we’re selling to them). This is critical and must actually be verified with early customer testing and validation (and the product doesn’t ship until it’s actually ready, regardless of the “schedule”).

4. The pre-launch market conditioning must create enough awareness and “buzz” with both prospective customers and sales channels that this new product is coming to enable the product to gain enough early mindshare and traction that leads to both actual “proof” and “social proof” that the product is ready for the market. To grow beyond the initial launch, the product must be proven to meet mainstream customer needs (mainstream customers are notoriously risk-averse, so they want to see other companies like them have already taken the risk and proven the product in their environment before using it).

5. The go-to-market engine must buy into the product early and allocate resources to it (e.g., sales force for directly sold product, resellers/affiliates for indirect sales must choose to invest) … and sales absolutely must have early success at selling the product. If the product isn’t really ready for prime time – it’s dead (the sales force probably won’t touch it again for a long time, if ever, and bad news travels fast). And get this, because it’s super-critical. If the product doesn’t convert better than what the reseller/affiliate is already selling today, it’s also dead (they won’t waste anymore of their precious time on your new thingy, and will go right back to selling what already works for them and makes them the most money today). Sales people are “coin operated” and their behavior and decision-making responds directly to what makes them the most money the quickest (and most of them couldn’t care less about your product).

When a product team gets all 5 of the above things right, the product is often a rapid, even amazing, meteoric success. Of course, it’s really hard to get all of these things right the first time, which is why startups, and even established companies, often struggle and fail with new products.

One of the biggest obstacles to getting all of these success factors aligned together is often the fault of senior management – a lack of “patience” and proper “planning” tends to rush the product team, causing them to take risky shortcuts. We’ve all heard the old adage that “time is money”, and these days management is under extreme pressure to increase sales, profits and meet their growth targets – and to do it fast.

Unfortunately, this time pressure often translates to being unreasonably impatient for both growth and profits. I like one of Clayton Christensen’s sayings, which applies here: “Be impatient for profits, and patient for growth“.

This means it’s fine to be in a hurry to get to market and begin your “learning journey” with something new, but if you rush to get to market too quickly, be aware that your product may well not hit the market’s needs properly the first time out, so if you find yourself in this situation, keep your costs low and avoid going “broad” and trying to hit a home run too early (or you’ll burn your customers and sales channel and have to start over – or worse, you’re project will get cancelled altogether and your world will change overnight – not a lot of fun).

You’re often better off holding back on a broad market assault (and full launch) and instead focus on a smaller portion of the market first, and ensure you’re product is ready and capable of market success. This is called a “learning journey” because you must learn about what the market really needs and what must be done to your product to make it capable of being more broadly applicable. In 21st century Internet-based product launches, we call this the “pre-launch” phase…

In a product launch sense, this learning process can also often be accomplished with some good “beta testing”, where you get early customer feedback and ensure you fully understand customer needs (and they understand your product and “want it”) – before attempting to launch the product broadly.

Inserting one or more early test cycles into the development/release/sales cycle takes time and flys directly in the face of an executive who’s in a hurry… so it’s very tempting to thrust past validating the product’s readiness for market.

Unforutnately, I have seen this fiasco unfold firsthand far too many times in my career. And anytime a product is taken to market prematurely, everyone loses – customers, the product team, sales and the sponsoring executive (who may get fired, reassigned or demoted). Avoiding this one “rush to market” pitfall involves patience, dligence and a willingness to face the facts and deal with them as they arise, only choosing to release that product when the market has told you “it’s ready”.

Customers will definitely let you know when you’re product is ready. They’ll start driving you to hurry up and make that product available for them to use in their business. This is the “go signal” you’re looking for to know for certain the product is ready. You’ll also have early (and real) customer testimonials about the product – and this proof goes a long way to comfort everyone that the product is ready for serious consideration.

Whatever approach you decide to take (faster to market / narrower market focus vs. slower to market / broader market focus), you need to be deliberate with your strategy, and your management team need to all fully understand and agree on the strategy, objectives and level of patience required to be successful.

It’s taken me decades of failures, mediocre sucessses and (a few) big home runs to realize that there’s no shortcut to new product success. One thing that really excites me about launching products in today’s global, Internet environment, is that we now have the ability to accelerate the learning journey and product validation cycle greatly – through building small, focused communities of customers around our products BEFORE we launch them, enabling us to see those “go/no-go signals” efficiently and faster than ever.

I hope these five new product launch success factors and insights are helpful and save you some time, grief and improve your odds of new product launch success – either in producing a great new product, if you’re a product vendor, or in evaluating new products and choosing the right ones to go with in your business, if you’re a customer.

For more product launch best practices, download The New Rules of Launch, a free e-book that’s full of helpful strategies, tactics and a proven launch process you can put to immediate use.

Rick

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