Launch new products
Today customers know a lot about the competitive companies and products before they even contact sellers. Therefore Marketing needs to work with Sales to provide the information necessary to educate the customer before the sales process begins, as well as, throughout the various buying stages as sales progress. And, they need to provide their sales teams the information necessary to become informed about the buyer’s company, industry and market.
To say the least, the process for educating the customer and informing the sales team is an entirely different story then simply producing product brochures and feature specification handouts.
Sales. New product launches often fail to deliver expected results because the sales force isn’t able to sell the new product. Money and time is spent on R&D, manufacturing, packaging, and marketing but the investment in improving the skills of the sales team to sell the new product is simply not commensurate with the overall effort. Specifically:
- Companies don’t focus on developing the sales skills, don’t train the sales force in applying the product and competitive knowledge in the sales setting, nor do they do a good job of reinforcing the training that is received by the sales force – so very little of the new product training “sticks.”
- Sales managers don’t properly coach sales reps to sell the new product. Some lack the skills to coach their sales teams while others don’t know the best practices for selling the new product any better than the sales team.
The result? Sales reps have difficulty selling the new product so they just go back to selling what they know. When the results are compounded – the dreams for the new product success never materialize.
How might a company turn this result around? Train your sales force then launch the 
product rather than launch the product then train your sales force. For some specific best practices take a look at this infographic.
For more information about launching new products download our whitepaper – Don’t Let Your Next Product Launch Fail.
If you found this post helpful, you might want to join the conversation and subscribe to the Sales Training Connection.
©2015 Sales Momentum, LLC
