New Products must be launched with customer centricity

In many B2B businesses, the marketing and sales departments live in different worlds and this results into :    

• the "ball not being caught” by any of these two
• new products failing to reach their potential (not to speak about their targets)
• reduction in the morale of both the sales and marketing teams
• grass-root salespersons consider promoting new products a waste of their time

what can be done about to avoid all this ?

NEW PRODUCTS : ENGINES OF GROWTH

CEOs love the  new product program because these launches

• are visible events - inside and outside - to rally people together
• make functional silos to work as towards a common goal cross-functionally
• improve the technology quotient in the overall product line
• give something to talk about to the customers and employees
• may serve as preemptive technological obsolescence of one’s own line
• are seen as “new ammunition” to fight the competition

HOW MARKETING LAUNCHES NEW PRODUCTS

In most companies, the marketing department conducts road shows in various branches. During these road shows they dump a huge load of data and materials during the internal launch seminar

• Explanation of how it works
• What are the multiple configurations
• What are the various connectivity options
• How to demonstrate various features
• Feature-Price comparison with the competition
• What campaign has been planned in print, magazines, websites
• Glossy and nice brochures, fact sheets, tech specs, FAQs, gifts.

NEW PRODUCTS : WASTE OF SALES FORCE TIME

But no one really asks what do the front line salespersons REALLY NEED from the company. Because, unless your products are so outstanding and so well promoted that the customers will queue up for them on their own,  this way of launching will not work. And this statement is particularly true if you do “solution selling” (also called “consultative selling”) i.e. you sell your products as “solutions” to the customers’ “problem”.

So, although the marketing department has taken a lot of effort to launch the products, the entire effort has been product-centric.  It is not clear who will make the  salesperson effective in selling the new product in a consultative / solution mode. This requires a the salesperson to have a deep understanding of the following in the context of new products

• the customer’s pain points
• how the new product addresses these pains
• how the new products is a better solution than the competition to alleviate these pains
• who is a prospect and how to locate them
• how to find where is the prospect on his “buying journey”
• how to provide comfort to him in context of “business”, “stakeholders”, his “persona”
• what specific messages are relevant at what stage of the buying journey
• Generally how to increase the sales velocity.

After all, the sales department wants marketing to give it the ammunition to jump-start the acceptance and sale of new products, to shorten time to revenue, to improve the lifetime profitability of their offering compared to customer needs and competition and to keep major competitors out of key accounts.

THE RESULT IN THE MARKET

The way things are in most companies right now,  this important stage is really no one’s responsibility and, since it is so, ultimately the burden falls on the shoulders of the poor front line salesperson to learn it all by himself - through trial and error - with some help from their own direct first-line supervisor.  

But the front line salespersons are so busy in their day to day job of selling the whole product line - and achieving their monthly targets - that most sales people cannot give a focused attention to how the new products are to be put across to the prospects. As a result, many salespersons take a long time to internalize it many do not get it at all.

The outcome of all this is that the productivity remains low for a new product for a far longer time than it is planned.  The salespersons and the sales channel member get disillusioned and demoralized and their expectations from the new product become low. All sales and marketing people connected with the new product begin to feel small due to constant needling from the top management. The product becomes a victim of self fulfilling prophesy and never meets the potential had been launched properly and given proper attention by both the marketing and sales departments. 

WHOSE RESPONSIBILITY IS IT?

Is marketing responsible? Many would take a pragmatic view and say that the marketing department cannot be held responsible because they are situated at HO and do not deal with – and hence have no visibility of - individual customers. And therefore they cannot possibly craft an individual messaging strategy for an individual customer.

With this kind of mindset it is easy to understand that most marketing departments in B2B business are product-centric. When you generally do not get to meet individual customers, you really do not know what drives them to behave in the way they do. And therefore the marketing people cannot be anything but product centric! What an irony!

THE ANSWER  

The REAL answer is that Marketing need not customize messages but should develop training material (based on research and testing) to help the sales force to prepare themselves for customization.  

The Marketing should develop "Buyer Personas" and "Buying Journeys" for each such persona so that this can be used in the field to train the sales force. If the sales force are just given product knowledge, demo and print material; they flounder when they personally meet the customers. But when they are trained in dealing with the customers and how to create consultative conversations with them, their trial and error time reduces drastically, they become more productive, more confident. This  results into the sales curve of the new products go up faster resulting into all round feel good factor and this lays a solid ground work for the company to introduce new products.

THE HIDDEN BENEFIT  

When the sales force is well trained not only in what the products offer but also in how to sell them to the customers, the time spent in "Sales Support" after the new products is launched comes down sharply. I know that in some companies, the sales force is so untrained that they call the marketing managers to deal with many customers as if it is their job to close the sales.