Here's How to Beat the Odds With a Successful New Product Launch

By Aaron Agius

The lead up to a product launch is one of the most exciting, yet daunting periods for a business. In the best-case scenario, a new product launch leads to huge sales and positive publicity. However, this is not always what happens.

In a study by Harvard Business School, it’s estimated that 95% of consumer goods fail. When you’ve poured thousands (or millions) of dollars and immeasurable labor into launching a new product and it tanks, this is a crushing blow for the company.

While there is no definitive way to guarantee success with a launch, one of the ways you can dramatically improve your chances is by promoting a multi-departmental approach.

Oftentimes, the success or failure of a product launch rests on the shoulders of the sales and marketing department. This is a large burden to bear. When all departments pull together collaboratively, the results of a launch are improved. Here are tips on how each department can help.

Sales and marketing

The experts on your sales and marketing team should be responsible for deciding how the product should be positioned. Also, they need to produce marketing materials such as sales copy, videos, and blog posts leading up to the launch.

These individuals need to determine which sales channels will be used to market and sell the product, and whether or not distributors will be involved. Market research should also be conducted to determine which geographical regions to focus on.

If social media marketing is part of your strategy, determining which platforms to focus on is crucial. For instance, 81% of Pinterest’s user base is female. If you’re launching a product for women, focusing solely on Facebook ads while neglecting Pinterest could be disastrous.

RELATED: 6 Steps for Using Social Media to Promote Your Invention Idea

Other tasks for the sales and marketing department include: sales forecasting, stock keeping unit (SKU) management, and compliance.

Customer service

Customer service personnel should be integral to any launch, but they’re particularly important when launching higher ticket items such as online courses.

If you’re sending cold traffic to a Shopify store that is selling a $40 product, getting people to convert on the first visit is totally reasonable. With some trust badges on your site, customer reviews, and a good FAQ section, people will feel comfortable making a purchase. If you’re selling a digital marketing course that costs $2,000, people are going to check you out thoroughly and ask lots of questions before purchasing.

Customer service professionals can alleviate fears, answer questions, and recommend the right product/model for each individual customer. Also, upsell offers should be presented to customers who are not receiving (or responding to) promotional messages. This can be achieved over the phone, on social media or with live chat applications such as Olark. And when common trends appear regarding consumer fears and queries, this information can be given to the sales and marketing department in order to craft more effective marketing collateral.

Whenever you’re doing a big launch, there needs to be an open channel of communication between your brand and your customers. Your customer service team should fill this role.

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R&D

While your research and development department will have played a significant role in innovating the new product, it’s wise to keep them in the loop for the launch. R&D can help to give your product context, and one of the ways you can achieve this is by having your marketing writers collaborate with R&D to produce customer case studies.

As I mentioned, social proof is essential if you want your product launch to be a success. Arguably the best form of social proof is a customer case study. Your R&D team can give you technical information and success metrics for your previous customers, while your marketing writer can weave this into a compelling narrative to attract new customers when you launch.

Likewise, R&D can discuss a product’s features in-depth, but you will need a competent writer who can word the emotional benefits so that your audience is encouraged to purchase.

Information technology

Sometimes your product is a perfect fit for your target demographic, the marketing materials are excellent, and people are willing to buy—but the launch is a disaster. Technical mishaps can completely destroy a product launch. This diminishes initial profits, hurts brand loyalty, and may prevent the new product from gathering any momentum at all.

Perhaps the server received an exceptionally high amount of traffic which caused a crash, or the lead page wasn’t properly configured to accept credit card payments. Even a failed webinar in the lead up to the event can have long-reaching consequences. This is why it’s important to have your IT department on standby for all stages of the launch.

Webinars need to be tested before they go live and any problems need to be ironed out. Likewise, all front-end facets of the launch need to be tested so that users can interact with the website as intended—with no unpleasant surprises.

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