How to Successfully Sell a Brand-New Product
How is selling a new product different than selling an existing product? It can sometimes be a lot harder. Here’s what you can do to make selling a new product easier.
Why Should Customers Buy Your Product?
All ethical sales are a result of meeting a customer's want or need. For example, it would be unethical to sell a more expensive roof with a 50-year warranty to a 90-year-old homeowner. However, that same sale would be ethical if you could get that 90-year-old a higher selling price for her home with that extended warranty.
As an ethical sales professional, you need to know why a customer would want or need your product. We can assume that the people who developed the product understand why--they identified a need or want and then developed the product. So now, you as a sales professional need to know what problem or need the new product is designed to meet.
Don’t be surprised if the market tells you something more. You might be familiar with minoxidil, a drug used for treating male-pattern baldness and hair loss in women. Did you know that oral minoxidil was originally used for treating high blood pressure? Its use expanded as patients and health care providers noticed that hair growth was a side effect of treatment.
You still have to start with a reason customers should buy, whether or not the market gives you new information.
Who Is Your Customer?
You can develop an effective sales process only when you know who your customer is. Some salespeople think that everyone is their prospect. That’s wrong.
You don’t have the time to sell to everyone. What you want to do instead is define your ideal customer. Selling to an ideal customer is a lot easier and more effective than trying to sell to everyone.
Consider who would need your product, and determine both the demographics and psychographics of your ideal customer. Some demographics or statistical data to consider are age, gender, income, job title, location, years of experience, or other relevant data.
Next, consider the psychographics of your prospects or the way they think. Are they risk takers or are they risk averse? Are they big spenders or are they frugal? Is quality important to them? Is their appearance important to them? You can begin to connect your product to your prospect once you know how they think.
What you will be doing with this information is looking for prospects who match those demographics and psychographics. It’s not that you won’t consider anyone who isn’t a 100 percent but you will know that they will be harder to sell to when they are a mismatch.
How Can I Reach Them?
Just as you can’t sell to everyone, you don’t have unlimited money to spend to reach your prospects. Your choice of how you contact a prospect depends on who your prospect is.
Think about the different ways you might contact a 70-year-old prospect versus a 20-something prospect. While many 70-year-olds are on the Internet today, you might wonder how effective a purchasing strategy based on the Internet would be if they aren’t online shoppers. An Internet strategy makes perfect sense for 20-somethings who routinely shop online.
Of course, you have other options to evaluate including face-to-face sales, bulk mail letters, and telephone sales.
In the end, your decision will be based on the cost versus effectiveness of each method. You will be able to determine the best way to reach your prospects with your new product after you evaluate all the different methods to reach your prospect.
Selling an existing product is easier because you know the answers to these questions. After all, you have the results to prove it. It’s only a matter of time before you will have this data for your new product. Just be sure to answer these questions before you start selling.
