Introducing New Products Effectively: The Solution Expert vs. The Problem Expert By Kevin Temple, President of ValueVision Associates	<< Back
In a recent study, 47% of responding companies' say they will rise to the challenge of the current economy by introducing new products to generate additional incomeàare you ready to sell them? Many organizations measure "time to market" - a measurement of the time it takes to produce the product or service, however, the important metric for every sales organization is "time to revenue". This is the measurement of the time it takes to sell enough of the product or service to overcome the investment in the product and start generating a profit. Although not commonly measured, it should be a focus of all broad product line organizations. The traditional approach to new product introduction is to hook the "fire-hose" up to the sales person, dumping information in their heads in an attempt to make them "solution experts". Unfortunately, unless they have a reason to care, they quickly saturate and their brains quite absorbing. A more effective approach is to develop the "who cares" trigger by making them "problem experts". Instead of attempting to fill their heads with knowledge about the capabilities of the new product or service, try a different approach - help them understand what problems can be solved by the new product or service. In other words, help them understand why someone would care about this new product. Then send them out to the prospective customers' looking for the problems. When they find a prospect that resonates with the problem list, you will then have two people motivated to find out more about the new product - the seller and the buyer. One of our clients is a leading software company, and they asked us to help them improve their professional services sales. After several years of pushing their capabilities with glossy brochures they were only able to build a $2M service business - less than 1% of their overall software business. ValueVision Associates implemented this "problem expert" method by profiling what problems their services could address, sent out the sales force to find the problems and their sales jumped to $100M in the next year. So the next time you have a new product to sell, ask, "who cares and why?" P.S. Although this sounds easy, it's tougher than it looks. Many sales organizations have a challenge switching to the language of "problem-ese", and their attempts to identify problems still ends up sounding like solution descriptions. Run one of your examples by us to check it out, and we'll let you know if you're on target. Kevin Temple is cofounder and president of ValueVision Associates (www.valueselling.com), creators of the Value Selling framework. Prior to ValueVision Associates, Mr. Temple was Vice President of Sales for Cadence Design Systems, the world's largest electronic design automation supplier. While at Cadence, Mr. Temple re-engineered the sales organization to move from product feature/function selling to high-level business impact selling using the Value Selling framework, which is now provided by ValueVision Associates. The results were outstanding -- revenue growth jumped from 6% to 38% annually, discounting dropped by 38%, and the breadth of products included in every sale increased dramatically. During his tenure at Cadence, sales increased from $48 million to over $700 million per year. Mr. Temple can be reached at kevin@valueselling.com.
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Introducing New Products Effectively: The Solution Expert vs. The Problem Expert