New Sales Enablement Ideas – SAVO’s AMPs, Part 3 – Product Promotion

This is the third post in a series about SAVO’s new sales enablement services that debuted at their recent Sales Enablement Summit. It’s no surprise to me that SAVO has doubled down on providing us advice on sales enablement. I personally have partnered with them for nearly a decade for advice and best practices. Now, they have packaged their best practices for everyone and labeled them AMPs, which stands for Achieving Maximum Potential.

In the previous post, I discussed strategic account management. Today, we’ll dive into SAVO’s offering that supports product promotion. The Corporate Executive Board’s recent benchmark indicates that only 8% of growth (on average) comes from new products sold to new or existing customers. Sounds small, but do you want to miss your growth goal by 8 percent? Neither do I, so I was very excited to talk to SAVO about the best practices they suggest for successfully launching new products.

Start early!

Teaser campaigns can get your sales teams excited about upcoming product launches, but you must outline your product’s value to the client so sellers can integrate that message into meetings with prospects well ahead of the launch. The result? You will be building your pipeline long before bringing the product to market. A strong pipeline and early excitement ensure sellers don’t get stuck in a long ramp-up time while they learn through the grape vine. Instead, they will be able to actually begin closing sales soon after launch.

Education

Many tech companies produce what’s known as “vapor-ware,” because they started marketing early, but did not properly educate their sales team about exactly the niche the new product would fill. The sales team, running with unsubstantiated information, promoted their great new offering as a silver bullet – a solution for everyone! When released, the product inevitably missed the mark. You need a format to explain the product, who needs it and what problems it solves. You also need to help the seller create a compelling conversation that explains all these factors. Whether you call it a guidebook or quicksheet , SAVO knows it has to be simple and concise to get the seller’s attention. Their consultants are skilled in helping you develop tools that ensure your sellers are telling the right story.

Pilot

This is a step you should consider in many launches. Even the best training and education program may need to be tweaked before launching the product to the entire organization. It’s possible that a close look will make it clear that the product should not be launched to everyone — maybe it’s only appropriate for a subset of the organization. In a pilot, you also find champions who will reinforce why and how this product can make a sales person more successful. They will assist you in the ultimate launch.

Launch

The sellers must understand launch timelines and how they will impact customers and prospects. At this point, you should be able to overcome the “vapor-ware curse;” be clear with the sales team about the product’s actual capacity and how quickly it can be delivered.

SAVO has seen this work well; I have even provided them some examples of what doesn’t work. They understand how this issue differs by industry and they have the templates and advice to ensure a smooth product launch.

This post originally appeared as a guest post on SAVO’s blog.

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