How to Create a Successful Product Launch
Dr. Jordan Sudberg is not only a renowned physician but as the CEO and Medical Director of a very busy spine and sports rehabilitation clinic in Islandia, New York, Sudberg is an expert in his business, which happens to be medicine orientated.
So when it comes to how to create a successful product launch for a business, Mr. Sudberg is an ideal candidate to turn to for advice.
Have a launch plan
One of the first keys is to have a product launch plan and involve everyone important to your launch’s success. A company cannot afford to just assign a project manager to lead the program and expect success. Every key player must be involved and sign off on the plan.
Conduct extensive market research
This is probably the single biggest reason product launches fail is that not enough research is conducted to see if potential customers even need or want a product.
A company cannot just create a demand for a product out of thin air, although many companies try. There needs to be a solid demand for a product. The product, in general, must solve a painful pinch point and make life easier for its customers.
Identify the target market
Once a true demand for the product is identified, the ideal customer needs to be identified to buy the product. If a company has developed revolutionary software to make it easier to deal with Customer Relations Management files, then concentrate on selling to the end-users, not just an anonymous employee in a general department.
The more the ideal target customer is identified, the closer a company gets to a successful product launch.
Identify the competing competitors for the product
It’s exceedingly rare that a company comes up with a product that has no competitors.
Dr. Jordan Sudberg believes that it’s very important that those competitors are identified so a company has a blueprint to obtain more sales by contrasting the new launch product with what competitors are offering.
Develop a marketing strategy
Once a company has done enough marketing research to determine if there is a need for the product and once competing competitors have been analyzed, a company still needs to
build a marketing strategy that builds excitement for the new product.
And excitement is not just a short-term thing. From beginning to end, a company should be lauded as a resolver of pinch points such as integration with other software, or advances that resolve real-world business problems.
Carry through by analyzing real-world measurements and benchmarks
A company needs to follow the advice of famed baseball philosopher Yogi Berra who said,
“You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you are going, because you might not get there.”
Set real-world measurements and benchmarks that the company wants to achieve for the product launch, conduct extensive testing, and analyze what worked and what didn’t.
Hopefully, a product launch was a big success, but if it wasn’t, that does not mean the product cannot be very successful. It may just mean that an element of the product line focus was dropped along the way and needs to be fine-tuned.