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Product-Related Causes of Poor Sales Response:

Fixing Problems with the Product (Part 2)

by Eric Gagnon

Last week, we discussed problems of poor sales response related to product information gaps—where what you’re not telling about your product is causing potential buyers in your market not to respond to your marketing program. This week, we’ll discuss how you can identify and address problems that relate directly to defects in the product itself.

Product-related problems have two main causes: Deficient products, or products that are ahead of their markets. As a marketer, you have a limited role in being able to cure a deficient product, but you have greater influence in increasing sales response for a product which may be ahead of its time.

Step One: If Your Product is Deficient, Fix Your Product

More and better marketing skill never saved a bad product. Experienced marketers who sell real products in the real world already know that a different, or more intensive, marketing program will never save a deeply-flawed product, or a product that is wrong for its market. If your market response reveals that your product’s poor marketability can only be reversed by improving the product, then the application of your marketer’s skill to the current version of the product is no better than a band-aid approach.

If your company’s product is broken, FIX IT: If it’s too slow, make it faster. If it’s weak, make it stronger. If it’s too expensive, find a way to make it cost less. If it’s too complicated, redesign its features to make it more accessible to your prospects. Sounds obvious, but we've all been put in positions as marketing professionals to defend products that come up short on key features, when fixing the problem would be just as easy.

You may be able to improve sales response in the short run, by cutting your price, or by puffing up the product in your sales copy and presentation, or by resorting to other cheap marketing tricks, but these methods only further erode market confidence, dampening your sales over time, making your company’s situation far worse than if you’d straightened out your product in the first place.

Prospects and new customers have long memories about bad products—so every day you spend putting more effort and marketing dollars into trying to sell a defective product is another day spent digging your marketing program into a deeper hole. Do this for too long and your company will never recover from its bad reputation.

If your company can’t (or won’t) fix their product, find a new job, or dump this client. Life’s too short and there are too many better ways to put your abilities to good use. Don’t waste another day working for someone too thick or compromised to recognize they need to be selling a better product.

Do marketers have a role in product development? You bet! Since you’re the one being held responsible for the result of the marketing program, if the product is broken, deficient, too costly, or off-target in any other respect, then it’s also your problem, too. You not only have an obligation, but a right to be a part of the solution. Increase your influence by aligning yourself with your company’s sales team to lobby for the changes necessary to improve a product, to improve its sales acceptance in your market.

Product-related causes of poor market response also require you to work closely with your company’s product development team to communicate the market response received on the product, and to champion the product fixes necessary to increase the product’s sales potential.

Crisis Marketing: Taking Action When the Product is Ahead of Its Market

Products that require too great a change in the prospect’s ways of doing business, or are ahead of their time, represent the toughest product-related problems to solve. This is a very common problem with “first movers”—high-tech start-ups and established companies launching brand-new kinds of products.

A start-up or established company may create and produce a revolutionary new product, process or service with many, very positive attributes: A new metals-finishing process for industrial manufacturers, a new electronic payment system for businesses, a new resume-screening system for personnel managers.

The company’s cutting-edge new product or service may well be a quantum leap beyond the current technology, manufacturing processes, or the market’s current business practices. But, despite their many positive attributes, and despite a well-conceived and executed product launch, sales response is poor.

The company’s management, product development, and marketing staff are stunned to see such a poor reaction to their new product, and rightly so. After all, they say America is the land of the creative innovator, the technology that transforms entire industries, the new way of doing business that creates an entirely new market. But why aren’t we getting traction with our product?

For every business innovation or technology that changes the world, there are many, perhaps equally significant, new products that fail to generate sales response, for one or more of the following reasons:

• They require users to make disruptive changes in the ways they currently do business, or to run their operations in ways that are too much of a radical departure from their current ways of doing business;

• They threaten the prospect’s economic livelihood by upsetting traditional, well-established sales and distribution channels in the industry;

• The time required for an industry or marketplace to accept and adopt the innovator’s new technology is well beyond the innovator’s financial staying power;

• The current technology in widespread use is just “good enough” for most people, and a new technology offering only a moderate improvement will have a very hard time gaining a foothold in this market. The QWERTY keyboard and VHS video recording are two examples of “good enough” technology that can withstand most “somewhat better” improvements

Sometimes the “disruptive technology” represented by your company’s new product or service is just too disruptive for its market. The smart marketing manager knows it’s a losing battle to waste time criticizing the prospect’s lack of vision, and to despair in his company’s bad fortune.

Action is the antidote to despair, and a product or its marketing approach can often be changed in ways that increase market acceptance and sales response.

A new day begins for a troubled company as soon as the company’s management team snaps out of the shock and despair that comes from the realization that its product is too far ahead of its market, and starts taking action to solve its problem in the here and now.

Saving a Product That is Ahead of its Time

Staging a turnaround for a company with a product ahead of its time in its market is the most difficult effort any company’s management, product development, and marketing teams can undertake. For an established company with other successful product lines, a single new product failure may be a major, but survivable, setback, but for a start-up, failure to save its one and only product can be fatal blow. Products utilizing technology or processes way beyond the understanding and acceptance of their markets must often be substantially modified to meet the needs and wants of the prospect.

Cut the feature set: One way to change a product that is ahead of its market is to scale back its features or components to reduce its price, and, hopefully, improve its market appeal. A product or service can also be reduced in scope down to the one or two essential features that are most useful to its potential customers, or new features may be added to bring the product more in line with market needs.

Changes in the product always mean changes to your marketing program: As a marketing manager with this kind of problem in a start-up or new product launch, you must make drastic changes in how you present and sell the product. Many of these marketing approaches will require a similar downsizing of your original marketing plan and deliverables. In the process, you must put aside many of the aspirations you once held in your original vision of the product, in order to make the required changes.

However, if you can keep from losing your sense of idealism and view the inevitable compromises you’ll have to make in the product and its marketing goals as a strategic pullback, not a defeat, your company’s original goals may only be temporarily deferred, and not compromised out of existence. One day, the full version of your product may return to the market and be embraced by it, with all of its exciting technical aspects. But until then, your current marketing efforts can generate sales and keep your company going so that it (and you) may live to fight another day.

Common Changes to Marketing Strategy and Deliverables When a Product is Retooled

When a start-up or established company undergoes a major product retooling, the sales copy and presentation used in the marketing deliverables of your marketing program also faces a massive revision. As the product is changed to make it more saleable for its market, here are examples of three kinds of changes to sales copy and presentation that frequently occur alongside product retooling efforts:

• Sell a piece of the product, not the whole: Focus on the one or two aspects of the product that provide the most benefit to the prospect, instead of overwhelming the prospect with all of its product features and detail. Prospects in your market may more readily accept a simpler product that is positioned as a solution to one of their problems, rather than a product they perceive as a complex new technology or process they will have to install and learn;

• Talk like an insider: Adopt the language of your market, describing your product in ways that are analogous to the kinds of products the prospect currently uses in his/her industry, and the ways the prospect currently does business;

• Hide the hardware: Shift the focus of your product’s sales copy from its technology (“the hardware”), to the problems your product solves for the user in his or her industry. Most people—your prospects—don’t like to think about having to do the extra work required to learn a better way of doing their jobs, no matter how impressive your technology, so cut back on the technospeak and marketing rhetoric you use to describe your product’s technology.

Many start-up (or new product launch) management teams lose touch with their markets because they have become too attached to the notion of touting their product’s advanced technical features.

These are the very features that made their product too advanced for their markets in the first place, and this attachment often carries over to the company’s marketing program, and the deliverables used to sell the product. When the product is retooled, the marketing deliverables that are used to sell the retooled product must also lose their attachment to these advanced technical features, and instead focus on the problems that the prospect needs to solve in their business, and how the product solves these problems.

Reader Comments

In response to last week's TMN on marketing turnarounds, Ford Kanzler writes:

Hello Eric,

Enjoyed your story, particularly the part about putting blood and reality into the product story. Only suggestion is not dwelling on comparative (better than) communications but focusing on strong differentiation in the story. Faster, cheaper, quicker doesn't really cut it if you want to stand out. Pointing to what your product or company can do that no other is doing or better yet, that no other can do, will get the desired attention. A bow to Jack Trout and Al Ries.

Best,
Ford Kanzler (ford@prsavvy.com)
Managing Partner
Marketing/PR Savvy
El Granada, CA

Ford:

You are absolutely right that changes in positioning, by developing what's unique about your company and product and using this new presentation to sell your products, is another critically important approach to solving market-related problems.

Thanks also for pointing out the classic book on this subject, Positioning, The Battle for Your Mind, by Jack Trout and Al Ries, as well as other related books by Trout and Ries, which deserve a place on every marketing professional's bookshelf...E.G.

 

Comments? Questions? Send them to me at: eric@businessmarketinginstitute.com

Eric Gagnon (eric@realmarkets.net), a director with the Business Marketing Institute, is author of The Marketing Manager’s Handbook and The CRM Field Marketing Handbook, and president of GAA ( http://www.realmarkets.net ), a marketing, sales turnaround, and product development consulting firm.