Tuesday Marketing Notes (Number 42—July 18th , 2006)

A B2B Marketing Newsletter for BMA Members
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Product-Related Causes of Poor Sales Response: Closing Product Information Gaps (Part 1)

Last week, we addressed some of the marketing and market-related causes of poor sales response on market tests and ongoing marketing activities. This week, we’ll discuss product-related causes of poor sales response, and what you, as a marketing professional, can do to fix the perceptions of a good product which may be misunderstood by the prospects in your market, or identify and close product information gaps that dampen sales response.

Product misperceptions or perceived deficiencies are a frequent cause of poor sales response in marketing programs. These product-related problems are not only revealed by poor market-test results, but also by the comments and feedback your company’s sales staff receives about the product from prospects in the field, as a result of the marketing activity.

Some product-related problems can be corrected by the application of marketing skill, but other problems in your product may not be correctable unless your product undergoes substantial modification. Sometimes the product must be reworked so that it is less expensive, or it must be made with more, fewer, or different features, or it must be improved in some other way to give your market what it wants.

This week, we’ll cover product-related problems that can be solved by application of marketing techniques, and next week, we’ll discuss product-related problems that go beyond marketing, and require extensive re-tooling of your company’s product or service.

Do You Have a Marketing Problem, or a Product Problem?

You must be honest with yourself, and with your management, to discriminate between those product problems that can solved with marketing skill, and the problems that require a retooling of the product. Poor sales response caused by product deficiencies are the most challenging problems for any company, because product retooling efforts often mean a crash program for the product development team to make the necessary changes to the product. This also means you, as a marketing professional, will have to work just as hard as your company’s product development or engineering staff to rework your marketing program to reflect the newly-modified product’s features, benefits, and capabilities.

Understand Marketing Vs. Product Problems Through Product Feedback

Product deficiencies and improvements are usually revealed by the word-of-mouth comments you and your company’s field sales staff receive from conversations with prospects during your marketing program. As your company’s sales reps make their follow-up calls to prospects who receive your mailings, or they hear from prospects who call your company in response to your ad placements, a picture often forms of the problems inherent in your product.

Of course, your most important feedback comes from early buyers who actually use your product. If they see problems or shortcomings in your product, they won’t be shy about letting you know. They’ll also tell their co-workers, business associates, and anyone else who will listen, so if these problems are significant, they will affect your sales response now, and later.

The product faults that kill sales response among prospective buyers tend to repeat themselves over and over again. As your sales reps make their presentations and “go for the close,” they will root out the prospect’s objections to buying the product.

While most skilled sales professionals can effectively counter the most common sales objections raised by a prospect, objections related to major product deficiencies can’t be overcome by sales skills. And if the same objections keep getting raised over and over by your prospects, your sales reps will definitely take note—and you will know that your marketing effort is plagued by a major problem requiring fixes to your company’s product, and one that can’t be solved by marketing alone.

Common Product-Related Causes of Poor Market Response Correctable by Better Marketing Skill

Product is not well explained or understood: This is a common problem for marketers of complex, high technology-related products and services, and is caused by not providing sufficient detail on product features and applications in marketing activities aimed at prospects.

Complicated, expensive products take more time and effort to sell. Part of your function as a marketing manager in a high-tech company is an “educating” task, supplying potential customers with all the information they need to make their purchase decision when it does your company the most good.

The latter point is critical in high-tech selling: You don’t want to bombard your prospects too soon with too much in-depth product information in the initial mailings, ads, and sales kits you send to them. Providing too much information too early in the sales cycle is self-defeating, because your prospects either won’t bother to read it or, absent any personal interaction with your sales reps, some of the prospects who do read these background materials may begin to develop incorrect impressions of your product, based on their incomplete or misunderstood reading of the sales information supplied to them.

Your potential prospects have an infinite capacity to ignore, misinterpret, misunderstand, and otherwise wrongly perceive the content of your marketing program. This happens most often among technically-oriented prospects, who will tend to overlook the business benefits of your product, choosing instead to impose their own, incorrect, final judgment on your product’s technical features in the manner of a frustrated product engineer.

Product information to give to the prospect right away: As a rule, you’ll want to supply just enough product information in your initial marketing activities to get the prospect to contact your company. How much is “just enough” depends on whether or not your prospects keep asking the same questions over and over during their first contact with your company’s sales reps.

Listen to the questions your prospects are asking your sales team: Here are some examples of questions that, if asked over and over again by prospects in their initial conversations with your sales reps, should have been addressed by the marketing deliverables sent to them previously by your company:

• Major functionality question:
“How does your product work?”

• Common product misconception clarified:
“Do I have to do such-and-so to use your product?”

• Major application question:
“Can your product do ___________?”

• Compatibility with another commonly-used industry product or service:
“Is your product compatible with [well-known product, system, standard, or process] ?”

• Common feature question:
“Does your product have [feature ‘X’]?”

If you’re getting a sizeable number of questions like these, important product information is missing from the marketing deliverables—mailings, ads, Web site, etc.—in your marketing program.

For every prospect who asks one of these questions above, there are probably several more who have also already asked and answered these questions, but not in your favor. These are the prospects who aren’t responding to your marketing program.

These important product information gaps in your marketing executables can be closed by revising the sales copy of your advertising and marketing deliverables to provide the needed additional product information. Other product information gaps can be addressed by developing additional printed tip-ins for mailings and sales kits, such as “Answers to Frequently-Asked Questions,” or “Product Q & A” sales sheets.

Answer the questions your prospects ask most frequently about your product in your first marketing contact with them (mailing, ad, etc.), and more prospects will respond to your marketing efforts. You’ll also clear the field to allow your sales reps to handle the more complex and difficult questions raised by your prospects during phone and in-person sales calls, which are the best times in the sales cycle to address these questions.

Product information your prospect should receive from your sales reps: In-depth, detailed information on your product’s technical features and capabilities, its applications, and other information addressing complex aspects of your product should be part of the sales material your sales reps supply to prospects in follow-up mailings and personal sales calls with prospects.

Examples of the kinds of product information that should be “talked through” with additional explanation and commentary by your sales reps include:

• Product case studies;
• “White Papers” on specialized product uses and applications;
• Third-party technical articles and analysis relating to the product;
• Product sales/applications video;
• Product instructional use manuals, reports, and specification sheets

The rule of thumb here is that any issue relating to your company’s product that prompts a question from the prospect which threatens the sale, should instead be handled and skillfully neutralized by an on-the-ground sales rep when the sales rep contacts the prospect.

To make distribution of these materials fast and easy by your company’s sales reps, many of them can be posted to a dedicated Web URL (i.e., a Web address not otherwise made public by your company) on your company’s Web site. Your sales reps can then e-mail this link to their prospects as a follow-up to their contact with them.

Next week, we’ll discuss the changes necessary to improve sales response in the marketing program, when products must be re-tooled and improved . . .

Comments? Questions? Send them to me at: eric@realmarkets.net

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Eric Gagnon (eric@realmarkets.net), is president of GAA (www.realmarkets.net), a sales and business development consulting firm, and is the author of The Marketing Manager’s Handbook, the master study guide for the Business Marketing Association’s Marketing Skills Assessment, Skill Builder, and Certification (MSA/B/C) programs.

For more information on The Marketing Manager’s Handbook, available to BMA members at a special discount, link to:

http://www.businessmarketinginstitute.com/book.html

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Test, Train, and Build Your B2B Marketing Skills for Better Sales Success: BMA Announces New Assessment, Training, and Certification for B2B Marketing Managers

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