Achtung Falle, wenn Sie neue Produkte einführen

Mal wieder bei Huthwaite im Newsletter The Spin Vol 5, No 8, unter der Überschrift When Enthusiasm Takes a Wrong Turn etwas lesenswertes über Produkteinführungen gefunden.

Sollten Sie also ein Neues Produkt einführen wollen, unbedingt lesen.

…When introducing innovative new products to the market do you find that initial customer interest is frequently underwhelming? Does your target audience seem to be a lot less excited about your new offerings than you expected? Do you know why?

Consider the introduction of those products. How were they launched to the sales force? Perhaps your marketing department spent a great deal of time and effort educating the sales force on each product’s great new capabilities. And, no doubt, sellers diligently memorized all of the state-of-the-art product features. But therein begins the problem. Focus is all on the products, rather than on what those products can do for customers. Sales people, excited about having something new to sell, tend to try to describe their way to success by telling customers about new product features. But customers don’t care about features; they care about solving problems and exploiting opportunities. They will have little to no enthusiasm for your new offerings absent a clear understanding of how those offerings can help them improve their businesses.
Huthwaite research reveals that sales people who are enthusiastic about a new product actually sell less effectively than those who are not as excited about the product. Yes, you read that right: enthusiasm about a new product can have a detrimental effect on sales. The reason – while surprising – is rather simple. It’s not the enthusiasm per se that causes bad salesmanship. Rather it’s the enthusiasm that causes a seller to ignore good sales skills and push the product itself – talking about features and forgetting to focus on the needs of the customer. We’ve found that even veteran “consultative” sales people are guilty of this critical oversight.

Effective sellers are keenly aware of the importance of uncovering and developing customer needs by asking good questions. Yet, our research shows that when selling new products sales people ask much fewer questions. The average number of questions asked per sales call drops from 24.2 for existing products to 15.8 for new products. At the same time, sellers pitch many more features per call than usual—increasing from 5.9 occurrences for existing products to a disturbing 18.3 occurrences for new products.
It’s hard to blame sales people for falling into this trap since companies tend to launch new products to them with a heavy emphasis on features. And we certainly aren’t suggesting that sellers should be discouraged from being enthusiastic about the offerings they sell. We do recommend, however, that sellers channel their enthusiasm into more productive activities like identifying business problems newly introduced products can address and planning questions that will help customers discover for themselves the benefits of new capabilities. We also suggest that marketers learn to deliver customer-focused product introductions and training.

In today’s market, if new products enjoy any differentiation at all, it’s not for very long. Don’t waste your precious window of competitive advantage trying to tell your customers how great your new products are. …

Wie gehabt: Nutzen statt Merkmale auch oder gerade bei der Einführung neuer Produkte.

Siehe auch meinen allersersten Artikel vom August 20005 hier im Blog über die Vorteilsargumentation.