Deep Dive New Product Rescue Mined Afresh

I blogged last month on my dispiriting first attempt to gain newfound insight around my 'new product rescue' niche authority. Using my own 'language model' from one of the big boys to identify 'golden threads', winning patterns and useful gaps.

Yet its output's slop-to-super ratio was sadly loaded on the wrong end of the see-saw. Where it was bad, it wholly misinterpreted the proven best-practice, made up misleading labels of its own, and generally sounded like a humanities undergrad mistakenly on secondment to a corporate Sales Ops team.

To recognise this, and able to build on it properly, is still useful. So here I split out good vibes from its initial 15pp 'deep dive' slide deck.

Starting with its given title; Rescuing the Enterprise B2B Product Launch.

Which is definitely on point with my approach. As most of my commissions in this arena follow the 'damp squib', with careers now on the line.

Yet that ought not dismiss the power of those realising it's way better to earlier siphon off some of the investment being thrown at the new wares to head off such occurrence - which let's not forget afflicts a shocking three-in-four such B2B launches - preventing any such rot setting in alongside trauma of remedial action and internal political recriminations.

Here's an early dose of word salad.

A launch is not a marketing event. It is a strategically engineered sales ecosystem.

Swiftly rammed home with;

If Marketing builds the launch, it fails. Sales must own the launch mechanics.

Fifteen years ago, I made a list of all the Enterprise salesteam product launch events I'd attended. All of them for projects I was actively involved in helping move forward. There were 64. Safe to say the number's now well into three figures.

One central plank that separates the blossom of winners from the weeds of losers around new product launch is knowing that a Marketing event and a Sales one are inherently not the same thing.

If - as lamentably is so often the case - pretty much the first time a salesteam get to hear properly of a new product is when Marketing get them in a room and tell them, you are likely headed for disaster.

Just one reason why it's better to understand how the full joined-up process must work, is around what our argot today calls Design Partners. I've long had my own taxonomy within these essential foundations. And as customers are usually tightly entwined with Sales, to not match this up is a huge alarm bell.

Whatever the second clause of the above pair's first sample means, despite needing to be written better it's sentiment is the right direction.

Yet that's not to say Sales launches automatically work. For this contains an astute précis;

Management assumes 'If we build it, they will sell it.'
This is the deadliest assumption in enterprise sales.

Without genuine belief, reps become "shills" peddling a fiction.
You must engineer internal conviction before external communication.

We do not await a magical whirlwind to assemble your sales motion.
We engineer the exact behavioral strands required to replicate enterprise success.

Even if the more flowery prose as it ends we can probably do without.

There is still key focus required.

Two of such deadly pincers to avoid of 'sales substitution' traps being new product tunnel vision or legacy comfort zoning.

And as the last couplet rightly alludes, we must engineer success that we can replicate. How does your present new product endeavour stack up on all this?