Ten Tips for Successfully Launching Your New B2B Product or Service

Improve your odds of a successful launch

If your B2B marketing plans include launching a new product or service, I think you’ll find this interesting.

Schneider Associates, a PR agency in Boston, worked with the Center for Business and Innovation at Babson College to poll B2B marketing and sales executives who recently participated in successful launches.

Here are the study report’s top ten tips for improving the odds of successfully launching your new product or service:

Create a documented launch process.
Set a separate launch budget and make sure it is adequate to meet the launch challenges you face.
Establish your launch budget as early in the product development phase as possible.
Keep your launch budget stable throughout the implementation phase.
Determine your launch performance measures before the launch begins.
Measure the “right” success metrics.
Include the “right” external launch professionals on your team.
Fight for bigger budgets.
Educate your sales force and other internal audiences about your new product or service. Also focus on distributor, retailer or dealer education.
Spend money on word-of-mouth campaigns rather than on advertising.

A complimentary report on the B2B Launch Survey findings is available here.

If you have additional tips or stories about lessons learned the hard way about new product or service launches, please share them.

4 Comments • Add your comment...

This post has good timing and yet maybe a little late for me as I launched a new product today. I think we followed most of your tips though. We tried our best to use as many platforms as possible to get the word out. We posted it to our blog, sent out a press release, added it to our website, and announced it at MarketingProf’s B2B 2.0 Expo virtual tradeshow (the new product is data service for events). Hopefully we will get some good coverage.

Mac, Can you tell me a little more about what you consider to be the “right” success metrics. To me it is ultimately revenue, but that is not very immediate. What are your thoughts?

Left by Amy Hawthorne on March 5th, 2008

Amy,

The easiest way to answer your question is to point you to a couple of articles I’ve written on the subject:

Marketing for leads - are you asking the right questions?

B2B Marketing - prove it’s paying off

Thanks,
Mac

Left by Mac McIntosh on March 7th, 2008

Amy,

Also consider social media. Bookmark the page with your product announcement in del.icio.us, Google Bookmarks, and other sites. (I’m not saying Digg because Digg is often not a B2B crowd. It may apply in some cases.)

Install the StumbleUpon toolbar into your Firefox browser and “Stumble It”. You’d be surprised at the steady stream of traffic that “stumbles” on your product. Probably a trickle, but if you have something catchy it can become a river, and if you are in a niche even a few interested prospects can make a difference.

And get a handful of friends and co-workers to do it too…

And remember to use your target keywords in the link and description (not just the product name) …

I’ve been using http://www.socialmarker.com/ to make it easier to manage my bookmarking accounts.

Hope that helps–

Left by James Prickitt on March 7th, 2008

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Left by b2b marketing agency on April 11th, 2008