QDI’s 50 Questions to Rate Your Launch Plan.
QDI’s launch planning checklist to put the odds on your side.
Whitepaper summary:
As companies develop new products and services, more is at stake than just incremental revenue.
A poor product launch can damage a company’s image in terms of alienating the sales force, lowering customer satisfaction, and reducing your overall credibility. Thus, while companies have invested millions to build their images, a few poor product launches could negate all these efforts. Companies that actively engage in the process of product planning, whether they undertake this process within their marketing or product development groups, need to be acutely aware of the risks to their reputations.
A poor product launch can erode decades of good will and quickly have a negative impact on morale.
Often companies place most of the planning effort on determining “which” products and services to offer. While product planning to select the right products and services to market is critical to success, “launch planning” is equally critical. Products fail not only because they are poor products, they fail because of poor launches.
For companies who are entering new markets, the risk of failing because of a poor launch is greater than the risk for a company that has established marketing channels and resources to support these channels in place. A poor launch destroys more than the product’s market. Poor launches damage your credibility with the customer and the channels, including your brand as well. It takes even less time for your sales organization to lose confidence in the marketing group!
If you are offering the sales force a new source of income and new tools to delight the customers, the sales representatives will champion your products. However, once they are “burned” because of a poor product or launch, as long as they have something else to sell that pays their salary and commissions, they will sell it instead of your products.
