“Charlie,” I said, You still haven’t released the new
product! What are you waiting for?”
“Fletch,” he sighed, “it’s just not right yet.”
Rick, our Direct Marketing guru jumped in, “The only way you
are ever going to know if it is saleable is to try to sell it.”
Rob took a sip of his ale and offered, “Charlie, you remind
me of ole’ GR Squared Jones a client of mine that had difficulties with getting
things done. We called him that because he was always Gettin’ Ready
to Get Ready. Now I’m not sayin’ we should give y’all a new
nickname but this has been goin’ on now for at least a year. Stop looking in that broken rear view mirror and get this show on the road!”
Charlie hung his head and muttered, “But it has to be
right.”
He put his hand up to ward off the evil eye from all three of
us.
I looked at the other two and said, “Rick, why don’t you
start.”
“Okay, Charlie you know how when we market a product or
service we give it our best shot, right?
But we just don’t fling it out there and hope for the best. We watch the
results. In the mail and in print and on TV we monitor sales and track where
they came from. It’s the same way on-line. We watch the click through rates and
the web site traffic flow and the actual orders.
We test against the best result we get which we call The Control.
Man, if you don’t try something you have no Control.”
Rob took up the cudgel, “If you don’t stop making it perfect
for you, you’ll never know what makes it perfect for the customer. I can’t
position it if I don’t know who the customer is and what need, use or occasion
it meets not to mention why if is unique for them.”
Charlie looked to me for help.
I shook my head no, looked him in the eye and told him, “No
product is ever perfect out of the chute particularly intellectual property
based products. I know I’m right. Everybody talks about how prescient Steve
Jobs was in introducing the I-Pad in 2010. Nobody seems to recall the Apple
Newton which failed in 1993 but provided
the information needed to build the I Pad and I Phone.
Vine, the 6-second looping video that is taking the internet
by storm didn’t have a time limit and didn’t loop when it was introduced.
Excel didn’t have linked pages when it first came out. ACT!
was a flat file database. FaceBook,
Linked In and even Google continue to change primarily to meet changing needs
of their customers.”
“Charlie,” Rob added, ”Perfection is in the eye of the
beholder and until you introduce it you are never going to know what a customer
thinks about it. Chances are what you think is perfect is not what they think.
Rick capped it off, “Use the 80/20 rule. When you get to 80%
of what your concept is get it into a alpha test with real potential customers.
Trust them to buy and to tell you how to make it better.”
Strategies for new products and services are Jerry’s
favorite marketing task. Learn more at www.JerryFletcher.com
Consider a speaker who stopped counting successful product
introductions at 207. Learn more at: www.NetworkingNinja.com