The Key Factors that Determine the Success or Failure of New Products and Services

Peter Drucker, the father of marketing and business leadership, on his famous book; “Innovation and Entrepreneurship’ put a very critical principle which I personally real appreciate as he said: “Marketing and Innovation are only two things which brings money into the company, anything else is the cost”

Based on Drucker’s principle and on the context of Tanzania’s market, the failure of products of many entrepreneurs’ in markets is highly attributed to the failure on advertising and selling of the product/service.

Marketing entails collection of processes which are taken from identifying the need in the market, using market signals to create and position a brand in the market and etc. The discussion on the differences can be find here as we discussed in detail before, we won’t discuss right here.

The critical area under which many products/services found themselves doing worse in the market is not product/services side.  But, how do sell person communicate products/services to the prospective customers. How do sells teams sell those new products in the markets? What do sell personnel communicate to prospects? How do they convince them to buy products/services?

If you have ever travelled with a bus from any region in Tanzania either to/from Dar-es-Salaam, you would agree, that there’re at least two salesperson who normally board buses and start to communicate to passengers and persuading them to purchase their products.  This technique of selling by those vendors is what is known as: “bells and Whistles Approach”

This the reason why many products fail in markets particularly on marketing and sells aspects. Under this approach, the marketing team after developing marketing strategies for the new products. They normally communicates how to market the product to sales team by explaining features and advantages.

Automatic sales teams becomes existed about the product to the extent that when they went to sell the products to customer they communicate the product the same way as they were taught. This is the reason, on board sell person all of them likely to be communicating their products the same. This is the biggest factor for products’ failure in their early days in the market.

Why Bells and Whistles Approach by sales team leads to failure of the product in the market? The answer to this fundamental and widely asked question is; the fact that salesperson become exited automatic their enthusiasm about the product become higher and seller’s attention shift from customer to a product. Thus, because of their enthusiasm, they normally don’t make sells and reach their targets.

Communicating the features and advantages of the product to customers is not an effective strategy for major sales. Customers don’t want to feel that they’ve been sold but they need to buy by convincing them of the benefits the products offer to their needs and problems. How to effectively communicating with customers using benefits would be our major focus on our next blogs. Keep watching this section for more lessons.