How to accomplish next year's sales targets? Where does incremental growth come from? The specific methods depend on the actual situation of the enterprise, but the most common incremental method is to promote 'new products'.
How to define new product development? There are three types of 'new products': the first type is 'new products' relative to regional markets, i.e., old products entering new markets. The second type is 'symbolic new products', which are not really 'new products' but existing products with slight adjustments in packaging, specifications, claims, price, or distribution channels to make them appear new. For example, Coca-Cola's beverages have not changed, but it continuously launches new packaging to give consumers a fresh feeling, which is a symbolic new product. The third type is truly new products. In fact, most new products encountered in marketing are the first and second types, with the third type being rare.
What to do when there is great resistance to developing new products? The key resistance to the success of new product development comes from the layers of vetoes within the company's marketing organization. Through in-depth research on numerous cases, we have found that the fundamental reason for the failure of new product launch and promotion is often not external factors, but the layers of vetoes from within the company's sales organization—from the sales company headquarters to regional managers at all levels, to salespeople, distributors, secondary wholesalers, and even retailers. Because of a lack of confidence in the new product launch; because compared with mature products, new products require high investment but yield low returns; because sales tasks are heavy, and to ensure the completion of basic sales indicators, there is no energy to focus on new product market development, the subconscious layers of vetoes from within the company's sales organization become the biggest obstacle to new product launch and promotion. The solution is the 'law of negation of negation':
- Negate the lack of confidence among internal personnel and build sales confidence across the board;
- Negate erroneous business thinking within the company and provide practical and feasible plans;
- Negate the possible layers of 'negation' to ensure the success of 'affirmation'.
What to do when salespeople and distributors prefer to maintain old products rather than promote new ones? For salespeople and distributors, maintaining the sales of old products through promotions and other means seems to be the most effortless and worry-free task. Management will continuously feel this pressure. In the early stages of new product promotion, it is both laborious and low in sales volume, so many distributors and salespeople are unwilling to do it. When I worked at a well-known company, when arranging sales plans, many provincial supervisors felt that the tasks were too high to accomplish because the market share of the leading products had little room for growth. We required focusing on new product development to tap potential, and the company's various products were unbalanced in development across regional markets. Six months later, the results in regions with different understandings were completely different. Some regional managers seriously implemented the company's spirit, analyzed and selected suitable products from the company's many existing products for key market development. They found the best entry points based on product characteristics and market features for promotion. Through six months of hard work, although it was tough, they maintained the market for original products while concentrating energy and resources on developing new products and new customers. The market quickly picked up, and they successfully completed or overfulfilled their sales tasks. In contrast, other regional managers clung to old products, believing that investing the energy and resources for new product development into old products would save effort and avoid risks. Although in the first three months, the sales reports showed that the former seemed to be doing thankless work, after six months, the latter clearly showed a lack of momentum.
How to improve the success rate of new product promotion? I believe the following three tasks should be done well: First, choose the timing for new product launch. If launched before the peak season, the three forces of seasonal push, personnel push, and policy push will work together, making new product promotion much faster. Second, explosive distribution. Explosive distribution can catch competitors off guard, quickly occupy the market before they can respond, and also enhance the confidence of distributors at all levels and consumers through high-density market coverage. At the same time, having the product everywhere is the best terminal advertising. Third, ensure success through more than three waves of policy push. No matter how strong the policy is, there is always a process for new products to be accepted. Therefore, do not hope to 'make one vigorous effort' and use up all policy resources at once. Instead, use more than three waves of continuous policy push, each wave creating a small climax, ultimately pushing the new product to success.
How to ensure a continuous stream of new products? Only when marketing personnel participate in the research and development of new products will the speed of new product launch be fast. Since most new products belong to the first and second types, the ideas for new products are usually first proposed by marketing personnel and then realized by technical personnel. Therefore, enterprises should establish a workflow that ensures marketing personnel participate in new product development.
How to ensure the volume of new products? It is a wrong mindset to expect every new product to achieve sales volume. Leading products naturally need to achieve volume, but non-leading products do not necessarily need to. Therefore, it is necessary to promote both leading products that can achieve volume and 'small-batch product groups' that cannot achieve volume.
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