What are the keys to driving sustainable product profitability?

I have a feeling that the following statistic will shock you.  According to the Bureau of Labor statistics, 50% of new businesses will fail in the first 60 months and up to 70% will cease to exist within 10 years!  It is an astonishing number given the hard work, long hours and funding it takes to develop and launch a new product or service.

One of the key reasons why small businesses will fail is because they do not have a vision and/or a strategy that includes how they plan to get their product or service into the hands of the customers that most need it, when they need it.

A “build it and they will come” mentality, while sounding good, does not address the fact that there are billions of options out there available on the internet, through trade shows, TV ads and a variety of other channels and the chances of you being in front of the customer, with your product/service at the time they are ready to purchase, are negligible if you do not have a solid strategy to make it happen.

My goal is to provide a go to market roadmap for a new entrepreneur to set up a product or service for commercial success using a strategy that will clearly define

• What you are doing – articulate what the product or service is (important for both you and the customer)
• Why you are doing it – what market and market gaps are you going to exploit with the product or service
• How you will win – in the context of a competitive market and an as yet undefined, long term customer.

Having a well thought out and researched go to market strategy is the cornerstone of a successful product launch and more importantly, a successful long term profitable enterprise.

In many instances, these ideas come from customer interactions where, through a clear “Voice of Customer” plan, an entrepreneur is able to identify key current unmet needs, take that feedback and define a solution that answers those customer requirements effectively.  Other times, working with a product or service creates issues, or the product does not actually address core needs and an engineer has a “eureka” moment and creates a modification or a new product/service to address these issues.

However the product or service idea is conceived, the real challenge is how you make the potential customer world aware of it and position it in such a way that customers will buy it.

Over the next several days, I will post several blogs detailing the process of defining and launching a Go-to-Market strategy effectively.  I will outline the 6 steps to follow to give a new product or service the best chance of succeeding early but more importantly, sustaining that  early success and providing continuing sales growth.

Starting with:

1. Who do I plan to sell to – target markets, customer types, geography.
2. What am I selling – clearly define the value proposition for your offering.  Why will a customer buy your product vs. competition?
3. How are we positioned in the market – deciding on the right price point.
4. Who are we to the customer – what’s our brand?  What do we stand for?
5. How are we going to get our product in front of the right buyers?
6. How will we measure our success and course correct if we have to?

My first post will be focused on how to understand and define what an ideal customer look like and where to find them.

If you have any comments or feedback, please use the comments section below to let me know your thoughts.