Previous blog post was focusing on important of deployment and people side of the changes (Don’t Forget Deployment!). Strategic development portfolios include also often development of new offerings, products, and services. How about the deployment of a new offering? What kind of approaches may work there?
It has been fun to work again more with offering development! One of the key topics for offering development teams is to ensure a successful go-to-market for the new offering. This is actually quite tricky – how to ensure busy sales teams get familiar with the new offering and feel comfortable and motivated to sell – especially if the new offering is outside the comfort zone of the sales force.
I have been working with many different types of offerings, some with complex hardware solutions, and some other purely service based. I will share 5 ways which I have seen have been useful, I hope this is helpful!
1. Offering catalog & news letters
When the offering is standardized, and familiar to organization and there are only small changes to way of working, well maintained offering catalog and news letter may work well to keep organization up-to-date.
An electronic version of the offering catalog works best, and with large offerings, there should be great searching functionalities to find easily what is needed.
Newsletter could include the following highlights:
- What is new? And where to find additional information?
- Pricing guideline updates
- Sharing value proposition for new offering
- Sharing learnings and tips related to sales of new offering
- If there are any actions to be taken locally
- Targets for sales
The challenge with the news letters in large organization is how to reach the correct people and to ensure busy sales and offering management personnel have time to actually learn what is new.
2. Community of practice
Communities of practice are one of the great approaches to keep the stakeholders engaged with the development, share learnings and feedbacks from the markets. Communities of practice are great for new growing areas, where content is further developing, and there are rapid cycles for learnings, but also for mature areas. Participants may join to community of practice from many different locations around the globe virtually to meet people with similar role and interest in other locations.
Optimally communities are not only information-sharing channels to introduce new changes, but also a forum to share learnings peer-to-peer and get expert advice as needed. A common platform or channel for discussion may be helpful especially when working with geographically distributed teams, to bring people together. Asking and commenting should be easy, and there should be also experts to find the answers even to tricky questions! Communities of practice are also great for onboarding new team members – it is great to be able to ask from other more experienced colleagues.
There may be for example community calls, to gather together to share best practices and discuss timely topics. Planning the content and facilitating for the community requires always some work, but is often worth the trouble!
Community of practice approach works well also for digital services, where there may be frequent releases happening bringing small changes.
3. Offering release
The third approach, which can be also combined with the first and second approaches is to consolidate all new offerings into offering releases. The frequency of offering releases may vary, and could be held quarterly, bi-annually, or annually, depending on the need and organization’s ability to absorb new offerings.
The benefit of offering releases and dedicated info sessions is to bundle offering changes together so that it is easier to get information on all new things at the same go. Release package may include for example training package, which can be used also for local trainings, as well as new beautiful marketing materials, as well as needed technical documentation.
4. Offering Launch
We have all seen beautiful offering launch events from different companies, e.g. Apple or Tesla. Offering Launches are great for public relations and to create excitement among the customers, but may be also a powerful tool to create excitement within customers, and media, but also among the own organization. Offering launches are also great kickstarts for marketing campaigns.
Offering launch alone is not enough, though! When introducing a completely new type of offering, rollout projects may be needed, too.
5. Rollout project
When introducing completely new type of offering to markets, there may be a need to develop many different capability areas within organization. Setting up a rollout project to ensure good training, change management, go-to-market, sales and operations may be a good choice, when:
- Significant changes for local roles, e.g. new activities needed for sales roles, customer service or operations roles
- New supply chains built to support completely new type of offering
- Organization requires extensive training to sell, install, maintain or service new offering
- New IT tools are needed for example to support sales and operations
- New pricing model, new business model configurations or
- New Go-to-market approach is introduced
- Local legal requirements, or area specific standards
Within rollout projects; this was covered in the previous post (Don’t Forget Deployment!).
Strategic Portfolio Management 