5 ways to improve go-to-market of new offering

Posted on by Heli Hiisilä

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!).

Don’t forget deployment!

Posted on by Heli Hiisilä

People working with projects, programs, and agile teams have typically a development mindset – we love to develop new things. However, one of the key learnings for me has been the importance of the deployment of the changes we have developed. If deployment is missing, it is unlikely to actually reach the aimed business benefits.

With Strategic Development Portfolios, there may be many different types of changes to be deployed across the organization, here are few examples:

  • Strategy deployment – creating awareness and aligning the organization to strategic targets
  • Introduction of new IT tool impacting business processes and ways of working
  • ERP rollout to a unit
  • Introduction of new offering, products or services to markets
  • Replacement of a legacy IT tool with SAAS service – impacting also business logic and processes
  • New pricing model changes
  • Changes in the roles and organization
  • Cultural changes or changes in the ways of working (e.g. leadership behavior, lean and agile)

It is not enough to send a newsletter or create 10 min online training to be successful with this type of change. I will go through some of my key learnings from the deployments, I hope this helps!

People side of the change

One of the challenging parts in any strategic initiative is people side of the change. We tend to be so busy with the hard staff – concepting solution, negotiation with the vendors, development and testing and keeping the schedule that there may not be enough time to focus on change management. Today, many large transformation have also change management leads, which is wonderful – the importance of change management has been recognized.

Here are couple of things, which I have seen very beneficial:

  • Engaging key stakeholders already during the development phase – co-creation, info calls, news letters, engaging teams early on in testing…
  • Communications or support package for people managers – how is the change impacting our team, how to go through the change in our team meetings, how to follow up on change.
  • Role based training materials – thinking about the messages and training materials from different roles view point, not just using generic materials which may not be a perfect fit for anyone. Creating modular materials, from where you can choose materials relevant for different roles.
  • Feedback loops & retrospectives – when developing something complex and new, it is important to continuously improve. Collecting the learnings from the pilot phase and improving both the content and ways of working makes the rest of the deployments smoother.
  • Overall high quality deployment package makes the change management easier – let’s review that part next!

Making it scalable via high quality deployment package

Documentation from the development project is not a proper deployment package. Deployment package should be created from the perspective of the receiving organization and to support the change adaptation within the unit.

Here are few components, which might be relevant for a deployment package:

  • Task list
  • Training materials (role based)
  • Communications package
  • Change management package for line manager
  • Marketing materials
  • Technical product & sales documentation
  • Value proposition and sales support materials
  • KPIs & criteria for success to be followed
  • Supporting tools or IT solutions

Deployment planning as a collaboration

Organizations have also limits, how many changes can happen in parallel while running also sales and business operations.

  • Align deployment plans with the units to collect also feedbacks on priority of your development, and other parallel activities. What would be optimal from the unit perspective?
  • Budget also funding for deployment – do you need a rollout coordinator? Would you need to translate some of the marketing materials to different languages? Would you need a project manager or a new key user hiring in some units?
  • Sometimes with large transformations, deployment may take years, as there are many organizational units to be considered. However, this may be also dangerous – business benefits are delayed, there are old and new solutions to be maintained, and also more and more changes may be required as time goes by. How to make deployment as smooth as possible – creating waves for deployment? Or perhaps engaging area organizations to scale up?

When would we need a rollout project and when release communication is enough?

If there is an existing solution or process, with well functioning regular release practices and an existing community of practice or a network of experts, there may not be need for a rollout project. Release communication may be enough to keep people informed, and key users or other experts are taking the needed training actions within the units.

However, rollout project may be a great approach, when:

  • Change is impacting significantly one or more organizational roles
  • Completely new IT solution is rolled out across different units
  • Introducing a completely new business model or new type of offering, products or services
  • Extensive training is needed or building up new competences within organization

I think deployment of new offering deserves an own blog, I will come back with that topic later!

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