Picture this: you’ve spent endless hours strategizing, planning, building, and testing. You’ve been gearing up for your new product launch over the course of weeks, months, or maybe years––and it’s quickly approaching. This launch of new innovation is an opportunity to inspire the organization, deepen customer satisfaction, engage new buyers, and generate revenue for the business.
If this is your reality right now, 31% of organizations are alongside you, preparing to launch a new product or service as a key go-to-market initiative this year. With your launch date nearing, it’s vital that the field is ready to sell your new solutions. When customer-facing teams understand your new innovation, know how to speak to it with buyers, and can use it to drive revenue, you can bet on a successful launch that will impact business results.
So, how do you equip, train, and coach your sellers to be ready for a successful product launch that drives revenue? Here are tips to prepare your go-to-market teams to land your new solutions with buyers.
Provide Actionable Guidance to Help Reps Land Your Product
A great place to start enhancing internal awareness of your upcoming launch is by sharing contextual guidance to help reps understand how to speak to the new innovation with different buyers. More than three-fourths (68%) of customers use Sales Plays for their product launches and document what their sellers need to know, say, show, and do to land the strategy with buyers. When working tirelessly to build an effective launch strategy, Plays help ensure your customer-facing teams can bring it to life in the field.
TIP: Equip reps with Sales Plays to bolster your enablement efforts. Create tailored guidance for every industry, market, and persona you plan to target, and include relevant content and training so reps have everything they need to learn about the initiative in one place. When reps adopt Sales Plays, they can be well equipped to land your new product in the field––as our customers report 22% higher buyer engagement, a 14% increase in pipeline, and a 12% increase in win rate when using Sales Plays.
Reinforce Learning With Training and Coaching
To ensure sellers are ready to take your new product to market, they need to understand how to position it in the field. That’s where a dedicated learning program can help. By having reps complete training Courses leading up to launch, you can educate them on the new product features, messaging, value propositions, and target audience. To deepen that learning and hold reps accountable to mastery, sales managers can then coach reps on landing the new product with prospects and customers.
TIP: Embed Video Practice into training courses to test how reps pitch the new product––and enable managers to provide feedback on their performance. Building training around your product launch and reinforcing that learning through coaching helps to boost rep confidence to sell the new solution. Customers who train and coach their reps with Highspot have 60% higher adoption of Sales Plays and report a 24% increase in quota attainment.
Validate Launch Readiness Using Analytics
As launch is approaching, knowing when your reps are ready to sell your new product is vital for success. Gaining a holistic picture of rep readiness is a common challenge, as 55% of enablement leaders struggled with a lack of insights into rep behaviors before Highspot. Sellers need to demonstrate that they can speak to the new offerings with buyers, which can be difficult to gauge without insights. Scorecards can help you distill behavioral data into a high-level snapshot of rep competency––so you know who is ready to take your product to market and who still has work to do.
TIP: Use Highspot Scorecards to surface insights, on either the rep or team-level, that hold sellers accountable to completing the necessary steps to prepare for launch. The Team Scorecard provides insight into your team’s engagement with the key enablement activities, while the Rep Scorecard dives into an individual rep’s performance––so you can ensure every rep is ready to engage buyers upon launch. Highspot customers who use the Rep Scorecard to evaluate rep activity experience 20% higher buyer engagement.
Land the Internal Launch to Maximize the External Launch
While product launches come with excitement and energy, they often are accompanied by high stakes as well. However, when you prepare every seller to land the new product in the field, you can feel confident knowing your prospects and customers are getting a consistent, relevant, and compelling message. By providing actionable guidance for reps, reinforcing learning with training and coaching, and evaluating readiness using analytics, your customer-facing teams can be prepared to go to market with your new solution and start driving sales. To learn step-by-step how to drive a successful product launch, download our guide: A Product Launch Strategy Built for Liftoff.
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This blog post is part of Highspot’s research-backed blog series, Highspot Insights. With the help of our research teams, we provide data-driven best practices for sales enablement. If you have a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.
