New Products: Launch for Success

Your new product is going to market today.?How exciting!?Operations??Ready!??Sales & Support? Ready!?Regulatory??Ready!?Sounds great, but there are a lot of moving parts. The problem is that many product launches are done as if nothing could go wrong.? Just sit back and wait while the revenue comes rolling in. But here are just a few of the many things that can go wrong:

• Marketing collateral is 90% done—all but the French assets.?That sounds great but sales in France and Belgium are tanking so Europe is missing by 40%.
• A new supplier is performing well below expectations.?Our lead times slid from 2 to 8 weeks. That's disappointing customers and our Sales organization.?
• Our new sales training leader built a great training program.?We’re just unsure if anyone listened during training sessions. Where are the tests??The role plays??The manager ride-along notes on rep presentations??Nonexistent.

All of this will sort itself out over the next year or two.?Meanwhile, this year's launch revenue will miss targets by half.?And that weak performance will be a drag on subsequent years.?Why is this so common?

Build a Launch Control Room--Physical or Virtual

Success in launch comes from solving launch problems fast.?Don’t sit in a conference room for 6 months of hoping and complaining.?Get a Launch Control Room: a virtual or physical place where a team of problem solvers actively solve newfound problems.?Find the quality issue that affects sales in 3 weeks instead of 12. ?Put a spotlight on it so Operations focuses, first with temporary countermeasures to protect the launch.?Anemic sales in France on week 3 lead us to get marketing assets out tout de suite.

At Lean Focus, we build in a launch plan that can make problems obvious in 2 or 3 weeks.?We recommend a comprehensive quality-delivery-cost (QDC) metrics set augmented with dozens of sales interactions per month we call “8 Minutes @ Gemba”.?However you do it, get rapid data and a problem-solving team in place who report to senior leadership against plan.?This is how we drive success in your launches.?It works!

Rate your organization

Scale: 1: Needs Improvement, 3: Okay As Is, and 5: Benchmark

1.?????We create monthly or weekly revenue plans for new products before we launch

2.?????We use those launch plans weekly to find problems fast

3.?????We collect QDC data reports for new products on a weekly basis

4.?????We interact with all our sales reps regularly and measure how they are doing with new products.?We don’t substitute sales manager opinion for going to gemba

5.?????We have a problem-solving team that uses the above four points to attack launch problems in weeks.

How did you do? Where you scored under 3, take action. Contact us at Lean Focus | Lean Business Systems & Lean Consulting . Whether you want help with one area of the Innovation Journey or a full Innovation Assessment, we can help!

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