Having difficulties in selling your innovations?

Here’s why, what to do about it and why you should!

Despite the vast amount of literature on this topic, we still come across many companies that experience great difficulties in selling their innovations, either in the scale up phase or in finding launching customers. The initial enthusiasm they received when talking to their potential clients suddenly appears to have vaporized and order volumes (if any) are disappointing.

This is a problem that we encounter far too often and, in most cases, has to do with how the innovation was validated in the market prior to the start of scaling up or even prior to acquiring launching customers.

A team gets the assignment to come up with innovative ideas for new products or services. Full of enthusiasm they start brainstorming and ideating, and out of this process comes a list of potential innovations.

These innovations are presented to, and discussed with, a group of internal stakeholders and a certain prioritization is made, usually based on gut feel and psychological biases (unfortunately, but this is in most situations the case).

A prioritized selection of the ideas gets translated into business model canvases, customer profiles and value propositions, but bear in mind, most companies don’t even get to this point.

And then it’s time to market test. To interview a couple of customers and find out if the idea resonates and gets a large enough positive response to assume that the actual product or service will become successful.

The product is being developed (hopefully in its minimum viable shape, but more often this is not the case), and being handed over to marketing and sales. To find out that nobody actually buys it…

In many cases it’s the market testing.. the mistake was made in interviewing customers, or rather, in selecting who was going to do this interviewing. Sales. In most companies, when customers are being interviewed, especially as part of an innovation process, sales is asked to do so. For they have the relationships, the intimacy, etc, etc.

But… sales sells. And they should. But most salespeople sell by promoting their products, by telling about features and benefits, about business value, and so forth.

In market testing ‘thou shall not sell’, as a matter of fact, ‘thou shall de-sell’, or as critically as you can be, test whether the customer has a real and compelling need for your innovation. This is more the work of a researcher, or a detective, or a critical member of parliament, than the work of a sales-man or woman. Sales always gets positive feedback, because hearing only positive feedback is their armor against the many times they get ‘no’ for an answer. It’s their job.

We can be brief about the consequences. Time and money wasted, innovation team demotivated, and worst case: the drive to innovate and be(come) an innovative company down the drain. Ultimately leading to becoming a victim to disruptive forces and losing relevance.

We can be brief about the consequences. Time and money wasted, innovation team demotivated, and worst case: the drive to innovate and be(come) an innovative company down the drain. Ultimately leading to becoming a victim to disruptive forces and losing relevance.

So, what should you do?
There is no single recipe, unfortunately. But… we can be certain about one thing, and that is that market testing is crucial. In market testing, the innovation should not be ‘sold’, it should be investigated whether potential clients have a real, urgent and compelling need to use your new product or service. This requires investigative questioning, rather de-sell than sell.

It requires careful design of interview questions and extremely curious people, like researchers, doing the interviews.

And it requires a scale on which you can plot potential customers’ interest in a non-biased, non-subjective way. A scale on which ‘I will buy right now’ or ‘I will become your co-development partner for this innovation’ is on the most positive side, and ‘it sounds interesting, can you send me some more info on paper’ is on the most negative side.

Should you want to read more on this topic, or start improving your innovation performance, we recommend the following:

• Download our corporate innovation playbook, there is a whole section (section 5, The validation challenge) on market validation of your innovations prior to going after real customers 
• For a more in depth read on validation, read our book ‘DARE, the mindset for successful innovators in the digital age, especially chapter 5 (from page 122 and onwards) will provide you with crucial insights into the process of market validation. 

Of course, you can always give us a call to discuss any innovation challenges you may have. 

Our colleague Eric de Groot (co-author of DARE) will be more than happy to share insights and experience. eric@revelx.nl or +31655196508