Launching a new product can be an exhilarating time for your business. Your team is optimistic about the future, your investors look forward to higher returns, and your suppliers anticipate larger orders.
But what if your target market isn't ready to buy?
What if your prospects don't adopt your new technology?
And how can you speed up the rate of adoption for your new product?
These are questions to ask long before you start selling, and the answers may surprise you.
Sales Results Begin with Buyer Adoption
Many companies fail to launch a new product successfully because sellers and buyers see it differently. Sellers overvalue their innovations, while buyers overvalue what they already own, and often don't yet understand why they'd need the new product. History is full of products that struggled because buyers simply weren't ready:
- Google Glass: despite enormous buzz and deep-pocketed backing, consumers weren't ready for a face-worn computer, and social and privacy concerns sank the consumer version.
- Quibi: the short-form streaming service raised roughly $1.75 billion and launched to huge fanfare, then shut down within about six months because audiences simply didn't adopt it.
- Segway: hyped as a device that would reshape how cities move, it never came close to that adoption, a textbook case of sellers overvaluing an innovation buyers didn't feel they needed.
The common knee-jerk response to slow sales is to expand your sales force and marketing budget: meet with more prospects, build a website touting the product's benefits, run an ad campaign. Those are all good strategies when the market is ready to buy. But early on, they can actually limit your results, because your prospect may not yet understand their own problem well enough to realize they need your solution.
If your prospect doesn't know what problem they need to solve, how can you expect to sell them the solution?
To maximize sales, you first have to help your prospect understand their problem. The problem, not your product, is where your sales and marketing should focus first. It sounds counterintuitive, but once you understand the psychology, the strength of this approach becomes clear.
What Is Buyer Adoption?
Buyers go through a process before they start using a new technology. Factors that affect how quickly they adopt include the product's advantages over existing options, ease of use and maintenance, and cost.
Buyer adoption is the process buyers go through to identify and solve a problem before they buy and use a new product.
A buyer's "problem" is an unmet need or a desired outcome. Until they fully recognize that problem, they won't see why your product matters, so they don't buy, at least not yet.
How to Enhance Buyer Adoption of Your Products
The number of buyers who are aware of their problem and actively seeking a solution is what really caps your sales. To grow, your priority should be to help prospective buyers:
- identify their pain and clarify their problem;
- understand the different options available to solve it; and
- make the changes across their organization needed to support your solution.
Do these things, and you expand and accelerate the market for your product.
Identify the Problem
The best way to sell is to focus on the buyer's problem; companies that address buyer concerns gain a real competitive advantage.
Weave the buyer's problems and concerns throughout your marketing, starting with your website. Today's buyers do most of their research independently, on your website, across search, and increasingly through AI tools, long before they ever talk to a salesperson. If they land on your site and see only a list of features, they'll be confused; they can't tell how it helps them if they don't yet grasp the problem it solves.
So focus your content on the common problems your prospects face. That also helps with SEO: when you use the words buyers actually search, more of them find you while looking for answers, and your content engages them, empathizes with their pain, and shows the viability of your solution.
Explore Solution Options
Once you've started building a relationship, help buyers define what a good solution to their problem looks like. This is not the time to start touting your product; they may not be ready. Instead, show them the full landscape of options and alternatives, keep matching problem to solution, and help them tell the options apart. Counterintuitively, this builds trust, and trust is what eventually wins the sale.
Change Organizational Behavior
The best way to sell is to get the buyer to want to buy from you. Once you've helped them identify their problem and understand the options, you can present your product, showing exactly how it meets their needs and delivers the outcomes they want. Because you've built a trusted relationship, you're now in a strong position to close.
You'll also need to help the buyer make the changes across their organization required to support and adopt the product, which vary by product and industry.
Know What's Ahead
The rapid pace of new technology makes selling harder. Product life cycles are short, so you have to maximize your return before the next innovation arrives. And no matter how fast technologies emerge, buyers still take time to adopt.
You can gain a real edge by building buyer adoption into your marketing strategy. The better you anticipate your buyers' challenges, the better you'll identify their problems, craft the right message, and reach more buyers faster, and sell more.
Want help building marketing that meets buyers where they are? Get in touch with our team.
This is part of our guide to marketing your small business online.
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