Seeing the product you’ve worked so hard on developing and selling crash is definitely not what business owners dream of. It can often be hard to pinpoint exactly what went wrong and why it is not selling the way you anticipated, though, and many entrepreneurs before you have fallen too much in love with their product to realize its flaws.
Here is a handful of tips on how you can make sure that you bounce back after a failed product launch, both stronger and wiser.
Talk to your customers
The first thing you should do before you try to recreate your product is to have a chat with your customers about what went wrong. Perhaps some of them liked it and, that way, you won’t necessarily have to change everything; the point is that you need to understand what the market enjoyed and what it disliked.
This means that you have a lot of data to gather, first of all, before you can get down to work and analyze it all.
Create some questionnaires to send out to your customers and lure them in with promises of freebies or similar. You can definitely let them know that you’re looking to improve and would value their opinion, by the way, to ensure that you have enough data to go through.
Improve the product or target another market
Now that you have all of the answers gathered and ready to be analyzed, you should be able to pinpoint what went wrong. Make sure that you fix whatever you need to fix with the product or hire a consultant to help you out with targeting another market; Mansfield b2b sales consulting is a great option for this.
Sometimes, it’s actually nothing wrong with the product but rather the wrong market segment to market it in – and you need to have everything sorted out before you attempt another launch. It does require a bit of work, though, so don’t do anything hastily before you know exactly what’s going on.
Send out another prototype
When you have fixed everything you can fix, it’s time to unleash the new and improved product, right? You should, in fact, try your luck on another prototype before you send off the final product; let the customers who answered your questionnaire be the lucky recipients, and let them know that you have taken care of whatever they pointed out.
Hopefully, they will be willing to give you some more feedback so that you can be absolutely certain that you’ve given them what they had in mind and ensured that successful product launch.