Time To Offer Customers Something New?
After you’ve been in business for awhile, the question inevitably comes up: Is it time to add a new product or service? Here are some questions to help in making those decisions:
1. What do customers like about your current products and services? Before considering whether to offer something new, it’s critical to understand from the point of view of your customers, what you’re known for. You know what your clients and customers have been buying from you, but how much do you know about why they buy them? The last thing you want to do is to mess up something they already like in the process of offering something new.
2. What do customers see as gaps in your offerings? And you can’t just ask existing customers. You also have to talk with past customers, customers of competitors and others out there who could use such a product, but aren’t currently buying it from anyone. What do they say is missing from what you offer? What similar products are they buying from competitors? What do they wish your products would do that they don’t do now? Is this really a new product they want or an enhancement to an existing product?
3. If you decide to offer this new product or service, is it likely to be naturally and organically complementary to what you’re already doing? Notice that the first two questions are from customers’ point of view. You want to hear from them and you value their input. But just because they say they need it and are already buying it from your competitors doesn’t mean you should offer it. This question is for you to decide as a company: Is the new offering consistent with who you are as a company — with the Central Idea (or driving force) of your existence right now, not when you started the company?
4. Do you like the new offering enough to make the commitment to do whatever’s necessary to bring it to market This is another question nobody can answer but you. And it requires fleshing out the idea enough for it to take sufficient shape that you can picture what your business would look like with this new offering in it.
Customers can’t help you much here. Companies often rely too much on literal responses to customer surveys because they don’t start with clarity about what’s in the customer’s province and what’s in the company’s as the people responsible for running the business.
It’s great to ask customers about their current experiences — what they value and what they feel is missing. But it’s wrong to rely on their answers to questions like “If we offered this, would you buy it?” Most of the time, they simply don’t know. How can they? They haven’t seen it yet! There’s so much that goes into the buying decision — marketing, advertising, packaging, customers’ shifting needs, competitors’ actions — that it’s unfair to try to pin down customers, much less rely on what they say about whether or not they’d buy something that’s still on the drawing board!
How disruptive would the development effort be to your existing business? Can you leverage existing systems and processes to smoothly integrate this new offering or would it involve building a lot that’s new and different? Are you willing and able to tackle what you have to do to make it happen?
You know from experience that all your planning and looking down the road can’t fully prepare you for the twists and turns and challenges you’ll encounter on the way to successfully building and launching a new product and the infrastructure you’ll have to put in place to support it.
Keep in mind that product development these days is an iterative process, and your first version may be just the first of many, and that monitoring and learning from successes and missteps is what’s likely to get you to something customers really value.