Innovative Ways to Take Your Product to Market

by Louis Hayner

There are many ways to innovate in an organization – new products, new processes, and new ways to take your organization to market. It’s not necessarily just about seeing what the customer asks for, but also about what theydon’t ask for – building their businesses around stable, reliable technologies. Many organizations keep their innovating at the executive leadership level only, which is a major mistake because it squanders   a wealth of opportunities. It’s critical for a successful organization to tap into the innovative ideas of its entire organization, educate its employees, partners and customers and most importantly, standardize its product set. It will help the entire industry if everyone – customer, vendor, and channel – speaks the same language. One of the most effective ways to take your company to market is creating new distribution models. In some cases, if you provide the right cloud integration, your customers can become your best marketing tool. An innovative product with a wide adoption rate will drive profit. This is why focusing on customer service is vital to successfully innovating and selling. Another way  to take your product to market is through channel partners. When selling UC solutions from the cloud, resellers can sell the components a la carte today, and add other components when the company is ready to do so. This enables customers to buy what they need today and to be reassured that the applications will be integrated when the customer is ready to use them. Because these components are integrated in the cloud, there is an added level of   brand loyalty that means the customer will certainly come back to you when they are ready to add those other services. There are concerns, however, and it’s important to ask these questions:

• Do I have enough resources to take on this new product?
• How will it be received, supported and implemented by existing resources?
• Will it be successful?

In order to truly unlock the revenue potential with a new product, you need to adequately cash your resources to implement and build. One of the biggest disconnects many businesses encounter is that their sales and marketing departments are not working together in a collaborative and uniform fashion. In regards to technology, innovation needs to take place from both the CEO and CMO roles.  When the person responsible for top line positioning is also being held accountable for revenue, products taken to market will be sold.