Launch of a New Innovative Service in a B2B Market

When launching a new B2B service a company can come across many different challenges and obstacles. At the same time, however, a lot of chances occur.

Success is in being able to exploit the opportunities and control the threats. This way one can fully optimize the go-to-market plans.

Challenges:

• The main challenge for the company was to be the first one introducing a certain new service in the market and to be sure that this new service would generate enough users and ROI in a 1-year time.
• Marketing’s task was to support and communicate the go-to-market of this new service.

Context:

• In a B2B market, a service company must maintain and continuously increase its competitive advantage.
• Therefore, a company must be creative and innovative and must propose new alternative and innovative products or services to meet the evolving market needs.
• In our case, the new service didn’t exist yet in Belgium. Therefore, a comparative market analysis was not possible.

Solution:

• When launching a new product/service in a B2B market and to make sure it will be easily adopted, a good practice could be co-creation with a few clients/prospects. The purpose of this is to evaluate if the service meets the real market needs.
• The first segmentation is based on “early adopters” (pilot companies) that will buy and experience the service.
• The marketing actions that can be built to support this strategy are:

1. Targeting the sales: each sales team member must experience the product himself to know it. The role of the marketing is to create the best sales support (presentation) which helps the sales team to sell the product to the prospects.
2. Targeting the market: organize a workshop for 50 clients/prospects. This is an effective way to present clearly the product (content, advantages) and to make it tested by clients/prospects. This should contain a testimonial of one of the client that already uses it.

Key success factors:

• Get the product/service adopted by a few clients/prospects: organization of a workshop where they can test and experience the product
• Make the product/service clearly understood by the sales teams (presentation and testing the product)
• Communicate clearly around the new product (context, content, price, advantages of adopting it, …), to assert its competitive position