Sales 2.0 for New Product Development

Sales team plays a key role in any new product development effort of a software company. Gone are the days when it was meant only for selling the finished products.At the very outset, it has an insight into what a prospective customer generally looks in for, in a new product and this always has necessitated the need for taking its inputs in the process. However, it does not mean that the inputs gathered from marketing and allied researches should be ignored. Rather, a balance is to be maintained between the two.

Coming to the products side, it may be allowed to have a feel of the prototypes of the products by demonstrating them. This does not mean that it should go ahead and sell them, but to provide certain inputs based on its interaction with the potential customers.
This is where Sales 2.0 comes into the picture.

Sales 2.0 for New Product Development is all about embedding various Web 2.0 tools and technologies such as Blogs, Wikis, RSS, Pod casts, Social Media etc. into sales. Its evolution was based on the perception that it would improve the customers-sales interface. Going beyond the customers, it will also improve the communication between the sales personnel and the people in their organization. This enables them to go ahead and solve the business problems of the customers rather than just selling them the finished software products.

The team is also expected to keep the discussions with the potential customers going and reassure them of better services. This is achieved over time by keeping track of all the current affairs in the industry, sharing of information and ideas, and detailed study of the customers’ organizations and their needs. All of these become really effective when the aforesaid tools and technologies are used.

Though tools and technologies seemed to have formed the foundation for Sales 2.0, it still cannot remove the human elements from the equation. It is when these two are combined that a sales force can work wonders.

The time is ripe for Sales 2.0.

Idea Validation: How important is it?

An idea can change the rule of New Product Development. It comes to include your soon to –be developed product and how would it fill the gap in the market, when it comes to addressing a specific issue of customers. A little variation from this could possibly be the uniqueness of your product from those of the rest in the market.

Having stated these, validating the product idea holds the key to the development process. This could help your ideas reach the ground of reality rather than staying on a paper or a discussion board. Beta testing is one of the most efficient ways of validating your product ideas as it gives you the much needed feedbacks of your product from the customers.

Apart from it, the good things that can be done here are to have an eye on your competitors’ offerings, bring customers into the development process and have your experts’ team streamlined the process.

The bottom-line that is to be seen here is to be acceptable to any changes, provided it guarantees a facelift to your product.  All said and done, negative feedbacks also are to be expected from the customers, but it is always a wise decision to make them feel that they are at loss if they are not your customers yet. And a strong validation of your new idea is the success mantra here.

Successful New Product Development-What does it take?

We are conducting a webinar on the topic,”Successful New Product Development-What does it take? ” on 25 th September,2008 at 2:00 PM ET / 11:00 AM PT.

Truly successful software products are hard to come by. Products that are adopted and embraced by their target audience are more the exception than the rule. So, what does it take to build great software? Is having a brilliant product idea enough? Do you need to have a stellar team and dedicated UX experts?

Anyone attempting to build successful software should understand that software has to first and foremost fulfill customer expectations, address real market needs and be better than the existing competition. In addition, it should be cheap enough to be affordable, fast enough and feature-rich enough to be relevant and available soon-enough for customers to start using it.

The webinar will be jointly presented by:

1.Shankar Krishnamoorthy,CTO,Aspire Systems.

2.Deepak Ramesh,Co-founder,Mango DVM.

In this webinar, you will learn:

* How to validate your product idea

* Usage of Web 2.0 concepts in the enterprise ecosystem

* How you can enhance the quality of your product

* How to leverage the latest development tools, technologies and platforms available

This is a must-attend event for you,if building a great product has been your watchword.

Registration is still open here.

New Product Development – Importance of Architecture

We were talking to one of our leads who wanted to develop a product and deliver it as a service to his end-customers. Yes, we are talking about the buzzword Software-as-a-Service. The lead had a few things clearly identified in terms of the market he wants to serve, the kind of features that his product should have, the architectural complexity of it, the engineering time-frame, and the release plan.

After a series of discussions on the technology to be used, the product management methodology to be followed and the kind and size of team that he would require, we came around to discussing about the architecture of the product. Essentially the requirements here were on releasing the first version of the product quickly and keeping it scalable for subsequent releases and versions.

The lead was very particular that he would own the product management and architecture of the product and he would look at expertise only for the development. Then, we offered to provide architectural services separately away from our development, which was liked by the lead.

Essentially, the lead was very clear in his mind that he didn’t want to mix the architecture with the development and he wanted to validate the architecture before getting into development.

The Making of Great Products-The people and roles involved

While it takes a lot of good people and resources to build a great product, there are three key roles that need to be a part of the core team. These three key people have to represent the needs of different stakeholders, for a product’s overall success. They are:

* The product manager

* The user experience lead

* The product engineering lead

The role of the product manager is to make sure that the product has value – he does his research, knows his target audience and defines the product functionality.

The user experience lead represents the user’s behavior and literally puts himself in the users’ shoes.

The product engineering lead is often an architect or senior engineer and is responsible for ensuring that the product that is defined is something that can actually be delivered.

Read the full story here

The Making of Great-The importance of persona profiling

Now and then, we come across a product or service that comes into an already-crowded marketplace and yet manages to establish itself as the new standard in its market. Some examples of these innovators are Google (which managed to penetrate through the crowded search engine space with its search technology that beat the rest of the competition) and MySpace (which picked up the lessons learnt from earlier social network sites and corrected the mistakes/effectively addressed the pain-points).

There are two key methods that smart companies use to create winning products in mature markets. First, they understand their target market and where the current products fall short. This is done by bringing in personas in your design decisions.

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The influence of Web 2.0 on Software Development

One of the drivers for the changes taking place in new product development is certainly the evolution of the consumer internet or the Web 2.0 world. YouTube, MySpace, Wikipedia, Flickr, Craigslist – the successes of these Web 2.0 products and services have spurred hundreds of competitors who aim to be the next big Web 2.0 success story.

Many of these consumer internet start-ups got started in garages with a fairly small team and had a beta version of the product out in a matter of 6 months – more or less.

While the success of some Web 2.0 start-ups can be attributed to early-mover advantage in identifying and filling an under-served niche, there are some underlying similarities behind the successful companies.

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User Interface Design: One of the key elements of a great product

Building a great software product demands a user interface which appeals to the end-user and is easy and fun to use. A great user-experience guarantees a product’s acceptability in the market. This has lead to complex technological innovations of UI design for building user- friendly products.

Many software developers consider themselves artistic enough, that they hardly follow any UI design standards or try to make a product attractive and easy to use from a customer’s point of view. Instead they resort to creating unique code and an attractive color scheme and believe that that is all that is required to build a good software product. This may have been acceptable in the past, but with growing competition, it is imperative to have product engineers to focus on technology and have separate usability specialists to focus on UI design.

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Agile-Changing the rules of the game!

When Agile first started making an appearance, it was viewed as yet another development fad. But with Agile showing dramatic improvements in delivery time, quality of software and a reduced number of strategic mistakes compared to the waterfall model, it has taken a broader role in software development today. A number of companies practice Agile as a product development methodology from project inception to delivery, support and end-of-life phases.

However, Agile is not about using Scrum, Extreme Programming or RUP. It’s about using the best agile practices to respond to today’s frequently changing business needs. Using the waterfall model, frequent changes to software is difficult – the development cycle is long, systems are over engineered and end up costing a fortune.

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The Changing Rules of New Product Development

There’s been a perceptible change which has been sweeping the VC funding landscape for technology companies for sometime now. This in turn has ground-shaking implications for how new products are built, the time-frame in which they are built, and the way development teams need to respond to this change.

Earlier, software start-ups used to be in the incubation mode for months on end. Business plans and financial projections were made for 5 year periods. Initial seed funding was typically in the $5mn range. But in today’s fast-changing world, companies can no longer be in stealth mode for years.

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