We're launching a second product at my company, and I'm struggling to get sales to prioritize selling it. How do you motivate and incentivize your sales org to prioritize this new product?

In April 2021 we launched our second product, FigJam, into beta, allowing anyone to use it for free for 10+ months until we released it as a paid product. Here are some ways to get Sales excited about selling a new product:

• Make it clear why they should care: This might sound obvious, but a big part of this is making sure the Sales team knows why they should sell this new product. This should include why it’s important to the company, but also what’s in it for them. Does this help them expand deal sizes? Hit their numbers faster?
• Thorough and consistent enablement: Doubling down on enablement is critical. A new product means new messaging, new competitors, new personas, and new resources. Not only does your Sales team need to know how to talk about this new product, they need to understand and share how your product suite works together. So much about the sales process changes with the introduction of a new product — if the team doesn’t know who to talk to, what questions to ask, and why it wins, they won’t be motivated to sell it.
• Prove out your partnership: Selling a new product isn’t going to be easy — reps will be running into new objections, competitors, and questions all the time, which can get frustrating, especially if they don’t have a way of sharing feedback and asking for help. When we launched FigJam we created a channel in Slack specifically for feedback from Sales, encouraging them to share anything and everything. This channel was a top priority, with folks from the Product team, GTM team, and Executive team reading and responding to every comment. And we made changes to the product, the positioning, and the materials based on what they shared with us. This effort made it clear that their feedback was important and motivated reps to keep selling and keep sharing.
• Celebrate wins: Selling a new product is no easy task, and wins should be celebrated. Highlighting wins in newsletters, sales calls, and public company Slack channels shows everyone how important the initiative is, and encourages more of the same behavior.
• Align incentives: A second product is always going to be harder for reps to sell than a product they are already familiar with. Incentives such as commission adjustments, SPIFs, and contests can help encourage Sales to prioritize a new product.

I might be misunderstanding the question but you usually can't get them to prioritize new products unless it's built into their targets :) Introducing a new product into their deal could unecessarily complicate and extend sales cycles (which isn't good for them or you—as an employee of a business that relies on that revenue), so if they're not goaled on that by their sales leader they won't attempt it.

If they have been told to focus on it, but still aren't, it could be because they don't trust it (this has happened to me!). Show them positive data/quotes from the beta, explain the uplift it'll provide to ACV, give them clear use cases, ensure your FAQs are tight, and above all else, just ask them why they aren't selling it. You might hear something you can solve really easily--like they need a call script for a bit until they feel more comfortable.

Honestly... you compensate them. It could be a spiff to incentivize short-term priority for this product, but long-term, you have to build it into the bonus structure and overall comp targets.

If they're already succeeding selling your existing product, it's going to be a challenge to ask them to take time away from something that's working to get them to their quarterly quota and/or accelerators to figure out how to sell this new thing. They have to learn the product, the value props, the objections, the market, the prospect, all of it! That takes time... and that means time away from selling the thing that's paying their bills.

Yes, you need solid enablement, but the real answer is money. Accelerator, spiff, build it into the quota, but you have to tie selling this product to their compensation.