What are uncommon reasons a product launch would fail or underperform?

One example is not identifying a potential risk and failing to address it proactively, then having it flare up during the launch. 

We've had this happen before when we had a lot of pressure to move fast. We kind of knew about the risk in the back of our minds but forgot to address it / flag it early.

Since then I've added a "risks" section in our product launch template and we take the time to call them out early and proactively address them with the product team and exec team where relevant.  

I loooove this question! A few reasons product launches may fail or underperform come to mind, all of which I've experienced personally and learned from.

Let's assume for a second that you have product-market fit, meaning the product features, pricing, and messaging all resonate with target buyers. Yay! But a quarter goes by and you miss your pipeline/adoption/bookings targets, and aren't on pace to meet longer term goals. Uh oh... Here are a few things to look into:

1. Your goals were unrealistic.

You may be like: LOL yes blame the goals! But I'm serious. It's not uncommon for tops-down goals to get handed to you during product launches. Before you agree to targets, you'll want to do a bottoms-up build towards those targets and gut-check the feasibility. 

In reality, pipeline ultimately come down to the # of opportunitities each rep can create in-quarter * the average deal size. If you divide your target by the average deal size & it amounts to way too many opportunities per rep to be realistic, then you probably have a problem. 

The same goes for self-service adoption. If you back out from targets to what would need to be true at the top of the funnel and it's astronomical, then you may be working towards unrealistic goals.

At SurveyMonkey, we typically have softer goals the first quarter of a launch (e.g. close X paying customers) so we can establish baselines for pipeline, average deal size, and sales cycles.

2. Sales wasn't confident in selling the new product.

You may have a great product, great content, all the messaging in place, etc. But if your sales team leaves a launch readiness training feeling confused or unenthused, that puts you in danger of underperforming. If you work on an extremely technical or nuanced product, you'll want to watch out for this.

At SurveyMonkey, we've run into this with market research solutions that are based on a complicated methodology. We split up enablement into multiple sessions: a methodology 101, product overview (ICP, pitch, demo, etc), and sales strategy (discovery, scoping, pricing, etc.). And we leverage training feedback & sales confidence surveys to make sure the team is excited, engaged, and confident in pitching our solutions.

3. There are other more attractive products in your portfolio.

As you scale from a single solution company to a portfolio of offerings, your sales team inevitably leans on selling a) what they know, b) what they're good at, and c) what makes them the most money (read: helps them hit their quota & get to accelerators fastest).

Whenever we launch a solution now, we think about how it can help increase deal sizes, get bundled with other existing offerings, or helps the sales team work with more departments in an organization.

At SurveyMonkey, we launched a solution that averages $75k per deal, then 6 months later we launched a solution that gets ~$8k per deal. Guess which one the sales team spent their time selling? The $75k solution, of course! Ultimately we ended up focusing more on the self-service entry to that $8k solution + worked in ways to bundle the solution with other offerings.

I'm coming from a software-as-a-service (SaaS) lens, but the sign-up flow + onboarding experience can make or break a launch.

You can have the best messaging, the best features, and the best price... but if it's hard to sign up for and use the product? FAIL.

Sign-up flows that force you to invite team members or connect all of your product are often confusing for users. Onboarding that requires you to read tons of pages or feels like a one-way door is daunting.

If I push this button, does that mean I can never go back? I don't know what any of these terms mean, how should I know which type of user/screen/purchase order to create? If I accidentally use my email instead of going through the single-signon flow... will I get banned?

What may be obvious to you is NOT obvious to your users, and if you make them feel naive or confused during the sign-up and onboarding process, your launch will fail. It needs to be intuitive so that your users see fast time-to-value.

Unfortunately there are many reasons a product launch can fail or underperform:

• Doesn't solve a felt problem by the target audience

• Solves a problem for a different target audience

• Is not differentiated enough in a competitive market

• Is not priced correctly

• Doesn't function as expected (bad UX, unreliable, etc.)

• Target audience doesn't know about it (isn't marketed well or discoverable)

In my experience the most likely reason a product launch fails or underperforms is when it is solving an internally-defined problem vs. a problem felt by the target audience. Sometimes these can converge into a successful launch but often this internally-focused type of launch is destined for failure.