Your Product Is Not Perfect. So What!

“Fletch,” he sighed, “it’s just not right yet.”

Rick, our Direct Marketing guru jumped in, “The only way you are ever going to know if it is saleable is to try to sell it.”

Bubba took a sip of his ale and offered, “Charlie, you remind me of ole’ GR Squared Jones a client of mine that had difficulties with getting things done. We called him that because he was always Gettin’ Ready to Get Ready. Now I’m not sayin’ we should give y’all a new nickname but this has been goin’ on now for at least a year.

Charlie hung his head and muttered, “But it has to be right.”

He put his hand up to ward off the evil eye from all three of us.

I looked at the other two and said, “Rick, why don’t you start.”

“Okay, Charlie you know how when we market a product or service we give it our best shot, right? But we just don’t fling it out there and hope for the best. We watch the results. In the mail and in print and on TV we monitor sales and track where they came from. It’s the same way on-line. We watch the click through rates and the web site traffic flow and the actual orders.

We test against the best result we get which we call The Control.

Man, if you don’t try something you have no control.”

Bubba took up the cudgel, “If you don’t stop making it perfect for you, you’ll never know what makes it perfect for the customer. I can’t position it if I don’t know who the customer is and what need, use or occasion it meets not to mention why if is unique for them.”

Charlie looked to me for help.

I shook my head no, looked him in the eye and told him, “No product is ever perfect out of the chute particularly intellectual property based products. I know I’m right. Everybody talks about how prescient Steve Jobs was in introducing the I-Pad in 2010. Nobody seems to recall the Apple Newton which failed in 1993 but provided the information needed to build the I Pad and I Phone.

Excel didn’t have linked pages when it first came out. ACT! was a flat file database. FaceBook, Linked In and even Google continue to change primarily to meet changing needs of their customers.”

“Charlie,” Bubba added, ”Perfection is in the eye of the beholder and until you introduce it you are never going to know what a customer thinks about it. Chances are what you think is perfect is not what they think. stop looking in the rear view mirror and get this show on the road!”

Rick capped it off, “Use the 80/20 rule. When you get to 80% of what your concept is get it into an alpha test with real potential customers. Trust customers to buy and to tell you how to make it better.”

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Consider a speaker who stopped counting successful product introductions at 207. Learn more at: www.NetworkingNinja.com