5 Points on How to build a Sales Ready Product (SRP)

/ Hatton & Berkeley/

Before you begin building any product or service you will need to isolate and opine on why your customers need your product.

First, Understand the WHY behind WHY your customers need your product, what does it solve for them?

Look at what makes your product unique, then get rid of any unnecessary fat on it, demo the concept to clients that you already have longstanding relationships with – listen to their remarks and adapt accordingly.

So here are the 5 basic points to building a successful Sales Ready Product

1.  Understand your future client’s needs, wants & desires

Uncover the solutions your clients are looking for, understand these needs – do they even want the solution you are offering? Importantly, if they have no desire to look for your product – ask yourself – Why would they buy it?

When developing any product – you should research thoroughly the requirements of your prospective clients, learn to adapt to what they need. A Prospective customer who opens up and details their exact requirement is invaluable.

Look at every detail you discover about the clients needs, it is only the greater purview that will help you make correct decisions about your offering.

2. Record any negative objections about your product

Now this is really important – when you are about to release a product into the market if one single person has something negative to say – there will be others who think the same but do not voice their opinions openly. Record these and take note.

These negatives can be turned into positives – adapt your product or response to objections accordingly, if it’s an issue with performance, back to the drawing board.

But don’t be drawn into trying to solve every problem, you will never release the product if that was the case. A well-designed feature of a product will win over potential clients in split seconds.

3. Understand WHAT the limits are of the product

When trialling a product it is important for future development that you understand what the limits of the product are, you may wish to stage a release of a product whilst restricting features for future releases if need be.

If a product is limited to what it can achieve – how can you improve this in the future making your ‘next’ product even better than the last?

It is important to understand any limitations your product may have, as it is this data that will bring you valuable insight to developing your next release.

4. Find your target customers

A critical point of the development process of your SRP is early identification of the ‘target customer’. Identify this and it will allow you to narrow the field, assisting you to concentrate your sales efforts on day one.

Your future clients will appear in the following order;

  • Innovators

  • Early Adopters

  • Early Majority*

  • Late Majority

  • Laggards

Once you have broken from attracting ‘Early Adopters’ moving to attracting the ‘Early Majority’ you have moved beyond the hardest part of sales cycle.

Your target audience will be predominantly made up of the Early Majority* - these being the most valuable due to significant scale in the volume of them – they will also be harder to win.

How you qualify a target customer is also as important – sales resources are always limited, try to understand whom the potential clients are individually, what is their lifestyle? Where do they holiday? What do you each have in common? All very useful information when making decisions on your first approach.

5. The all important Unique Selling Point ‘SRP USP’

What are the leading features of your product?

Present a user case study that will have future customers fall in love with your product.

Once you have the USP defined there should be absolutely you will do away with feature bloat, the art of reduction surrounding this unique selling point will define your product allowing you to peel back any unnecessary extras that obscure WHY the target customer needs your product.

So with this in mind – knowing that when building a Sales Ready Product your upfront investment into research and development may be high, but the results should be well worthwhile.

An SRP should be ready to be sold as is with immediate effect, even if it does take long to develop. Once released new customer transactions should increase, your sales cycles should shorten and client renewals should increase quickly.