Is your business to business company aligned with your customers, or only with your product development team? Ask the people in your company in sales, service, and support to tell you what really bothers them the most about the way new products are launched at your company. Are your sales people frequently being asked to sell products which dont yet exist? How about selling products that you absolutely have to offer in order to compete, but theres no clear positioning message to help sales articulate why someone should buy it from your company?

Does your hotline support group complain that the same general problems show up over and over again with new products? Can they successfully answer the customers calls during the first couple of months after a new product is launched? Do your implementation services technicians spend a lot of time gathering requirements for customized versions of your product, tailored to meet their customers unique needs? Did your operations or IT organization create a special task force that meets every Tuesday to analyze and determine how to support any new product announcements that have happened in the last week?

If the answer to any of these questions was yes, you may be wasting huge amounts of money in poor sales performance, larger than expected service and support costs, and out of control operations or information technology infrastructure. You may be frustrated at each of these organizations for these issues without recognizing where the troubles began. Lets say you were planning to open a new department store, attached to a large shopping mall. You and your architect and the construction company successfully put a building in the right place.

When the doors opened on the first day, visitors entered the nice wide double doors and found nobody to greet them. After searching for the right department for the items they needed, nobody was at the customer service desk or any cash registers. The escalator to the next floor was all the way in the back of the building down a narrow hallway passed the restrooms (escalators do take up floor space). There was no store directory. The entrance from the mall on the second floor was completely obscured by an artistic architectural design that displayed your logo up in lights.

Not one person in the store had been trained on how do deal with returns, or in-store financing, or helping customers to navigate the wide array of products in all those different departments. The ladies shoe department was on the second floor right next to the mens shoe department and the cosmetics department was in a corner next to the coffee stand. Where was everyone? attending an emergency meeting to figure out what to do with the scuba gear that arrived for the mens department in the middle of winter in Minnesota.

What kind of experience would shoppers have in this store? Isnt the experience what it is all about? How do your customers experience your product and your company? Your engineering team may be very good and smart and innovative. However, they must include all of the functional units that will be required to sell, service and support the product in the process for planning, justifying investment, and developing new products from concept to launch. If they dont, you will more than likely be creating a long term expensive mess.

That will cost you real time and money to correct while risking your reputation and making it harder to sell as well. Your top line will suffer from difficulty in selling and your bottom line will suffer from both poor sales and inefficient operations and service having to divert time and resources on corrections that could have been avoided completely. When designing your products or services to meet your customers needs, do you include all of the customer facing groups in your company in that process? Is there well defined process for them to participate and contribute to new product developments?

Once the product is launched and providing service to customers day to day, it is all of these customer facing groups that need to support the products and interact with the customer in sales, implementation, hotline support, and so on. Their experience at servicing your existing customers and products, plus their system requirements, should have a significant influence on the design requirements for any new product.

You may have a phased process for managing the development of new products, with explicit executive decisions required after each phase to open the gate to proceed with the next phase. It may look something like this:

Phase 1: New idea or concept evaluation
- is this idea really worth pursuing? Does it fit with your strategy? Will it pass the financial hurdles for your business?

Phase 2: Business Case development
- a thorough assessment of the market opportunity, competitive landscape, market functional requirements, resources and timeframes required, and detailed financial analysis

Phase 3: Design and develop specifications
- detailed specifications and engineering resources and schedules to validate the business case

Phase 4: Development
- writing the code, quality assurance and customer testing, implementation and support service documentation and training

Phase 5: Launch
- organization readiness including sales kits, promotional plans, pricing, final updated business case, sales plans

Phase 6: Life cycle maintenance and support
- customer service, support, software updates, service and satisfaction reports

You may delegate the management of processes like these to product managers, business development managers, or even engineering managers who take full responsibility for driving a new product from concept to market. Make sure that they are not the only people aside from executive review who participate in the development of the requirements and of the product itself.

The right place to engage sales, service and support, and operations in new product plans is Phase 2, the business case phase. They should provide requirements to validate market assumptions, functional needs of the products to improve serviceability, and cost estimates to develop, launch and support the product once it has completed development. They need to sign-off on the business case at this phase to assure their requirements have been addressed. Then they should be fully engaged during the design, development and launch phases to ensure their needs are addressed during development of the product itself, and to develop the tools, training, systems, and plans necessary to launch and support the product. Their sign-off on Phase 5, the launch, indicates they are satisfied that the product is ready and that their organizations are ready to sell, service, and support the product.

Engaging these teams in this way will go a long way to assuring that your products meet the needs and live up to your customers expectations when launched, while maximizing your ability to sell and support them at the same time thereby reducing time to profit. So, instead of having weekly emergency support services meetings to try to handle the new product surprises your engineering team is regularly producing, invite those teams to participate in the planning process and youll all arrive at the same place together at the same time what a concept!