Recently Seth Godin wrote a post that explains the essential steps to bring a product or service to market. He called it Marketing in Four Steps.
The first step is to invent a thing worth making, a story worth telling, a contribution worth talking about.
The second step is to design and build it in a way that people will actually benefit from and care about.
The third one is the one everyone gets all excited about. This is the step where you tell the story to the right people in the right way.
The last step is so often overlooked: The part where you show up, regularly, consistently and generously, for years and years, to organize and lead and build confidence in the change you seek to make.
Of course, these four steps are not the sole responsibility of the Marketing department. In fact, they require involvement and coordination between all three of the core functions—new product development (NPD), production, and sales.
Let’s look at who play the primary roles in each of Mr. Godin’s four steps.
The first step is to invent a thing worth making, a story worth telling, a contribution worth talking about.
NPD and sales work together to conceive new products (or services). These can be entirely new products or extensions to existing products. Sales is intimately involved with customers—what they want and what they will buy. NPD has the creativity and the technical knowledge to push boundaries and to know what is possible.
The second step is to design and build it in a way that people will actually benefit from and care about.
Once NPD has a design, it works closely with production to engineer how to build and deliver the product or service.
The third one is the one everyone gets all excited about. This is the step where you tell the story to the right people in the right way.
Sales has responsibility for acquiring new customer relationships, managing those relationships, and converting sales opportunities into customers. In a professional, scientific, or technical services firm, sales opportunities come from the relationships you have under your care. Some of these relationships are with existing clients. But most of them are relationships that you’ve been cultivating for months or even years. Your automated communications program educates them about industry trends and problem-solving.
When you have a new product or service to explain, you have a ready-made audience not only with your customers, but also with all the other relationships you have been nurturing.
The last step is so often overlooked: The part where you show up, regularly, consistently and generously, for years and years, to organize and lead and build confidence in the change you seek to make.
In this crucial final step, sales and production work together to deliver quality products on time. They solve customer service issues, process repeat transactions consistently, conduct requirement discovery and design custom solutions.