Why It’s So Hard to Sell New Products

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 11 December 2018

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Thomas Steenburgh, a marketing professor at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business, was inspired by his early career at Xerox to discover why firms with stellar sales and R&D departments still struggle to sell new innovations. The answer, he finds, is that too many companies expect shiny new products to sell themselves. Steenburgh explains how crafting new sales processes, incentives, and training can overcome the obstacles inherent in selling new products. He's the coauthor, along with Michael Ahearne of the University of Houston's Sales Excellence Institute, of the HBR article "How to Sell New Products."

Transcript

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0:00.0	Kurt Nick is here from Ideacast. I want to tell you about the Big Take
0:05.1	podcast from Bloomberg News. Each weekday they bring you one important story
0:10.0	from their global newsroom like how AI will upend your life and why China's
0:15.4	targeting the US dollar. Check out the big take from Bloomberg wherever you
0:20.2	listen. Welcome to the HBR Ideacaste from Harvard Business Review. I'm Kurt Nickish. In 1979 in California, a group of engineers and executives from Apple, led by Steve Jobs,
0:55.8	visited a research and development lab run by Xerox, the company better known for its office
1:00.8	copiers.
1:01.8	And it was there at Xerox Park that Jobs saw some new
1:06.0	computing innovations including the mouse. And it's good that they showed us
1:10.1	because the technology crashed and burned at Xerox.
1:13.0	Jobs remembered that visit in a 1995 TV interview.
1:16.0	He said Xerox was successful at innovating,
1:19.0	but not at commercializing those innovations.
1:22.0	The people at Xerox Park used to call the people that ran Xerox toner heads.
1:26.0	Copier heads that just had no clue about a computer or what it could do.
1:31.0	And so they just grab defeat from the greatest victory in the computer industry.
1:37.0	Xerox could have owned the entire computer industry today.
1:40.0	But anyway that's all ancient history it doesn't really matter anymore. But it does matter to today's It doesn't really matter anymore.
1:43.0	But it does matter to today's guest.
1:46.0	Tom Steinberg started his career at Xerox,
1:48.0	and what he saw there troubled him.
1:50.0	He wanted to know, where do sales teams and leaders go wrong when they fail to sell new products.
	...

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