Should your agency launch a new product or service?

Hello and welcome to episode 65 of the Agency Accelerator Podcast. Now today I want to talk about researching and validating your ideas before you launch into creating a new product or service for your audience. Now, I originally spoke about validating your ideas way back in episode 16 when lots of agencies were thinking about pivoting and getting online. So I wanted to revisit this topic and speak more broadly and take a little bit of a deeper dive to think about how how you should launch a new product or service and indeed whether you should do that. So that's what today's episode is all about. So let's get on with the show. Accelerate your agency's profitable growth with tools, tips and value added interviews with your host, agency owner and coach, Rob DaCosta. Today's episode of the Agency Except Accelerator Podcast is sponsored by Cloudways. Cloudways is a managed cloud hosting platform that simplifies the web hosting experience for agencies. The platform offers complete peace of mind and allows agencies to focus on their growth with 24. 7 support and easy to use features. Now, Cloudways is launching its Agency Partnership program that's designed to help agencies grow to new Heights. So visit cloudways.com agency and join the program to get access to extended technical support, discounts and co marketing opportunities with Cloudways. Okay, on with today's show. Hi. And I hope you're having a fantastic week. And no doubt every now and again you think about launching a new product or service. You see lots of people online telling you how easy it is to do it, and you get ideas from what they're doing and you look at your competitors and you think I'm going to launch new product or service and you think that is your solution to increasing your revenues and keeping you guys busy. Now, of course it may well be the right thing to do, but often it isn't. Often we need to look where we're standing rather than looking at the other man's grass and thinking it's greener or getting seduced by shiny new objects and promises of get rich quick schemes, and so on and so on and so on. So as I said in the introduction, I've spoken about this before, but today I want to focus on whether you should be launching a new product or service and when you have decided that you want to do that, what are the next steps that you should do? So as ever, today is an action packed episode that I hope you get some great value out of and one that you should definitely listen to if you are thinking about broadening your portfolio of products or services that you offer your clients. So the first thing you need to do is make sure that you are really clear about your piece one, your core product, and that you are a specialist in doing this and you are seen as an expert and your audience knows that from you. So it might be that you are a WordPress web design agency, but you're thinking about a secondary product, could be hosting, or it could be SEO or PPC and so on and so on. But the first thing you need to do is make sure that you have really penetrated your marketplace with your core offering. And if you're thinking about having a secondary product, it's driven because you are consistently hearing your market tell you that you need it. There's no point hearing one client say, oh, it'd be so fantastic if you could do SEO for us as well as hosting our website. And you go, okay, great. So I'm going to launch an SEO product because that's taking you down a massive rabbit hole. And because one customer says they need it doesn't mean that the market needs it from you. So the first thing you need to do is make sure that if you are thinking about launching a P2 product, a secondary product or service that you know your market wants it, and knowing that your market wants it rather than thinking it's something that your market needs is a huge, huge difference. And so I'm just going to say that again, knowing that your market wants something rather than you thinking they need it is, is a huge difference. And that's the first kind of rabbit hole that you're in danger of going down. And you know, I've written about the difference between selling painkillers and vitamin pills to your audience, and this is a really good example of it. So let me just remind you of that. So a vitamin pill is something that you know is going to be really good for somebody. You know that in the long run it will probably make them really healthy. And a painkiller is something that's going to get rid of their pain. Right now, if your customer has a headache and you try and sell them a vitamin pill based on the fact that, you know, in the long run it will stop them getting headaches, then they are not going to buy from you right now because what they really need is a painkiller. And yeah, of course there's a place for vitamin pills, but predominant message here is to make sure you're selling painkillers to your market rather than vitamin pills. So selling things that you know they need rather than things that you believe will be good for them and that they should have. Because at any one time your customer every day will be thinking about their top three pains and thinking about ways they can solve them. And if your product or service addresses those pains, then they're more likely to engage with you. Whereas if you're trying to sell them a vitamin pill, it's just not on their mind, it's not a top of agenda item for them, so they won't buy. Now, I've written about this many times before, so in the show notes I will include a link to my blog post on selling painkillers or vitamin pills. So if you're thinking about expanding your product or services portfolio, it has to be driven by your ideal target market demands. And of course, you need to research that idea before you invest any time in developing the product or service. And that starts off by going out and talking to your marketplace. And my advice to you is to record those conversations if you possibly can, especially if you're doing it via Zoom, so you can capture the exact language that they use and, and that will enable you to identify the key pain points that you think your new product or service can solve. Now, I can't tell you how important this is, and I'm really going to speak from personal experience here because I have made the mistakes in the past of thinking I know exactly what my marketplace needs and going and producing products for it. When I first got into the online learning space, I thought, I know there's loads of people out there who want to start their own business, so I'm going to create a course called Start yout Own Business and Gain Financial Freedom. So I went hell for Leather, spent loads of time outlining the program, shooting the videos, buying the hosting platform, spending tons of money in it, and then launching it to crickets. And then I thought, okay, well, I'll do my second product. Now everyone wants to learn how to sell, so I'm going to produce a course on selling. So I did exactly the same thing again, went hell for Leather, spent loads of time and money and effort producing a course and launched it to cricuts. Now, it's not that people don't want to buy a course on starting your own business, or people don't want to buy a course on selling. It's just that I didn't do what I'm telling you to do, which is go and do your research. And if I had done my research and if I'd have got clearer about exactly who this course was aimed at, my ideal target market Then I would have got their language right and I would have identified their pain points and I could have produced a course that worked, rather than trying to produce a generic course that in theory could appeal to everybody, but, but in reality appeal to absolutely nobody. So please don't make the same mistakes that I've made. And a lot of my own personal journey is what I put into helping my clients get this right so they don't spend loads of time, money and effort producing something that nobody wants. Okay, enough of my sob story. And back to you. So you've got an idea, you've gone to your ideal target market, you've done some research and you've recorded them and you've identified some of the key pain points which help shape your product or service and also how you market it. Market it. Now the next thing you need to do is start outlining what we call your minimum viable product or your minimum viable offer. And this is a really important stage. So what you want to do is create a short description that would explain exactly what your product or service is. And your goal now is to go back to that marketplace and pre sell some of this product or service before you actually formally launch it and formally develop it and flesh it out. And the reason for this is because there is a huge difference between someone telling you in your research that they are interested in this offer versus someone actually buying it. So again, let me just repeat that. There's a huge difference between someone telling you that they are interested in this theoretical new product or service and someone parting with money to buy it. So your goal with your minimum viable offer or your minimum viable product is to get people to buy it before you invest tons of time in fleshing out the product. Now this is exactly what I did with my Group Mastermind program, the self running agency implementation group. So I created a minimum viable offer which was like a one page description sort of outlining exactly what the program looked like, who it was aimed at, what were the pain points that I was trying to help my target audience. I you guys solve and then I asked people if they were interested in joining. Now your goal is to convert between say 5 to 10% of the people that you go to to get feedback from and actually ask them to buy your product. If you can get 5 to 10% of those people to actually say yes, I want to buy your product, then you know you have now validated it and at that point you can start fleshing it out. And let's face it, there's nothing more motivating than selling something that you actually haven't produced yet. Now this is an approach that people take in every kind of industry. If you think about cars, where they produce early sort of versions that are probably never going to go to market, but they use that to help shape the final version that gets launched, and you want to take exactly the same approach. So if you are, let's go back to My example, a WordPress web development company, and you are thinking about providing hosting, which is a whole different kind of setup, then you need to go to your market and you need to explain to them why your hosting solution would be different. What's the benefit of designing your website and hosting it as well? And what is the challenge that it's solving for that client? And if you can get people to say yes, we would buy into this, then you have validated it. So if you are asking 100 people and you get 5 to 10 of those people parting with money to actually pay you for hosting, then you know you validated it. However, if you go to market and people have said yes, but they don't actually buy, then you haven't validated it. And you need to do more research to understand why and how you need to refine your proposition. Because it's probably that you are not hitting that core pain point enough to make someone part with their money. And like I mentioned earlier, my first two online courses, which I launched about seven or eight years ago, the starting your own business one and the selling one, they were just too general and too broad and they didn't hit the core pain points. I was just thinking, of course people want to know how to sell more. So that's my vitamin pill and I going to produce it. And what I needed to do was go and talk to the specific challenges of my market, understand those pain points and get the shape of the course right and also get the marketing messages really clear as well. Now you can do this research using focus groups and it needs to be an iterative process. In other words, you go to your first sample audience, you get some feedback from them, you refine your proposition and then you take it to your second audience. So there's a real methodical way of doing this. But I can't emphasize to you enough. Make sure if you are thinking about launching a new product or service, you go through this research and validation phase. First of all, because if the research and validation shows you that no one is interested, just know that you have saved yourself a ton of heartache and a ton of time and a ton of wasted money rather than just going to produce something that you really struggle to sell. Now, another thing about this is that you want to make sure that you are really clear about your core product, your P1 product or service. Because you don't want to take your eye off the ball because you get excited by this new shiny object. You go hell for leather producing it, putting all your focus onto that. And meanwhile, you start losing clients for your core product or service. So again, that's why you need to have a really methodical approach for researching and validating before you start producing something. Because not only could you waste loads of time on this new idea, but you could actually lose clients for your current proposition as well, which is your core product and should always stay your core product. So once you've validated your idea, let's say you've gone through this methodical, iterative process and you've come out the other end with a bunch of clients who've committed to buying it. Now you need to do two things. First of all, of course you've got to get the product or service ready, and you're going to have to invest some time in doing that, whether that be your time, your team's time, or outsourcing time. And the second thing in parallel to that is you've got to think about how you are going to market and sell your product. And that is equally important because there's no point having an amazing product that nobody buys because you haven't marketed it well. And there's no point having an amazing marketing machine for a product that nobody wants. So both of these are super important. But you need to start putting your attention to how am I going to market this as well. And I would really encourage you to use all of the language through your research to help shape the language for how you're going to sell your page, whether that be in the actual sales page on your website, or how you take it to market, or your emails, or however else you're going to promote your product or service. Now, one of your first strategies is going to be to go to your existing client base and let them know that you have this new product or service, explain what it does, talk about the pains that it solves for them, and obviously try and get them to sign up to buy the product or service in addition to what they currently buy from you. So, using our web design analogy, again, if you've been designing websites for clients and you're now thinking about hosting, then you want to go out to market and let them know. And as I said earlier, talk about the benefits of hosting with you over somebody else and how the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and how you are addressing some of those key pain points that you established in your research during your valid validation phase. Then you want to think about what are the best ways of reaching new customers that perhaps don't know about you yet, and how can you give them the confidence that buying from you will be a really good move. And that's a whole other topic that we talked about in other episodes of the podcast, but nevertheless something that's super important for you to focus on when you are creating your sales and marketing plan to launch this new product or service. Now, I'd really encourage you to set some targets around growth and make sure that they are really realistic. And I'd also make sure that you continue getting iterative feedback from new customers or from people that didn't buy so that you can keep refining your messaging because there's nothing like talking to your marketplace to understand why they bought or why they didn't buy. I do this with some of my online programs and and those people that take the time to complete a short questionnaire about why they didn't buy really is insightful. And it's all sorts of reasons from me not getting my messaging quite right through to me targeting the wrong kind of person through to people saying well actually I'm interested but now is not quite the right time. And then of course I'm going to be really reliant on my email nurturing to keep in touch with those people. So when it is the right time for them, they do reach out and buy from me and they know exactly the full breadth of my product or services. Now I have written a 29 page book on researching, validating and launching a new product or service. So if that's something you're interested in again, I will put the link into today's show notes, but I hope you found today useful. I've kind of perhaps just reminded you and reminded me of the message of slowing down to speed up, slow down. Do your research, validate your idea before you launch your new product or service and you will save yourself a ton of time, money and heartache. As I said, it's when things are tough, it's really easy to get seduced by shiny new objects or promises where the other man's grass is greener because I'm struggling to sell my current product or service. So I know I'll go and launch a new one. But that is usually completely the wrong approach and what you really need to do is double down on your current core products and look at better ways of marketing and selling them. But if you are thinking about launching a new product or service, then please follow some of the steps I've outlined in the podcast and I go into much more detail with specific templates and emails and so on that you need to use when you are trying to validate your new product or service in the book that I just mentioned. So another short and sweet episode, but I hope you will agree some really actionable items and hopefully some sage advice. If you are thinking about launching a new product or service or you are planning to do that in the future, as ever, please hit the subscribe button. Share this with your colleagues and if you enjoy the episode and found it useful with some genuine value, then please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts because that helps me be found by more people and I am on a mission right now to really grow the audience for the podcast. Other than that, have a fantastic rest of the week. Check out the links for the various books that I mentioned throughout today's podcast. And other than that, I will see you next Thursday for the next episode of the Agency Accelerator Podcast where we have our next guest.