New Technology for Old: Legacy Products Can Be the Open Door to Selling New

Product lifecycle is a fluid, ever-changing practice. When you launch and sell a new offering, it's usually with the knowledge that it will be updated and/or replaced sometime in the future. With today's unprecedented new technology offerings, the cycle is faster, their frequency increasing.

The nature of today's high-tech global economy dictates change. You must compete not only for new customers, but for existing customers as well. Do you have the automated systems, business processes, tools and personnel to make sure current customers don't get stuck holding legacy products which might not be long supported in the rush to sell new customers your latest offerings?

Legacy or Phoenix? Set Your Company Up for Customer Rebirth

Because of their nature, new rollouts typically hold more appeal for most businesses to pursue. In the scramble to launch, the excitement of new sales commissions and increasing revenue, aging, out-cycling legacies and their contracts can be overlooked. Once shiny, new and full of promise, the move to smaller, faster, onward, upward product march steals their luster.

When what they're currently using is replaced, companies that depend upon manual tracking and output cycling via spreadsheets and other outmoded techniques can experience a drop in existing customer activity. If you don't have your finger on their declining pulse, you may miss the opportunity to excite current customers with completely new and/or enhanced versions of what they have now. You'll also miss the chance to excite your sales channels with positively inclined leads.

When existing customers get lost in the cracks, when their current connections cycle out, if they are managed poorly or not at all, the account might cycle out too. By automating current customer data management in alignment with your new launches, you'll know when to approach them with more useful replacements and not-to-be-missed upgrade deals.

Rising like the Phoenix, New Product Introductions Can Inspire Out-Cycling Clients to Buy Again

Think your latest offers look good to prospective customers? They'll probably look good to present day clientele too. Knowing who and when to announce, present and follow through should be loaded into your automated customer data management system. Instead of sending Direct and/or Indirect Sales Teams off to find new leads, you can hand them a list of prospects who need no introduction: satisfied buyers already onboard and predisposed to continuing their relationship using your new technology and upgrades.

In the meantime, while they're still satisfied with older, existing contracts, you can plan and assign annual and customized follow-ups that include the option of existing product improvements. All it takes is factoring their end-of-life products/contracts into your rollout practices.

Proactively managing both Direct and Indirect Sales Data and business processes to reflect end-of-life-cycle deals should be part of every endeavor's workflow automation system. Your POS Management Data will point the way to warm and fuzzy relationships that make new product sales the thing fortunes are made of—rising from your legacy offerings to profitable new beginnings.

Want to learn more about turning legacy product customers into eager new product prospects?  Look to our upcoming blogs and iasset.com feature publications.