New Product Launch to Boost Business

Changes in the printing industry were causing a leader in shareholder and marketing communication to lose market share. Schaffer Consulting helped them develop and launch a new competitive product in five months. The product was a huge success, bringing in more business year after year.

Losing Market Share

A market leader in providing shareholder and marketing communication services to Fortune 1000 and Investment Management companies around the world was losing share in its compliance filing service as a new breed of competitors began to offer a cheaper version of its electronic filing services, luring away customers and using this as a beachhead to gain the more lucrative and profitable business of filings associated with M&A and IPO deals.

The client had an idea for a competitive response that involved offering clients a less costly option that was quicker to implement but that did not offer the dozens of customization options of the traditional compliance product. Getting this to market required close collaboration between Marketing, Sales, and Composition Operations, and going to scale required fundamental changes in the way the sales force operated. But many issues had to be resolved and there was deep-seated concern about the capability to develop a profitable offering, and about the cannibalization that might follow if they succeeded.

Difficulties Responding to Competition

We helped the Marketing leader of the Financial Print division to organize a conference for all the parties concerned – to identify the decisions that had to be made, and then to scope out the strategy for answering these questions. With support and encouragement from Schaffer Consulting, the team set a short term goal to establish operations and secure a minimum number of work orders.

In the following four months, we worked with the team to innovate the composition process, establish a pricing model, reinvent billing processes, develop a co-positioning strategy to compare and contrast the new product with the premium service offering, train the sales force, select an operations team, and go live.

New Product Retains Customers and Brings in New

The company’s new, proprietary product was launched five months after the conference meeting. Revenue passed $100,000 in the first four months and grew to $1.2 million the following year. One year after that, sales of the product totaled 284, with $3.5 million in revenue. The business continued to grow, with revenues for the first three quarters topping $5 million in the third year. The business has operated as an effective low-cost alternative, allowing our client to hold onto hundreds of clients who might otherwise have left for lower-cost, lower-feature competitors.