Launching a new product in a B2B environment almost always starts with confidence.
The investment has been made, the development work is done, and internal stakeholders are aligned. Early customer conversations are positive. Sales teams return from the launch energised, talking about potential and early interest, convinced the market is ready.
For a brief moment, everything appears to be working. And then something changes.
Deals that felt promising begin to stall. Sales cycles stretch out longer than forecasted, targets are quietly revised, and leadership starts to question whether that initial optimism was well-founded. Conversations shift from excitement to explanation – and eventually to blame. Was the product over-engineered? Positioned incorrectly? Are customers simply resistant to change?
Decades of research into new-product sales suggest a more uncomfortable truth: when good products fail early, the issue is rarely the product itself.
When early sales fail to materialise, organisations tend to reach for familiar explanations. The first is customer resistance – buyers are cautious by nature, preferring familiar solutions and avoiding risk, especially where the innovation is complex or untested. The second is sales resistance – sellers retreat to what they know, avoiding new offerings because they feel harder to explain or outside their comfort zone.
These explanations are reassuring because they place the problem outside the organisation's control, with the market or the salesforce, implying that time alone will resolve things. The challenge is that they don't stand up to scrutiny.
In our research of new-product launches, customers initially reacted with genuine enthusiasm – curious, engaged, and openly exploring alternatives. Salespeople, meanwhile, reported high motivation to sell the new offering and real confidence in its potential. Yet despite this promising start, sales still slowed. The failure didn't occur at first exposure. It emerged later, as conversations progressed.
To understand why, researchers looked not at intentions or opinions, but at behaviour inside real sales calls – and what they found was striking.
When selling new products, salespeople behaved very differently compared to when they sold established offerings, even when the same individuals were involved. Three consistent shifts appeared: sellers asked significantly fewer questions, spent more time describing features and capabilities, and conducted calls that were often longer but markedly less effective.
These changes weren't deliberate. Sellers weren't consciously abandoning good practice – in many cases, they were doing exactly what felt professional and responsible. When a product is new or complex, there's an implicit pressure to explain it properly. Sellers worry that if the customer doesn't fully understand the solution, the sale will fail. Features feel safe. Capabilities feel factual. Questioning, by contrast, can feel risky. Ironically, this is precisely when effective questioning matters most.
This pattern is well documented in the SPIN Selling research, which found a strong positive correlation between the number of questions asked in a sales call and whether that call succeeded – and a negative correlation with the number of features described. Across tens of thousands of observed calls, the data was unambiguous: telling customers about a product’s capabilities before understanding their specific problems consistently undermined the sale, not strengthened it.
The more innovative the product, the stronger this behavioural shift becomes. Innovation increases novelty, and novelty increases cognitive load – customers have more to process, more uncertainty to resolve, and more internal justification to make. In these situations, giving customers more information rarely creates clarity. It often has the opposite effect.
But sellers, enthused by the innovation and eager to communicate its value, instinctively lean into feature-led explanations. The result is a subtle but damaging mismatch: customers need help thinking through their problems, while sellers feel compelled to explain their solution.
One of the most counter-intuitive findings from launch research concerns enthusiasm. Conventional wisdom suggests that belief in a product is essential for sales success – particularly when it doesn't yet have a market track record. But data shows a different pattern.
Salespeople who displayed the highest levels of enthusiasm for a new product often delivered poorer early results than their peers. Top performers, by contrast, were noticeably more restrained. They weren't negative about the product – they simply refused to let their excitement override their focus on the customer. Where others led with breakthroughs, specifications, and superiority, these sellers stayed grounded, treating the product as just another option until the customer's problems, priorities, and decision criteria were clearly established.
The SPIN framework helps explain why. Effective selling in complex or high-value products depends on exploring the customer’s situation, surfacing the problems they face, developing an understanding of the implications of those problems, and only then establishing the need for a solution. Top performers instinctively follow this discipline: they invest in the problem before they introduce the product. Less experienced sellers, particularly when selling something new and exciting, tend to collapse that sequence and jump straight to the solution.
In many organisations, slow early sales are treated as an unavoidable learning curve. Leadership assumes sellers need time to build confidence, and that performance will improve once experience accumulates, but research points to something more hopeful.
When sellers stop leading with the product and return their attention to uncovering customer problems, performance recovers – and often rapidly. Not because the product changed, not because the market became more receptive, but because selling behaviour realigned with how buyers actually make decisions.
New products rarely fail because customers don't value innovation. They fail because, early on, sales conversations focus on what the product is before customers understand why they need it.
For sales enablement and commercial leaders, this distinction matters, because while market conditions can be difficult to influence, selling behaviour is not. And that’s where good products either find their footing or quietly begin to fail.
The principles of SPIN Selling – developed from direct observation of successful and unsuccessful sales calls – offer a practical framework for achieving exactly this. By equipping sellers to lead with questions rather than capabilities, and by structuring product launches around the problems a product solves rather than the features it offers, organisations can close the gap between a great product and a successful launch.