By the time you reach the release date for a new prod­uct, you and your team have already invest­ed a sig­nif­i­cant amount of time, mon­ey, inno­va­tion, and emo­tion into mak­ing sure every­thing goes per­fect. Because there is so much rid­ing on the suc­cess of a launch, it’s crush­ing when a prod­uct doesn’t receive the pos­i­tive atten­tion or sales you antic­i­pat­ed. Where do you go from here?

Despite the plan­ning, cus­tomer inter­views, pro­to­type test­ing and val­i­da­tion, and mes­sag­ing, the launch fell flat. This unfor­tu­nate sce­nario is some­thing many prod­uct man­agers and mar­keters will expe­ri­ence at some point in their career. When it does, how do you bounce back from an under­per­form­ing launch?

1. Open The Dialogue Externally And Internally

The ulti­mate goal of a launch is to kick start a sales engine that con­tin­ues to grow and gain momen­tum. When that doesn’t hap­pen, it’s time to get out and talk to cus­tomers and prospec­tive cus­tomers again (hope­ful­ly you did this pri­or to launch). Iden­ti­fy why they didn’t take to the prod­uct or the mes­sag­ing. Once you’ve gained that data, the next step is to pull the team togeth­er to dis­cuss the find­ings, as well as iden­ti­ty oth­er holes in the launch. It’s impor­tant to estab­lish a pos­i­tive tone dur­ing this debrief­ing. It is not about plac­ing blame. Focus on the facts – the goal is to iden­ti­fy the root caus­es of the wins and fails of the launch. Was it relat­ed to prod­uct fea­tures? Not tar­get­ing the right mar­ket? Were the mar­ket­ing chan­nels off? Or was it a mat­ter of tim­ing? Doc­u­ment what you learn from this debrief and cre­ate an action plan for iter­at­ing the prod­uct or mar­ket­ing cam­paign.

2. Diagnosis By Numbers

As the say­ing goes, “the num­bers don’t lie.” Grab a shov­el and dig into the ana­lyt­ics. Exam­ine the mar­ket­ing chan­nels and strate­gies that were employed. Did these gen­er­ate leads, but not con­ver­sions? Where along the sales fun­nel did prospects drop off? This can help uncov­er whether it was an issue with the mar­ket­ing mes­sage, sales tool, prod­uct, or mix of all three. If you have past prod­uct launch his­to­ry to bench­mark these fig­ures against, that can also pin­point what led to the launch fail­ure. Also take a look at your goals and how you mea­sured those goals. Were your pro­jec­tions or sights too lofty? In some cas­es, prod­uct launch­es aren’t actu­al­ly unsuc­cess­ful – they were just put up against unre­al­is­tic expec­ta­tions. Look­ing at the ana­lyt­ics and trends in the mar­ket at the time of launch will help zero in on con­tri­bu­tions to the lack­lus­ter suc­cess.

3. Be Upfront With Your Customers

If the unsuc­cess­ful launch was a ver­sion update of an exist­ing prod­uct or a com­pli­men­ta­ry prod­uct to one you already have cus­tomers for, it’s essen­tial to be up front with them about how you plan to make it right. Com­mu­ni­cat­ing with cus­tomers direct­ly may mean spend­ing some time on the phone with them to make sure they under­stand how to use the prod­uct, or a free upgrade once you have the prod­uct improved. You may remem­ber Apple offered to replace the bat­tery on thou­sands of iPhone 5 mod­els when it didn’t hold a charge prop­er­ly. You may take a loss finan­cial­ly, but it’s a small price to keep a long-term cus­tomer. If it was a new prod­uct that failed to con­vert beta users to pay­ing cus­tomers, get a dia­logue going with those who aban­doned post launch, as well as those who stayed on. From these con­ver­sa­tions cre­ate a com­mu­ni­ca­tion strat­e­gy to inform the non-con­vert­ing ear­ly users about the pos­i­tive changes that will be made.

4. Redefine, Recalibrate & Relaunch

Are you tar­get­ing the right mar­ket? You might find your prod­uct is fine, but the prob­lem you thought it would solve for a par­tic­u­lar mar­ket, is actu­al­ly bet­ter suit­ed for anoth­er. Or maybe the end user is not the buy­er, in which case you’ll need to recal­i­brate your mar­ket­ing and sales strat­e­gy. Sim­i­lar­ly, maybe you thought this prod­uct would be a quick, imper­son­al sell, but it turns out it’s going to take a longer, more hands-on sales cycle to close the deal. Some­times it’s the sim­plest of tweaks that can make all the dif­fer­ence between a wild­ly suc­cess­ful launch and one that goes south.