Tom Steenburgh on Selling New Products, Part 2

We continue our conversation with Tom Steenburgh, the Richard S. Reynolds Professor and Senior Associate Dean for Faculty Development at the Darden School of Business, co-author of “How to Sell New Products” in the current issue of the Harvard Business Review. See Part 1 here.
 
Q: In the sales organization, who should drive the new approach to selling new products? Where should the change in training come from?
TS: Most sales organizations seem to rely a lot on L&D to help develop the training programs, and that’s certainly one group that needs to be involved. There’s another group, though, that a lot companies could use but don’t: If you think about the new product design process, companies that have a design thinking group spend a lot of time with the customer designing products. And that process of spending time with the customer will give you a lot of insight into how