In the ideal world, you would release a product, it would be an instant hit, and customers would purchase it forever.
Unfortunately, that’s rarely—if ever—the case.
Selling the most products and getting the best business outcomes starts with a smart approach to product lifecycle management.
The Importance of Product Lifecycle Management
In case you’re unfamiliar with the concept, product lifecycle management is the process of overseeing a product across all stages of the product lifecycle, including development, introduction, growth, maturity, and decline.
In addition to focusing on developing the product itself, product lifecycle management also touches upon other factors, including marketing, pricing, customer segmentation, and more.
At a core level, product lifecycle management is very similar to customer lifecycle management—it’s just exclusive for your products.
The Consequences of Not Properly Managing Your Product Lifecycle
Today’s leading organizations are laser-focused on product lifecycle management because it enables them to optimize their operations and drive more profitability.
On the flip side, failure to properly manage the product lifecycle can lead to a number of downsides, which we’ll examine in this section.
1. Missing Out on Opportunities
When you take a less-than-optimal approach to product lifecycle management, it’s impossible for you to understand exactly how your customers are interacting with your products. As a result, you’re much more likely to miss out on opportunities because you won’t be able to identify key dropoff points or areas of your product that customers aren’t using as much as you wish they would.
When you lack deep insights into the way your customers interact with your products, you struggle to drive users to key features you know they’ll love. This could open the door for your competitors to steal users away.
2. Frustrating Your Customers
Without deep visibility into the product lifecycle, it’s that much harder to build features your users actually want. At the same time, if you’re not prepared to manage your product effectively as it starts scaling rapidly, you might cause your users to run into all sorts of performance issues, which can steer them toward other solutions.
By making product lifecycle management a top priority, you can avoid frustrating your customers, strengthening your business’s reputation while making your product stickier.
3. Damaging Your Profitability
When your approach to the product lifecycle leaves much to be desired, your costs go up and your revenue goes down. Maybe you don’t have enough products on hand during peak demand periods, maybe your marketing messaging doesn’t resonate, or maybe you’ve priced the item incorrectly.
Whatever the case may be, you’re incapable of meeting customer demands as well as you possibly can, which means your profitability won’t be as strong as it otherwise could be.
As you can see, poor product lifecycle management can wreak havoc on your operations. Depending on how bad the situation gets, your business could be pushed to the brink.
The good news is that there’s an easy fix: investing in purpose-built software designed for product lifecycle management.
Product Lifecycle Management Made Easy With Gainsight PX
One of the main reasons organizations struggle with product lifecycle management is because they do the bulk of the work by hand, which introduces errors and makes it harder for teams to see the big picture.
If you’re looking to manage the product lifecycle more effectively, you might be better off using software to take care of the heavy lifting for you.
With Gainsight PX, your organization can embrace a digital approach to product lifecycle management, baking more efficiency into the process and increasing the chances you make the right decision every time.
For more information on the easiest way to take your product lifecycle management game to the next level, request a demo of Gainsight PX today.
