• Home
• Experience
  • Resume
  • Industries & Clients
• Portfolio
  • Articles
  • Backgrounders
  • Brochures
  • Case Studies
  • Data Sheets
  • Direct Mail
  • Press Releases
  • Websites
  • White Papers
• Testimonials
• Classes
  • Business Writing
  • PR Writing
  • Marketing Writing
• Articles
  • Communications
  • Corporate ID
  • Interviews
  • Trade Shows
  • Journalist’s POV
  • Catalyst for Change
  • Measuring PR
  • Product Reviews
  • CEO Role
  • PR Measure Up?
  • Jerry Jeff Theory
• Contact

Managing a Successful Product Reviews Program

by Kathy Keenan

The good news is that product reviews can boost your sales and propel your product into the market with much more impact than advertising.

The bad news is that product reviews can spoil sales and give your company a poor reputation — even if you have a good product.

It’s no wonder that marketing and product managers approach reviews with trepidation. I have even known some who wouldn’t let their products be reviewed, to the detriment of their sales effort.

But there’s more good news: product reviews can be monitored and managed, resulting in better reviews than those left to the whims of nature and the reviewer. (No, I don’t mean that you can influence the reviewer, and I am certainly not suggesting bribes!) If carefully observed, there are a few guidelines that will help to assure a fair review. (These apply equally to software or hardware products.)

• Start with a good product. If your product has problems, sending it in to a review will only expose those problems to the public. Fix the product. Then get it reviewed.

• Make sure that the review is of comparable products. Normally, you don’t want a reviewer comparing your 16-MHz whatsis to a group of 33-MHz whatsits. Reviewers will usually screen out inappropriate products — but not always!

• Start with a known good unit. Test that specific product before you send it out. Accidents sometimes do occur in shipping, but a non-functioning review unit is not the best way to begin the evaluation process.

• Find out which benchmarks will be used. If you know in advance which benchmarks will be used, perform these tests before you send the product. Try to evaluate the results as the reviewer will — in the larger context of the marketplace.

• Tell the reviewer what makes your product unique. In your preliminary conversations with the reviewer and in the materials you send with your product, delineate what makes your product better, different, appealing to users. Reviewers have their own agenda, and may not be looking at product features and benefits the way you do. Try to help set the agenda by pointing out your product’s benefits to users.

• Find out who is doing the review. For highly technical or complex products, it may be necessary to screen the reviewer. Someone who has never used a CAD package should probably not be allowed anywhere near your CAD software product. Unqualified reviewers are (alas) not rare. Politely decline the review.

• Don’t turn down qualified reviews. Some companies set a limit on the number of reviews in which they will participate, either because of staff resources or the cost of having X number of units in the hands of reviewers instead of shipping to customers. If you compare the cost of participating in a review to the cost of making a sales call or creating and running ads, it can easily be seen that this is a false economy.

• Participating in reviews is a cost of doing business. Budget for it. Also budget for a certain percentage of review units that will not be returned by unscrupulous or lazy reviewers. You can pursue some of these guys for years and never see that product again.

• Alert your tech support operation. Good products can get bad reviews if the reviewer requires technical support and is unable to get it. It is imperative that your support staff understands that responding quickly to reviewers’ calls is more urgent than responding to customers’ calls. One unhappy customer is bad enough — he will tell at least 10 other people just how unhappy he is. But one unhappy reviewer will efficiently communicate his rage to perhaps 150,000 individuals in your target market.

  There are two approaches to reviewer tech support. Assign a dedicated phone line to reviewer calls only. Tell your tech support staff if that line rings, it’s a reviewer: jump on it. Do everything possible to make that person happy.

  The second approach, which can successfully be used in combination with the dedicated line, is to assign a specific tech support person to each reviewer. Give that person’s name, daytime and home phone to the reviewer.

• Periodically check in to see how things are going. It is sometimes the case that a reviewer will run into a problem — and not call tech support to solve it! The result, inevitably, is a poor review for a product whose only sin is that the reviewer didn’t read the manual.

• Take bad reviews with grain of salt. In the event that, despite all precautions, your product did receive a poor review, do not flame the reviewer, his editor and the publisher. Nothing will be accomplished by this except to alienate everyone.

  Instead, take an honest look at it. Is your product really the equal or better of others in the review? Read the comments carefully. A negative review can tell you a lot about your competition and how well you are stacking up. There may be a valuable message here that will lead to making your products more competitive.

A review program, properly planned and executed, can be a tremendous support to your sales and marketing efforts. One good review can potentially sell more products than one good ad, and at a fraction of the cost. Go for it.