You've probably heard that 95% of new products fail. It's one of the most repeated statistics in business, traced back to a Harvard Business School classroom estimate from professor Clayton Christensen. It's also, according to more recent analysis, somewhat misleading.
The 95% figure bundles together finished, launched products with ideas that died in R&D and never reached a customer. When researchers narrow the data to products that actually launched, including a widely cited study by George Castellion and Stephen Markham, the failure rate comes down to a range closer to 35% to 45%. Still bad. Roughly two out of every five launches miss their commercial goals. But a meaningfully different story than "nearly everything fails, so don't bother planning."
That distinction matters, because it changes where you should be looking for risk. If 95% failed regardless of what you did, planning wouldn't help much. If 35% to 45% fail, and the reasons are identifiable in advance, the planning stage is exactly where the outcome usually gets decided.
The warning signs worth watching for before launch day
No one has been able to say, in one sentence, why a customer would choose this over what they use today.
The launch date was set before the go-to-market plan existed, not after.
Sales has seen the collateral for the first time in the same week as the launch, rather than having weeks to get comfortable with it.
Success has been defined loosely ("get it out there and see how it does") rather than with a specific number the team can be held to.
Every one of these is fixable weeks before launch. None of them are fixable the week of.
We're here to help. This is precisely why we built our GTM Strategy Sprint and Launch Plan & Playbook services the way we did. We work with teams in the weeks before a launch date is set in stone, not after, to pressure-test positioning, define what success actually looks like, and make sure sales isn't seeing the story for the first time on launch day.
We've seen how much of a launch's outcome is decided in those early weeks, which is exactly why we build the plan before anyone locks in a date they can't move. If you've got a launch on the calendar and want a second set of eyes before it's too late to adjust, reach out to Gallop GTM or email us at hello@gallopgtm.com. We'd love to help.
Sources:
Castellion, G. & Markham, S.K., new product failure rate research, cited widely in innovation literature
Microsoft Research, "Four Fallacies That Can Make Your Idea Fail," referencing Christensen's original estimate and subsequent revisions