Access challenges run both ways: smaller companies face challenges selling to bigger ones, but oftentimes, bigger players can’t get small enough to sell to smaller companies or individual buyers.
Whether you developed your product with a specific customer need in mind, or happened upon a product and want to sell it to someone, you have to start by knowing your customer. Before the Internet boom, I assembled a group of friends and raised angel capital to start a company to develop a commodity chemical trading system, based on the notion that a hundred pounds of a specific chemical powder was the same as any other hundred pounds of the same chemical powder. It would be a trading system for chemicals – a brilliant idea – or so it seemed.
Sometimes, the development of a new product doesn’t start with a specific problem.
Don’t forget that at the heart of every business – every organization – you will find… people and relationships. My favorite client also became one of my best friends. Tony was a Brooklyn-raised child of the Depression. He was an early IT professional – the kind that could talk about having programmed in IBM 1401 Autocoder[i] language in the early sixties.
Carefully crafted messages alone won’t sell your product or service. You must target your message for your best audience and via the most effective venues. While doing this you must continuously refine your position against relevant competitors in the marketplace.
Great ideas would still fail to attract an audience – money and energy wasted.
Not only money and energy wasted – but also an old way of doing things. What else needed to change? For over 50 years, companies involved in complex or big-ticket sales have dichotomized “developing the message” and “delivering the message”. Even companies that derive the majority of their revenue from their direct sales channel rarely ask their sales teams, “What’s happening out there?” – relying instead on traditional market research and industry experts. Is this a wrong practice? Marketing experts are not typically sales professionals and the converse is usually true. That wasn’t the issue nagging at me. What was “off” was this: why not take advantage of the intense customer-facing resource that is your direct sales force for real-time market intelligence?
A recent article in the WSJ, “Slicing the Bread But Not the Prices”, discussed the Panera Bread company.
The title line read, “While rival rest offer discounts, Panera focuses on employed eaters willing to spend.”
Wow! What a focused target market statement. And – the secret to why Panera is growing in stores opened over a year, where Cosi, a competitor that most casual observers put in the same category, reported a loss of $969,000 for its second quarter and a 14% decline in revenue.
Today, I know that these memories are shared by many thousands of other business leaders in high-tech and other “soon-to-be revolutionized” industries of what is now referred to as the “dot bomb.” Since that time, I asked myself – and anyone who would listen – what was there to learn from this incredibly expensive education. [...]
