Why Killer Products Don't Sell E-Book

Ian Gotts

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 236

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

Coming from conversations with executive teams of technology companies, venture capitalists, and M&A advisers, the insights contained in Why Killer Products Don't Sell are gold dust. First the book lays bare the claim that sales is sales is sales. It exposes the 4 very different 'Buying Cultures' and how they should be approached: Value Offered, Value Added, Value Created, and Value Captured. But it also gives a proven methodology for assessing a company's product mix ('offering' vs 'buying culture'), and a transformation approach to optimize sales and improve competitiveness.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Praise

Title Page

Copyright Page

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Introduction

WHAT THIS BOOK IS ABOUT

WHY WE WROTE THIS BOOK

A BAR IN ROTTERDAM

WHO SHOULD READ THIS BOOK

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

CHAPTER 1 - Some killer products really don’t sell

SO MANY PRODUCTS, SO FEW SALES

HEROIC FAILURES

SO FIRSTLY, WHAT IS A FAILURE?

CHAPTER 2 - It’s not how you sell, but how customers buy

SALES IS SALES IS SALES - RIGHT?

FOUR BUYING CULTURES

HOW DOES ALL THIS RELATE TO GEOFFREY MOORE’S CHASM?

WIIFM - SO WHAT EXACTLY DOES ALL THIS MEAN TO ME?

HOW DO PEOPLE BUY?

MANAGING RISK

CHAPTER 3 - If they are buying - are you selling?

CHOOSING THE CORRECT BUYING CULTURE

EXPLORING THE BUYING CULTURES

DIFFERENT BUYING CULTURES, DIFFERENT OPERATIONAL CULTURES

WHAT DOES A VALUE CAPTURED COMPANY FEEL LIKE?

WHAT DOES A VALUE CREATED COMPANY FEEL LIKE?

WHAT DOES A VALUE ADDED COMPANY LOOK LIKE?

WHAT DOES A VALUE OFFERED COMPANY LOOK LIKE?

CHAPTER 4 - The best kept secret - Value Created sales

WHY VALUE CREATED

WHY DO SO MANY COMPANIES GET IT WRONG?

VITAL SIGNS

WHY IS VALUE CREATED DIFFICULT?

A VALUE CREATED SALESMAN WORKING IN A VALUE ADDED COMPANY

AND NOW SOME GOOD NEWS

CHAPTER 5 - The magic of a Value Created company

THE PERFECT STORM

THE CASE FOR CHANGE

MANAGEMENT

R&D

MARKETING

SALES

DELIVERY

SUPPORT

SAFETY NOTES

CHAPTER 6 - So what can I do about it?

CEO

CEO OF A START-UP

CHIEF OPERATIONS OFFICER

SALES DIRECTOR

HEAD OF M&A

HEAD OF MARKETING

INVESTORS OR VCS

HEAD OF INNOVATION

CHAPTER 7 - Always change a winning team

CAN YOU HAVE TOO MUCH SUCCESS?

SO, ARE YOU PERFORMING?

TRANSFORMATION - THE OCA METHODOLOGY

USING THE OCA METHODOLOGY

The Final Word: A summary

Appendix

Index

“Ian and Dominic’s sharp and lucid analysis of what works and what doesn’t is both compelling and instructive. This is a must read for any business in a competitive market place.”

René Carayol, author, internationally renowned business guru, and media personality

“I really enjoyed reading the book. In fact, once I started I wanted to finish reading to the end in one sitting. Why? Well, the book has some really solid messages and has a good way of putting it over. I feel I need to read again and plan to dip back when I need a refresh. It is easy and amusing and so should probably be read once and then referred to again and again.”

Mark Varney, Strategic Sales Director, Atos Origin

“Coming from the procurement field I was pleasantly surprised to find how readable the book is even though I am not well acquainted with all the associated jargon. I was much impressed by the comprehensive action plans and by the substantiation of the effectiveness of these provided by the customer endorsements - the proof of the pudding is in the eating!

My only regret is that the book was not written 25 years ago as it would have enabled me to better understand where sales and marketing people were coming from because where they wish to go they always make abundantly clear.”

Stephen Wicks, Head of Procurement, European Space Agency

“Direct, pungent and straight to the point A book that finally takes marketing out of the box and onto the next level. Why Killer Products annihilates all conventional thinking on the subject and offers a radical new recipe for dealing with customers. Consolidated mental processes are reprogrammed in order to be capable of perceiving needs in a new way and create a durable linkage with the Customer. The result is an infallible marketing strategy which generates and sustains added value over time. In essence the book provides an innovative set of tools capable of dealing with today’s marketing chaos, and this I must say is no simple matter. Well done.”

Nigel Zanenga, Global Network Manager East Asia, UniCredit

“Strategy is good, execution is even better, but nothing else counts if sales are on the floor. Ian and Dominic have written a lucid and energetic book that gets to the bottom of the fundamental sales problem: killer (and other) products rarely walk straight out of the door. The key contribution is simple, like the best ideas - sales fail if we miss the value culture dominating the thoughts and actions of buyers. It’s not a difficult door to unlock because this actionable book provides the keys. Highly recommended to thoughtful leaders.”

Jyoti Banerjee, Co-founder, M Institute

A sale is the key and core element of every successful business. There are a 1000+ books available around the subject. But Why Killer Products Don’t Sell is different as it uses a very strong angle which is buying behaviour. Whether you are a service company or a product focused organization, no company continues to have a killer product as markets evolve. Therefore even the best products need a competitive sales approach. This book gives you very good insight and ideas on how to optimise your sales process. The examples can easily be related your own situations and is recommended to anyone who wants to grow their business.

Steen Foldberg, Managing Director, Merrill Lynch Luxembourg

Copyright © 2008 Ian Gotts and Dominic Rowsell

First published in 2008 by Capstone Publishing Ltd. (a Wiley Company) The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, PO19 8SQ, UK. www.wileyeurope.com

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Acknowledgments

Some say that experience is standing on the shoulders of giants. In this case it is climbing over the piles of obsolete stock and failed products. We could only write this book because many, many people in the corporate world were prepared to open up old wounds and relive the pain and anguish of seeing their potential world-breaking product end up on the junk heap. And then picking themselves up, learning from it, and trying again. And again. And again.

As you can see from the list below, these are not dotcom boom and bust companies. They range from the highly respected Fortune 1000 companies through successful mid-market businesses to the rising stars of tomorrow.

EADS: www.eads.com; 113,000 employees; Jeremy Greaves - Vice President Communications & PR, UK

Cisco Systems:www.cisco.com; 64,000 employees; Nick Watson - VP, Europe

Fuji Xerox Global Services:www.fujixerox.com; 40,000 employees; Andy Berry - General Manager

Symantec:www.symantec.com; 17,500 employees; Martin Brown - Senior Sales Director

SAS: www.sas.com; 10,500 employees; Robert Mercer - Regional Director Nimbus:www.nimbuspartners.com; 130 employees; Adrian King - Chief Operating Officer

Fourth Hospitality:www.fourthhospitality.com; 100 employees; Ben Hood - Managing Director

First Recovery: www.firstrecovery.co.uk; 50 employees; Paul Jackson - Managing Director

81G: www.81G.org; 30 employees; Samantha Hinton - joint Managing Director

DanielsReeve:www.danielsreeve.com; 7 employees; Nick Daniels - Managing Director

And finally our thanks go to the team at Wiley and to those closest to us, who have given us the space and time to write another book, especially Anna who painstakingly transcribed hours of interview recordings and Natalie who patiently applied her Classics degree to my grammar.

Sensibilities and Political Correctness: For the benefit of simplicity throughout this book, ’salesman’ means saleswoman, salesperson, sales rep, account manager, and customer business developer. We recognize that some (most?) of the most successful sales people today are women. When we say ‘he’ we mean ‘he/she/it’.

Foreword

There is nothing more soul destroying for an evangelist, an investor, and most of all, for a founder than a truly innovative product which never fulfils its revenue promise. A little bit of you dies as every week the sales quotas are not met until the product is relegated to the dumpster.

I love starting companies, investing in start-ups, and promoting great products. But what I really love is seeing them succeed. And success is measured in dollars, so selling is job number 1, number 2 and number 3. Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore clearly showed that there are different buyers with very different buying habits. But, despite these insights, little has been written to help entrepreneurs (and intrapreneurs) understand how to transform their brilliant ideas into products or services that companies want to buy and are able to buy.

What is missing is an understanding from the buyer’s perspective on what they go through when they make decisions about buying innovative and disruptive technology. Only then can the entrepreneurs understand how to align themselves and support their buyer. So this book is about sales, but not about sales technique or a detailed sales methodology. This is far more fundamental than that. This turns most hardened sales professional’s ideas and prejudices about sales on their head, and buries them forever.

This book provides practical and implementable actions that you can apply to your organization, tomorrow. It is designed to “make a difference” whether you are leading a start-up, innovating inside a corporation, or standing on the sidelines as an investor cheering the team on. I wish more entrepreneurs like Ian and Dominic would make time to capture their valuable experience of building successful companies. If we did, then probably fewer ground breaking products and services would wither on the vine starved of that critical life-giving resource; sales revenue. Let’s drink to that.

Guy Kawasaki, 2008

Guy Kawasaki is a founding partner and entrepreneur-in-residence at Garage Technology Ventures. He is also the co-founder of Alltop.com, an “online magazine rack” of popular topics on the web. Previously, he was an Apple Fellow at Apple Computer, Inc. Guy is the author of eight books including The Art of the Start, Rules for Revolutionaries, How to Drive Your Competition Crazy, Selling the Dream, and The Macintosh Way. He has a BA from Stanford University and an MBA from UCLA as well as an honorary doctorate from Babson College.

Introduction

WHAT THIS BOOK IS ABOUT

You all thought it was a killer product, but sales flopped

You’re a major corporation with a track record of strong sales for your current product range. You’ve worked long and hard to produce a unique innovative product that you know the market needs. It should have flown out of the warehouse, but sales tanked and it has hit the morale and commissions of the sales team. Why?

Alternatively, you are a nimble start-up with experienced founders, who have built their reputation on sales in previous large corporations. Again, you’ve developed a ground-breaking product and made some early sales. To really ramp up revenues you have decided to sell through the channel, or you’ve hired a hotshot salesman. But nothing is happening. The only sales are being made by the founders. Why?

There is more than one type of sales

It has long been understood that different sales techniques are required depending on the type and maturity of the product, the industry, size of customer, and the market. Some people think ‘sales is sales is sales’, and that any good salesman can simply change or morph their technique to suit the particular circumstance. But over 15 years of research into business-to-business sales has shown that this thinking is fatally flawed. There are sales techniques, but these are fine-tuning. What really make the difference are four clearly defined ‘buying cultures’.

The maturity of the product in the customer’s mind determines which of the four buying cultures is appropriate, and this is most stark in the purchase of technology or software. So, it is not surprising that there is a startling parallel between the buying cultures and the Technology Adoption Life Cycle principles that Geoffrey Moore made popular in his books Crossing the Chasm and Inside the Tornado1, which focus on buying technology.

This book will help you:

• Understand why killer products don’t sell.

• Appreciate that there are four very different ways of selling, based on the customer’s buying culture.

• Appreciate that sales today require you to sell to a buyer in such a way that he wants to buy.

• Realize that how you create value is a very different proposition from the traditional ’sales is sales is sales’ approach.

• Understand how to engage your entire organization to support Value Created sales.

• Find a methodology to transform your organization to be much more successful.

So, if you have a killer product, here’s how to ensure it really does sell . . .

WHY WE WROTE THIS BOOK

Crossing the Chasm and Inside the Tornado, by Geoffrey Moore, are essential reading for every marketer in the technology field. In his books, Moore describes beautifully the dynamics of a disruptive marketplace, and the fundamental customer traits at different stages of market maturity. But there was not space within those books to give any insights on how a company should organize itself, and operate based on the needs of different buyers. As profound (yet obvious) as Crossing the Chasm is in assessing the customer’s perspective, there is something equally profound (and obvious) to be said about the supplier’s perspective. Each different customer type needs a radically different method of engagement.

So, we wrote this book because we have seen products fail in company after company. Yet we’ve seen far less compelling products soar once the organizations have understood the four buying cultures (see page 12), the corresponding operational cultures (see page 13), and the IMPACT buying cycle (see page 21).

There are only so many companies that we can educate, work with, and support at any one time.2 This book needed to be written to enable us to help more companies understand how to get their innovative products to market. Nothing in the book is pure theory. Nothing is conjecture. Nothing is unproven. Some of the case studies are from global corporates, making an impact on the world with their innovative products. Others are small start-ups, embarking on their own quiet revolution.

We hope that you will gain as much from reading this book as we did from researching and writing it.

A BAR IN ROTTERDAM

This story started in a bar in Rotterdam in 1992. I was consulting to a Dutch oil exploration company because at that time the oil industry was going through one of its transitions, and the old-style ‘roughneck’ manager needed to become more of a leader in the field. At the end of a particularly long day I was having a beer with their Managing Director (MD); we got onto the subject of suppliers and their ability to align to the complex business needs of an exploration rig. The MD was not happy with his suppliers, from the caterers to the mud technologists. He saw them as one of the factors holding back the cultural evolution of his business. He knew that there were some suppliers who could contribute much more than they did, and there were others who tried to do too much. At one end of the spectrum they needed too much management attention, and at the other end his managers were developing ideas that suppliers had already perfected. I asked him to describe to me what a perfect supplier engagement would look like. It was not so much what he said which sparked my imagination, but what he did not say and the great difficulty he had in not saying it. I took his description of a supplier engagement and laid it out as a process, and by doing this I realized his problem. He was not articulating a single supplier engagement but multiple engagements, and the factors which changed the engagements were not just what the supplier was offering but what that offering meant to him at that particular moment in time.

What followed were several years of listening, observing, and learning from other people’s successes and failures, and bit by bit I was able to show how all these successes and failures followed a common pattern. I got the answer to my original question, and the realization that there was a huge gap in accepted practices in sales. One other major realization was that selling is one of the greatest global employers - it is a social science, and as such should be a serious degree subject, but it is not. No serious university on the planet offers sales as a degree subject, and that is something we would like to see change.

In summary: You can win much more business and your products will sell much more effectively if you understand a Value Created sale. This book explains what you need to know. So, what started in a bar in Rotterdam has turned into a global consulting business and now a book - and possibly a degree subject . . .

WHO SHOULD READ THIS BOOK

This book is intended to be a catalyst for action aimed at a range of people inside and outside your organization. Here are just a few, and why it is relevant to them:

Chief Executive Officer

As CEO you are responsible for the overall performance of the business. That means the critical decision about which business model or models to apply should rest with you - or at least with you and your executive team. You determine how innovative you want the company to be, and the associated investment that goes with it. You need to see a return on that investment. You need ways to measure and evaluate your R&D, which is normally characterized as black-ops or special projects; or art rather than science.

This book will give you the framework to make these decisions, resulting in science rather than the art of the possible.

Chief Executive Officer of a start-up

If you are leading a start-up, unless you have decided to take on an existing player with your me-too product, you probably have an innovative, paradigm-shifting, trend-leaping product. The unfortunate thing is that you have probably already hired a hotshot, big-ticket salesman, who has been successful with a ‘generate lead - handle objections - close deal’ approach. You know, as founders, in your heart of hearts, that this approach won’t work, but you need to scale. The only savior is the market. If your market matures really quickly, you may suddenly find yourself in a competitive market. Then you probably have the right sales team and business model. But if you are not the gorilla3 in the market, you may have a torrid time competing against the market leader. Then the only place of safety is in a niche that you can protect well.

This book will show you how to align your approach to the market, rather than waiting for the market to align with you.

Chief Operations Officer

You are responsible for optimizing the operation of the entire business; for ensuring that each of the moving parts delivers a seamless experience for the customer and a great working environment for the employee. You know that sales are made by more than just the sales teams. You also get frustrated by the R&D spend which gets wasted when the products fail to sell. What if you could improve the success rate - dramatically? Running a company with sales going through the roof and money pouring in is easier than launching the latest cost-cutting initiative or turning down the funding for a new product idea.4

This book will help you understand how you organize the entire company, not just sales, to sell innovative products.

Sales Director

The challenge you face depends on the size of your organization, the span of products, and your background. If you are Sales Director of a major multinational, you will have a wide range of products. Some will have been developed in-house and others from acquisitions. They will vary in market maturity. Understanding the best approach for selling each of these products is critical if they are all to succeed. Simply creating one sales team and putting all the products on the price list will not work - appealing though it sounds. A single product start-up is simpler, but the challenges remain the same.

A sound understanding of the principles in this book will help you recruit, organize, measure, lead, and coach your sales teams.

Head of M&A

Your job is to buy companies for the organization and then sell off the bits that don’t fit with the overall corporate strategy. But now you have another consideration when you buy that new innovative start-up with a really sexy new product. Is the company geared up to sell an innovative product? Or is it just going to add the new product to the existing salesmen’s price list? Or worse, chuck it onto the company’s e-commerce site? The implication is that a consideration of the sales approach should at least influence the M&A strategy for the company - what products to sell off, which to support, and which ones to buy. You can also acquire products that are underperforming in other companies confident that you can make them fly off the shelves in your company.

Using the ideas in this book, you can formulate your M&A strategy.

CMO/Head of Marketing

Are you viewed as the team that develops brochures and sources leads for the latest whizzy product, or are you part of an integrated and innovative sales machine? How do you know what marketing spend will contribute most? It’s easy to spend time and money that goes nowhere. And with innovative products, you have relatively little time to get it right.

The ideas in this book will help you decide on your marketing strategy, and understand when and how marketing should lead sales. You’ll find this book is the perfect companion to Crossing the Chasm and Inside the Tornado, as it explains how you work with the rest of the company.

Investors and VCs

Before you invest in a company, does it have the correct business model? It’s a pretty fundamental question. But simply asking the management of the company is probably not enough. They are hardly going to admit that they don’t. So how are you going to validate that they are on track?

Clearly this is not the only due diligence you’ll do. You still need to evaluate the management team, the product, the market, and the competition. Now, using the approach in this book, you have another lens or perspective which will make you ask some different questions throughout the due diligence. Take a look at your existing portfolio. How many companies with great products are failing to meet the expectations they had when you invested? Have you and your management simply written them off; you get some stars and some dogs. You make so much on the stars that the dogs don’t matter to the portfolio. What if that didn’t have to be true? What if you could help the dogs become stars? This book will help you understand how to de-risk your investments.

Head of Innovation

Your title gives the game away. You are there to be innovative. And if the company can afford to have a Head of Innovation, it’s probably a relatively large and mature business.5 You will have a portfolio of products and your role is to bring in new innovative products. So, where are the innovative products going to come from?

If your role is to look for innovative products in the market and acquire them, then you should look back at the Head of M&A/Investors and VCs sections. If your role is to generate innovative ideas internally across the whole company - or just within your team - then a fundamental question is, “How will the new sexy, innovative product be taken to market?” Will it be through the existing sales teams? This book will enable you to answer that fundamental question, based on theory backed up with experience.

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

This book is intended to be the catalyst for action. We hope that the ideas and examples inspire you to act. So, do whatever you need to do to make this book useful. Use Post-it notes, photocopy pages, scan pages, and write on it. Go to our website and email colleagues the e-book summary. Lend it. Rip it apart, or read it quickly in one sitting. Whatever works for you.

We hope this becomes your most dog-eared book.

Send us your feedback

We love feedback. We prefer great reviews, but we’ll accept anything that helps take the ideas further. The ideas have resulted from every single person we’ve worked with. We welcome your comments on this book.

We’d prefer email, as it’s easy to answer and saves trees. If the ideas worked for you, we’d love to hear your success stories. Maybe we could turn them into video or audio interviews on our website, www.killer-products.com, so others can learn from you. That’s one of the reasons why we wrote this book. So talk to us.

[email protected]

[email protected]

[email protected]

CHAPTER 1

Some killer products really don’t sell

SO MANY PRODUCTS, SO FEW SALES

Thereare great products in the marketplace, but great products don’t automatically mean overnight success - or even long-term success. In many cases, really innovative products not only fail to capture the market, but are swamped by inferior competition. Stories of entrepreneurial success and failure tend to focus on the product, without looking at the company behind the product: the culture, the business model, the sales approach, the back-office support. But this is where the magic ingredients are mixed into the secret sauce.6

Despite highly visible failures, the entrepreneurial spirit is stronger than ever in every corner of the world. This is fuelled partially by the relative ease with which a software product or website offering can be brought to market. And now, software is a critical and compelling part of every piece of hardware.