You’ve
got a wonderful new technology. It works. Customers benefit from it. Game over,
right?
Wrong.
Sadly
(for you), the world does not revolve around you. The world is not on constant
alert waiting for better mousetraps to appear somewhere so that the world can
beat a path to your door.
Let’s
take the B-to-B case. If you’re a big technology buyer, you’ve got better
things to do than constantly flirt with new vendors. To the contrary, you want
to find ways to cut the number of vendors you work with. If your
existing vendors aren’t screwing up, if their products are good enough and
their price is good enough, chances are you’ll save time and stress and feed
them more orders as you grow. You may take meetings from wanna-be’s, mostly
for your general education; it’s a waste of the wanna-be’s time, but that’s not
your problem.
The
reality is that most big technology buyers have a barn of designated winners,
all of whom are “approved vendors.” The vendors
have won the design competition, and are now baked in to the buyers’
expansion plans.
The
only thing that is likely to change this situation is a combination of buyer
pain and incumbent supplier inadequacy. While some technology buyers are
motivated by opportunity, most consider a vendor change only when they feel
pain. The pain is nearly always driven by a need to reduce costs. In order to
reduce costs, the vendor needs to do X, and if it can do X, it needs to be able
to do it for a particular price.
Since
this sounds abstract, let me illustrate it with a real example from Xiotech, my
favorite storage vendor.
Xiotech
has invented a new mousetrap, the storage blade, which delivers
storage in better ways than existing storage products, sometimes dramatically
better. Is it really, objectively better? Yes. Can buyers get more done and
spend less money? Yes. Does that matter to most buyers? Do storage buyers beat
a path to Xiotech’s door? By now, the VP of Sales at Xiotech has accepted the
fact that they do not. Having hoped for the easy life of taking orders, he is
resigned to having to go out and sell stuff. The world feels cruel and unjust,
but that’s how it is.
Xiotech
has a better storage mousetrap, and the world has reacted the way it always
reacts to better mousetraps. So what does Xiotech do?
It’s
pretty simple, actually. If you had a mousetrap that was really and truly
better than the other guys’, wouldn’t it make sense for you to find places that were totally, horribly overrun
by mice? Not just places that have mice – places where the mice are in
charge; places where the mice start trying to invent “peopletraps” because they
think they’re infested. Places, in other words, where the inadequacies
of the best existing mousetrap technology have been put to the test and come up
short – miles short.
No
one expects the incumbent mousetrap vendors to walk away from the business that
has served them so well for so many years. They are bold and shameless, and
will come up with all sorts of arguments. They will argue that if you have a
mouse problem, you obviously haven’t bought nearly enough of their wonderful
traps; the solution is to buy more! If that doesn’t work, they will wave their
arms furiously about the new trap that is about to come out, avoiding any
mention of the increase in maintenance charges for existing traps. Meanwhile,
you walk around and see the mice dancing on the existing vendor’s obviously
ineffective traps.
If
you’ve really got a better mousetrap and are looking for motivated buyers, the
place with the super-sized, invasion-from-Mars MOUSE problem is your candidate.
Most people buy the same mousetraps they’ve always bought. They may be lousy
traps, but they just don’t care. It doesn’t matter enough. But the guy with the
MOUSE problem, HE CARES. He pays attention to mousetrap technology, because he
knows he’s got a whole pile of mice that need catching REAL BAD.
The
cruel fact of life for inventors of better mousetraps is that, if you can’t
find anybody with SERIOUS mouse invasions, you are hosed. Your superior trap
will do nothing but waste the time and money of everyone involved. But even if
you can find places where the mice are dancing in the halls with impunity, your
mousetrap had better be SERIOUSLY better than the incumbent. If the incumbent
knocks off a mouse or two but leaves dozens aspiring for a spot on Dancing with
the Stars, while yours knocks off two or three or four but still leaves most of
the mice dreaming about skimpy costumes and getting “ten’s” from the judges,
you may as well hang it up now. To make a long story short, you had better:
- Find
a truly worthy mouse problem. - Solve
it. Really solve it. No kidding, nail it! - Solve
it for a reasonable price. If you’re too expensive, you may sell to a few
desperate buyers, but you’ll never become the industry-standard mousetrap.
Back
to Xiotech storage. Xiotech is focusing on buyers who have the kind of problems
that Xiotech storage, with its high performance and linearly scalability at a
reasonable price, is uniquely positioned to solve. Just as mousetrap guys look
for places with too many mice, Xiotech looks for places that can’t get at their
storage. Just as the incumbent mousetrap guys boldly say “just buy more of my [crummy]
mousetraps,” the incumbent storage vendors say “just buy more of my [slow]
storage [that gets even slower as you fill it up].” In spite of such incumbent
resistance, smart buyers with mouse madness buy better mousetraps, and smart
buyers with storage bottlenecks buy better storage.
Success
with new technology is usually only achieved when:
- there
are pockets of buyers who have SERIOUS pain; - the
pain is worth serious money; - you
can find the people with the pain; - you
can address their pain; - your
technology can really make the pain go away; - ideally
without charging more money.
Failing
this, I guess you could try waiting and hoping that the world will beat
a path to your door…