How to Not Execute Guerrilla Warfare

By Kevin Wang

Click Here To View Image

Tactics
We assembled a dedicated sales and support team in China who had been selling our power supplies into the selected target accounts for years. However, the process was painful. One of the primary advantages of Guerrilla Warfare, the focus on specific customers in a defensible niche, is the opportunity to provide superior service. The Company forfeited this advantage because we lacked RF knowledge, RF reputation, and experience in coordinating with our signal generation technology partner. We did not anticipate so many bugs on the instruments; it just took us too many nights communicating back and forth with the engineering folks to diagnose and resolve issues. It was like sending the troops to the battlefield, but giving them weapons that just weren't able to fire!

Our China sales and support team pressed onward, relying on historically good relationships with the China opinion leader customer, the dominant domestic cell phone supplier. After a full year of effort, our Company received a volume order from this account, and soon after received a second order from another domestic customer. On the day the contracts were being signed with the second customer, the China sales team got the news that the Company was withdrawing the RF analyzer product from the market.