How to Capitalize on Changes in Customer Value Drivers
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By Doug Lawson
ResultsEarly identification of a compelling economic reason to buy, combined with a very aggressive approach to attacking this market, resulted in high market share in this growing industry and company revenue growth of nearly 15X in five years from ~$15M to ~$215M.
Lessons Learned
Identifying a compelling economic reason to buy can be difficult. Often times there is not one, and sometimes once it is discovered it is easy to view it as intuitively obvious. The key lesson from this experience is that once it is identified you must react quickly and aggressively. You need to add the expertise to your company, develop a solid strategic plan, get full buy in throughout the company and execute. In this situation it was very difficult to get a group of highly technical individuals to agree and believe that a non-traditional, non-technical reason would propel the company into a growth period like it had never experienced before.
The second key lesson learned is that many companies will enter markets with compelling economic reasons to buy, to be successful you must enter with an augmented product and ultimately a whole product offering to take full advantage of the opportunity. Despite establishing an organizational structure to address the development of the augmented product, it was very difficult to maintain focus on developing it during a period of such rapid growth. As a result some sales opportunities were lost or margins reduced due to price competition that could have been avoided if the augmented product was completed more rapidly.
