This company has a brilliant product that is hard to sell because it is very complex. The company offered me the project of commercializing their technology because they felt that I understand both the marketing and sales issues as well as the technology and its potential.
I realized that the difficulty was in convincing people to work in a very different way to enjoy potential benefits that are hard to quantify until checked in their specific environment.
A customer would have to heavily invest in hardware, software and expensive and hard to find scientists to set up the needed infrastructure to even test the operational benefits offered by this amazing technology.
I assessed that the risk to the company and to the executive that is supposed to lead this initiative is too great and this will not only result in lack of sales but also long and expensive (free to the customer in many cases) beta sites and proof of concept projects that will be dragged on for a long time because the company lacks the funds and cooperation needed to do them properly and the enterprise is not ready to invest money and risk reputation seriously going into the project. Their greatest risk is becoming a CTO hobby that will never become a sale.
I created a presentation that detailed my proposed sales process that focused on the benefits and not the complex technology and reduced customer risk by letting them decide on taking baby steps and deciding on progress as they see intermediate results.
I re-structured the product from a software solution targeted at scientists to a packaged solution that has both technology and services components.
I cannot disclose the exact structure of the package but the focus is on cycles of joint analysis, small scale implementation as a black box, review of results and larger scale deployment. Instead of dealing with the merits of the technology we deal with specific optimizations of business silos such as “real-time lead prioritization” and “real-time credit evaluation”.
The shift in thinking was created by thinking about the budgets that would pay for such technologies, who can make such decisions, how to convince this executive and how to protect him or her from project failure (risk reduction).
This engagement consisted of several sessions over several months and a sponsored business trip to talk to potential customers and see how they view such an offer.
I enjoyed the experience at first but we ended the engagement over a dispute with a graphic designer that I introduced to them and I was stupid enough to let them route the payments through my company so I ended up being in the middle and suffering agony from both sides. I am proud to say that I learned from this experience and I will never again be in the middle of such transactions when I have no added value in the process.
