Avoiding holes in your whole product strategy

Chris Bohrson signing in…

This is my first entry so I would like to introduce myself. My name is Chris Bohrson. I have been in various sales, marketing, product management, and senior management roles for the last 20+ years in the U.S., Asia and the UK. I have worked in the semiconductor equipment, telecom, datacom and automotive industries – all related to testing of complex electronic software/hardware systems. I currently lead sales, marketing and product management for a business that supplies specialized diagnostic systems to automotive manufacturers for testing electronics in cars. These systems are used in auto dealerships to support warranty repair and for in-line testing during car manufacturing.

I first got involved with Chris Halliwell and her Strategic Marketing of Technology Products (http://www.irc.caltech.edu/courses/Technology_Marketing_Courses.htm) in the mid 1990’s. I was running marketing and product management for a company in the telecom space. I took along to the course my most experience product manager and the division engineering manager. We had just read the book “Marketing High Technology” by William Davidow. He spent some time in the book outlining the importance of the whole product. We were intrigued by the concept and Chris’ course covered that - so we wanted to learn more. Plus with my two colleagues being from England it was an easy sell getting them to agree to head to Pasadena for a week! Wwe learned served us well over the years and impacted directly our experience in the case study I wrote that is now on-line at the TMC web site

(http://www.technologymarketingcenter.com/resourcearchive/how-to-sell-a-whole-product.php).

I will be discussing this case in the next 8 weeks. It focuses on how we created a new multi-million dollar market segment for pre-qualifying phone lines for DSL service and used concepts from Chris’ course on the whole product to accelerate adoption. I’ll also talk about other things we learned along the way on our own. With “20/20 hindsight” some of the changes we made to our approach to the market seem obvious now. I now have a much better appreciation for coaches who have to make major adjustments during the “heat of the game”. In any case, hopefully you can learn from what we learned.

I’ll be back next Sunday. Until then, have a great week.

Comments

[Georg Loos]

Hello Chris,
There is a major aspect not sufficiently covered which are the consequent changes in CAPEX and OPEX for the solution. Initially, as a separte solution it caused 2 time OPEX running a current and new system in parallel. In the 2nd step, launching the solution as an enhancement to the existing system, the increase in OPEX was significantly reduced. A wider deployment also required a significant reduction in CAPEX.

[Chris Bohrson]

George; thanks for the comments. Your observations are spot on. One of the points the case study makes is we had originally banked on our ability to sell a product focused only at DSL pre-qualification. But we found this approach was not working due to the complexity of the sale. That is, for this type of product required we had to “make the sale” to three different groups in different ways: 1) the operational sale to those responsible for generating DSL revenue, 2) the financial sale to senior management and 3) the deployment sale to the groups responsible for managing the extensive phone network. As you note, that by enhancing the product and positioning for both DSL and voice we reduced the effort in all three areas including being able to make a much more effective financial pitch focused on OPEX and CAPEX.