Leaders' Blog

A Market Driven Organization is the Key--- Guerilla Marketing Can Be Dangerous

Kevin Wang signing in to continue the discussion on my Technology Marketing Center case study: How Not to Execute Guerilla Warfare

So, it's time to talk about the lessons we learned. For sure, a fighting map (battle strategy and battle plan) is definitely the key .  I've mentioned this several times throughout my posts.

But today I am going to share another learning that is: A successful operation/company needs brilliant marketing people, or to put it in other words: It's NOT sales, NOT engineering, but marketing who makes the most difference. This may sound simple or familiar to marketing people, but absolutely not to most sales people like myself and I know neither for engineering folks as well, and that's exactly the problem. If you look back at my story, the whole initiative was pretty much pushed by sales guys in the first place, and indeed, the second round attack was very much driven by engineering people(those who were acquired from our competitor). To put it plainly, we did not have our "General Marshall", and without whom th emarketing team could only be running re-actively and only in a supporting role. Marketing is supposed to be the brain of the body while in our case, without great leadership, marketing was torn apart to be part of arms(sales) and part of heart/blood(engineering). For example, marketing may spend the most time making annual plans based on sales targets, while letting the engineering people decide on the product road map. So if you imagine the situation that I described in my last post about the real disaster, what I was trying to describe to you was a company in which engineering develops whatever they love to play with, while sales tries to sell wherever they can, and essentially there was NO marketing in between!

Scary, right? Then please don't let yourself run into it. How? A real marketing driven organization is the only answer, if you already have one, then congratulations, if you don't, send your people to Chris Halliwell's course immediately!

 

Panic after the attack -- Guerilla Marketing Can Be Dangerous

Kevin Wang signing in to continue the discussion on my Technology Marketing Center case study: How Not to Execute Guerilla Warfare

Not surprisingly (only when we look back though), we were overwhelmed by our enemies at the selected beachhead. Basically, they simply cut the price on their competitive products to fully match ours by removing some of the luxury options. It sounds simple but good enough to kill us as a newcomer into this market, because the key buying criteria from the customers in the selected target market place is the balance between risk and benefit (cost saving in most cases. Here cost does NOT just mean price, it's the overall Cost of Ownership); and once they closed the gap on cost, then the risk just weighed too heavily on customers' minds during the decision making process.

However, unlike the initial guerrilla strategy, we could not do "hit and run" anymore because the resources we had put into this created a stubbornness that forced us to stand and continue fighting. The worst part of it was there was no "fighting map" beforehand, so when the sales troops went back to marketing people asking where we should go from here and how to march to there, marketing simply answered: try wherever you can to win something!

To me, this was when the real disaster started, from which point everything was went out of control. Think about it, it was like you landed the troops at Normandy on D-day and after you realized that you could not overcome the defense there, you then tell the troops: "try to find your way out on your own!"

So very soon after, the situation went wild. Some of the sales people tried, failed, and lost confidence until gradually they finally drew the conclusion that this product was not suited for their territories. The rest of them who found some initial interests or opportunities from the customers always had to ask for more application support from the factory on things like software modification, add more functions, or features enhancement, etc. It was like you sent the troops everywhere and they keep on asking for more supplies. And once again, because of lack of overall strategies and planning, everybody became exhausted and frustrated. Sooner or later, by the time they couldn't receive the support they requested, they all walked away. And that was the time when engineering people started to blame everything on sales by concluding "we need a dedicated sales team on this who really understand the products and market".

This is almost the end of my story. In my next post, I'll try to summarize some of the "what if" stuff to talk about the lessons and what we might have done differently.

 

 

The Fog of War -- Guerilla Marketing Can Be Dangerous

Kevin Wang signing in to continue the discussion on my Technology Marketing Center case study: How Not to Execute Guerilla Warfare

So we decided to start the attack under the "guerilla" strategy (a sneaky and ambush way). Like any typical guerilla fight that you might read in war history, it was extremely painful in terms of very limited capability of the weapons you have and the lack of overall support compared with your enemy's. In our case, our new RF instruments did have some expected (and unexpected) issues, both hardware and software. And the overall support and service capability from our company had just started up too. But thanks to the great relationship we enjoyed with selected target accounts, we managed to overcome most of the difficulties to get the first order from an opinion leader in the selected target market place. However, the whole process was such a painful experience that, while some initial successes were encouraging, our marketing people started to doubt the overall guerilla strategy, more and more voice coming out to say: Obviously, it's a huge market that we could benefit, so we should have large scale "formal" and "thorough" campaign.

Then our company started to invest heavily in this initiative. We acquired a group of engineering people from one of the major competitors and spent huge resources on marketing communications activities; press release, trade shows, seminars, etc. To be honest, everybody including myself was excited and passionate about it during that time.  We felt we could grow to the next milestone, to double or even triple our company by next a couple of years! However, it took us (unfortunately, not of all us) 2 to 3 years to realize that we had made at least 3 major mistakes by then:

1. The very first key decision from the newly acquired engineering group who was supposed to develop some super weapon was to discontinue the existing products;  by doing which we lost the initial momentum to keep engage the key target accounts because the only thing we could do was to wait for the "super weapon" which was planned to be available within 3-6months while the real case was almost 18months.

2. The whole marketing campaign exposed our plans to all the competitors, giving them all the information they needed to make corresponding preparations or even counter attack. Even worse, a partner once working together with us during the initial success, decided to terminate the cooperation because they viewed us as a competitor instead of a partner anymore.

3. The worst decision was: We did not adjust the target market place to fit the new product strategy when we were launching the 2nd round major attack 18 months later. It was like you tried to land your troops on Normandy on D-day and you retreat soon after, but then one and half year later, you started another landing operation targeting on the exact same beachhead where your enemy had surely entrenched themselves with everything enhanced heavily.

So what does all these mean? How about the outcome of this "biggest ever compaign"? Let's talk about it next time.

Strategy for Sales War -- Guerilla Marketing Can Be Dangerous

Kevin Wang signing in to continue the discussion on my Technology Marketing Center case study: How Not to Execute Guerilla Warfare

Our sales team had been enjoying the success from the wireless indurstry for quite several years mainly by selling DC power supplies. However, for those aggressive sales people like myself, it  hurt when you realized that customers were actually spending 10 times more money buying other equipment working in the same test racks, but you did not have the high volume product. It was a typical greedy feeling, you know, the more success you achieve selling what you have, the more desperate as well as convinced you become that you deserve much more. We simply believed that once we brought anything to market, something just decent enough, we could sell them like crazy.

So that was the time, our marketing people, of course heavily pushed by sales folks, decided to develop the RF test equipment targeting the existing customers who had been buying large amount DC stuff from us already. The strategy was very clear: To maximize our share at those large accounts by providing them more equipment that they need.  The ultimate goal was to become the total solution provider growing together with our target customers in the wireless industry.

Everybody was excited about this and we sales people couldn't wait to sell it. But we all agreed to hold any information from leakiing out until the last minute simply because we just know how strong our competitors were. The only way we could win out of this was to do it in a sneaky and ambush way. The more surprised our competitors, the more chance we would have to survive during the first round battle, after which we could entrench ourselves and find the way to march.

So what about the real fight? It was such a series of bloody long battles that I'll try my best to give you a thorough story in my next post.