After Mary Schmidt’s "Somebody will always buy it"

Mary Schmidt has a little goodie over on her blog, where she asks the questions we all need to ask when we’re bringing a B2B technology product to market:

Who would buy it?
Who would buy more than one?
How many “whos” are there? (Horton may be able to hear ‘em, but can you sell to them?)

Oh, we always kinda-sorta ask and answer these questions: oh, there are six million widget examiners in the US, and if we just get 10% of the market, well, mission accomplished. But we often fail to go much deeper than that in terms of who and where the buyers really are.

And these questions are, of course, inextricably wound up in the price question.

I think that those of us who’ve worked in small companies with big ticket technology plays can get really tripped up here. After all, what we’ve got is quite pricey (hey, that site license goes for $500K, plus 15% support every year for a big, fat annuity stream….). And we’re pretty small (hey, we only need to sell 5 a month to stay in business!). So we don’t need all that many who’s, do we? So we take some short cuts: we’ll sell to big banks; “the enterprise”; Fortune 100’s; Global 200’s.

And there’s a key point embedded in M title that you shouldn’t overlook, either.

And that’s the truly hideous fact that somebody will always buy it.

I defy you to come up with a product - no matter how out of whack the price-to-value balance is - that no one buys. (Okay, I did work at Genuity when they launched their Black Rocket dud. $40M in marketing, and we never sold a one that I know of. But we solved that problem by dubbing everything we did sell that was vaguely similar a “Black Rocket”.)

But the only market I can think of where you only need one buyer is when you’re selling your house.

So, it’s not necessarily good news if you’re selling a complex, big ticket technology product and you find your first customer. Unless you know that there are more out there, who they are, and where they are, you can go broke trying to find them after the fact.

But the very fact that one customer has paid the BIG PRICE and bought the whole darned shooting match will just confirm to some folks that they’re on the right track. Unfortunately, they’ll put their head down and follow that track, only to find that they’re back where they started - and haven’t bagged any more big game than the one white elephant they started with.

So do yourself a favor, and take as much time as you need to ask Mary’s questions about your product or service.

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