Product Behind Your Back and Focus on Your Core

Philip Lay's April Under the Buzz newsletter has a great essay on enterprise sales:

If your sales teams (including executives) walk into customer meetings with the product squarely in front of them (as in: “We’ve come to see how to help you buy our product”), what else can the prospect or customer do except poke at the product, and remember, most prospective customers hate having to focus on the product, especially as the first order of business? In contrast, if sales teams walk in with the product (and tools, and services) behind their back, they can keep the customer’s problem in front of them, and the business problem then becomes the focus of everyone’s attention.

If you are selling, and especially if you are not, go read the whole thing. Solid advice on building relationships between organizations.

The issue also contains a great article by Geoff Moore, who has focused his practice within the enterprise:

He is now focusing on the problem of how large organizations can focus their efforts and overcome the inertia that so frequently retards progress. As it turns out, the analytical tools Moore has been developing in his work, including the concepts of ‘Core versus Context’ are directly applicable to enabling the Real-Time Enterprise, a concept evangelized by many experts.

Geoff suggests that the traditional notion of new technology for competitive advantage has changed to mean implementation of existing technology:

...But as companies become more successful, as their earlier generations of products become standard infrastructure, the challenge shifts to one of orchestration and integration. The key question now becomes: How can we achieve the competitive advantages of getting closer to the real-time enterprise by taking advantage of current technology rather than inventing new technology?...This concept is new for Silicon Valley. Unlike past generations of technology, today’s IT in and of itself is no longer a differentiator – what differentiates a business is its application of IT...

Recently and related, I have been playing with how the technology adoption lifecycle may have changed from a bell curve to a power law. Still flushing this out and seeking feedback.