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Archive for March, 2010

Market opportunities exist whenever a group of individuals with common attributes (a market or a market segment) perceive a discrepancy between an existing or expected condition and the way they want things to be. For instance, John wants to spend more time with his family, but he can’t because he must work 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. to get his work done. An opportunity exists for someone to create a product that will help John do his work in 75% of the time. He’ll buy it to gain more family time. There may be thousands of people who also need to compress the time it takes to do work similar to John’s. By providing a single product that will be purchased by all these people, you seize the opportunity.
In the workplace, there are four conditions that determine whether an opportunity exists:
• Things are fine. There are no problems.
• Things are bad. Help is needed.
• Things are fine now, but a surge in work load is expected.
• Things are fine now, but a decrease in work load is expected.
To find your opportunities, look for situations in which condition 2, 3, or 4 exists. The more companies or individuals who fit into these three categories, the greater the opportunity.
If things are fine, there is no opportunity. No matter how good your product is, it is a solution in search of a problem—and the problem does not exist. When I was marketing CAlm systems for Auto-trol, I found a class of prospects that had already automated. Instead of using CADD, though, they “automated” by cutting and pasting paper. These people were already getting three times the productivity of manual drafters and they didn’t feel that they needed to spend $100,000 or more to do the same thing electronically. There was no opportunity.
On the other hand, you have an opportunity when your prospective users feel they have a problem. Most large corporations, for instance, have facilities management departments that assign space to other departments, lay it out, and keep track of furniture and equipment. They constantly produce drawings that show how furniture is arranged in rooms. Every time the furniture is rearranged or a department is moved, a new drawing is made—a perfect application for CADD. It is much quicker to arrange furniture and equipment electronically than it is to do it on paper, especially when the electronic database associated with the CADD drawing can also help track inventory.
Expectation levels fuel opportunity, too. Suppose the economy is expanding; new buildings are being designed in record number. The expansion is so great that good designers are in short supply. Architectural firms would have to find ways to meet their deadlines even though they may not have enough staff. Even if the situation is not yet dire, the firms will move to buy productivity enhancement software before the real problem hits. Likewise, if the market expects conditions to worsen, prospects will look for ways to decrease cost or get into new businesses, hopefully avoiding layoffs.
While my examples focused on how discrepancies between capacity and work load can generate opportunity, there are other types of discrepancies that create it, including: quality, cost, ease of accomplishing a specific type of task, and ability to do something that currently cannot be done at all. Your mission, as a marketing strategist, is to identify the opportunity, then seize it by developing and marketing a product that solves the customer’s problem.
Borland seized its opportunity when Lotus Development, then the unchallenged leader in spreadsheets, decided to split Lotus 1-2-3 into two separate products (using separate version numbers). One product was fully functional; the other cost less. Perplexed spreadsheet buyers had to choose between functionality and price—and they viewed that as a problem. Borland viewed it as an opportunity. It gave users both, by aggressively pricing a single, full-function version of Quattro Pro.
Market opportunities are created every day—whenever a new problem flusters the individuals in a market. What’s your opportunity?

It’s 9 p.m. Friday. You’re in your office staring at your monitor, trying to fix a bug in a software module that you have been working on for months. You’ve been hacking away since 7 a.m., with only a few short rest breaks. Your eyes are bloodshot. Your left leg has fallen asleep, and you can’t wait to get home to rest. No wonder you don’t have time to look at your market—the collection of individuals who might buy your product.
That’s no excuse. You must look at the market. It pays your bills. Every time John Q. Enduser buys your product, he provides money for salaries, phones, rent, and profit. In a strangely disconnected way, that makes him your boss. How can you satisfy the boss when you don’t even know what he wants? Henry Ford once said, “If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from his angle as well as your own.t In essence, this man, known best for his automation techniques, not his marketing savvy, says the secret of success is being market driven.
To be truly market driven, every action you take must be driven by your vision of who your end users are and what you can do for them. You need to ask four important questions:
• What are users trying to accomplish?
• Are they having any problems doing it?
• What methods are they using now?
• Can you offer a better way to solve their problems?
In recent years, businesses of all types have been installing relational database products (ORACLE, Ingres, Progress, Paradox, etc.). The problem is that divisions and departments would choose their own software without concern for corporate requirements. The result: a myriad of incompatible databases. Recognizing the problem, David Assia of Magic Software seized the opportunity to develop a fourth generation language (4GL) that would allow users to access the multiple databases already in use.
Throughout the industry, many companies have succeeded by understanding what people were trying to accomplish, and by designing solutions to real problems. Robert MacNeal and other engineers had helped NASA develop NASTRAN, a finite element analysis (FEA) package that analyzed stress, vibration, and heat transfer characteristics of NASA spacecraft. Recognizing that other industries—notably automotive and aerospace—could use FEA to solve similar problems, MacNeal formed MacNeal-Schwendler Corporation to refine and market NASTRAN, which was already in the public domain. Similarly, John Swanson formed Swanson Analysis Systems, Inc. to produce and market FEA software similar to what he had developed as an employee of Westinghouse Electric. Like Ford, these successful software entrepreneurs put themselves in the other person’s position to find and solve his problem.
Even if you spend most of your week in your office, get out to view the market. Understand its problems. Offer a better alternative. In other words, be market
driven.

Finally, since you cannot control the world around you, look out for opportunities and take advantage of any breaks that come your way. Being in the right place at the right time has provided leverage for companies such as Mergent Corporation, which used the Michelangelo virus scare of 1992 to elevate sales for its system security software. Luck, in large part, is good planning properly executed.