Day 1 and First Principles

Hi and we are on day one of getting the company I mentioned in yesterday’s blog to market and selling.  For the purposes of this very candid set of blogs, we are going to call it Triple X.

We hope this will let you see the Backwards Business process in action and how to apply it so that it could help your business achieve its sales goals.

Today as we always do when we are starting the communications stage of a programme, was spent going through all our research, the early sales and the other insight we have gathered on the market to make sure we have fully understood everything and are offering products and services the market wants and will buy.

This is first principle stuff in Backwards Business as the diagram below shows.

For the last 2 months we have been working closely with the Triple X’s market to define exactly what is required for them to move to the new way of doing business. In reality it is pretty simple and down to one word – more.

For this particular market the trigger is more:

• More Choice for buyers from the supplier base
• More opportunities for vendors
• More confidence in suppliers
• More business being done between buyers and suppliers

Now the reason this is not a particularly easy programme is that the products and services offered by triple X are disruptive and mean the market adopting new habits.

There is plenty of evidence that this is welcome, but it is a disruption and addresses some areas of operation that are historically inefficient and more expensive than they need to be.

So the point of today’s blog is this. We know there is a market and purchases are being made, but we need position the products as an additional benefit as opposed to the solution to the problem. Semantics?

We would like to suggest not and here are a couple of examples to let you see what we mean:

• In an industry where vendors traditionally find generating demand for their products difficult, a contract with Triple X puts your products directly in front of your target buyers to generate the demand you need to win business

• A contract with Triple X puts your products directly in front of your target buyers to generate the demand you need to win business.  

Both say exactly the same thing. However the first one is dominated by the opening statement, which highlights a problem and even with the strong positive outcome, never quite feels positive. 

The examples are pretty rough, but we hope you get the point that even when you are solving an acknowledged problem, our experience is that staying on the positive and focusing on the desired outcome is the most successful way of generating business, which is really the point of commercialising a new business.

By Tim Sandford