Stop Putting All the Sales Focus on Product

So much of business is built around things. A company banks its future on a hot new product. Product management is the hub of manufacturing, distribution, and retail. Large companies drive out small companies with the promise of saving money. Advertising links happiness to cars, houses, and things to fill up our houses and empty our wallets.

Product Centricis

Early in my career as a marketing consultant, one of the first things I used to do was look at the product line, immediately followed by a look at the cash-flow and debt load of the company. In other words, conventional business practice had taught me that marketing was all about what you wanted to sell and how much money you had to sell it. Then I would do consumer research to justify my ideas about repackaging, branding, and advertising the product.

The problem with this way of doing business was that sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. A hit or miss approach can be good if you have a lot turns at bat. But in the bottom of the ninth, striking out often equals losing.

Another problem with focusing on products, is that some genius is always building a better mouse trap. We see it played out over and over again. An entrepreneur invents some nifty widget, packages it, and throws it out on the marketplace only to get stepped over by a newer, better widget. Product-centric companies spend all their time playing leap frog – fun, but tiring.

The business world is rife with books that advise following this exact model. Search for books on amazon.com using the keyword “innovate.” At the time I wrote this I found over 12,000 listings. That’s a whole lot of leap frog instruction.

In his best-selling book Purple Cow, Seth Godin cheerleads innovation, encouraging companies to spend more on finding the next big idea. Sounds simple. However, more circumspect research by Booz Allen Hamilton revealed a different story about innovation as a recipe for success.

“There is no easy way to achieve sustained innovation success-you can’t spend your way to prosperity,” said Booz Allen Vice President Barry Jaruzelski. “Successful innovation demands careful coordination and orchestration both internally and externally.”

Don’t get me wrong. Product innovation is important, and some of the books are absolutely brilliant. Innovation is one of the hallmarks of American business success. It is also very much like a lightening strike. The problem arises, as many of these authors point out, when you try to force lightening to strike in the same place twice. Building the biggest lighting rod is expensive, and even then, odds are that the lightening will still strike somewhere else. I strongly advocate building lightening rods – keep investing in innovation as part of doing business. Innovation and product management only become a problem – a destabilizing factor – when they are the central focus of a business.

When all eyes are on the product, businesses miss what matters most. Of course, you know what that is.