At some point in time, all Incumbents started as challengers of the status quo leading as a Disruptor or acting as a Fast Follower. As they built out their presence replacing the then present Incumbents they developed structures and processes taylored to meet their customers' expectations. And these structures and processes defined who they hired and promoted and the behavior they expected.
"Most ROI comes from productivity improvements, and most productivity improvements come from releasing trapped value. The reason is simple. All systems trap value all the time, the only question is, where is it getting trapped today? That is, systems are implemented to help make people more productive than they were, and they do so with varying degrees of success. But to whatever degree that success has been achieved, that simply resets the bar. The old bottlenecks have been addressed, but that just surfaces the new bottlenecks." - Geoffrey Moore -
The term "Incumbent" has a negative connotation when in reality they are the result of significant and sustained success in the past: Incumbents disrupted an existing value chain and replaced it with a better one releasing trapped value. The problem Incumbents must resolve is overcoming the inertia this past success drives via structures, processes, and culture to exploit their full market opportunity. And to prevent themselves from being disrupted.
In the below video Karl Osti describes his expectations for hiring Disruption Selling to help Autodesk with driving the transformation from selling workplace products to selling a platform including an entire ecosystem of 3rd party solutions.
Disruption Selling:
Thank you for having us here, Karlo. To kick this off, what was the problem you wanted to solve when you engaged Disruption Selling?
Karl Osti, Autodesk:
The one thing we tried to understand is, can we apply learnings and best practices from other industries and potentially trigger a change process here at Autodesk, particularly with regards to Disruption Selling.
Disruption Selling:
And what convinced you that Disruption Selling was the right partner to help you with this task?
Karl Osti, Autodesk:
Here at Autodesk we operate in a worldwide organization with different business units and different geography, of course. When working with Disruption Selling, actually the risk for me engaging with you was very small because we knew each other from the past and I knew I can put you in front of even very senior executive salespeople. So every one of my salespeople can take something away.
But the big topic I had on my side was like: Can I learn something from you to prepare my sales team as a part of my own digital transformation? So we are moving from on-premise solutions to platform and I want to get the sales guy to a position where they're not just looking at our own portfolio, but they're looking at the complete ecosystem we are having and use that properly in order to drive customer impact.
Disruption Selling:
So if you should describe your expectation you had, what was the expectation and how was it met at the end of the day?
Karl Osti, Autodesk:
Okay, I think the easy one to start with is potentially how was it met. We had a couple of account teams which we put together, working with you Stefan and the Disruption Selling team. And what's very important is that you helped us understanding the clarity to articulate the value propositions, to understand the holistic concept, how to engage and drive value with the customer.
And again, we have experienced people, so they know a lot of sales methodology, of course. But having it as an active knowledge, having it with that clarity was really something you helped us with in Disruption Selling. And the interesting piece, and that's why I measure it as a success, is it drove motivation.
Motivation of the individual account teams, alignment between the different functions, and we brought it out actually with the individual account team as mentioned. But more interestingly is what we have done actually here in the organization here in Germany is something I can scale around the globe. I can scale to US, I can scale to Asia-Pacific, and I can scale it into different business units.
So even if it's still a change process, which we have to go through, the real compelling factor for me is it works, it drives motivation, it triggers a change process, and I can use it for scale on a global level.
What Karl describes here are the first steps an Incumbent must take to rejuvenate their sales organization:
Understand the current situation and what prevents the organization from exploiting new business opportunities.
Establish a small group of customer-facing resources and challenge their current sales approach.
Jointly develop a think-bigger approach addressing new and higher-level Economic Buyers.
Go here for watching the entire video.
Comments