We talk a lot about how rising tides raise all ships and how the more we give to the market, the stronger that market becomes - thereby raising all ships and giving us better long term business opportunity. This blog, however, is about the opposite.
It's about creating a market that can't survive and won’t create value due to short term goals and short term thinking. With that in mind, here are three tips for creating an All Ships Sink market:
1. Give away value for which you should be charging: Take a product or solution that once offered value and add to it, then discount it until it sells. By selling too much for too little, you have created a difficult work environment for your internal team; one in which they will not be able to continue providing value. Your staff and your customers will suffer since this isn't a long term business strategy.
2. Block opportunity for your customers to work with your competitors, even if they can offer the customers a value additional to yours. By blocking all competitors from working with customers, you can offer deeper discounts because you are holding more market revenue. But, you have successfully stunted your customer’s growth opportunity -- thereby, helping to sink their ship.
3. Sell. Everything. Even if you know it won’t help your customer. Because you know #goals. So go ahead and sell a high-end solution that is probably best for a company three times the size of your customer even if the base program will be sufficient. Your customer won't utilize the products full value and at the same time they will bite into their profit, forcing them to make cuts in other important places. Not a great strategy for long term revenue relations.
Amy Katz (@amybkatz) is an entrepreneur who has launched, built and sold a range of IT media platforms. As president and CEO of After Nines Inc., she oversees business development, sales and finance for the overall company and ChannelE2E. Read her blogs here.
