Customers buy the basic and learn to love the features

Most customers buy the basic and learn to love the features, but the whole customer experience is based on trying to sell the features.”
Roger Gibson
.

This statement appears oh-so-true in the OSS sales pitches that I’ve observed.

In many cases the customer really only needs the basic, but when every vendor is selling the features, customers also tend to get caught up in the features. “The basic” effectively represents Pareto’s 20% of functionality that is required by 80% (or more) of customers. However, since every vendor has the basic they don’t feel differentiated enough to sell that 20%. They sell the remaining 80%, “the features,” that give the perspective of uniqueness compared with all the other vendors.

When I help customers through the vendor selection process, I take a different perspective though. I work with the customer to understand what is “the basic” of their business model and what the OSS will channel most impact through. It’s not the hundreds of sexy features, the ones which will get used on rare occasions, but “the basic” that get used hundreds (or thousands, or millions) of times every day. I then work with the customers to figure out a way of benchmarking which vendor solution delivers the greatest efficiency on their basic.

A couple of side benefits come from this strategy too:

  • The basic is usually the easiest part of an OSS to roll-out and get delivery momentum going (and momentum is such an important feature of delivering large, complex OSS projects)
  • Once delivery momentum is established and the customer’s operators are using the basic, there are still hundreds of features to play with and enhance over time. Hundreds of more little wins that enhance the customer experience, building the love

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