Hi Reader,
On Tuesday, I wrote about why your account team can be flat out with customers and still not grow them. Today something else: not every sale into your installed base is worth making.
Let me share an example.
At Unit4, Agresso, our flagship ERP, was one of a kind. It was built so that business people could change it themselves. Reorganise, acquire, move into a new country, and they could adjust the system the same day without waiting for consultants. No competitor could match that, and it's why customers stayed with us for fifteen years.
After Unit4 delisted from the stock exchange and became part of private equity, the acquisition strategy changed. The focus became functional breadth. Modules our customers asked for, and our competitors already had. Every one of them gave real value to somebody.
Take the Corporate Performance Management suite we acquired. A good product, yet completely different technology. It was built to read traditional data sets, not the information model that made us different. So it couldn't handle the changes our customers made every day, which meant what came out of it wasn't reliable for exactly the customers who changed the most.
Or the professional services suite. It was built on Microsoft CRM, the platform of one of our biggest competitors. It gave us a CRM story we didn't have, and it cost us the one thing customers came to us for. Where do you plan projects now? Where do you plan people? Where do you invoice, where do you do project accounting? And once you've decided all that and the customer reorganises, which of the two follows along?
So yes, the suite was broader and the sales team had more to talk about. But meanwhile our answers started to change. What used to be a straight yes turned into "it depends which part of the suite you mean."
Here's what I learned. Every piece you add has to do two things.
- Create value for the customer today.
- Make the reason they picked you bigger, not smaller.
Most additions pass the first and fail the second (especially with acquisitions).
When something genuinely helps your customers but doesn't make you more of what they came for, consider another route: Partner instead of buying. It changes expectations. The customer knows that's a different company, judges it on its own, and your core stays clean (and differentiated).
The key takeaway here is:
Get both right and each new thing makes the next one easier.
Get only the first right and you grow this year, weaker every year after.
Question for you to reflect upon:
Think of the last three things you added to your offering. Would your customers say any of them made you more of what they came to you for?
The Remarkable Effect is when everything you add makes a customer want to do more business with you
Ton