In a recent LinkedIn Post, THE REVELATOR asked:
Under which category does your solution provider demo fall?
- 🤫 Selectively Stealth With A Reason
- 🎩 Smoke And Mirrors
- 🌟 Courageous Dreamers
And, more importantly, which one would you, as a practitioner, prefer to work with?
the doctor, who has reviewed over 500 solutions in our space over the last two decades (and interacted with considerably more vendors than that) answered for you:
- 𝐍𝐎𝐍𝐄 𝐎𝐅 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐀𝐁𝐎𝐕𝐄!
a) Selectively Stealth vendors are either
- considerably overrating their solution against the market (usually due to lack of homework) or
- hiding their solution because they know there is absolutely positively nothing unique about their offering (which is NOT a bad thing if it is easier to use, quicker to implement, better supported, and cheaper than competitors, but if that was the case, why would they be stealth?)
b) Smoke and Mirrors are
- greatly overselling a significantly underperforming solution (and usually trying to gouge you with a high price tag while they are at it)
c) Courageous Dreamers are
- selling you on a vision they may realize someday, but are usually doing so while trying to sell a woefully inadequate solution (or, a solution with one new great capability but none of the critical baseline functionality)
So what type of vendor do you want?
e. Open, Honest, and Informed
Even if they don’t have anything explicitly unique.
As SI has noted before, a good vendor is one who will be focussed on
- a particular market size
- one or more related industries
- a subset of functionality where the founders / core team have strength
In addition, it will consult with organizations in that niche, analysts and consultants who serve that niche, and third party experts to get feedback during design, development, initial implementation, etc. and take all that into account in order to design a solution that will solve the problems of the aforementioned identified market niche in a manner that will be usable, and used by, the market they are going after.
It’s not about who has the most features, who has the best bells and whistles, who has the coolest sounding tech under the hood, …
IT IS ABOUT WHAT SOLUTION WILL WORK FOR YOU!
It’s the solution that will solve the 80% of your problems, that will contain all the functionality to do the tasks you do every day (not every quarter or every year), that will make those daily tasks more efficient and effective, that will be used in the majority (not the minority), that will be affordable for a business of your size, and generate an ROI.
And, sometimes the best solution is the NO-AI inside solution with nothing new, but the solution that was form fit for companies of your size in your industry, that streamlines your daily processes, that is easier to use than avoid, that solves the problems you wanted solved, and does so at a fraction of the price of the mega-suite that is just complete overkill with respect to what you are looking for.
Some of the vendors that received the best coverage here on SI are those that didn’t contain a single capability the doctor hadn’t seen ten (to one hundred) times before, but came from vendors who designed a solution for an underserved market niche, made it valuable for that market niche, and were completely honest about what they had and who they were selling to. That’s what the market needs.
AND THAT IS WHAT YOU NEED!