Gold Silver or Bronze?

What makes your product or service different or better than your competitors?

Gold Silver or Bronze?

With the Winter Olympics underway, we cannot help but think of ‘reward for performance’. Athletes from all over the globe compete for a place on the world stage to bask in the glory of their hard work and the achievement of receiving a Gold Medal for victory.

Companies receive rewards based on their performance. Great products and services, generally speaking, result in great rewards for the organizations that convene daily to build and deliver something different or better than anyone else does. Hard work pays off when teams provide something the competition does not do, cannot do, or lacks the will to do.

What makes your product or service different or better than your competition?

The software industry does a wonderful job with sales and marketing. ISV’s will release a flashy minimum viable product spawned from that great marketing. Unfortunately, time to value suffers due to long implementation cycles. The result is prolonged delay in a consumer’s ability to measure or even capture value. In the end, can anyone even understand the path to the ROI of his or her investment?

Some ISV’s are aggressively spending $100:1 on Sales/Marketing to Revenue ratios and are given the illustrious label “Unicorn”. They receive rewards for their hard work and for finding stylish ways to out-brand and out-sell their competitors. The industry analysts remind us of the judges in Olympic competition holding up scorecards based on a set of conditions pre-subscribed by them. Meet those criteria and you make it to the finals. Consumers line up to give Unicorns the gold. As a lifelong sales and marketing professional, I say ‘bravo’.

However, let us ask again, ‘what makes your product or service different or better than your competitors?’

Figure skating is fascinating to watch, and I have even attended live professional shows featuring former Olympians. In my humble opinion, it seems a bit subjective in competition. I really enjoy the events that have measureable results like Hockey where the team that scores the most goals wins, or the racing events where the fastest time wins.

Great software should be measured by the value it delivers. It is possible to do if an ISV is bold enough to deploy a service offering that executes in two-week sprint cycles that are minimally disruptive to your business. A methodology that delivers rapid measurable incremental value with controlled investment.

Gold, Silver, or Bronze? At the writing of this blog, the spot prices were as follows:

Gold = $1,333.65 per ounce

Silver = $16.63 per ounce

Bronze = $1.72 Per POUND (its considered scrap)

It makes sense why the winners should get the gold. A high value is placed on top performance. The thing that inspires me the most is the athletes that prove it through measurable results.

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