Curtis shook his head as he paced around his office. He wasn’t angry, just awestruck. “Five contracts,” he said, “We lost five contracts to those bozos, in the past two months.”
“What do they do, that you don’t do?” I asked.
“Nothing, that’s what gets me. We run circles around them with what we can do. We spent a $100,000 on a machine last year that does all kinds of stuff they can’t do.”
“What did the last client say?”
“I don’t understand it, the last client said that it was nothing special, that they just deliver a plain vanilla product. When they need it, it’s there.”
“And what’s the backlog on your delivery?” I prompted.
“Well, we are a few days out on our delivery, but look at our quality, it’s so much better,” replied Curtis.
Execution trumps a promise every time. Execution of a plain vanilla product on-time trumps late-delivery of a special product, every time.
I see this as a matter of preferance on the customers part. Quality always wins out in the end. I would much rather wait a few days longer for a better quality item than settle for something less. You pay more in the end for it.
It also depends on the stickiness of your product and its entry price. Sometimes a product cannot be bought alone, without also drinking a bit of that product’s coolaid.
A high priced product, with very few competitors, and an even more expensive coolaid infrastructure required to keep it operational means you can get to market FIRST, with a mediocre product and then enhance it in the future to become something better. Getting your foot in the door first makes it very sticky.
I work in the medical industry, and this is especially true regarding high-priced medical-grade equipment.
One thing is for sure, though, is that you cannot stay vanilla after your product has stuck. đŸ™‚