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When you are out to sell anything, an important decision you make is to either make something for the mass market, keep margins low and make it up by selling large volume or make something too good for a niche market not to not have it and charge a premium. There’s no wrong way to do it and the decision is more often dependent on the industry and competitive landscape to position the product right and gain competitive edge.

But then every once in a while there comes along a company (read Apple or Nike) with a premium on their products and attract a mass audience to sell huge volume. But history will confirm that at beginning of their sales process, they made the same decision of choosing between volume and premium. Eventually they made great products, had outstanding marketing and a well oiled supply chain and sales machinery to hit the bull’s eye of selling high volume at premium price.

Windows, Coke Classic and iPhone are cash cows for Microsoft, Coca-cola and Apple respectively. What cash cows provide is the ability for these companies to fuel innovation and launch new products. Consider Microsoft as an example. The company keeps fueling innovation in new products like XBox and Bing while at the same time putting in a lot of effort in feeding the cash cows they own as their flagship products–Windows and Office.

It is very important to keep feeding the cash cow. Every company out there wants to have an iPhone or Windows in their product portfolio, so the key here is to maintain the market dominance for these products. You cannot afford to take your foot off the accelerator when it comes to developing and marketing these products. Product development, innovation, advertising and support for cash cows should always be maintained.

Feeding the cash cow doesn’t mean missing the innovation cycle or sticking to something that can be replaced by a better and more useful product by your competition. Cash cow for your company may evolve or completely change over time. You may start with something as the biggest revenue generator for your company and change it to something completely different. Take Apple for example. Apple evolved its cash cow from iPod to iPhone pretty seamlessly. On the other hand, consider Kodak. The company completely missed the digital camera innovation cycle fearing the cannibalization of its cash cow (35mm camera) and eventually losing the leadership position in the camera market.

I believe there is a much deeper meaning to the why question in the lives we live. We all get up in the morning and go to do what we do. How many of us know why we are doing it? We all do our jobs and money is the result of it. That’s not the reason why we do it. If you are not sure why you are doing what you do, you got to take some time out and answer to yourself, why?

I am not qualified enough to talk about the philosophy of life but from what I believe in, you can live up to a much higher potential and eventually succeed if you believe in what you are doing. If you believe in building great homes for people to live in, design buildings. If you believe in managing people’s money so that they can have a better retirement, be an asset manager. If you believe in doing innovative research using cutting-edge technology and state-of-the-art techniques, be a part of a great market research company.

Don’t do something because the race is on to work for the biggest bank or hottest technology firm. It is never too late to learn something new to fulfill your passion. Life to too short to do something that you don’t believe in. Every few days, ask why you are doing what you do. Make sure you are  excited enough to go to work in the morning. The question you need to answer is not what you do, it’s why you do it.

Selling is as much fun as it is a challenge. After meeting so many prospective clients and people I would want to work with over the last 15 months since we started marketing of MavenMagnet, I took some time to retrospect on this short journey (and hopefully the start of a long trip) as to where we got success and where people didn’t go with us. We got success when people believed in us and believed why using MavenMagnet is a better way to meet their needs.

Everyone knows what we are doing. The hard part is to convince why this the best thing for them. In case of MavenMagnet, our core challenge is to convince people why market research with a different source of information and  with a different way of analysis will help them in their decision-making process. Why our methodology, our technique and our technology is the best thing for them to use. Why they should trust our results and make decisions taking our recommendation into consideration.

How is critical. You will find companies dime a dozen to claim they can do what any other company is doing. The real meat of the discussion is when we explain how we can do it and how we have got the team, the technology and the vision to do it better than anyone else. How we have developed innovative products that use cutting-edge technology and techniques to come up with real and actionable insights in a fraction of time as compared to anything out there.

It is a mute exercise trying to sell to someone who just doesn’t believe in the reason behind why using this particular product is going to help them. It’s a moment of great satisfaction and pride when someone buys into your vision of doing something, no matter how small or big it is. This is what keeps us going and I believe no matter how things turn out, this is something worth cherishing.

Cheap and economical are two words with very distinct meanings which are sometimes used (incorrectly) interchangeably. The meaning of the two words are evidently more different when it comes to selling a product. Take automobiles for example. Not many people will want to drive the cheapest car in the world but many of them will opt for a car which is the most economical in its class.

When you say that the product you are trying to sell is cheap, it loses its value. An economical product on the other hand is something that is the best value in its category. The key thing to define here is value. Value is a very intangible thing. Some products are sold at a premium because the perceived value of the products is higher than normal. Others are discounted to map to their perceived value. Any product that best justifies its value to the consumers in a category is theoretically economical.

Something that is sold cheaper than its perceived value eventually starts getting perceived as a product of lower value.  Develop a great product, create campaigns and build service infrastructure to in-turn increase the value of your product for your consumers. At the end of the day, price is always mapped to the value of the product. So the right strategy is to make your product economically appealing. Don’t sell it cheap.

A product becomes successful when it is able to cross the chasm and become a resident of “Must Have Land” from “Good to Have Land”. Malcolm Gladwell wrote The Tipping Point and Geoffrey Moore wrote Crossing The Chasm on how an innovative product moves from being the priced property of the early adopters to becoming a mass phenomenon. A product really becomes a mass phenomenon when regular people think that it’s a product they must have.

In case of consumer products, crossing the chasm is well defined. The triggers are various factors ranging from cultural acceptance of a product to development of the product ecosystem. The mavens play an equally important role in making sure new features are added to the product and its ecosystem is rich enough for mass adoption.

The principle applies broadly to enterprise products as well. But in case of enterprise products the success is defined to a large extent by the answer to one question: is the product a must have product for the client enterprise? Every product starts as a good to have product. Based on the usability and eventually criticality of the product in serving its purpose, it either goes obsolete or becomes a must have product. The chasm for an innovative product in enterprise space is that gap between good to have and must have territories.

In a nutshell, the recipe for success of an enterprise product is to add features to it and develop an ecosystem to take it to a point where it becomes an essential product to serve its purpose and meet the desired goals of the client enterprise consistently and dependably.