SellingBrew

Insights & Tips

Already a subscriber? Login

Become a subscriber and unlock an information arsenal focused on making your sales operation more effective.

The Hidden Costs of a Commodity Mindset

A few years ago, I consulted with a Fortune 500 high-tech company on their go-to-market strategies.  It didn’t take long to run into a surprisingly common hurdle–they were convinced that they sold a commodity.  But it wasn’t just the sales and marketing team that I was working with that believed this.  It seemed to be the whole company…the executive team…the CEO…even the board.  Digging into their 10-K filings, they had even managed to get their shareholders convinced.

And they sure had their customers well trained, too–each quarter buyers reaped the rewards of having a supplier that was convinced they were selling a product without any qualitative differentiation.  It made it really easy to play their sales team like a fiddle and buy at prices that seemed to drop each month.

You see, accepting the mindset that you sell a commodity can be like unleashing a pathogen into your company.  It’s a mindset that can be surprisingly infectious…with dire consequences to profitability.  The company that believes they sell a commodity can quickly start seeing changes in how their employees think and work:

  • Sales people don’t need to sell, they just need to take orders.
  • Marketing people don’t need to market, they just need to show their products are the same as the competition.
  • Pricing people don’t need to set prices, they just need to know what products cost.
  • CEOs don’t have to deliver on innovation, they just have to lower costs.

This company is hardly the only one out there afflicted with this mindset, but hopefully few have taken it to this level.  Let it serve as a warning, though.  Don’t let the word “commodity” freely enter your company’s vocabulary–once it’s released, it’s hard to eradicate.

Get Immediate Access To Everything In The SellingBrew Playbook

Related Resources

  • How to Deal With Churn

    How can we mitigate churn and retain more of the customers, revenues, and profits we've acquired? In this webinar, learn a simple methodology for figuring out what's best in your situation.

    View This Webinar
  • How to Tackle Trade Tariffs

    In this insightful conversation, Sean Arnold helps us sort through the issues and understand our options when addressing the latest addition to our list of challenges: trade tariffs.

    View This Interview
  • Assessing Core Sales Skills in the Hiring Process

    Relying on first-impressions, intuition, and gut-feel is just too risky when hiring salespeople today. This guide explores new options for infusing more objectivity and science into the process of finding good salespeople.

    View This Guide
  • The Reality of an "Intelligent" Sales Technology

    Every once in a while, a sales technology comes along that purports to do things that just seem to good to be true. But does the reality actually line-up to the claims? We wanted to know. So we did our homework and talked to actual users. And what we discovered may surprise you.

    View This Research