Business System Consultation Center - Our Business System ColumnVol.13 2011.06.01 Takahashi Minoru

IT salespeople who sell bad packages and run before the market catches on

Thank you for your interest and continued support.
This is Takahashi from the Marketing Plan Research Laboratory.


When selling a specific product or service,
in an era when public awareness and individual consumers’ ability to make informed choices are low,
even quality is poor or the price is unreasonably high,
it was easy to sell (and easy for salespeople to pitch).


Since customers lack the ability to make informed choices, they don’t notice the poor quality.
Since there are few competing products on the market, they also fail to realize they are being overcharged.
I believe that the market matures through the accumulation of individual consumers’ mistakes.
That is my gut feeling.


The same can be said for systems.
Especially in this era where only "three-letter names"—which could be called cutting-edge or trendy—are all the rage,
people, without understanding their true meaning or essence, get duped by salespeople
and end up buying into a suite of packaged products with “three-letter acronyms.”


Take “ERP,” for example, which was all the rage a while back.
(※I do believe there are many successful implementation cases in the ERP market these days.)


Packaged software solutions
tend to effectively address the “failures of individual consumers” mentioned earlier.
IT vendors with sales teams pay several million (or even tens of millions) of yen to exclusive distributors or their Japanese subsidiaries,
not only grant them the right to resell the product,
but they’ll even provide a template contract specifying, “Please enter into this type of agreement with each individual customer.”


These contracts can be a hassle for customers,
and even if you end up buying a system that you can’t use,
they won’t even accept a return, let alone a refund.
All that’s left is a massive debt from the lease agreement, and that’s the end of it.


Be wary of system products that use unfamiliar technical jargon.
This doesn’t mean “unfamiliar = the CEO is uninformed.”
That’s purely the sales team’s strategy.


Will the company go bankrupt if you don’t buy it right now?
I don’t think putting it on hold for three to five years would make much of a difference.
I believe it’s not too late to implement it even after you’ve done your research.


That's all, Thank you for reading.

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