Expert's Panel

A collection of timely and important topics posed to our panel of experts.

My tool is going up against a long-time incumbent. How do we break into the market successfully?

 (ep105)
1. If you are going to go up such a competitor---lets equate that to an Applied, Lam, TEL, ASML type–you must have a differentiated solution that is needed in the market and attacks the problem in a meaningful way that your competitor cannot. If you don’t have that, you will definitely get whipped and be down-priced. "Me-too’s" that don’t have quantifiable differentiation do not make sense.
2. Keep in mind that if you are going up against the big gorilla, the offensive tool you have is your "agility." You may indeed come up with something that is missing that they cannot engineer and market in a timely manner.
3. Let me give you a real story. I was part of a company of moderate size and we wanted to go after some major growth. In a strategic planning meeting we identified 13 broad opportunities that met the criteria of: 1.could be developed with our existing technology; 2. There was a strong need in the market; and 3. Nobody was meeting that need. We sent a team of executives out to talk with customers and within 4 months they had crystallized one of the needs with a major customer and a potential market of billions. Because we were smaller, the customer would only buy it from us if these 3 behemoths (major companies in the industry) couldn’t produce it better, and they gave our idea to those companies. Within 90 days–before the 3 big companies even got off the dime–we were able to develop a working prototype. We got the orders, the first of which was three times the size of our whole company.