Commercialisation failures are not bad products. They are good products built for the wrong customer. And no one found out about it in time.
Average sales growth for our customers
Completed project
Internationalisation project in the Nordic countries and Europe
In November 1998, Motorola launched what was to be the eighth wonder of the world.
Iridium was a satellite telephone system: 66 satellites in low orbit, ten years of development, five billion dollars of investment. The system worked. It worked in the Sahara, the South Pole and the Pacific Ocean. Technically, it was unique.
Nine months later, the company filed for bankruptcy protection. The number of subscribers had reached 10 000, against a forecast of half a million. In spring 2000, the service was shut down.
What went wrong? The phone weighed almost half a kilo and cost $3 000. A phone minute cost five dollars. The system did not work indoors, in cars or in cities. And above all: when Iridium was first conceived in 1987, GSM networks did not exist. By the time it was launched in 1998, most of the world’s cities were already covered.
Iridium engineers solved the problem in 1987. The customer for whom they solved it no longer existed in 1998.
Iridium is the most clichéd example possible, told in a thousand strategy lectures. Yet the same story is repeated every week in the Finnish business world, on a smaller scale but with identical logic.
A Finnish technology company had spent three years and a significant amount of capital designing a tool for a manufacturing industry. The product was good. A technical victory. To use a favourite expression: a project favoured by engineers.
Launch in spring, sales team hired, marketing budget set. First quarter: three deals. Second: two. Third: four, two of which crashed during rollout.
The Steering Group met. The diagnosis was obvious, but wrong: we have sales problems. More sales resources, more marketing, a third campaign with a new message and a discount. Fourth quarter: five sales, still one-sixth of plan. Money dwindled and investors pressured.
When we were called in to help, the first thing we did was not an audit of the sales process, but twelve customer interviews: six current customers and six who had been offered but didn’t buy.
The findings were uncomfortable. Existing customers were not using the product for the features that the company had built as the main feature, but for a single side feature that had emerged as a semi-random feature. Non-customers had refused not because of price, but because even after the demo they did not understand what problem the product solved.
A month later, the value promise was rewritten. Same product, different story, different key message, different pricing. First sale in two weeks and a steady stream after that. By the end of the year, the company was in a turnaround. Not because it was selling better, but because it was finally selling the right story.
Commercialisation does not mean taking a finished product and starting to sell it. It is a process, not an event. It starts long before the first sales meeting.
The classic false idea goes like this:
The correct logic goes the other way round: first understand the customer, then build what they need and finally sell it in a language they understand.
This sounds obvious, but the vast majority of Finnish growth companies build the product first, often based on deep technical expertise. Customer insight work is only done when sales do not take off as expected. By then it is usually too late: capital has been committed, the team has been built around a particular product logic, and the product platform has choices that will not be changed without a complete rewrite. The company is committed to the path. The path turns out to be the wrong one.
Over the past couple of decades, I have seen the same pattern so many times that it can be predicted in advance.
First: product development without the customer. The product is designed based on what the founders think the market needs, not what the market says. The leader who defends this usually invokes the quote “if Ford had asked people, they would have wanted faster horses”. It is one of the most misremembered quotes in business history: Ford never said it. And Steve Jobs, the second most often invoked, observed what people did more intensely than anyone else. He didn’t ask what people wanted, but he didn’t guess either.
Second: a value proposition built around the product, not the customer’s achievements. The company talks about features: integration with SAP, real-time reporting. The customer is not buying features, but achievements. The same product sounds completely different in customer language: ‘You’ll know on Monday what went wrong over the weekend before your customer calls.’ The first is technically correct. The second is sales-wise correct.
Third: a sales process built on the logic of the seller, not the buyer. Sales organisations love process diagrams: sales funnels, seven-step sales decision models, three-letter acronyms. They all describe how the seller is proceeding. None of them describe how the customer buys. The customer buys through his own process, which is slower and more complex and of which the seller controls at most a quarter. Commercialisation must be built into the buying process, not the selling process.
Commercialisation starts with a debate. Not with a slide show, not with channel choice, not with pricing.
When we get involved in a commercialisation project, the first week does not include sales calculations but interviews. Ten or twelve: existing customers, interested non-customers, non-customers who have refused, industry players who see the buying decisions from the sidelines. And above all to the end user, who is rarely the one who decides the deal.
After twelve interviews, the picture changes. Always. In none of the more than 200 projects we have done has the client’s initial assumption about the market been entirely correct. Sometimes half, sometimes almost all.
This is a step that most companies skip. They rush into messaging, channels and pricing. They build a house without a foundation and wonder why it’s wobbling.
When commercialisation is done without understanding the customer, failure typically comes in one of four forms.
A product is built for a customer that does not exist. Like Iridium. Like many Finnish software projects that imagine big companies buying an unfinished system from a three-person company.
The value pause appeals to the person who does not make a buying decision. The engineer loves the product. The Finance Director, who signs the purchase order, sees the price sheet. If the value proposition is against the enthusiasm of the engineer, the CFO will reject it.
The sales process is taken directly from an American textbook. The Finnish buyer rarely follows a stylised funnel. He takes his time, asks his subordinates, wants to see a reference. If the process does not allow these steps, the deal will fall through. Not because the customer doesn’t want to buy, but because he was pushed at the wrong pace.
The first customers are wrongly selected. The temptation to take first crack at anyone who pays is understandable, cash flow is needed. But the wrong first customer will produce the wrong requirements for the product, the wrong recommendations for the market and the wrong expectations about the nature of the product as a whole. One right first customer is better than ten wrong ones.
One-off commercialisation goes like this: make a product, build a sales organisation, hold a launch, get the first sales, celebrate. Six months later, the sales pipeline is empty because no one knows why the first people bought, why others didn’t and what should be done differently. This is sometimes called growth adjustment. A more correct name would be the replay of guesswork.
Sustainable commercialisation goes the other way. Customers are interviewed before the launch. After the launch, you interview more. Every quarter, you stop to listen to ten new people, not with a form, but in conversation. This creates a knowledge base that no competitor can replicate because it’s not public. It’s yours.
The difference is not reflected in the figures for the first quarter. It is visible in the second year. The first way to generate growth when the stars are aligned. The second produces growth even when they are not. And it is in the second year that the companies that end up in successful acquisitions stand out from those that quietly exit. They don’t differ in product quality or team skills. They differ in whether they listen to their customers systematically or improvisationally.
The product does not sell itself. But a customer can buy into a shop if they are asked the right questions before being offered anything.
Commercialisation is not a campaign. It is a systematic way of listening before speaking.
One act that takes fifteen minutes.
Choose one bid that you lost in the last six months. Call that person. Don’t sell anything. Honestly say, “The deal went elsewhere and that’s okay. I’d just like to learn: what did we not understand about your situation?”
Most people answer because no one has ever asked them this question. And that answer says more about the true state of your value proposition than any internal meeting.
Product quality is rarely a bottleneck. The value proposition, the buying path and the salesperson’s pitch are. Let’s map together where your friction is and what is the first concrete step to unlock it.
