Sales Offshooting
There's a step-change hitting the car trade.
All those longstanding, storied global colossi that for lifetimes and beyond have sucked up the entire market are perhaps already falling towards oblivion.
To casual observers, how difficult can it be? Scale up that phone battery which a handful of years back was mere minutes and now boom to days. Make that fast-mode charge up the same mileage in the same time as a tank of petrol at the same places. Get an easier life without the faff of all those unfathomable moving engine parts.
Turns out, too difficult. For no existing manufacturer seems to have cracked it.
As evidenced by the eye-watering write-downs their failed efforts have forced.
Stellantis (Fiat, Peugeot & Chrysler) is writing down €22bn on its electric vehicle unit. General Motors already gave notice on similar for $7bn. Ford, $19bn. VW, Porsche and let's not forget Jaguar Land Rover have also admitted catastrophic EV travails for lost billions of their own too.
That's just a recent sample.
The one beneficiary of all this wasted effort is China's jackboot. Where neither normal economic nor invention principles apply. Their dictatorship literally thieving the market without worrying of any cover of darkness.
Even the lone shard of hope now wobbles. Tesla seemingly struggling to match threats of subsidised price tags and enemy-stoked artificial yet lasting negative consumer sentiment.
To think that on the streets of London over a century-back there was briefly competition between electric, hydrogen and liquid carbon to run a vehicle. The more you dwell on that the more you ponder what disaster unfurled via the winner of that battle and sob for what might have been.
Here's summation from London broadsheet columnist, Matthew Lynn.
The traditional auto giants thought the transition was just a matter of replacing an internal combustion engine with a big battery, but it turned out that an EV was a piece of electronics with wheels attached. It has much more in common with the mobile phone market than anything the petrolheads running the industry were familiar with.
And that's by no means the only problem. Combine this with wildly misreading the pace of and will for energy transition, a misplaced belief in 'new' customer values, and misled neglect of re-fuel infrastructure and you see why the old guard are now in deep trouble.
As concluded;
It is far easier to create a new EV company from scratch than to convert one of the traditional giants.
And this can be a perennial lesson often ignored in our solution space.
Like a 70s rock band that suddenly tried to embrace 80s synths. Even The 'Stones tried a disco single, and it wasn't bad. U2 once went 'Pop' alright?
There's a new, shiny, attractive zeitgeist. We gotta get on board! Be leaders! No way we can afford to miss out!
I think back to the several salesteam re-directs like this I've been close to. Tin still sold at cash upfront despite leasing chasing hard. Software lump sums with annual fees when monthly per user pricing emerged. Likewise, access online belittled for preference of on-site install.
Then there's the type of selling. It's a myth that change buy-in is correlated with age. It's a fact that creating something is likelier better than re-moulding what already exists.
And here's the issue as appears with recurring certainty for us.
Which is why I am a proponent of Piloting. It makes any subsequent Pivoting way more solid.
This applies to how we sell. As well as how our prospects may wish to choose, deploy and measure that which we provide (a crucial 'by the way').
Sure, it's tempting to go Big Bang. Marketing/Production/Tech say they've a winner. Sales cannot fail! Well, they all-too-often do. As I say, 3-in-4 times.
If you're thinking of repurposing your whole sales effort around some new ware my advice - as someone who's been involved in that countless times - is do not go all-in up front. Please, no.