The Myth of the Informed Buyer – And the Importance of Vision Reengineering!

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Do you know everything about the products you buy?

 

 

“Informed decision-making comes from a long tradition of guessing and then blaming others for inadequate results.”

 

 

A while ago, I was in a tight competitive battle with another vendor in the cheminformatics space, and, frankly, their software looked slicker than ours. The prospect had specified “exact structure and sub-structure searching” on their list of requirements and both vendors provided these, without significant differentiation.

 

However, we had recently implemented chemical similarity searching (oohs and aahs, please…!), which was unknown by the prospect (and most of the industry at that time).

 

I was in a meeting with the prospect, discussing their requirements list. I said, “Many of the other customers we have worked with, in very similar situations to yours, found that similarity searching enabled them to find novel compounds that they would have missed with sub-structure searching alone. In fact, several of our customers shared that they have moved these compounds into the next phase of research for tox and metabolism testing. 

 

I’d suggest that similarity searching be included as a requirement for your implementation

as well.”

 

This was a perfect example of Vision Reengineering: Broadening your prospect’s understanding of what is possible and expanding or changing their vision of a solution with a bias towards your capabilities.

 

Well, this brief conversation paid off!

 

The prospect chose our solution and told us it was largely because of the new similarity searching capability. And I learned later that they too had found novel compounds using similarity searching, including some that they had moved forward into preclinical testing.

 

This is also another example of The Myth of the Informed Buyer and the importance of Vision Reengineering. Prior to the discussion above, the prospect thought they were familiar with all the available types of chemical structure searching – they weren’t!

 

 

Moral: Buyers don’t know what they don’t know, and you may have to address this!

 

Learn more about Vision Reengineering starting on page 87 in Doing Discovery: https://www.amazon.com/Doing-Discovery-Important-Enablement-Processes/dp/B0B8RJK4C2/

 

If you missed some of these knowledge nuggets, you’ll find another dozen more waiting for you at https://greatdemo.com/blog/.

 

And you’ll find 35 additional story gems in “Suspending Disbelief: A Collection of Sales, Presales, and Marketing Stories (and Lessons Learned)” here: https://tinyurl.com/yc7rsrmy