One of the things that I get involved in are discussions on differentiation.
How can we make ourselves stand out from the crowd?
As someone in a technology organisation people constantly want to talk about functionality and widgets.
(I tend to use widgets as a generic term for all sorts of technical stuff)
There’s lots of angst in these discussion about price and getting the balance right between high quality high cost widgets and lower cost widgets.
Many of these conversations are driven by bids where we are being scored on functions and pricing that we offer. I’ve been convinced for some time that these things are now baseline issues. The price has to be about right, the functions have to be about right, but the reality is that these things rarely set anyone apart from the crowd.
What does differentiate are the people that the customer gets to see and the level of relationship that they manage to build.
This following video sums it up really well:
Graham Chastney 