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This week's new blog post:
Tuesday, August 26, 2003
The Talent Myth Part V, continued
The Curse of the ATS
Marketplace
Thank you all so much for the recent interest in the
Talent Management Blog and the Talent Management Newsletter. Your feedback and
support has been interesting, challenging, and motivating. Please continue to
share it.
If you are new to my blog, you might want to start by reading
my
first post. Many of the recent emails have asked what my motivation for all
of this is - I tried to outline it there.
My last few posts have been
following the litany of mistakes that have been made and repeated by every
vendor in our little market. These mistakes have added up to what I call the
path to extinction. So far we've reviewed the following
mistakes:
Stop One on the path: They listened to their customers
a little too much, and not effectively for their business. (find
this post here)
Stop Two on the path: They over-complicated their
products while they over-inflated their egos. (find
this post here)
Stop Three on the path: They diluted their strength
as a vendor by diluting their domain expertise in customer facing positions. (find
this post here)
Stop Four on the path: Vendors aggressively acquire
customers in large numbers before their infrastructure or product are able to
support them. (find
this post here)
As Stop Five on the road to extinction, I'm
going to introduce a mistake I've been watching vendors make more and more
frequently and more and more offensively: They fool themselves into
thinking their products are incredibly different than everyone else's, then they
try to fool their prospects and customers.
Attention all
vendors: WAKE UP! The reason you all have such a hard time
differentiating products within this market is because you have all been at it
for so long that your products have very little in the way of functionality or
capabilities that are different from vendor to vendor. Stop trying to tell your
customers and prospects that your solution is different than the competitor that
just left the building yesterday and showed a solution so similar it's hard to
tell you apart... Other than the colors in your interface - and even then some
of you are exactly the same.
Please, please stop making statements like
"No one else in the market can offer this." or "This functionality really sets
us apart" or "Our ease of use is unmatched." or "No one else can scale like we
can." or my all time favorite: "We're really the only end to end solution in the
market."
Do you understand how silly and uninformed you sound when you
say these things? My entire blog has been written around the fact that all of
you are so replace-able that you've driven yourself into the ground after a few
years of success. It has become painfully clear to me that every vendor in the
space lives in their own little vacuum and makes incredible assumptions about
what the other vendors can and can't do. You are all really not doing yourself a
service by making assumptions about your competition.
The scariest thing
about this problem isn't how silly the vendors all look when they make these
mistakes in front of customers and prospects. We all expect you to walk in and
over-inflate your position in your market. The scary thing is how this impacts
the vendors internally - what fooling yourself does to your product,
performance, and execution. If you are living in a vacuum - kidding yourself
that your search, or ranking, or assessment, or passive candidate marketing, or
reporting, or scalability, or infrastructure, or international capabilities, or
support, or delivery model, or culture, or domain experience is better or unique
you are denying yourself the opportunity to truly take your solution to another
level.
On the vendor side it is a daily occurrence for a prospect or
customer to articulate a need - or a gap in the vendor's solution - and the
vendor's response is limited by their perspective that "well, no one else can do
that". It's the equivalent of saying "what we have is good enough". This
mentality really helps explain why so many vendors have great ideas at the start
and then find themselves floundering in mediocrity with The Dinosaurs that have
gone before us.
A suggestion for the vendors: The next time you interact
with a customer or a prospect - or the next time you review your direction,
product, and messages in the market - keep this in mind:
You
are not different. You are not unique. It's all been done before. We've seen it
all before, and we'll see it from your competition tomorrow. Be respectful of
your competition and what the customer or prospect knows about your competition.
You're wrong about what the competition has or doesn't have, and what they will
or won't do. Stop fooling yourselves, and stop trying to fool the market. We're
on to you.
The first leading vendor to make
honesty their approach to this market will stick as the leader.
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