Friday, December 14, 2007

Asia is ready to buy! Are you ready to sell? Remove the barriers for successful ventures

Is the Asian Market lucrative enough for s/w and consulting providers? Price, Culture and Imitation are causing heartburns to most of us. [Read Bog- Is it worth doing business in APAC?]

Price: For years, Asia could not afford US rates for Services and Enterprise s/w. Consequently businesses did not buy mission critical s/w and limited their investments to greenfield projects.

In the Asia of 2007, wages and infrastructure costs have sky-rocketed, real estate is rare and expensive, and outsourcing is no longer the ‘cheaper’ option. Only recently, the booming economies have allowed businesses to invest into strategic projects (such as Knowledge Management and CRM). Such investments include valuable consulting services required to maximize ROI and enable best practices.

Asia is ready to buy! Are you ready to sell? Read-on.

Culture: Communication and Cultural barriers are often the source of evaporating margins.

Understanding the culture of our Asian partners, and getting their ‘buy-in’ to best practices, are a key ingredients for success. Asians have analytical minds, in need of hard evidence and proof. (this not that different to doing business in Missouri -the ‘Show Me’ state). My advice? Take the time to build the relationship needed to become a trusted adviser. Be honest and straight to the point. Speak the facts. Explain in cause-effect language. Be respectful and patient.

Imitation. The persistent stereotype about Asia is that companies imitate rather than innovate.

The product imitation mentality is evaporating while focus is shifting to customer experience and service. [Read: Innovasia Survey - top 3 reasons affecting customer choice are: a) 44% Customer experience b) 41% product c) 15% pricing.] S/W vendors in the Customer Services space have a unique opportunity to sell enterprise level s/w with relatively low risk for imitation. The value of enterprise s/w is only unleashed with best practice deployments. Best practice is hard to imitate as it is derived from years of experience in deploying top notch customer service centers. Sell 'value' not just s/w. Sell value as the combination of services, experience and technology.

2 comments:

ConsultantGuru said...

Great insights. How do you propose overcoming the obsession of Asians with quility of features they will never use?

CRM KnolwedgeBeam said...

First things first. Quality is important; when you advertise a product feature it better work, regardless the client’s intentions to use it. In many cases, the biggest issue is expectation gap. Often a feature is oversold or vaguely defined. Set clear expectations upfront as to what the feature is designed to do, make sure it is in writing. Frankly, what is the point of overselling a feature that will not be used?