Mark Woodward is trading in-your-face sales pitches for a few extra finger exercises. That’s why, when you visit the website of E2open Inc., you’ll go three clicks in before you even see a product name.
Right away, though, you’ll learn about the broader problems that E2open aims to solve with its cloud-based supply chain management solutions that enable visibility, collaboration and control across large trading partner networks.
“Where many companies fall down is … [they] get really hung up with the details of their products and get enamored with the widget they’ve created,” says Woodward, president and CEO. “They go out and they try to sell the widget, as opposed to the business benefits of what that widget does for you. Where companies go from being marginally successful to really successful is when they change the focus from the product they’re selling to the problems that they’re solving.”
By getting his 300 employees into that mindset, Woodward led E2open to record revenue in fiscal 2010, up 20 percent from fiscal 2009.
Smart Business spoke with Woodward about understanding your market.
Keys to growing a company. One is just focus. You need to understand what it is you’re going to do and also be pretty focused on what you’re not going to do.
Something that we’ve done at E2open really well is understanding what the value proposition is for the customer, making sure that they understand the benefit. Before we go launching a lot of time and effort and resources behind pursuing an opportunity, we really put a lot of time and effort into qualifying that opportunity and making sure there is a business case. Make sure that you’re focusing your limited resources on the opportunities that are the highest probability to close.
A lot of people get really hung up on putting a little too much emphasis behind having a really fancy growth strategy. But if you’re really focused on growth, it’s really understanding the market you’re in, who you’re selling to, what your value proposition is and then just putting all your resources behind making that happen.
