I recently read an article, titled The Disintermediation Era posted by Tara Hunt on her blog http://www.horsepigcow.com/. Tara’s article can be summed up in the photo that appears at the top of the article – scribbled text on a whiteboard exclaiming, “If your job is based on managing an artificial scarcity of information, YOU’RE SCREWED.” I can’t help but think about how this relates to our mantra at SAVO that “value drives adoption.”
Ms. Hunt discusses the undercutting of the middle-man in some of today’s biggest industries, including music, telecom/cable, journalism, retail, and entertainment. Hunt notes several reasons for their demise – most notably that they operated as gatekeepers on a “false sense of scarcity” and were not smart or nimble enough to switch gears when the internet began democratizing the services they provided. I couldn’t help but think that the reasons for the rise of a more “direct to the manufacturer” or “direct to a better middleman” approach really boils down to the concept of value drives adoption. It’s now quicker, cheaper, and easier to get what we want without the traditional gatekeeper. Perhaps even more importantly, the options provided in the long tail of the web are a lot more plentiful now that we don’t have to rely on one provider to supply us with our news or music. We don’t even need a phone line anymore to make calls, and our Friday nights in are no longer beholden to what Blockbuster happens to have in-stock. Remember the anticlimactic experience that was Blockbuster on Friday nights? (For those of you who are either too young to remember or too cool to stay in on a Friday night – every new release was rented out for the weekend by 6pm on Friday. Guaranteed).
We have forgone the middle man because we’ve discovered that traditional gatekeepers to the things we want and need more often than not hinder and do not help us. The adoption of services like Limewire and Napster in the 90’s, for example, came quickly and came with a fury! Everyone flocked to these sites because the music was free, and you could pick and choose the songs you wanted – live versions, studio versions, and remixes even! Talk about value! People swarmed, and no one cared that it was illegal. Screw the middle-man was the pervading attitude. The value we received overrode even our consciences. The Amazon’s, Ebay’s and Netflix’s out there displaced traditional retailers almost overnight thanks to business models driven not just by quicker, cheaper, more, and whenever-you-want-it, but also by helping consumers discover things they might like. The profound value provided to consumers was the key to overwhelming adoption of these sites, and as companies like these continue to evolve, value to that front-line consumer is at the heart of every decision they make.
SAVO’s approach to our own technology application, aptly called “SAVO,” while not a consumer retail site, is nonetheless very much aligned with the models described above. We know that in order to keep busy salespeople coming back, we need to provide value that they will not find anywhere else. We need to ensure that our approach is not the old way of doing business, but a new way of enabling them to do their jobs better every day. Whether you are a SAVO user yourself or if you utilize other technologies in your business, which have attracted widespread adoption, I’d love to hear from you. What technologies have your people gravitated towards? What technologies are your people passionate about – even addicted to – and why?
