"A Lot Of Us Do The Same Things, Some Better Than Others But In The Long-Run The Real Differentiator Or The Real Product, If You Will, Are The People."

One criticism I received was that this was disdain for sales and marketing people. It's not.

Everyone in a company is dependent on a sound competitive product strategy. Without that, the 'people' can be great but the 'company' will generally struggle. Likewise, it is why salespeople generally prefer companies with strong product offerings since even 'good' salespeople will be challenged to sell a 'bad' product.

And from the perspective of DeFina, who was a sales and marketing executive with limited control over what the product was, his advice is reasonable. He couldn't force or make Panasonic or Samsung to change their product strategy. The best thing he could focus on was to make his people strong.

But companies need to ensure they have strong product strategies, and that does not simply mean 'engineering' or lots of features. It means the market segmentation, pricing, and competitive positioning is optimized to provide a sustainable advantage vs other entrants. With that, you can attract and retrain more good people. Without, even the most 'people-focused' strategy will be challenging to execute.

I believe that a company that sells a commodity product can achieve better than average success by having a great sales and support team. In that case, having better people does make a difference. 

However, there are certain products that are game changers in the industry. These products offer clear and compelling differentiators that make them easily stand out from their competitors. Unless the manufacturer really screws up, these products almost literally sell themselves while they are in their prime. Not to disparage the sales teams that sell these products, it is largely the game-changing product, not the sales team, that is responsible for the overwhelming success of these products.

The competitors to these game changing products, no matter how skilled they are, cannot really do anything but stand back and watch their market share erode. Even the best people cannot fight the onslaught of a significant change caused by a new market innovation. Their only real choice is to come up with a game changing product of their own - not an easy task to achieve. 

When evaluating any firm, we always go to the "P's"...

• Product…how well does the product meet the market’s needs?
• Performance…how does the product hold up? Acceptable warranty & replacement?
• People…is the staff effective and customer-friendly?
• Policies…is the company fair to deal with? Good customer support?
• Promotion…is there effective marketing, trade show attendance, local event support?
• Price…is the product competitive?
• Procurement…how is the product purchased…through distribution, direct to dealer, a combination of both?
• Penetration…how well is the company known in the marketplace?
• Participation...is the company truly involved in the industry, belong to organizations, etc?

Depending on your viewpoint, some categories may have more weight than others. No organization has it all, but several do very well in many of the categories. If a company doesn't do well, in too many of the categories, we pass.

Someone said: Ubiquiti

The only differentiator I can 'IMHO' on is the aspects of design, implementation and support services required to keep products and people fresh throughout lifecycle management along with warranty SSA/SUP timelines. Software support services, remote services may be provided and technically executed better by some people rather than others no matter what the product is. Overtime the people that perform less have the option to study/learn/progress/excel with the only restraint being the scale of their own ambition/character/technical curiosities/growth from failure and why a not a little hacker anarchist mentality provides as much force as caffeine. However if the CMO LinkedIn paraphrasing parrot is talking about selling some new sort of carrot jerky at trader joes market then I guess the people are the product as you are what you eat.