MEDMEN: What People Get Wrong with Competition

00:09 Pim Roelofsen: Welcome to The MedMen Show. This is Andy — 00:11 Andy Whyte: — and that's Pim. What are we talking about today? 00:16 Pim Roelofsen: Today we are talking about what people get wrong with competition. And that is kind of the first thing, isn't it — talking about competition. 00:24 Andy Whyte: It is. The thing you get wrong — you don't want to do that. You don't want to talk about the competition. Why would you waste the precious airtime you have with your prospective customer by talking about something that is not you? And let's be clear — customers don't like it when you knock the competition. It doesn't help at all, even if the things you're saying are true. It's one step forward, two steps back. At best you end up where you probably were. And if your facts are incorrect, you end up worse off — with less credibility and looking insecure to your customer. 01:00 Pim Roelofsen: Spot on. And I think that's a very good segue into the next thing I'm thinking about — which is thinking about competition as just being your rivals. The rival solutions. The other brands, the ones on the same quadrant. You expect to see them in every key deal. But they're not your only competition, are they? 01:19 Andy Whyte: No. That's very one-dimensional thinking about competition. Because in my career, the competition I've lost to the most — want to guess? 01:33 Pim Roelofsen: Not rivals? 01:34 Andy Whyte: No. Inertia. 01:37 Pim Roelofsen: Inertia. Yeah — that is the competition. That's what I lost the most to in my career too. And if people listening to this think about their own experience — if it's not the most, I'm sure they've lost their fair share to inertia. Meaning the customer has chosen to do nothing. And so if we set ourselves up with a competitive strategy that only puts us against beating our rivals, we might be the last person to lose the deal. Which is the worst outcome. 02:05 Andy Whyte: The best outcome is being the winner. The second best outcome is being the first person to lose. The worst outcome is being the last person to lose — meaning you beat your rivals off, they're out, and then the customer carries on evaluating your solution and decides "no, we're going to stay as we are." Yeah. And I think there's a subtle difference there, because if you think about a typical RFP and you come out scoring second against the criteria — coming second isn't great. But the first to lose doesn't mean coming second at the end of the race. The first to lose is being the first one out. So you get back the time and the resource you would have otherwise put in, and you can spend them somewhere better. 02:50 Pim Roelofsen: Yeah, exactly. So we've got: competition isn't just your rivals. It can also be inertia. But it can also be companies building for themselves — especially nowadays with the toolkits available, open source, AWS Cloud, all these things. Organizations can bring in technical resource to build their own solutions. The build versus buy debate will always rage on. But that is a type of competition. And of course it tends to be political as well. The likelihood of an organization being better at building a solution like yours than you are — when it's all you do — isn't high. So it's going to be a political area of competition. 03:35 Andy Whyte: Yeah, absolutely. So as we expand the thinking around this — another thing people get wrong is not thinking about the champion that competition might have. Because "do nothing" — inertia — someone might be championing that with great power and influence. Or there's another initiative fighting for the same resources. And I think where people get this wrong is they think about competition as being their rivals, or as this sort of lump of money or outcome scenario. What I mean is: we don't think about who is going to be the person that wins and causes us to lose. 04:17 Andy Whyte: And that is something you should consider — because we are trying to get mindshare in the evaluation. If there's something that's higher priority than us — it doesn't matter if it's a relocation of offices or a company changing the manufacturer of their fleet of delivery vehicles, something completely different to our solution — if that is higher on the priority list and getting more mindshare of the people you've aligned to your project, they still need a project manager for that project, and that might steal resource from ours. Or the economic buyer doesn't want to take on too much risk at any one point, even if that risk is completely distributed across different departments and different solutions. 04:58 Andy Whyte: That's what we've really got to consider with our competitive strategy. What are the things that can slow down or put our opportunity at risk? Closing those things off is competition. Because the same strategy you use to show that your solution is a better investment than your rival's will work for those other investments too. 05:21 Pim Roelofsen: Yeah, absolutely. Cheers to that! 05:23 Andy Whyte: Cheers, mate!