Quality, quantity and price are not synonymous. The essence of this Mario Pretorius tip is that it is only by clearly defining – and gaining acceptance of – your product quality that you unlock the route to quantity and price. GK
Choose between quality and quantity output as a goal. It is a slow but satisfying role from quality to quantity but a hazardous one the other way.
The best watch in the world is not the most expensive. Nowadays people can hardly compute value from the elements of quality and price. Incessant brand marketing has led to consumers (who also staff the decision making departments of your customers) to mis-equate price with quality. This is not necessarily a bad thing if you are in the quality business. The claim can be backed up, usually by direct comparison with the rest of the shopping list vendors.
Quality is not an ephemeral concept. It is decidedly mundane if you define it yourself. Heaven help the telecoms executive that asks his client how good the voice quality on his network is. This means neither party has defined the ratios nor element of quality so pertinently that the customer can confirm in an intelligent way that the quality is indeed superb.
Very, very few CEO’s take the trouble of defining quality in the mind of their prospect. MoS (measurement of service) is a rating on a 5 point scale that defines voice quality in telecoms, but no customer can measure this. Therefore we would educate him about hiss, warble, delays and volume; all which our brand of digital communications is free of; most other VoIP systems have these non-lethal but customer-killing deficiencies.
Best quality printer? Your guess. Watch? Automobile? Widget? Without detailing what quality IS there will be no acceptance. Once defined on your terms – and hopefully real – it is easier to sell quality and improve your offering to reflect more and better ‘quality’ on your terms in an undifferentiated market.
If your quality acceptance path is going well, you have all the impetus needed to push quantity, and probably at a superior price than the quantity only purveyor.
This tip is an extract from the manuscript of “The Unconventional CEO: Common sense outside of conventional Management thinking” (by Mario Pretorius).
