How to stand out in the land of grey?

Have you ever been to a real marketplace? A place where vendors come with big boxes and bags and spread their goods on the table. The marketplace is divided into areas – meats, fish, vegetables, spices, and so on. Now imagine the same marketplace but with all your competitors – mostly using the same IT systems and providing roughly the same products and services. How do you stand out?

Pandemic led the way for fast digital transformation. It also made hundreds of enterprises that look and feel the same. When all the promotion events were gone, all individual in-person approaches and centuries-old sales tricks had to be rested. All that was left was some random web store mostly filled with products that are being sold both by you and your competition. How to get out of this mess? The first answer usually is – good marketing and value-added products and services to support the marketing claims (you can skip this point, but people will catch on fast enough and it will hurt your bottom line). As we are not experts in marketing or manufacturing, let’s leave those topics out, but we can review points that will make your IT more competitive and will allow you to innovate faster, fail faster, and dynamically adjust your path.

What are the points you should consider:

• Speed. How fast can you create value? How fast can you adapt to the market? How fast can you respond to new challenges? If an honest answer lands somewhere between long and very long you have to invest in IT architecture and process that decreases this time.
  • Agile way of working
  • Microservices and building blocks – instead of waiting for months to get functionality, build microservices (building blocks) that can be reused, decreases testing times (both technical and user acceptance tests), decreases maintenance costs, and allows business to just stack the blocks however they want while IT delivers “key functionality” incomparably less time
  • API platform that allows you to quickly add and map many SaaS, API, or other systems to your IT stack. With this ability, you can create services that your competitors haven’t even thought of. What if you decided to add Love Calculator API to your pizza delivery service and couples with more than 80% match get a discount on the heart-shaped pizza while less good matches get a discount on the mixed pizza to share? Now you can do that flawlessly and integrate the API in your web store, CRM, delivery planner, and SCM software.
• Scalability. You need to have the flexibility to scale up and down, depending on your needs and peaks. Both horizontal and vertical scaling are available with the right cloud service and microservice/API management systems.
• Governance: do you have the same rules for all aspects of your enterprise (you will never reach top delivery speeds and high quality if your in-house systems are silos or always “do things their way”)? Do you have security, delivery, maintenance, etc. processes in place? How do you manage your API lifecycle?
• Connectivity. Is your company connected in one ecosystem or there are the sales, the warehouse people, product support, etc.? Right now to stand out and provide the best products available you need to evaluate each individual client’s needs and offer the most suitable service. You can continue to map each and every client to a specific set of rules (e.g., you buy 1 item and get no discount, you buy 10 items and get 5% discount, up to 50 items – 10% discount, and so on) or you evaluate each client’s purchase history, generate a future trend and do a combination of discounting and additional services to both benefit the client and have a good profit margin.

To truly stand out you need to provide additional value, have the flexibility to adjust to the market, and most importantly – use the data you have to deliver the best service possible. Just like in your regular marketplace once you start going exclusively to one vendor, they tend to give the best cuts, offer the freshest products and suggest where to buy other things that go perfectly for the meal you are planning. You get the most out of the transaction and the vendor gets a lifetime client. And most importantly you both have a big smile on your face because it just feels right. 

You can always stand out with the right tools. Right API management approach, process handling, and tools to connect opportunity with the right execution. Get in touch with us and we will help you choose the best solutions to fully connect your enterprise!