Mark Woodward grows E2open by understanding the marketplace

Mark Woodward is trading in-your-face sales pitches for a few extra finger exercises. That’s why, when you visit the website of E2open Inc., you’ll go three clicks in before you even see a product name.

Right away, though, you’ll learn about the broader problems E2open aims to solve with its cloud-based supply chain management solutions that enable visibility, collaboration and control across large trading partner networks.

“Where many companies fall down is … [they] get really hung up with the details of their products and get enamored with the widget they’ve created,” says Woodward, president and CEO. “They go out and they try to sell the widget, as opposed to the business benefits of what that widget does for you. Where companies go from being marginally successful to really successful is when they change the focus from the product they’re selling to the problems that they’re solving.”

By getting his 300 employees into that mindset, Woodward led E2open to record revenue in fiscal 2010, up 20 percent from fiscal 2009. 

Smart Business spoke with Woodward about shifting your focus from vitamins to aspirin.

What are the keys to growing a company?

One is just focus. You need to understand what it is you’re going to do and also be pretty focused on what you’re not going to do.

Something that we’ve done at E2open really well is understanding what the value proposition is for the customer, making sure that they understand the benefit. Before we go launching a lot of time and effort and resources behind pursuing an opportunity, we really put a lot of time and effort into qualifying that opportunity and making sure there is a business case. Make sure that you’re focusing your limited resources on the opportunities that are the highest probability to close.

A lot of people get really hung up on putting a little too much emphasis behind having a really fancy growth strategy. But if you’re really focused on growth, it’s really understanding the market you’re in, who you’re selling to, what your value proposition is and then just putting all your resources behind making that happen.

How do you gain an understanding of the marketplace?

It’s through analysts, basic research and then talking to your customers.

Sometimes companies get caught up in thinking they know better and they know the problems that need to be solved without really doing very good market research or without talking to their customers enough. It’s really important to understand not what you think your customers want but really knowing that by having those conversations with your customers.

We’ll just start off with very open-ended questions like, ‘What are your problems?’ Not even asking about our particular area but just very high-level, top-of-mind: ‘What are you thinking about? What keeps you up at night? What are your greatest challenges?’

And then, based on that, start to bore in and even ask, ‘What vendors do you look to for solving those kinds of problems?’ As you get answers, get a little more specific. Customers are usually very open to telling you about other vendors they’re working with or problems that no one has solved for them yet. That can actually help in your product strategy, as well. I’ve learned about a number of really interesting new areas, things that we didn’t even get from analysts, just purely off of customers telling us about shortcomings they had with other vendors. So the customers give you a more real-world perspective, not just the marketing spin that the analysts are hearing.