Know Your Ground: Why Understanding the Landscape Is the First Step to Winning
Ordnance Survey map
Business leaders love to talk about disruption, agility, and “moving fast.” Yet ask any general, mountaineer, or competitive intelligence professional, and they’ll tell you a blunt truth: moving fast in the wrong direction just means you get lost sooner. Strategy begins not with speed, but with understanding the ground beneath your feet.
This isn’t just metaphorical. For centuries, militaries have invested staggering time and effort into mapping and understanding their operating environment. Why? Because success in war—and by extension in business—rarely belongs to the biggest army or the shiniest technology. It belongs to the side that understands the terrain, anticipates the obstacles, and positions themselves before the other side knows what’s happening.
And in Britain, the gold standard of that philosophy has long been the Ordnance Survey.
The Military’s Obsession with Maps
Let’s start with the obvious. Armies don’t march into the unknown with blind optimism and a PowerPoint deck. They study the terrain. They obsess over ridges, rivers, and choke points. They ask whether bridges can carry tanks, whether roads turn into mud in the rain, and whether a hillside can conceal artillery.
Napoleon reportedly said: “The map is everything.” He wasn’t exaggerating. The difference between victory and disaster often comes down to whether someone took the time to measure the ground.
The Second World War is full of examples. Allied planners preparing for D-Day had to understand not just the length of Normandy beaches, but the tide tables, sand quality, and even the hedgerow layout behind the shoreline. Soldiers trained on mocked-up villages in England that replicated what they’d encounter in France. Enormous intelligence units collected and updated maps constantly, because the battlefield punishes those who don’t know the lay of the land.
In business, our “battlefield” isn’t an actual beachhead, but the principle is identical. Launching a product, expanding into a region, or trying to outmaneuver a competitor without understanding the environment is strategic malpractice.
Ordnance Survey: Britain’s Strategic Mapmaker
The British military formalized this need for terrain intelligence in the 18th century. Following the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, the Crown realized it needed accurate maps of Scotland to control movement and prevent uprisings. By 1791, under the Board of Ordnance (hence “Ordnance Survey”), Britain began systematic, scientific mapping.
Over the next century, Ordnance Survey became legendary for precision. Soldiers relied on their maps to navigate hills, defend positions, and plan campaigns. Civil engineers used them to build canals, roads, and railways. By the First World War, OS had evolved into an industrial-scale intelligence operation, producing thousands of maps for every conceivable purpose: trench construction, artillery targeting, logistics planning.
This wasn’t a “nice to have.” It was national infrastructure, the information backbone that allowed Britain to project power.
The Business Parallel
Now, you may think: “That’s quaint history. What’s it got to do with my quarterly targets?”
Plenty.
Maps are just one form of intelligence. In business, the “terrain” is the competitive landscape. The rivers are supply chains. The ridges are regulatory barriers. The choke points are distribution bottlenecks. And your competitors? They’re the other army, looking at the same map and planning their own moves.
If you don’t understand your environment—customers, partners, competitors, regulators—you’re just marching blind. It doesn’t matter how shiny your product demo is.
Take retail expansion. Countless chains have failed by planting stores in “attractive” locations without understanding foot traffic patterns, local regulations, or shifting demographics. It’s the equivalent of setting up camp in a valley prone to flooding. By contrast, the winners analyze every factor: transport links, catchment demographics, competitor presence, future urban planning. They map the terrain, literally and metaphorically.
Or consider technology adoption. A hardware vendor might boast about a slick product, but if they haven’t mapped the ecosystem—supply chain risks, partner certifications, software compatibility—they’ll be blindsided by delays, tariffs, or incompatibility. It’s like building a bridge without checking whether the ground can hold the weight.
Mapping as Competitive Intelligence
Competitive intelligence (CI) is business’s equivalent of Ordnance Survey. It’s the disciplined, often unglamorous work of charting the environment so decision-makers don’t step into ambushes.
CI asks questions such as:
What new “terrain” is forming in my industry? (AI regulation, new standards, shifting buyer behavior)
Where are the choke points? (supply chain dependencies, scarce talent, rising costs)
What “cover” can I use? (alliances, certifications, unique data assets)
Where is the enemy exposed? (overpriced acquisitions, regulatory weakness, customer dissatisfaction)
Good CI isn’t just Google searches and competitive tear-downs. It’s building the map of reality—the shared picture leadership uses to decide where to invest, where to retreat, and how to outmaneuver.
The Cost of Not Knowing Your Ground
History is equally rich with disasters caused by ignoring the terrain.
In 1941, Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union famously underestimated Russian winter. Troops marched with summer uniforms, tanks froze, and supply lines disintegrated. A basic failure to respect the environment derailed the campaign.
Businesses do the same. Consider the flood of Western retailers who tried to expand into China without understanding local consumer behavior or government regulation. They assumed the terrain would be like Europe or America. It wasn’t. Billions were lost.
Or the dozens of smartphone manufacturers in the late 2000s who thought hardware specs were the only battlefield. They ignored the “terrain” shift towards ecosystems and app stores. Apple and Google mapped that ground correctly; everyone else marched into a swamp.
Lessons from the Ordnance Survey
So, what does Ordnance Survey teach us about how to operate today? Three big takeaways:
1. Precision Matters More Than Averages
OS didn’t draw vague outlines. It measured every hedge, wall, and field boundary with obsessive accuracy. That allowed armies and engineers to make precise plans.
In business, precision is equally vital. Knowing that a “market is growing 10%” is about as useful as knowing “France is to the south.” You need granular data: which customer segments, which competitors, which regulations, which supply routes.
2. Update Relentlessly
A 20-year-old map is a curiosity, not a planning tool. OS constantly updated its data, especially during wartime when a new trench or bridge could appear overnight.
Your competitive map must be refreshed too. Competitors change pricing, new entrants appear, regulations shift. A once-a-year “landscape review” is like fighting World War I with Napoleonic maps.
3. Make It Accessible
OS maps weren’t locked in a vault; they were distributed to soldiers, engineers, and planners. Intelligence unused is intelligence wasted.
CI teams should ensure insights are consumable: dashboards, executive briefs, interactive maps. The point is to inform decisions, not to collect dust.
Bringing It Back to Business Strategy
The military invests so heavily in environmental intelligence because they know the battlefield punishes ignorance. The same applies in business.
Before you launch that product: map the competitive terrain.
Before you enter that market: understand the regulatory rivers and demographic ridges.
Before you scale that operation: survey the supply chain like an engineer inspects the soil before laying foundations.
Your competitors are doing this—or at least, the dangerous ones are. If you aren’t, you’re just hoping the terrain is kind. Spoiler: it rarely is.
Final Thought: Don’t Just March, Map
Strategy without landscape awareness is nothing more than wishful thinking. The British Army of the 18th century learned this the hard way and responded by building Ordnance Survey. Modern businesses should take note.
Competitive intelligence is your Ordnance Survey. It doesn’t guarantee victory—but it dramatically reduces the chance of blundering into disaster.
So, before you chase the next shiny trend, ask yourself: Do I actually know the ground I’m standing on? Because whether you’re storming a beach in Normandy or launching a product in London, the side with the better map usually wins.
#CompetitiveIntelligence #BusinessStrategy #KnowYourGround #OrdnanceSurvey #LocationIntelligence #BusinessLandscape #MarketMapping #StrategyExecution #MilitaryStrategyLessons #DataDrivenDecisions #CompetitiveAdvantage #BusinessWarfare
When Sales Becomes a Toddler with Blocks
When sales becomes a toddler with blocks
Every parent has seen the scene. A toddler sits in front of one of those brightly colored plastic toys with cut-out shapes: circle, square, triangle. The mission is obvious—match the shapes to the holes. Yet inevitably, the child decides that the triangle must fit into the square. They twist, push, and finally bang it with growing frustration. The toy, of course, remains unmoved.
In sales, many organizations do exactly the same thing. Only we wear suits, carry quarterly quotas, and call it “pipeline management.”
Forcing the Wrong Deal
Not every deal is a fit. That’s not pessimism, it’s reality. Some prospects don’t have the budget, the right use case, or the organizational will to buy what you’re selling. Yet, instead of moving on, teams cling to the fantasy:
“If we just discount a little more…”
“If we customize that feature, surely they’ll say yes…”
“If our CEO personally calls their CEO, maybe that’ll do it…”
It’s the corporate equivalent of a toddler hammering a triangle into a square hole. Entertaining to watch—if you’re not on the payroll.
Why We Fall for It
Why do perfectly rational adults persist in this madness? Three common culprits:
Pipeline Pressure
Numbers have to be made. When senior management wants forecasts, every prospect looks like a potential savior—even the hopeless ones.Emotional Investment
After months of demos, RFPs, and steak dinners, it’s hard to admit the obvious: the deal is a mirage. But sunk costs don’t make a triangle fit.The Hero Complex
There’s always the fantasy: “If I can close this impossible deal, I’ll be a legend.” Spoiler: you’ll be a cautionary tale, not a case study.
The Real Cost of Wasted Effort
When you refuse to let go of a bad-fit prospect, the damage is wider than you think:
Engineering burns weeks building bespoke features that will never scale.
Marketing is diverted into producing custom collateral for an audience of one.
Executives waste time escalating, cajoling, and negotiating with a buyer who never wanted you in the first place.
Meanwhile, the opportunities that do align—those perfect round pegs ready for your round hole—are neglected.
The Power of Saying “No”
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: one of the most strategic moves in sales is walking away.
Saying “This isn’t a fit” isn’t failure; it’s focus. It frees your team to concentrate on opportunities where your product solves a genuine problem, where value is clear, and where the buyer isn’t secretly wishing you’d leave them alone.
This is precisely why I built the 12-Vector System at Excession Events. Products today look increasingly similar, and forcing deals through brute strength isn’t a growth strategy. Winning comes from aligning with customer outcomes—business pain relief, not product features.
The Toddler Test
So here’s a thought exercise for your next pipeline review:
If you removed discounts, CEO-to-CEO calls, and endless “special” features, would this deal still make sense?
If not, congratulations—you’re the toddler with the triangle.
The good news? Toddlers eventually learn. As adults running multi-million-dollar businesses, we should too.
War-Gaming the Deal
Before you burn another week chasing a questionable opportunity, stop and run a quick war game in your head—or better yet, with your sales leadership team. Ask yourself three brutally honest questions:
Can you actually see a good reason for the client to say “yes”?
Not your reason, their reason. What’s the business pain you’re relieving? If the answer is “because our product is great,” congratulations—you’ve just described every vendor in your category.What will your competitor be saying?
Because you can bet they’ve already mapped the same business problem, and their pitch will sound eerily similar to yours. Now, imagine you’re the buyer—why would you choose them instead of you?How would you counter their statements?
Not with feature lists, but with outcomes. Features are ammunition; outcomes win wars. If you can’t articulate the client’s path to success in a way that makes your competitor irrelevant, you don’t have a strategy—you have wishful thinking.
The point of war-gaming isn’t to invent clever comebacks. It’s to expose whether the deal is fundamentally viable. If you can’t clearly see why the client would buy from you, then the brutal truth is: they almost certainly won’t. And every day you spend trying to force it is the one resource you can never replenish—time.
Final Thought
In my book Who Put That Idiot in Charge, I talk about how organizations often confuse activity with progress. Nowhere is this truer than in sales. Beating your head against deals that will never fit doesn’t make you a hero. It just makes you tired, with a sore head.
Choose alignment. Focus on outcomes. Leave the toddler games in the nursery where they belong.
Simon Dudley is a technology strategist, bestselling author (The Competitive Intelligence Playbook, The End of Certainty, Who Put That Idiot in Charge), and former senior executive at Logitech, Lifesize, and Polycom. He is the Founder & CEO of Excession Events, a consultancy that helps companies compete more effectively in a world where products look increasingly similar.
#SalesStrategy #CompetitiveIntelligence #CustomerOutcomes #VideoCollaboration #AVIndustry #ExcessionEvents #B2BSales #Leadership
How to Stress-Proof Your Thinking (and Stop Outsourcing It to Loudmouths)
Serenity now
In my last article, I explored how stress hijacks our brains, shoves the rational prefrontal cortex into a cupboard, and hands the keys to the amygdala—our inner alarm bell. The result? We stop thinking clearly and happily outsource our reasoning to whoever offers the loudest, simplest explanation. Unfortunately, those explanations often come courtesy of demagogues peddling simple lies to complex problems.
So how do you avoid falling for this? You can’t eliminate stress (unless you’ve cracked immortality, in which case: please DM me). But you can inoculate yourself. Think of this as installing anti-virus software for your brain.
1. Spot the Early Warning Signs
Stress doesn’t knock politely. It shows up as irritability, obsessive news-checking, or an oddly warm embrace of slogans like “It’s all their fault!” Recognize these red flags and pause. Just naming it—“my brain is outsourcing again”—helps reboot rational thinking.
2. Breathe Like You Mean It
Yes, it sounds like a yoga cliché, but science backs it up. Slow, deliberate breathing reduces cortisol and calms the amygdala. One study from Harvard showed “4-7-8” breathing (inhale 4, hold 7, exhale 8) improves self-regulation. Translation: fewer bad decisions involving pitchforks or bulk-buying bleach.
3. Build a Checklist
Pilots use checklists under pressure. You can too. Ask yourself:
What’s the actual evidence?
Am I reacting emotionally or logically?
Who benefits if I believe this story?
Is there a boring explanation that’s more likely?
A checklist keeps your brain from borrowing someone else’s script.
4. Diversify Your Information Diet
If you only ever listen to one voice, don’t be surprised when it hijacks your thinking. Curate a mix: read across political leanings, follow experts, and deliberately seek out complexity. Think of it as cross-training for your prefrontal cortex.
5. Strengthen Your Baseline
You can’t avoid stress, but you can make your brain more resilient.
Sleep properly. Sleep deprivation weakens rational control faster than a budget airline cuts legroom.
Exercise. Movement reduces stress hormones and sharpens cognition.
Mindfulness. Studies show it literally thickens the prefrontal cortex. Yes, meditation gives your brain biceps.
6. Learn to Tolerate Complexity
Demagogues thrive because people crave certainty under stress. But reality is messy, and “It’s all simple” is usually the world’s most expensive lie. Practice sitting with ambiguity. It may not feel satisfying, but it’s far less likely to end in regrettable voting decisions.
7. Appoint a Rational Anchor
When stress hits, talk things over with someone boringly sensible. Not your conspiracy-loving uncle. Someone steady, rational, and ideally unimpressed by slogans. Sometimes outsourcing does work—if you choose wisely.
The Bottom Line
Stress will tempt you to hand over your reasoning. But you don’t have to. Recognize the signs, breathe, check your thinking, vary your sources, and build habits that keep your rational brain fit. Complexity doesn’t disappear just because you ignore it—it waits patiently until your “simple solution” collapses, then presents the bill with interest.
Stress may be inevitable. Stupidity is optional.
About the Author
Simon Dudley is a chump. A man who believes in paying taxes, waiting his turn, the rule of law, being a decent human being. He writes a lot about strategy, technology, society, education, business, Excession Events and science.
Visit ExcessionEvents.com to learn more about his work in the Competitive Intelligence space and how he helps companies compete more effectively.
Simon has nearly 40 years experience in the tech sector, and has a wide range of experiences across markets, geographies, and disciplines.
#StressResilience
#CriticalThinking
#LeadershipUnderPressure
#DecisionMaking
#CognitiveBias
#BusinessResilience
#CompetitiveIntelligence
#EmotionalIntelligence
#MindfulnessAtWork
#NeuroscienceInBusiness
#ComplexityThinking
#RationalLeadership
Stress, Brains, and the Strange Appeal of Demagogues
If you’ve ever found yourself doomscrolling Twitter at midnight, muttering “surely this can’t get worse,” congratulations: you’ve experienced the peculiar cocktail of stress, anxiety, and brain fog that makes humans exquisitely vulnerable to nonsense.
If you’ve ever found yourself doomscrolling Twitter at midnight, muttering “surely this can’t get worse,” congratulations: you’ve experienced the peculiar cocktail of stress, anxiety, and brain fog that makes humans exquisitely vulnerable to nonsense. It turns out, when we’re stressed, the brain does something rather unhelpful—it abandons its higher reasoning functions and effectively outsources thinking to anyone loud enough to offer a simple explanation. Unfortunately, that “anyone” is often a demagogue with a megaphone.
The Neuroscience of Going Dumb Under Pressure
First, let’s peek inside the cranium. The rational bit of your brain—the prefrontal cortex—is like the wise accountant of your mental firm. It handles planning, weighing evidence, and making cost–benefit decisions. Unfortunately, under acute stress, this accountant gets locked in the stationery cupboard.
Research published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience (Arnsten, 2009) shows that stress hormones like cortisol and norepinephrine literally impair prefrontal cortex function. Instead, the amygdala—the brain’s “threat detection” center—takes charge. The amygdala is brilliant at spotting lions in the grass but hopeless at nuanced debate about fiscal policy. Under stress, your brain switches from “considering multiple perspectives” mode to “get me out of here now” mode. 【Arnsten, 2009†source】
In other words: stress makes us less rational and more reactive. This is why people buy toilet paper in bulk during pandemics. Not because it makes sense, but because their brains are yelling, “Do something!”
Outsourcing Reasoning: A Coping Mechanism
So what happens when the rational brain checks out? We look for shortcuts. Humans are cognitive misers at the best of times—we like easy answers. Under stress, we’re positively desperate for them.
Psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow explains this beautifully: we have a fast, intuitive system (System 1) and a slow, rational system (System 2). Stress effectively locks the door to System 2. Suddenly, System 1 is running the show—and System 1 loves a confident, simple-sounding answer.
That’s where demagogues come in.
The Demagogue’s Toolkit: Simple Lies for Complex Times
A demagogue is essentially a con artist who realized politics pays better than selling snake oil at county fairs. Their trick is to present simple but false answers to hard problems.
Immigration is why you can’t get a job. (Never mind automation, global trade shifts, or corporate offshoring.)
One secret cabal runs everything. (Because acknowledging the messy complexity of economics and geopolitics is less emotionally satisfying than blaming a shadowy group with a secret handshake.)
If only we returned to the “good old days.” (Which, if you check the record, were mostly “good” only for a narrow group who could afford cigars and waistcoats.)
These answers are appealing because, under stress, our brains are allergic to ambiguity. Uncertainty feels like pain. Certainty—even false certainty—feels like relief.
As philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche put it: “People don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed.” Under stress, they’ll gladly swap truth for a soothing illusion.
Why We Keep Falling for It
The phenomenon is depressingly consistent. After the 2008 financial crash, populist movements surged globally. After the COVID-19 pandemic, conspiracy theories flourished like mushrooms in damp basements. In each case, uncertainty bred stress, which reduced rational capacity, which made simple narratives sound irresistible.
And the science backs this up. A study in Trends in Cognitive Sciences (Petersen et al., 2019) shows that heightened anxiety makes people more likely to adopt authoritarian attitudes and seek strong, decisive leaders—even if those leaders are demonstrably incompetent. 【Petersen et al., 2019†source】
It’s not that stressed people become stupid; it’s that their cognitive bandwidth shrinks. They start leasing out their thinking to third parties—preferably ones who sound like they know what they’re talking about. And demagogues, whatever else you might say about them, always sound confident.
The Humor in All This (Because Otherwise, We’d Cry)
If you want a metaphor: imagine your brain as a Wi-Fi router. Under normal conditions, it connects multiple devices, runs smoothly, and maybe buffers Netflix now and then. Under stress, it’s like someone just microwaved popcorn next to it—the signal drops, half the devices disconnect, and suddenly your neighbor is offering to “fix your internet” by wrapping your router in tinfoil.
That neighbor is the demagogue. And millions of brains under stress are happy to hand him the router.
The Business (and Life) Lesson
You might be wondering: what does this have to do with corporate strategy or competitive intelligence? Everything. Leaders under pressure—whether in boardrooms or parliaments—are just as susceptible to stress-induced simplification. When markets crash, when rivals surge, when shareholders glare, leaders may ditch nuanced analysis and instead grab onto the first confident voice in the room.
That’s why robust decision-making systems matter. You need processes that keep the prefrontal cortex metaphorically “online” for organizations, not just individuals. Think red-teaming, stress-testing strategies, and ensuring that dissenting voices aren’t drowned out by whoever is shouting the simplest solution.
Because in the end, complexity doesn’t go away just because you ignore it. It waits patiently until your “simple solution” collapses, and then presents the bill—with interest.
Final Thought
Stress is inevitable. Pandemics happen, markets crash, children discover glitter. But the danger isn’t just the stress itself—it’s how stress hijacks our ability to think rationally and leaves us vulnerable to anyone offering certainty.
Demagogues thrive in those moments, selling simplicity at a discount, even when the true cost is ruinously high. The antidote isn’t to eliminate stress (good luck with that), but to build resilience: individually, organizationally, and societally.
So the next time someone offers you a simple explanation for a complex mess, ask yourself: is this genuine clarity, or just my stressed-out brain outsourcing reasoning to the loudest person in the room?
If the answer comes with a secret cabal, a magic fix, or a promise to “return to the good old days,” it’s probably the latter.
Sources:
Arnsten, A. F. T. (2009). Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(6), 410–422.
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Petersen, M. B., et al. (2019). The politics of stress: How stress influences political attitudes. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 23(5), 369–372.
The PC Industry: A Warning from History (and a Lesson for Video Collaboration)
PC Brands, 1990’s
Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I was in the thick of the personal computer business.
Compaq 286/20s. IBM PS/2 Model 30s with dual 3.5” floppies. If a client’s budget was tighter than a drum, I’d dust off a Tulip, Philips—or heaven forbid—an Amstrad. And laptops? Take your pick: Zenith, Toshiba, or Osborne.
Choice was everywhere. To call it a crowded market would be an understatement of Olympic proportions.
And you know what? It was thrilling. Specs changed monthly. Prices fell constantly. Every month felt like the Cambrian Explosion of computing—wild, messy, and full of bizarre species.
But then reality arrived. Margins collapsed. Prices cratered. Consolidation steamrolled the industry. Innovation slowed to a crawl, and before long, the once-vibrant PC sector was reduced to an enormous, low-margin, logistics-driven slugfest.
Today, only four and a half players remain. Dell. HP. Lenovo. Apple. And the half? Asus—still clinging on.
That’s it. Decades of creative chaos distilled into four logos.
History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does enjoy a good rhyme
Déjà Vu in 2025: The Video Collaboration Crunch
Fast forward to today. In 2025, there are 28 companies manufacturing Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR) video conferencing devices. That’s 28 players fighting over an industry worth less than $5 billion annually.
For context: in 1992, the PC industry was worth $57 billion—equivalent to $130 billion today.
And just as in 1992, innovation is thinning. Products are converging. Differentiation on features is becoming harder by the quarter.
Sound familiar? It should.
The question is simple: what happens to the video collaboration space?
Do we end up with a commoditized race to the bottom, where the cheapest box wins? Or is there a smarter play available?
Lessons from the PC Wars
Let’s rewind. In the 1990s, the difference between an Amstrad and a Compaq was minimal in terms of specs. Yet Compaq—the more expensive choice—won.
Meanwhile, Toshiba made brilliant laptops but still faded away. Premium pricing alone wasn’t enough.
So why did some win while others vanished into the annals of tech trivia?
The winners didn’t obsess over being the cheapest. They built trust. They went global. They offered portfolios, not just products. They gave risk-averse corporate buyers the things that actually mattered:
Service Level Agreements
Global availability
Broad solution sets
Meanwhile, the losers assumed the pie was big enough that everyone could carve out a slice. They offered “me too” boxes, ignored corporate trust, and leaned on channels that weren’t fit for enterprise buyers.
In short: Dell, HP, and Lenovo didn’t win because their boxes were shinier. They won because they made enterprise customers feel safe, supported, and understood.
The Video Collaboration Industry’s Fork in the Road
So, what now for video collaboration vendors, resellers, and distributors?
The market is tiny compared to PCs—even by 1992 standards. And yet the herd keeps piling in. Something has to give.
Here are a few paths forward:
1. Get Big or Go Home
For vendors who want to matter, scale is non-negotiable. Being the “easy button” globally is a powerful narrative for cautious buyers.
2. Be Truly Different
If you can’t be big, be unique. Cisco, for example, positions itself like Apple once did—offering a distinct, premium experience. Owl Labs takes another path with radically different form factors.
Differentiation is survival.
3. Compete Beyond the Product
When products blur together, outcomes matter more. Ask yourself:
Do you have a compelling ESG story? Clients increasingly care.
Using the best recycled plastics? Tell the world.
Got rock-solid, audited financials? Lean into governance.
Manufacturing in high-quality, ethical workplaces? Help buyers sleep at night.
It’s not just about the spec sheet anymore.
4. Sell Scale, Not Specs
Got a management suite that handles massive deployments seamlessly? Lead with that.
Have an ordinary product but an extraordinary sales team? Focus on creating raving fans, not just clients.
Reality Check: Not Everyone Survives
Let’s be blunt: not all vendors will make it. Some already have warehouses full of unsold kit, or share prices that resemble ski slopes.
At some point, the industry will consolidate. Some players will exit gracefully. Others will be dragged out feet-first.
The warning from history is clear: size and specs don’t guarantee survival. Strategy does.
The Big Questions for 2030
Which raises the open questions for all of us in the industry:
How many video collaboration vendors will still be standing in 2030?
What separates a compelling solution from “just another black box with a camera”?
What criteria—trust, governance, ESG, service, scale—will actually decide the winners?
History gives us clues, but not the answers.
Over to You
I’ve shared my view. The PC industry taught us that chaos collapses into consolidation, and that winners aren’t always the ones with the best products—they’re the ones who understood customers’ deeper needs.
What do you think?
How does our industry avoid repeating history—or are we already halfway there?
Drop your thoughts in the comments. Let’s compare notes before the rhyme becomes reality.
Simon Dudley
Technology strategist, bestselling author, and former senior executive at Logitech, Lifesize, and Polycom.
CEO & Founder, Excession Events.
Author of Competitive Intelligence Playbook, The End of Certainty, and Who Put That Idiot in Charge?
#VideoCollaboration #Strategy #MarketIntelligence #PCIndustry #MicrosoftTeamsRooms #Consolidation #AVIndustry #BusinessStrategy #CompetitiveIntelligence #FutureOfWork
Sales Activities: Why We’re Still Selling Like It’s 1999
Clients are baffled by slideware
You can tell what really matters in a company by where it concentrates its energy. And nowhere is that more obvious (or occasionally tragic) than in sales.
At an old employer of mine, we had what was politely called “the sales deck.” It was 450 slides long. Yes, four-hundred and fifty. To put that in perspective, that’s longer than most doctoral dissertations, but with fewer footnotes and less originality.
Of those 450 slides, 449 were about the product. Every little toggle, switch, feature, and blinking LED was lovingly detailed. There was one—just one—slide about the company itself. And I never, not once, saw a salesperson bother to talk about it.
I once asked how on earth anyone was meant to present 449 slides. The answer? “Oh, we don’t present all the slides. Just the ones that matter to the client.”
Ah yes. The ones that matter. Because nothing says “client focus” like handing over a product encyclopedia and telling them to pick their favorite chapter.
The Problem with Product Worship
It’s safe to say that sales team was focused on products. Lots and lots of products. And here’s the funny thing: clients don’t buy products. They buy solutions to business pain points.
In a world where products increasingly look the same, do we really think concentrating on the product is a winning strategy? I mean, honestly—does any CIO wake up at 3am and whisper, “If only this widget had a 17% faster data throughput, my problems would be solved”? No. They wake up at 3am worried about lawsuits, budgets, compliance audits, and whether the board will sack them before they cash their bonus.
But in technology sales, we cling to this romantic notion that clients will fall in love with our products if only we can help them understand how clever they are. That if we can just explain how our algorithm is 0.2% more efficient than the competition’s, the client will leap into our arms, sign the contract, and maybe even write us a sonnet.
That’s simply not true.
What Clients Actually Want
What clients actually want is something far more boring—and far more important. They want a solution to their business problem. Preferably one that is:
Easy to buy
Easy to own
Low hassle
Notice what’s not on that list: world-class algorithms, revolutionary architectures, or synergies so disruptive they’ll make your eyes water.
Clients want less drama, not more features.
What Does “Hassle” Look Like?
Hassle is a vendor who makes life difficult in ways that go far beyond the product. For example:
Accounts payable nightmares: If their purchasing department can’t get you into the system, congratulations—you’re not a vendor, you’re a problem.
Employment practices: If your company ends up on the front page of the newspaper for the wrong reasons, you’ve just given your client’s legal department a migraine.
Supply chain risks: Nothing keeps a CISO awake like the thought that your supplier’s supplier might also be moonlighting as a spy.
Reputation for drama: Even the faintest whiff of instability—financial, ethical, or operational—becomes a big red flag.
And these issues often play on a client’s mind a lot more than whether your product has a new button labeled “AI-powered.”
The Questions That Really Matter
When clients are deciding who to buy from, here’s what they’re actually asking themselves:
Future direction: Will this vendor still exist in five years, or are they on a countdown timer?
Alliances: Who are they aligned with? Do they have the right certifications, partners, and credibility in the market?
Supply chain security: Not just at the factory—what about the entire reseller and distribution network? One weak link and the whole chain snaps.
Market alignment: Are they even going where the market is headed, or are they desperately trying to sell VHS tapes in a streaming world?
Channel relationships: Do resellers and distributors actually make money selling this stuff? Because if they don’t, guess what—they won’t.
Legacy product handling: Do they support their older products, or do they abandon them like a toddler losing interest in a toy?
Leadership quality: Does the senior team have deep industry experience, or are they quarterly-obsessed spreadsheet jockeys who think customer loyalty is a “nice to have”?
Acquisition risk: If this vendor gets bought, what happens to support, pricing, and continuity? Clients know acquisitions often come with “surprise” changes—usually unpleasant.
In other words, clients are buying risk management as much as they’re buying a product.
The Brutal Truth
The brutal truth is this: product differentiation is shrinking every year. The speed at which competitors can copy your shiny new feature is terrifying. One engineer in Shenzhen can make your “revolutionary” idea look positively mainstream within a quarter.
So if your sales team is still trying to win on product alone, they’re playing checkers in a world where everyone else is playing 3D chess.
Clients know they can get a good-enough product from half a dozen vendors. What they want is confidence that the one they choose won’t become a headache, a liability, or a career-limiting move.
What Leadership Should Do
For senior leaders, this requires a mindset shift. Stop asking your sales teams, “How are we proving our product is the best?” Instead, ask:
How are we making ourselves the safest choice?
How are we reducing friction in the buying process?
How are we demonstrating long-term stability, vision, and alignment with customer needs?
How are we helping customers look good to their own leadership when they pick us?
Because here’s the kicker: most clients don’t actually want the “best” product. They want the least risky option. The one that lets them sleep at night.
A Final Thought
The next time you see a 450-slide deck, remember this: nobody ever closed a deal because slide 327 explained your product’s “innovative use of containerized microservices.”
But plenty of deals have been lost because the client thought, “This vendor seems unstable. If they implode, I’ll have to explain it to my board.”
So, by all means, polish the product slides. But don’t forget: your customers are buying peace of mind, not feature sets.
And if you really can’t resist showing all 449 product slides—at least have the decency to provide coffee. Strong coffee.
To Cloud or not to Cloud. That is the question.
To Cloud or not to Cloud. That is the question
Less than 10 years ago I remember meeting many clients who scoffed at the idea that Microsoft Teams would be a cloud based solution, and that they would not be able to host their own environments.
The large pharmaceutical and finance houses I was talking to at the time had invested huge amounts in their own networks, so their position was understandable. The idea of simply using the internet seemed like a step back. And of course in many ways it was. Security, resilience, scaleability, and long term cost of these cloud solutions were all major concerns.
But come the pandemic, most big orgs embraced cloud with a vengeance. Realistically they had little choice. With so many people working from home, empty offices and networks designed for a different world, where people primarily came to a central office, they simply needed to embrace it.
Fast forward to 2025 and I’m beginning to witness what I think is a bit of a swing back toward on-prem solutions. Now to be clear I’m not suggesting the likes of Zoom, Webex or Microsoft Teams are in trouble, far from it. But I do see clients who are moving toward more of a hybrid world where some communication is brought back inside the walls of organizations. Security, geo political risk, AI scrapping and the ever rising cost of Cloud solutions are beginning to rise in importance to the point where reshoring some of these activities are becoming strategically important.
The questions I have for my readers are.
Am I only seeing this because I’m looking, or is this real?
Do developments such as Azure and AWS sovereign in country solutions change the dynamic, or mitigate clients risk assessments?
If you are seeing clients moving in this direction, do you have a sense of what type of calls, or what percentage of traffic would be reshored?
What are the reasons cited by clients for looking to reshore, or reasons not too?
What challenges around reshoring are top of mind for clients?
What have I missed that should be covered?
How much of this is going on beyond communications solutions?
Please feel free to email me, or send me a message through Linkedin if you’d prefer not to comment publicly on this. I promise to keep your comments private. Ideally I'd like to make this an interesting thread for conversation.
Assuming I get some feedback on this topic, I’d like to dig into some detail over the coming months. So please stay tuned for more.
About the Author
Simon Dudley is a chump. A man who believes in paying taxes, waiting his turn, the rule of law, being a decent human being. He writes a lot about strategy, technology, society, education, business, Excession Events and science.
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