Effective Sales Techniques

One of my favourite success stories is taking a 50% share of the retail market with zero marketing dollars.

When I was the general manager of ANZ for AMD, things were in rough shape. We had 12% retail PC market share. Intel was the dominant processor brand, and hardly anybody knew us.

The landscape was dominated by Intel and its marketing fund war chest. They leveraged it with retailers and OEMs to stock tons of product. Everybody remembers the Intel four-chime jingle. Nearly every print advertisement had its logo. To take a spot on a retail shelf, you needed to pay more money than Intel could. With almost 0 marketing dollars, that wasn’t an option.

So, I developed a strategy called “40/40/20” to use Intel’s own marketing dollars against them.

Looking back, the strategy was crazy. I knew the Intel playbook well. When they lost market share, they would increase their marketing funds and buy it back.

I noticed that the marketing funds Intel was spending to maintain its market share in Australia were far less than it could afford.

My team and I met with the retailers and laid out a story about how they could both help AMD become more competitive in the market and extract more money from Intel.

Step one was to increase AMD‘s share to 20%. Intel had no incentive to pay retailers more if it had over 80% market share. Intel would notice the shift and tell retailers to stop. I taught the retailers to recognise that this meant the strategy was working and to push our market share to 30%.

We couldn’t offer much at 30% market share, either. I correctly predicted that at 30%, Intel would become more threatening. They would tell retailers to stop pushing AMD and open their checkbook - with the caveat that their competitor would get the money if they refused.

We prepared the retailers to ignore the threat. The extra money was significant, but it wasn’t the true maximum. I asked them to take us to a 40% share, the point where Intel would back up a dump truck full of money. We said to take that money and push us back down 20%, but only for one quarter.

At a 40% share, we could pay some funds, enough to keep a new market equilibrium. Intel would pay what they originally paid to keep 40%. The remaining 20% was a bidding war, which I happily lost every quarter.

The retailers made much more money than before, our OEM partners had more options in their portfolio, and we had solid market share. We didn’t need money; we just needed aikido-like maneuvers to turn Intel’s own success against them.

None of this would’ve been possible without the phenomenal team we had on the ground to deliver the strategy. It took their effort, belief in my crazy vision of a storyline, and a retail partner willing to take a chance.

When your team is asked to do more with less, sometimes it takes out-of-the-box thinking, but it's possible.

Learn more about Teamwork Unlocked here.