Let's start with a little quiz to think about business model type to get you more fluent with this and help you iterate to a view, a testable view, of what business model type your particular organization is. Our first quiz subject is ExxonMobile. This is a company that extracts oil and gas, and also sells it through retail. What business model type do you think they are and why? I would say infrastructure because they are principally in the business of having this extraction infrastructure that the more oil they get out of it, the more profitable they are, and this delivery infrastructure which has essentially the same kind of characteristic. Kaiser Permanente is a healthcare organization company in the United States and they're focused on providing close network that is all Kaiser employees that do all the different things that might come up for you in getting your healthcare sorted. Surgery and primary care all, radiology. What kind of business model type you think is their principal business model type? I would say scope because their focus is on doing all these different things for the same type of buyer and they're getting an economy of scope from that. IBM has actually done a lot of different things over its history in the early days. They built some of the first computers, and later days they were really focused on being a big consultancy for businesses on IT and digital stuff, and now they have this artificial intelligence infrastructure that they're working to sell the businesses called Watson. So this is a triple header. What do you think IBM was at this sort of phase one there, phase two and phase three? I would say, originally when they were making the first computers, and that was really hard and they were super expensive, that was a product-focused business. And the period where they were really focused on consultancy, I would say there were more scope driven. And now with this Watson focus, I would say from my understanding of it that, that is an infrastructure-focused business because their idea is to create this Watson thing, put it out there for people to use and have as many people use it as much as possible in essentially the same way. Johnson & Johnson is a consumer packaged goods company that sells Band-Aids alongside a store brand Band-Aids. Likewise with shampoo. What do you think is their business model type? I would say product because they're working to extract a price premium for better things that the consumer ascribes superior quality to. And then what about Enable Quiz? What you think is their business model type and why? Based on what we've talked about, I would say infrastructure because they want to put this system up and have as many people use as many quizzes and essentially the same way as possible. Now, what if that isn't the case? What would make them a product company instead? I would say that if they learn that being able to do these quizzes is really important but people don't want to buy it and use their infrastructure on a standalone basis, but they're really good as an embedded component in somebody else's learning management system, that sort of does more job, solves more problems in the area of helping employees learn stuff at a company, and they just sort of focus on that one thing and supply it to these other people. I would say that's would make them more of a product-focused company. And what will make them scope based? I would say if they go out to these companies and they find a couple of huge clients that are like look, just you know our learning program isn't the way we want. We want you to come in and just fix it. We know the quiz thing is great but we have all these other problems we want you to solve for us. Then I would say that would make them more kind of scope based. And so the question is, what do you think is your business model type and why do you think that? Why and how would you sort of test that idea? Let's talk about a few, just a few implications of business model type and these are just a few examples related mostly to kind of enterprise IT and enterprise software and operations. Sales process. If you are infrastructure driven, and you want something relatively standardized. Whereas if your scope driven, you want something relatively flexible to accommodate the different ways that the customer is going to buy all these different things from you. And if you're product driven, ideally you're selling things through a channel and you're not really that focused on a large, highly skilled sales organization. What about, the related question of kind of pricing and packaging, how we sell it? Standardized here. I would say relatively customizable here. If you're a lawyer, you're the lead partner servicing some corporation at a law firm, you're probably do a lot of different things to accommodate the way one customer wants to do things versus another. My guess. I'm not an expert on that area but I gather that that's the case. And finally for a product, it's probably relatively standard, although perhaps if you have a few large customers it might not be this. This one is probably a little fuzzier than some of the other ones. And then finally customer support. The way that you deal with the sort of post-sale but pre-retention part of the customer journey, I would say a pretty system. Let's say we're implementing a CRM for a company that we're going to what I want to figure out which one of these types it is. If it's an infrastructure-driven company like a huge telecom company that sells residential internet service to millions and tens of millions of people, we need something relatively systematic and repeatable. Let's say we're putting in a CRM for a big law firm that services gigantic corporate clients. We want something pretty customizable that deals with capturing the differences in what's going on between one account and another and maybe even the items within an account that may vary a lot. And then what about a product company? Those may depend more but assuming that they are selling the same proprietary thing to different channels this is probably going to be systematic. Although again on this one I would say this could vary quite a lot. I would take a moment before we move on to the other material and think about what do you believe is your fundamental business model type, and why do you think that? And we'll use that as kind of a focal point for going through these other items on the left side of the canvass.
