Say you're the international product manager of a product which has previously enjoyed success, but has been suffering a little lately. Now, say you were going to be visiting a region where things were "not going so well" for your product . Possibly your company as a whole has very little market share here, especially when it comes to new business. You might encounter a lot of highly trained Consultants who have specialised in your product here who are finding that there's quite simply no demand for their skills. These consultants might be a little peeved, or they might have simply gotten busy with the task of retraining into something with a future some time ago and forgotten about you and your product. Some of this might be because this region is comprised of mostly SMBs, and that the products your company makes have often seemed to appeal more to larger businesses, or it might be simply because your company seems to employ fairly ineffective marketing campaigns beyond back slapping of existing customers. Whatever the reason, the fact is that your product isn't winning a lot of new business in this region.
In your position of International Product manager you might be able to pull out loads of statistics and figures and quotes and URLs and numbers and pie charts and so on about how things are peachy, but deep down you know the region needs attention. Good thing you're visiting huh?
So where would you go and what would you do when visiting this region?
Would you maybe think about teaming up and trying to time your visit to coincide with the annual event/expo your company holds in this region? Well, you might try this, but it seems that your company doesn't want to talk about your product at the expo. So that's not going to fly.
Maybe you'd organise a seperate smaller event - your company holds these all the time, so maybe something could be done to coincide with your visit? Or maybe not. Who knows!
Well, if all else fails you can always go visit existing enthusiasts of your product and slap them on the back after reading them some prepared statements. Should be good for morale, even if it wont win any new business or help the future job prospects of those enthusiasts one little bit. That option sounds good - that option sounds safe. Lets do it.
It all sounds great, doesn't it? Welcome to the world of NO DEMAND.