Beware the Analyst Suggesting the Safe Choice

Analysts insist that buyers want a safe choice but today the buy decision is almost never motivated by fear. The influencer and analysts community is an important one, they make their living from intimately understanding the complexities of a marketplace and the products and services that meet the needs of that marketplace. There is, however, an unfortunate legacy that exists in the analyst community today; supporting the ‘no-one-ever-got-fired-for-selecting’ sort of choice.

In the 80’s the argument sounded like this ‘No one ever got fired for choosing IBM”

In the 90’s it sounded like this “No one ever got fired for choosing Microsoft”

The early 2000’s big ERP tried to make themselves the safe play but the mystique was destroyed as plenty of people actually were fired for failed big business transformation driving ERP software installations.

SaaS ushered in a different era by exploiting the fear of selecting anything but the safe choice. SaaS successfully built software that focused on very specific functional needs and met users exactly where they were at the moment. SaaS was built on the ‘safe play’ concept.

The ‘safe-play’ pitch goes something like this, “Buyers making decisions that have a significant impact on their business want to be as sure as possible that they are making a strong decision and they want the safe choice. In fact they’ll select the safe choice over what might seem to them to be the best choice” The message to solution providers in the market is ‘make decisions that don’t challenge your marketplace to think forward, but to distill your offering down to the collection of options that are implemented with as little difficulty as possible.’ The result is stagnant technologies and services that never enable customers to tap into their full growth potential.

But now more than half way through the 2nd decade of the century the safe play concept is tired, and buyers expect so much more. First they are more educated than ever. They are, in effect, their own analysts. They will decide what defines safe. They still look to influencers and analysts, but the tired old ‘no one ever got fired because” mantra adds no value. They want to uncover what they do not know. They want to be inspired in their solution search. They seek not a go along get along selection, but a catalyst that lets them finally direct the change they believe they need to make. They want a partner in serving the needs of their own customers, and they want a solution that reinforces their company’s purpose.

Analysts play an important role, but be careful when you hear them espousing the so-called ‘safe-play’. It doesn’t exist anymore and a strong buy decision is absolutely never motivated by fear. It is motivated by the desire for unlocking a new path to success.