Concorde was a marvel of engineering. And one of history’s most expensive proofs of how hard it is to abandon a decision you have already made.
Mach 2 across the Atlantic. London to New York in under three and a half hours. A plane so far ahead of its time that it still looks like the future, twenty years after the last one landed.
But the economics never worked. Concorde was designed in the 1960s, when jet fuel was cheap.
By the time it was in the air, the 1973 oil crisis had doubled the price. Concorde burned about as much fuel as a jumbo jet but carried a quarter of the passengers.
Before the first flight, everyone involved knew the numbers would never add up.
They kept it flying for 27 years anyway.
Too much prestige was at stake for anyone to want to admit the mistake.
Your customers often do the same thing, on a smaller scale, every day.
They have already chosen a supplier. Already built their processes around it. Already defended the decision upward. Switching now would mean telling their own boss that the last choice was wrong. So they stay, even when they know something better exists.
So your real competitor is rarely the other supplier. Your real competitor is the customer’s reluctance to undo their own decision. You can win every comparison on paper and still lose to that.
You don’t break that lock by proving the customer chose wrong. That only forces them to defend themselves, and it is hard to argue anyone into a yes when the first step is admitting they got it wrong.
You break it by moving the blame from the person to the time. Not that they chose wrong, but that the choice was made under entirely different conditions than the ones that apply now. Then no one has to carry any guilt. They only have to see that reality has changed.
And ideally, you are there before the lock even forms. While the question of what the problem really is remains open, before anyone has tied their prestige to an answer.
Most sales teams don’t know where in the customer’s thinking they actually are. And that is where the deal is decided, long before price ever comes up.
Upstream is not a point in time. It is a choice.
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