Over the coming weeks I will share five lessons that changed how I understand B2B business: ecosystems, markets, systems, risk and P&L. This is the first.
“There is no need. We know all the customers.” That was one answer I received soon after joining Buses, when I asked about our customer base and commercial coverage. It was probably true. But it also revealed an opportunity: knowing a market is not the same as managing it.
In buses, a sale often has to be won twice. The manufacturer sells a chassis to a bodybuilder. The bodybuilder integrates its product and sells the finished bus to a passenger operator, often influencing that final decision. Selling a chassis therefore involves financing, lead times, warranties, availability, support and responsiveness. The end operator must also want the result. You are not managing one account; you are managing an ecosystem.
With a more disciplined view, we saw that we were strong in long-distance coach applications, especially double-decker 6x2 buses. But there was another Chile in which we were barely present: 4x2 buses for mining and industrial services. Jorge Masías had identified the opportunity earlier, though the pandemic made it hard to develop. Chile is a mining country. Why were we nearly absent?
We started customer by customer, from Salamanca to Iquique, while strengthening our presence around Santiago. We listened to operations, understood routes, specified correctly and put the product to work. Its performance and the network's ability to support it provided much of the commercial argument. We also worked more closely with a bodybuilder to demonstrate potential and generate traction—while maintaining consistent terms and trust across the channel.
It worked, and left me a lesson: the largest opportunities are not always where the market is biggest. Sometimes they lie where your own share is still too small. Years later I took on Trucks. The mining opportunity remained, and the hypothesis had been tested. This time we could manage the business end to end: product, customer, price, financing, service, network and lifecycle. The same question, many more variables under our control and a very different scale. That is where chapter two begins.