Commercial Knowledge | Digital Business

How do you know it works?

10:20 pm in Social Media, business, marketing by Will Hawkins

Do you believe in anything?

I have been trying to persuade a deeply skeptical businessman that his business will benefit from providing useful content on his website for prospective customers to download. His business is very technical and provides technical services to the publishing industry, a global outsourcing company and a number of other marketing agencies who don’t have the technical know-how themselves to build web solutions for their clients.

Their technical know-how is impressive not only from the software solutions they develop but also the commercial knowledge they possess and the consultancy they provide to help people plan for the solutions they are hoping to achieve. Their main market is the educational and trade publishing sectors where, to be frank, the clients are generally conscious of what they want to do but don’t often have the competencies to implement the solutions themselves. This is where they help them.

As a consequence, the clients need a lot of help in framing what they want to do so that is commercially viable and practically possible. It’s almost a process of educating the clients to help them be successful. It sounds potentially patronising but that’s the reality of how they help their clients. They help their clients by providing pragmatic and impartial advice of what to do.

Most of this consultative work is carried out for free and they only charge for the development work they do on actually building the solution. The particular individual is convinced that people won’t pay for this advice, which might be true. The clients don’t value their skills and experience until after they benefited from them. By then, it is too late for this company to ask for payment and, therefore this individual sees that there is no value in that knowledge to the business.

But this knowledge is one of the biggest opportunities that they have to market themselves to gain more business, which is exactly what they need. They can use this knowledge to find out who is interested in their services and therefore who, potentially, needs their service.

By distilling their knowledge into case studies, whitepapers or tools and placing them onto their website for people to download for free in return for their contact details is a simple way to demonstrate their core value to customers and that they know how to help people and organisations with specific needs.

Trying to persuade someone to your points of view who completely disagrees with you is a challenge. It’s particularly difficult when they are your boss and they hold the resources you need to do what you believe to be the solution to the challenge. But this individual believes that their type of clients don’t look for their type of skills on the web, which is flying in the face of a large technology industry which provides a huge amount of information, tools and answers to people with challenges.

I am trying to show them that this will work but with no current evidence that it will work. They need facts and figures when I am asking for a leap of faith. So, the question in the title of this post is something which I can show how it has worked for other people in the technology sector. They question this individual needs to ask is ‘Why haven’t we done this before?” But some people don’t want to believe. They want certainty without risk. They don’t actually believe in themselves.

If you don’t believe me, here’s a good article by Valeria Valtoni on her blog ‘Conversation Agent’ which argues that people should stop adding value and that “to build a platform today, you need to be of service“.