Archive for the 'IT' Category
In my previous articles, I took some more fundamental IT theory and applied it (for better or worse) to SEO. As part of an occasional series, I’m going to pull it up out of the weeds a little bit and focus more on project sales and delivery from my own experience and perspective. My hope is that my own recollections can spur some conversation from readers about their good and bad experiences and that we can all learn a little bit in the process. So without further ado, I give you Part 1:
Know Thyself
Clients are generally smart people. This is something that many professionals in service delivery choose to ignore. In any given proposal process, you may have 10 people on a selection committee, and you may successfully BS 8 of them. But there’s always going to be 1 or 2 naturally cynical people, who through that cynicism fulfill the blind squirrel-nut theory. Keep in mind that during this process, you’ll be standing in a room explaining to this group why your product is the best for them, why the organization can’t get your skills anywhere else, and why they should pay a premium for an outsider to come in rather than do the work in-house.
Based on past experience, “The 8″ (as I’ll henceforth call them) are probably mid-to-upper/executive management from all business process areas. Strategic thinkers interested in the long-term and the financial in nature. “The 2″ are probably direct reports or low-to-mid management. They will be impacted most immediately and on a larger scale than “The 8″. They’re tactical thinkers, interested in day-to-day operations. How do you reach both groups, sell your services, foster partnership, and, hopefully, reap benefits for both parties?
The Value Proposition
Developing a value proposition is one of the most important and time consuming activities a service provider can do. Significant thought needs to go into first deciding what it is that you’ll do, then deciding how you’ll do it. And all the while, you need to be able to articulate how what you offer and how you offer it will provide benefit to the client in a way that separates you from your competition. For established providers, the value prop is easier to articulate and has probably evolved over time. For a startup, it can be daunting.
And so it comes back to the old adage, “Know Thyself”. It can be tempting as a startup to say “We need clients, so we’ll do whatever they want us to do and hopefully something will stick.” But that can lead to an identity crisis for the organization and can distract it from doing what it’s good at or what the original intent was. So how can you develop a value proposition that you can stand behind and can win work.
- What the organization does?
This should be a straightforward, simple sentence (think nouns and verbs with as few ad-words as possible). “ElectronSEO enables clients to better reach and retain customers by…”
- How the organization does what they do?
This should contain the services you provide at a high level. Things like copywriting, linking strategies, reciprocal agreements, website design, etc.
- What are the benefits to the organization?
At this point, you may be tempted to put in some bulletpoints you found on the net about potential gains a client can achieve. But this should be at a higher level. You don’t want to start promising specifics that will never be met. Statements suitable for this can be “Measurable increase in website traffic” or “Enhanced search engine results”. It may seem like a cop out, but it can save you from legal issues down the road.
With a well-developed value proposition, you can be better equipped to respond to RFP’s or to cold-sell your services to an organization. Research will aid you in tailoring the value prop to the specific needs of the organization so that both “The 8″ and “The 2″ will be in your camp.
What are your experiences? Have you been involved in a selection process and one of your potential partners couldn’t tell what they did to save their life? Have you developed a value proposition that worked on the first try or took multiple iterations to get right? Let’s hear your thoughts.
IT has undergone a shift. Some of this shift has been talked about previously. But right now, I’m talking bedrock principles. Basics, building blocks, foundations, DNA…you get the point.
There’s a little transitive property thing going on. For those like me who are not always strong on basic algebra knowledge:
The transitive property states that if A=B=C then A=C. Follow me as I make a few leaps with this:
1. Search Engine Optimization is the effective and efficient design of an organization’s website in order to garner attention and traffic.
2. A website is an organization’s statement of its central vision and mission (i.e. strategy).
3. A strategy is an organization’s top-down plan for future success.
Put it all together and what do you get? Any effort for search engine optimization should and must be in line with the vision and strategy of the organization as a whole. If executive management says they want to increase their customer base by X number of customers in Y months/years through internet channels, whoever is developing the optimization plan needs to A. stop panicking and B. have passable (or better) knowledge of how SEO can achieve those goals.
So what should this person do? Here’s a short, non-inclusive list:
1. Talk to an organization’s business process owners to understand the existing environment.
2. Talk to executive management to gain historical perspective on where the organization has been, where it is now, and where management envisions it to be in 5 years.
3. Look at the competitive environment. What is the organization’s competition doing? What do they do better/worse? An extension of this is a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats).
The great thing about this is that although you may move from one organization to another, you take the knowledge about a given product, market, or industry with you. You become a valuable resource that can provide informal benchmarks and deep-seeded expertise. The benefits go both ways.
When you think about it, IT (emphasis on information) has something that most organizations already own, pay outsiders to sell them, and everyone wants - detailed information about the habits of its customers, trends in the industry, and profitable or unprofitable products.
The process for using this information will be different for an organization like Amazon.com, web-only business, constantly customer facing, versus a company that uses its website for informational purposes rather than commerce.
But you don’t have to be a retailer to use the information a website stores to gain valuable insights into your potential or realized customer base.
This podcast from Gartner talks about the importance of leveraging a web presence to gain those insights.
Its pretty hard for a CFO to say no to an IT leader that presents coveted marketing data on a silver platter, for little or no additional cost over the initial investment.
The dog days of 2001-2004 are finally behind us and IT spending is approaching post-Net Bubble, pre-9/11 levels (i.e. the sweet spot). However, the way money’s spent and approval of that spending has changed drastically. Free-wheeling CIOs are practically non-existent.
This slideshow from CIO Insight calls attention to a number of facts facing IT management in today’s business environment. Increasingly, CIOs (or more often, Directors of Information Technology) report not to the chief executive, but to the chief financial officer. The slideshow spells out one obvious aspect of this; the CIO, and by extension the IT organization are not privy to the formation of a company’s longterm vision.
A second, less obvious, but equally important aspect of this change in reporting hierarchy is this: Who’s writing the checks? By making the IT leader a direct report of the CFO, the company is sending a clear message to IT - “What have you done for me lately?” Whether its a request for a new server, the latest Windows OS, or hiring an additional developer, the IT leader must justify the expenditure and prove Return on Investment.
ROI is nothing new in the business world, but in my own personal experience at clients in multiple industries, it IS new for IT. Obviously, ROI for an enterprise resource planning application, a mainframe upgrade or replacement, or developing a new application is complex, with numerous factors to consider. But there’s a couple key points that can be boiled up into this:
1. IT leaders need to play the hand they’re given.
2. IT leaders need to clean up their house in order to prove to the rest of the organization that they’re as vital to the company’s success as the manufacturing, accounting, or service departments.
3. IT needs to prove ROI by leveraging what they have in their possession, which is arguably one of the company’s most important assets. Something so obvious, that its in IT’s very name and yet is often overlooked…
INFORMATION