In the services industry, (especially in small business), it’s sometimes difficult to identify what your core business is. Whilst it can be beneficial (usually to your bottom line) to branch out into a wide variety of different industries, the management nightmare that arises from the need to troubleshoot and coordinate seemingly autonomous service offerings is nothing to be scoffed at. Bill Swanson’s “25 Unwritten Rules of Management” puts it best with the statement “It’s easier to get into something than it is to get out of it”.
When offering a multitude of services that seemingly deviate from your core business, you need to have a clear definition between product and process. Whilst this may seem obvious, you have to realize that your customer does not care about the amount of time and effort required to offer a service and, despite how much they’re paying you, they want the product provisioned and they want it now. What does this all mean? The answer to this lies specifically in the ability to identify with parts of the scoping and implementation process needs to be exposed to the customer. This is especially apparent in larger projects, where it’s all too easy to expose the customer to unnecessary (and sometimes daunting) convolution that, although obvious to the service provider, is overwhelmingly complex to the customer, who lacks the context/knowledge of the industry to effectively digest or reject superfluous information.
To break this down further, I’ll create a hypothetical to better generalize and exemplify the issue.
Take for example, providing a managed WAN service to a small enterprise. The product that you are offering is a “Managed, Australia-wide network solution that enables them to connect disparent offices together to allow secure, effective communication”. This is your product - easy! The tricky bit is determining the difference between your product and the process that you use to offer it. The wholesale DSL line that you use to offer the managed WAN over is NOT your product - it is part of the process that you use to offer your product. The 2651XM that you use to concatenate Frame Relay PVCs in your POP is NOT your product - it is part of the process.
Whilst information about infrastructure, implementation and the management thereof can be selling points for your service, don’t rely on these things to sell your product. You may run across clients who are “in the know”, so to speak, who will request information pertaining to your infrastructure. If there is no reason to not give it to then, then give it to them - it will instill confidence and ratify their positive interpretation of your brand. For the most part, however, you will be presenting proposals to a board with no background or knowledge of telecommunications. This is where it’s important to abstract details of the process from information about your product.
When presenting to a non-technical board, identify the key aspects of your product that differentiate it from other products within the market or, if you are selling a product that everyone else seems to have, be sure to identify the key advantages that your product brings to the organization. You’ll find that many of your competitors make the mistake of selling on process rather than product, which gives you a clear advantage within the marketplace.
Make sure you scope your potential clients well, Ensure that you know what they’re hoping to achieve by potentially implementing your solution. If you don’t know, and you have no way of finding out, then it’s probably a pretty safe assumption to run with the power three reasons:
1. How can this product save me money2. How can this product improve change workflow to benefit productivity3. How can this product help me reach more customers
Identify the ways in which your product will improve the bottom line of the board that you’re presenting to, rather than how much inter-capital backhaul you have and even if your service offering isn’t as comprehensive as your competitors, you’ll already have an advantage over them.