Price Is Not an Indication of Value.

Although everyone this morning is talking about Paris Hilton and her release from jail, we decided to be mavericks and talk about somewhat of a different topic.

We recently met with the VP of marketing at a mid sized company who had invested over $250,000 in an email marketing/contact management system. He went out of a limb to get the necessary funding to purchase the new system and ended up blowing almost his entire quarterly budget on this one piece of software. The sales people he had worked with prior to the purchase promised him everything he needed - Easy to setup and track marketing campaigns that would seamlessly integrate into his existing CRM system.

Right from the get go there were huge problems. The system took forever for the vendor to install and configure and once it was finally up and running performance was painfully slow. The vendor recommended installing a dedicated server to resolve the issues, which after thousands of more dollars, and weeks more of work, only slightly improved the bottleneck. The first quarter came and went without a single email campaign being sent... From there things just went down hill. The user interface to the system continued to be slow, confusing, and did not allow marketing to customize the emails and web forms to match their corporate look and feel. The "easy to setup" campaigns turned out to be so difficult the marketing department had to offload large portions of the work to programmers in their IT department.

After almost 3 full quarters the first email marketing campaign was finally sent. Calls immediately started coming in. Some people were unable to read the emails, some people complained the opt out forms weren't working, and almost everyone agreed the website associated with the marketing campaign was incredibly slow. To add insult to injury, when the reports about the success of the campaign were finally ran, the data was definitely off.

For the next 6 months they continued to try and streamline the process, work the kinks out of the system, and find a way to capitalize on the rather large investment they had made. Unfortunately despite trying everything imaginable (including flying the vendor out for personalized 1 on 1 training) they were unable to find a way to make the software work for them. They had to make the hard decision to walk away.

A couple mistakes this VP of Marketing mentioned to us:

1. He didn't involve his IT department in the decision. These people are paid for their knowledge and expertise in technology, but he failed to leverage their skills to help him make an informed technology investment. In retrospect there were several issues they would have raised the red flag on right away.
2. Brand Recognition got the Better of him. Because the vendor who made the email marketing software also manufactured the CRM his company was already using, he assumed this product was the only logical choice.
3. He didn't outline his specific needs. During the purchase process he never clearly outlined the details of exactly what he needed to accomplish and how his department was planning on accomplishing it. Relaying this information to the vendor and having them respond on the specifics of how their tool could accomplish these goals would have either given him insight into some of the shortcomings of the software, or given him ammunition for a partial refund when things ended up not working out.

The 4th thing that became clear during the course of our discussion was that he assumed any piece of software that was $250,000 had to be able to do the simple things he had envisioned, plus a whole lot more. He thought anything with that sort of price tag just had to be an enterprise class solution they would be using for years to come. He found himself making the unfortunate, but common assumption that the price was an indication of the value.

As a company, Big Step often runs into that same sort of thinking. Companies often wonder how our price tag is so much lower than other companies competing in the same market. They make the unfortunate assumption that our price is an indication of the value we can deliver. Normally after a quick discussion with them about how we keep our overhead low, utilize our time and resources efficiently, and leverage existing pieces of code, they realize that the value we can deliver (especially considering our price) is rather exceptional.

This story does have a happy ending. We helped work with this VP to find a new hosted email marketing solution that met all his needs. With a little integration work the new solution is now talking to their in house CRM software. Marketing campaigns are taking days (not months) for them to design, target and launch. Perhaps best of all the new solution only runs them a few hundred dollars per month.

If you don't want to fall into the trap of paying too much for your next technology investment, we encourage you to contact us over at Big Step Consulting. Whether you need an affordable website, desktop application, or just some cost effective technology consulting, we can help work with you to deliver an immense amount of value, without a ridiculous price tag.

How Do Customers Know You Exist?

We just finished inking a deal with a radio show on KLAY (serving Seattle, Tacoma, and Olympia) and will have radio spots running during drive time in the next few months. We're excited about continuing to get the word out about our great web design, development, and consulting services - With our radio ads reaching a potential listening audience of over a million people, they definitely will help!

Many clients we build websites for initially approach their project with a "if you build it they will come" type of mentality. The reality is the internet these days is a very, very big place. The chances of you just putting up a site and having it be successful by accident are rather slim.

Just like a brick and mortar store, a website's visibility is essential to its success. Increasing your website’s visibility may mean doing simple things like securing an appropriate domain name, putting your website address on your business cards and letter head, getting links to your site from industry associations, or just making sure to mention your website to EVERYONE. Often though, these simple approaches are not enough and you may need to look into things such as search engine optimization, the stickiness of your content, paid advertising options, and aggressive cross linking campaigns.

Regardless of what method you are using to advertise your website, the most important thing is that you have a strategy in place. 9 times out 10, whatever approach you choose to market your site with will take time, patience, and consistency. Without a cohesive plan of attack in place it is very easy to get caught up in the moment, become frustrated if there are not immediate results, and walk away from something that was on the verge of success.

If you don’t want to fall into the “If you build they will comes” mentality and need help formulating a marketing strategy, we encourage you to give Big Step Consulting a call. More then just a Design or Development shop, Big Step Consulting can expertly handle your project in house from beginning to end and make sure that your next technology investment not only turns out looking and working great, but is a long term success for you and your business.

New Web Site Coming....

As part of our initiative to redesign our web site, we have decided to add a blog. Our goal is to share what is happening over at Big Step Consulting with our clients, contractors, and whomever else is interested. In addition we'll also be recording unique technological and business challenges we run into and the solutions we implement to solve them.

Its been almost 5 years since our last web site update and a fresh look and feel is long overdue. Our new layout is going to be an entirely standards based CSS (cascading style sheets) creation. This will be a nice upgrade from our existing table based design. The search engine benefits of going with a CSS design really are astounding. It continues to amaze us that although CSS support is increasingly standardized, there are many people out there still doing things the old fashioned tabular way. If search engine ranking is important to your site then then we encourage you to contact our search engine optimization (SEO) gurus. It's amazing what a new design and a simple rewrite of your content can do for your search engine rankings. In the future we'll probably discuss keyword density, code to text rations, and other search engine optimization concepts a little bit more to give the non technical folks in our audience a better understanding of what all this gibberish means.

In the meantime, we're excited about the new redesign and the opportunity to spend some time applying our consulting experience to our in house systems. We are shooting for a go live date at the end of July for the new website and we'll keep you posted as things progress.