SiteCrafting Blah Blah Blog
Dec. 18, 2006 at 10:37am
The Right People For Your Job
I'm in a band. Well, two of them, but only one that matters for this discussion. I've noticed that the progression of a musical group that wants to be professional on some scale in many ways closely mirrors that of any product-based business. You start out spending a certain amount of time in development. You come up with ideas, assemble the best team available to execute those ideas, and then do your level best to refine and perfect your product before you release it to the public.
At this point we run into the same question as any business who is ready to put their product on the market: how do we sell this? Sure, I can tell my friends, and they can tell their friends, and eventually enough people will be convinced we're worth seeing before they've heard a single lick. But this only works on a small scale. I can't walk up to a venue and say "I promise I have enough friends to fill you up." Even word of mouth works best when there's something to back it up. For a band, it's a demo recording. For a business, often it's a website.
So how do you get out there? Sure, you can pick up Web Development for Dummies and figure a few things out. Heck, you could even slap something together in Word, output it as HTML, and you'll have a web presence. And you know what? I could tape a microphone to the ceiling in the middle of my basement, plug it into a tape player, and we'd have a demo. I've done that. But eventually you reach a point where competition comes into play. It doesn't matter how good your actual product is, if you can't make it look (or sound) professional, then how are you supposed to convince your clients that you are professional? In the end, the value of a front end produced by professionals makes it a more than worthwhile investment.
So then how do you find the right person for the job? As much as this or that company may have a reputation for producing a quality product, one of the biggest issues (and one that not enough people consider) is finding the right person for your job. If you're lucky, a service-based company will have a list of clients and examples. I came across a Tacoma-based recording studio (convenient and cheap), but in my efforts to shop around, also talked to a few in Seattle. Frankly, from a glance at client lists, the Tacoma studio seemed the worst fit. The style was all wrong, whereas the (farther away, more expensive) Seattle studio appeared to be a much better fit.
In this case, we got lucky. The proximity of the cheaper studio made it easy to go in and visit with them, and allowed them a chance to convince us that they were what we were looking for. They walked us through their process, showed off their equipment, and played a few samples that suited our style.
A couple different things can be taken from this experience. First off, the studio themselves could benefit from these kinds of marketing steps. Sure, SiteCrafting has a giant master list of clients to show off. You can look all you want at that list and say "Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium? Well, we're not a zoo! Guess we better keep shopping." But to be perfectly honest, the fact that we made a site for a zoo isn't what we want to sell. It's the core quality of the product and the commitment to the process: making sure we're the right people for your job regardless of our past clients. That's why we've also got a few key case studies, demonstrating just exactly what we provide, focusing on breadth of products rather than the length of our list.
Second: in the end nothing really beats just sitting down and talking things through. This goes for both sides: without that meeting, we would probably have been out a couple hundred more dollars for a product that most likely wouldn't have been any better. And obviously they would have been short one new client.
Posted in Deep Thoughts, Marketing by Joe Izenman
Comments (1)
dude. whenever i get back to north america, i have to come see you guys play.
1 | Left by silly punk | Dec. 27, 2006 at 3:37pm