Businesses asking - what should we offer
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Is it just me, or does it seem particularly odd with regards to the number of businesses posting on SW asking, what should we offer, how should we go about drumming up business or how would you grow your business. Or the best yet "What services should an IT provider provide
"Now don't get me wrong, I completely feel a business needs to grow to sustain themselves, but there seems to be an alarming number of these types of topics that are cropping up.
Which seems completely insane, shouldn't they be querying their customer base and determining what their clientele needs? Shouldn't it be painfully obvious based on what services this company provides, and what they want to provide are two distinct items, and subsequently different business models.
Asking for advice, or guidance is one thing, but asking a question in such a direct fashion leaves everyone else out of the conversation, who is in the same market. They no sooner want to give advice, but would love to receive it for their own gain. How is this not understood when a question like this is posed?
The advice provided may sound "sound" but very well could be putting the person/business into much deeper water then what they're prepared for.
Sure something like in the above link "My advice is to work your way out of the break/fix support model toward a managed services (MS) support model." is boiler plate sort of advice, but offers nothing. (I've refused to read iandrewmartin's entire response).
A businesses leadership should have a focus, something that their looking to do & support as their product. A lowly employee may say "Hey we really should do this" but it doesn't mean any results will occur from that conversation...
Am I just reading to much into this? Maybe. But I think it's completely insane for people to ask for advice like this.
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@DustinB3403 said:
Which seems completely insane, shouldn't they be querying their customer base and determining what their clientele needs?
Honestly.... no. It is actually quite rare that a customer knows what they need. People rarely know what they need and if they do, they generally don't need it any more by the time that they have figured out what it is. Knowing what you need is such a huge component of actually having the thing that while sometimes this is true, by and large it is not.
This is why Spiceworks doesn't even look at their suggestion box for SW features - because their users are crazy and request horrible things that they would never use and would make the product useless for most users. Successful software companies never solicit design features from their customers for this purpose. Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, IBM, etc. all hire smart people to think about what their customers need and build what makes sense for their needs - if the customers had any idea how to build software to meet their needs, they would be making lots of money doing so.
There are exceptions, of course. But by and large, customers are a very bad source of knowing their own needs.
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@DustinB3403 said:
The advice provided may sound "sound" but very well could be putting the person/business into much deeper water then what they're prepared for.
Very common. If you need told what service to offer, obviously it is unlikely that you know how to offer that service or would have already been doing so.
Although I am unclear thus far as to his business model. Is he an MSP? Is he a VAR? The question is odd for an MSP but makes a bit of sense as a VAR.
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@DustinB3403 said:
Sure something like in the above link "My advice is to work your way out of the break/fix support model toward a managed services (MS) support model." is boiler plate sort of advice, but offers nothing.
Yes, you could sum up that whole thing as:
I recommend you do a good job.
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But in the above example, this is an Service shop, offering a Fix-IT type service. If the business is looking to change to an MSP you'd expect them to know what they need to offer, wouldn't you?
The business is effectively changing from a single customer (ie broken laptop) to a business customer needing to have something managed.
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It's viable to look at it that way. But also to look at it as moving from reactive to proactive support of the same things.
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It would be really weird, though, I agree, for a company to have customers and want to just "support them better" and yet have no idea what they would need. But this circles back to my MSP vs. VAR question, an MSP should always know what to provide but a VAR relies on connecting people to the right resources. So for a VAR, the question makes more sense.
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Well that's what I mean above with the above questions. As the business, you must be having conversations with your customer base about their day to day life, and things going on in them / in their business.
This should provide the Fix-IT business many conversation points to come up with new business models. Things to investigate if the business really wants to expand.
Instead a random question like this is posted to a public forum, eliminating everyone else in the region from responding. But certainly monitoring so they might gain an edge.
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Even if this business doesn't have any competitors who "care" it still seems odd to ask this sort of question, right?
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Oh, it is a weird question, that is certain. How would random public forum commenters have any idea what services he should be providing? Good feedback or at least highly useful feedback will be lean.
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@DustinB3403 I like the fact that the OP in that post actually directly asks their question instead of beating around the bush.
While iandrewmartin's advice may seem like Captain Obvious, type remarks, I think he does give a clear statement, if not a mostly complete business plan, lol. There's also the chance that the OP really doesn't know how to get past the break/fix type support. Especially if he's not helping his customers do much with virtualization.
You are right about asking their current client base about their needs!
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@dafyre or just doing some research - like having the techs who work with these clients talk about the problems that they see and collect that information.
Or think about how they can improve things for their clients.
Or look at ticket databases to see what issues come up all of the time.
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Wait, OMG, he's local to US!! He's right in our overlapping "local" territory between NTG and @Mike-Davis
SpiceCorps was held in the little town where this guy is based. Okay this makes more sense, this is a rural NY local business. He has NO local business and no local IT people.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Wait, OMG, he's local to US!! He's right in our overlapping "local" territory between NTG and @Mike-Davis
SpiceCorps was held in the little town where this guy is based. Okay this makes more sense, this is a rural NY local business. He has NO local business and no local IT people.
So you're saying I should go down to this guys business and offer him my expertise on expanding his business
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It's a nice little town. If there was work there, living in Auburn is quite nice. I love walking around town at night, it's so peaceful but has great old Upstate NY architecture.
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Auburn is beautiful. I think I know him! I am pretty sure he has been to at least one of the SpiceCorps down there.
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Now that I know he is a document / copier center, not an IT shop, and that he is in Auburn, NY (there are no real businesses to support there) and that he is looking for VAR products to resell it is making more sense why and what he is asking.
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This is basically a Crazy AJ's business but in rural Upstate NY rather than Central America. Sadly, there is far more business opportunity in Central America.
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@scottalanmiller said:
This is basically a Crazy AJ's business but in rural Upstate NY rather than Central America. Sadly, there is far more business opportunity in Central America.
ha.... ha...
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@scottalanmiller said:
Now that I know he is a document / copier center, not an IT shop, and that he is in Auburn, NY (there are no real businesses to support there) and that he is looking for VAR products to resell it is making more sense why and what he is asking.
Actually I know that @Mike-Davis is doing pretty well in Auburn. But he has been in the area a long time and in IT a long time. People know him and trust him.
