As the CTO and Co-Founder of Tegrita, I always have to look at the big picture when it comes to technology and how we serve our clients. Successfully delivering the service is the easy part, but ensuring that we keep our customers happy, and for our business to remain aligned to our brand, is what keeps us at the top of our game. A question that I constantly ask myself is “how do we consistently deliver value to our clients?”.
Value is the key word here, and it is important to note that value ≠ price. Value is that which you find valuable. You can offer the same thing to two different people and it will be valuable to one, but not the other. It all comes down to perspective.
So how do we drive value? Well, we can’t. Value isn’t something that we can assign – it must first exist for the person seeking to get value. Otherwise, you’re left convincing people that something is of value when in fact, it isn’t (at least not to them).
How do you know that something is going to be of value to the receiver of that value? People – your prospects, leads, customers all tell you, loudly (incidentally, “te grita” is Spanish for yelling at you!). Just listen to what your customers are telling you.
I regularly ask my clients:
• Why is something valuable?
• What are you getting out of it?
• How are you able to show results?
• What is it that we are doing to validate the investment?
These are important questions to ask because all too often, technology is blamed for bad business decisions, processes, or worse – the lack or corporate alignment or understanding of the company goals.
When we see clients switch away from Eloqua, it’s not because of the technology. More often than not, it is failure in proper planning, definition of success, and organizational alignment. Seeing things through also helps.
When you buy something, you should be able to finish this sentence – “I will get value out of this technology because…” and that “because” must be directly in line with what your company wants to do. If you cannot complete the sentence or it conflicts with your business process, I will be the first to call out that it’s going to be a boondoggle.
This is true for purchasing Marketing Technology, initiation of new projects or campaigns, or even hiring people. It’s universal.
Knowing the value of something before acquisition of that something is the first step to getting value out of that something.