Comment by jerf
2 days ago
"If your messaging is vague, people will need to get on a call to understand what you actually offer."
I am so tired of someone at work saying "Hey, we're thinking of using X" (or "going to use X"), and I go to their web page, and what is X? Why, it's a tool that will unlock the value of my business and allow unparalleled visibility into my business to connect with my customers and brings highly-available best-of-breed services to us to secure and empower our business, which has up to this point just been businessin' along without the full power of businessy business that we could have been businessing if we just businessed this business product earlier.
But...
.. what is it?
Is it a hosted database? Is it a plugin to Salesforce CRM? Is it a training program? Is it a deployable appliance or VM image? Is it a desktop application? Is it a cloud service? Is it an API? Is it some sort of 3rd party agency meant to replace some bit of my business? Who is meant to use it? Developers? Business? Finance? Ops?
These are all very basic questions that are only the very beginning of understanding of what the product actually is, and I frequently can't even guess based on the home page. I have more than once been told we're using one of these products and linked to the homepage in question, and still had to come back and ask the person "Yes, but what is it?"
The best thing you can do is hit the developer docs page, if there is one, but even then it's fairly rare for there to be a clear answer. You have to poke through frequently disorganized, task-based documents with no clear progression as to "here's where to start with our product" and frankly some products have defeated me even so. I can get as far as "Ah, you have some sort of web interface" and probably some clue about what it actually is, but that hardly nails it down. You'd think I could juts derive the answer almost immediately.
So glad it's not my job to poke through these things. I have to imagine there's a lot of people who would equally find it a breath of fresh air to hit a website and have some sort of idea what it is in 30 seconds or less.
I understand, even if it's not my personal philosophy, still being vague on price so you have to call about that. I don't understand the idea behind hiding what your product even is behind such a thick layer of vague buzzwords that a professional in the field is still left virtually clueless about what it actually is even after a careful read.
Even more frustrating is when you're specifically looking for a simple tool to do X, but the marketing material is so aspirational you can't even find out if they offer X, and finally when you figure out that they DO offer X, it turns out it's only X, and not world peace and an end to hunger like they promised.
You just want a single-sign-on thingamajig with 2FA, but the website is selling ultimate trustworthiness and compliance in an everchanging regulatory environment for dynamic and growing digital natives with federated AI. Hmm.
I always try looking up the product or company on Wikipedia. If there's an article there, that's more often than not a lot more helpful than the company's own web page.
Of course, if you had already fully unlocked the value in your business, you’d be leveraging accelerating growth and reaching synergies few can even contemplate. Your go to market strategy would be adaptable, extensible, on-demand, customer focused, market driven.
How about we circle back to put a fork in it?
But seriously, when I see such nebulous companies, I immediately look elsewhere. They are either trying to sell snake oil or are just too clueless to understand what’s actually important.
Either way - a waste of time and effort.