Marketing IT: Please Come to The Dark Side. It's Nice Over Here.

Marketing IT: Sell Services Internally, Win Respect is a neat article.  Lots of good thoughts for service catalog practitioners.

Often, technical IT staff looks down on marketing - it's the equivalent of going to the dark side. It's not. It's about understanding the value your customers need from you, communicating and delivering it. 

Excerpt:

For many IT professionals, the idea of marketing the services they provide every day might seem like a useless luxury. But Berry says marketing IT internally has never been more necessary, particularly to avoid what he calls the double-edged sword of cutting IT services to lower costs.

"If the organization cuts the IT budget with a full understanding of the value being delivered, that's one thing," Berry says. "But if they cut the budget and service levels go down, the customer is getting hit twice. So it behooves us to be able to speak to what IT does so people understand what they're doing as they make these decisions."

At newScale we put a huge amount of effort on the marketing side of the catalog because "if you just build it, they will not come."  From service packages to look and feel (we even have color strategies) all of it has to come together in professional looking presentation.

How serious?  We have a whole catalog library called dynamic marketing templates to help our customers deliver a high quality consumer experience in their catalog. Check it out.

And it really has to do with the fact that customer have ever more choices and they don't need internal IT as much anymore.  And marketing is about communicating value. If the customer can't understand you, how can they buy from you?

"We're in a competitive world, and clients can just as easily hire Bill and Ted's Excellent Training Adventure," says Janet Craig, a training leader in Bayer Corp.'s internal business and technology services group.

While the term "marketing" can throw IT people off, she says, it's a crucial practice for her group, which depends on billable hours from internal clients. In fact, through its marketing efforts, Craig's group has expanded its mission from supporting IT implementations to facilitating soft skills.

So we are in the business of helping IT communicate value in the language of the customer. That's the service catalog's role.

Comments

[Matt]

Um, speaking of marketing...how about the link you provided to "check out" these customer focus vibrant templates take us to some screen shots? I saw nothing new on the press release, other than newscale has a new offering.