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Most It services companies think that they’re marketing. But when you look at their web presence, you see stock art photos of people celebrating in conference rooms– one of every nationality. When was the last time you saw that?
More importantly, there’s no authority (showing why YOU are worth hiring), no authenticity (who are those people hiding behind the website), and no personality (might as well be talking to a cold heartless machine, instead of a human who will take great care of the relationship.
Mark Wagner, co-founder of Gantry, a software infrastructure provider (think servers and cloud native) is showing us how to not make these fatal mistakes. Even with simply an iPhone, he’s made videos explaining his service offering in plain language– a $10,000 DevOps implementation package that takes 4 weeks. Look at your website– is it clear what you offer (don’t say everything) and do you have a price (don’t say it’s custom every time)?
When you try to be everything to everyone (hey, the more things we offer, the leads we’ll get, right)?
WRONG.
And you don’t want to talk about price, because you need to customize it, talk to them first, and not leave money on the table, right?
WRONG.
Qualify them via your content, so they know THEY are the right client for you and that you solve the PARTICULAR problem they have.Note how Mark makes one video on each particular tool he uses, instead of trying to generalize about everything.
“Putting a human face in an educational video is something very IT service providers are willing or able to pull off. Where clarity and depth come together is the sweet spot. Education is what many managers and engineers are searching for. If they like what you taught them about performing step 1, they are likely to purchase your service for steps 2, 3, and 4.”
Since the learning curve with Site Reliability Engineering is steep, yet most companies need a similar infrastructure, the market is ripe for a SaaP offering.
He’s even updated his company LinkedIn to say he’s hiring the best Site Reliability Engineers, which is a great signal to potential clients. The relatively few videos out there explaining kubernetes are not even at the caliber of your average direct-to-consumer product presentation, because so few engineers want to speak publicly. Making content that stands out is no challenge.
“We want to find small and medium companies struggling to scale like the big firms, and show them how to build what larger firms have without expanding their number of employees or spend. We mainly do this by setting them up with the latest of open source tools that exist but are relatively obscure to the market” explained Mark in today’s interview.
An example: Argo is free, but because of the lack of subject matter experts, not everyone has implemented it yet. Gantry comes in and sets it up while educating the team on how to continue independently.
“It is basically a bootcamp package for your developer team” says Wagner.
See how simple iPhone videos placed on your YouTube, your website, and your LinkedIn can get you ahead of 99% of other IT firms you’re competing against?
Mark Wagner
I make your Kubernetes infrastructure more efficient via Argo CD, Prometheus, Terraform, and other tools. After seeing common problems and best practices, I co-founded Gantry.cloud, a SaaS platform to glue together these open source components, so every company can benefit from what Google, Amazon, Capital One, and other leaders are doing.