One of the more difficult transitions to make (for all of us) as we dive headlong into this new world of marketing is that “Authenticity Beats Slick.”
For years, we’ve been conditioned to believe that flashy, polished, sophisticated communications are the best way to show people that we are “professional,” which, if you think about it, is another way of saying “s/he knows what she’s doing.”
Matt Katzer of Kamind shows us that being authentic actually generates revenue.
Like everybody and their grandmother, Microsoft is making a big push to “the cloud” and Matt, as a Microsoft partner, is interested in helping his customers with their migrations.
Microsoft’s offering is called “Office 365” and it went to beta in early April.
Matt knew that to be a trustworthy technology provider, he needed to have his organization up and running before he could credibly sell it to his clients
(he avoided the shoeless children phenomenon).
But, here’s where it gets super interesting.
The team at Katzer decided to share the experience of the migration to the new service…even though it failed initially…with their larger community via some LinkedIn groups.
- They talked about how they were without mail for 1 week.
- How this led them to discover a specific issue with a compliance archive.
- Then, how they had to manually clean up a domain footprint.
- Next, they had to wait for a fix from Microsoft on May 19.
- And, because they use multiple domains, they discovered a second problem with logins and email addresses.
All along, they were offering suggestions on how others could avoid these issues.
Anyone in technology knows that first release products are going to be buggy and have issues, but what Matt and his team demonstrated by being authentic in their challenges is that they are knowledgeable and committed.
Instead of people saying, “these guys are idiots,” they said, “wow, these guys are discovering the problems now, so we won’t have to discover them later. What’s more, they are on the cutting-edge.”
This builds trust.
And trust leads to revenue.
The Results?
Don’t take it from me, take it from Matt:
Because of our actions we have picked up 3 new unsolicited accounts (~26 seats), and working on a 4th 125 seat account in the UK.
