June 07, 2005
And with whom am I speaking please?
Shari Thurow has an irresistible article about those pesky SEO clients. (Hat tip to Lee Odden.)
The piece is set up like series of directives issued to a prospect: "Tell your Web developer to get with the program or get lost." Whom are we addressing with these edicts? It sounds like marketing is hiring us and we are using their authority to dictate to IT.
Have you ever met a marketing department that could order IT around?
I understand the problem: IT loves to build completely unspyderable pages while marketing needs to show high page rankings. Getting pages parsed is not entirely a problem of IT foot-dragging and technophilia - it also has to do with a budget divide in silo-centric organizations.
The seller must find an advocate within the client's org; the seller must make estimates for IT and marketing involvement in the project; everybody then gets on board the client's (usually slow) cross-organizational budget train to await allocations and project authorizations.
There are shortcuts. In a hurry, I once told an IT department, "Just give me two spyderable pages, 'Home' and 'About' and I'll get you better rankings." That worked without giving the IT budgeteers a heart attack.
I suspect Shari's informers were from SEO firms who had sold fat consulting projets to one part of the enterprise, then faced non-involvement from other players. "Tell your Web developer to get with the program or get lost," is a cry of frustration from people who do not understand how big-ticket sales are made to the enterprise, nor how budgets are finessed across operational silos.
After the break - one kind of remedy - scorched earth selling.
I once worked for a firm that sold systems priced at $2 million to $20 million to the business side of the enterprise. Knowing that IT departments complicated such sales, our salesmen went in with the secondary mission of crushing the IT department; or in street language, bypassing them, denigrating them, and humiliating them at every opportunity presented by the sales process.
As the sale was made to the very top business executives in Fortune 100 companies, Shari's formula was freely used: "Tell your IT staff to get with the program or get lost," and a certain residual bitterness was harvested during the two-year implementation period.
Happy ending: they have since turned to catching IT flies with honey.
If the SEO shop brings a small business mindset to the sale of its services, it will appear that IT or whomever is getting in the way.
Which is not the problem at all.
Posted by at June 7, 2005 05:20 AM