How many of you have used the phrase “boots on the ground“?
In the “war” against competitors, your company needs “boots on the ground”…especially for on-premise deployments.
I’ve known a couple of companies that didn’t realize that they lacked boots on the ground…and that they had no plan to get the boots on the ground that they definitely needed.
This doesn’t just affect a company’s products. It also affects a company’s content.
Company X brainstorms
Company X was a new software solutions provider that had an internal brainstorming channel, and one person made the following suggestion:
Why stop at providing software solutions to our customers? Why not provide complete solutions with both software and hardware?
Now you NEVER want to totally shoot down a brainstorming idea, but it’s appropriate to consider the positives and negatives of any brainstorm. I won’t delve into ALL the negatives of shifting from a software solution to a software/hardware solution (profit margins, delivery times, etc.), but I will focus on one:
If you deploy integrated software and hardware solutions, you are responsible for MAINTAINING them.
What does this mean?
- This means that you have to hire employees with hardware maintenance expertise, or you have to hire managers who can oversee subcontractors with hardware maintenance expertise.
- For certain products (such as those Company X sold), customers demand fast response times. Maybe a 2-hour response. Maybe a 5-minute response.
- Customers won’t wait a week for a maintenance technician to show up at their site. Broken hardware grinds business to a halt, and customer’s won’t tolerate that.
- And they DEFINITELY won’t send the hardware off to a distant facility for repair.
As a pure software firm, Company X had few if any people qualified to perform the necessary maintenance activities.
But at least Company X had SOME people to consider these issues. Company Y wasn’t so fortunate.
Company Y sells
Company Y was also a software solutions provider. Company Y wanted to break into a particular industry in a particular country. I won’t reveal the industry, but I will reveal the target country: the United States.
Company Y developed and delivered a sales pitch that talked about the importance of the industry in question, and how the company could deliver a solution for that industry in the U.S.
But it glossed over one thing: Company Y had very few people in the U.S. at the time. Oh, they were working on hiring some more people in the United States, but at the time they didn’t have many.
And it was painfully obvious that Company Y’s U.S. presence was lacking. While talking about the expectations of different generations of people in the industry, the company rep referred to “Generation Zed.” For anyone listening to the sales pitch, that sent up an immediate red flag.
Now I’ll be the first to admit that American English may not be considered the most advanced English in the world. After all, we spell many words with an abundance of z’s…whoops, I mean an abundance of zeds.
If you’re going to do business in the United States, you have to speak our language. And we Americans will be criticised (with an s) when we don’t speak another country’s language.
So when do you buy boots?
If you need boots on the ground to fight your competitors, you have to…well, you have to obtain boots on the ground. But when?
- One option is to wait until you need them, and THEN buy the boots. Wait until someone actually buys your software/hardware solution, or wait until you actually have a U.S. contract in your industry. No need to spend money on resources if you never use them, and if you do need the resources later, they’ll be able to ramp up quickly…right?
- The other option is to take the risk and put the boots in your closet NOW, so that when a customer calls upon you to deliver, you don’t embarrass yourself. This financially costs your company, but you’ll be primed and prepared to move forward when the business does come.
So let’s talk about your content
You don’t only need boots on the ground to deploy your products. You need boots on the ground to create the content that will entice prospects to BUY those same products.
You’ve been meaning to create that content for a while, but just haven’t gotten around to it. After all, there’s a financial cost in hiring an employee or a contractor (like Bredemarket) to create the content, and there’s an opportunity cost in taking one of your existing employees and tasking them with content creation.
So you haven’t created the content you need for your business.
And you’re probably not going to create it next week either.
Or next month.
Or next year.
Unless you move forward NOW and bring in some boots on the ground, namely Bredemarket, to work with you and create the content you desperately need.
Are you ready to move forward, or are you going to stay in place?
Or retreat?
Bredemarket 