Managed Web Services for Small Business
When you visit a restaurant, what does the menu represent for you? Does it depict the restaurant’s products? Does it set the tone for what sort of experience you will have? Maybe it influences your likeliness to stay, order, eat, and drink? I guess my real question is, do you consider it marketing material or an essential component to your experience?
At the risk of getting into semantics, I think it is important to distinguish between services, solutions, and products. The term product can be used in two ways – one to define the widgets, or food, that a company sells and one to define outcome or experience a company offers. For companies that sell widgets, both uses of the word product apply. For those that provide services however only the latter applies, thus your product ultimately is the resulting business experience for customers, employees, vendors, etc.
Creating profit selling widgets is relatively black and white. You have fixed costs and pricing that result in a forecast amount of profit based on sales volume. With services however your costs are difficult to fix. They can vary from customer to customer and from situation to situation. As a result, your profit can fluctuate and scalability throws even more curve balls.
Say hello to Managed Web Services. Like widgets, managed services have a fixed sale price that the customer can budget. The primary difference is that the sale is recurring, typically on a monthly basis. This is not uncommon for IT-related purposes such as computer networking, PC and server maintenance, but there is little market awareness for this when it comes to web-related services. However, that doesn’t mean there is little demand for it let alone supply. In fact, lots of business provide some form of managed web service to customers and customers do have a consistent need for web-related services, you just don’t see it referred to as “managed web services”.
In the coming weeks we will strive to build a case for the mindset of managed web services and depict the importance for businesses to embrace the idea of appointing expert professionals to their web presence to evolve the marketing message, business process, and customer experience in a fixed or budgeted fashion that is solution-driven rather than retainer-driven.
