Help Your Customers Achieve Their Goals

Our industry has historically marketed our solutions with phrases like "lots of disk space for your mailbox or Web site!" and "easy to use Web site creator!". It is important to note that these are technology references, and in 2007 many of our customers expect these features. The actual benefits that customers are realizing are different and can be summed up with phrases like "give your employees access to their files - anywhere" or "become more competitive by improving business processes".

Thanks to theWHIR and other industry leaders like Isabel Wang and Andy Schroepfer at Tier1, many of us are changing our ways. With the success of many Web 2.0 Web sites that make it easy to achieve a "goal" such as storing, sharing and viewing digital photos or sharing your life experience with a blog, many hosting companies are looking around their own suite of technologies and realizing "hey!, our customers can achieve these goals with our technologies."

The problem is they are not. And for the foreseeable future they won't! Why? The simple answer is because we are enablers and for the most part our products and services are not (perceived to be) the simple, easy, single solution to each or all of the goals of our customers. While we know that being a single source for domains, email, Web and application hosting is good for the customer, few hosting companies have created a compelling integrated solution to the goals our customers have.

Our success lies with developers (who build and integrate solutions for their customers' needs) and customers who come to us to and are willing to solve their problems with the solutions we provide them.

Tomorrow, I will post a real world example of an Intermedia.NET customer who is benefiting from the technologies that we provide to his company.