SharePoint and Customer Buying Decisions

This week I spoke to an Intermedia.NET Microsoft SharePoint hosting customer. The company specializes in training sommeliers and restaurateurs in the art of selling and upselling beverages to their clientele. They create customized training sessions, materials, wine lists and reports to help their clients increase profits and service quality.

They use Microsoft SharePoint to store all of the base materials that are used to customize the training program for each client. A separate SharePoint site is created for each client and in some cases the client is granted access to the SharePoint site. This assists the restaurateur to provide each new employee with a location to go to download, learn and keep track of the customized training materials.

Document storage, access and security are all important features for the client, and Microsoft SharePoint meets their needs. Because SharePoint is simple to use, and many hosting companies make SharePoint available to their clients, small businesses are able to access what was once only available to enterprises - expensive content management systems.

This customer has relationships with three companies in our industry. Their purchase decisions were all about timing - they bought what they needed from the provider that met their needs at the time. In this industry our customers depend on us to create a suite of services that work together while being the best in class solution available to them.

With the tremendous number of choices, in both providers and resellers, the best way to grow our business is through trust. Build trust with our customers and they will listen to us and buy from us. The services we provide are critical to the companies that we provide them to. Web sites, email, intranets and applications, and the technologies surrounding them, are all mission critical now. If we deliver on the promises we made at the time of sale, customers will buy more from us and hopefully move all of their accounts to one provider.