Having been in business for 21 years, the school of hard knocks has taught me more than a few things. One of the most important lessons I’ve learned is that anybody can beat you on price but not everyone can beat you on value. Changing your price to be cheaper than your competitor is easy to do, but it’s a practice usually followed by large organizations that sell huge volumes of goods. For many types of companies, competing on price alone can be a dangerous practice.
Price is important in that you need to be competitive; however, savvy customers know what really matters is the value you provide them. Customers are looking for partners they can work with that will help them be more productive, become more efficient, make best use of the resources they have, provide a better service to their customers or help them attract new business. A service provider that offers this type of value-add gets the attention of the customer — they understand that while the price may be more expensive than another supplier’s, the value the company brings to the table is worth much more.
For example, we recently developed a Customer Billing System for one of our clients. Before the system went into operation it used to take our customer 14 days per month to prepare invoices, and their staff spent countless hours pushing paper and performing repetitive data entry. When our team looked at the client’s current processes, we took a step back and instead of automating a labour intensive process we worked with them first to streamline their operations and minimize the work required to perform their customer billing. They now produce their invoices in four days instead in 14. That’s a savings of 10 days per month, a staggering four months per year! Our client can now focus their resources on providing better service and value to their own customers, which results in increased business for them.
There’s much more to developing a software solution than just writing code. By taking the time to get to know our customer, their business and their processes, we are able to provide a service that outweighs the one-time savings they may have initially realized by going to a less expensive software supplier.
Our tagline ‘Beyond the Software’ is our promise to you, the customer, and we welcome the opportunity to show you exactly what that means.
