Over the past week, I've had discussions with several folks who have been surprised at our willingness to help companies for free, seemingly asking nothing in return.

"This is good information you can't get anywhere else. You should charge for it."

"Why would you do this? Don't you have a business to run?"

So, I decided that it was time to explain why we think it's a good idea to help companies without charging them.

What Grey Sparling gets out of helping companies for free

The short answer is: it's the right thing to do. Chris Heller and myself have looked many people in the eye as we convinced them that purchasing and using Peoplesoft products was a wise thing to do. As old fashioned as it sounds, we both value our reputations, and believe that in many ways, this is the most important thing we have.

The reason it's a good business decision (versus personal one) is as follows. The information we give out to help PeopleSoft customers, whether in the form of Blog entries, emails, or conference calls, allows us to improve the way we market, sell, and build our products.

Sales

Let's start with sales, since giving away things without charging for them seems contrary to heping with sales, especially since we realistically could charge for this advice. So, how does this help with sales? It's all about relationship building. When our free advice helps a customer, several things happen:

• We've proven to them that we know our stuff.
• We've given the prospect/customer a reason to talk with us. Hey, even if they realize that our products won't work for them, we haven't wasted their time
• We've kept the door open for future discussions. Just because there isn't a match today, doesn't mean that there won't be one in the future

From a sales perspective, this is all very powerful stuff.

Marketing

Okay, now let's talk about marketing. In many ways, giving free advice is our secret marketing weapon. Marketing is all about getting yourself known and recognized. How do you raise awareness of your company and products?

Providing free quality advice helps us market in the following ways:

• The Experts Corner drives traffic to the website, which also ranks us higher in Google searches. In addition, we have a lot of folks who hit our website periodically to see what's new. Very powerful from a marketing perspective.
• Helping PeopleSoft customers without asking anything in return causes them to want to say good things about you to others. Most purchasing decisions are driven by word-of-mouth, so giving away advice that helps customers today helps your brand. Anybody who buys from us is putting his own reputation on the line for us. The more we do to prove that he isn't going to get burned by trusting us, the more likesly we'll be able to successfully sell to him.

Product Planning

The effect of helping customers without charging them in product planning is the same as in sales: it keeps the conversation going. From a product planning perspective, it's extremely valuable to get your feedback from people where your products aren't a good fit today. The challenge, however, is to get non-customers to be interested enough in you and your products to take the time to provide this feedback.

From our perspective, if we can help them and make them willing to spend time talking with us, we can get the following information to help us set our product direction:

• They will be more willing to tell us their software plans for the next year and and what pain points they have.
• They'll be more willing to tell us what marketing events they're attending and who else is going.
• They will be more willing to evaluate our products and tell us what we need to do improve them.

The real reason we do it.

Okay, the real reason we like to do this is that it was a major part of our jobs when we were at PeopleSoft, and it's something we really enjoy doing. By nature, each of us are problem solvers, and we really enjoy finding ways to solve different and unique problems. Each company has its own set of issues, and we learn a lot about business, technology, and ourselves through the process of helping them.

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