Don’t Know Much about History…

Well, that’s not exactly true. I know plenty about history.

And after listening to a webinar replay from a prospective client, I know plenty about their history, too.

What I don’t know is how that history directly connects to the value they provide to their customers. And that’s because they didn’t make the connection for me. (The webinar, by the way, was excellent - very informative about an important issue-of-the-day. If anything, I think they sold themselves a bit short by not saying enough about their own products and services, which - as you can imagine - is something I’ve rarely felt after sitting through so many of the far more prevalent “thinly veiled sales pitch” webinars.)

The whole thing got me thinking about the uses and abuses of company history in messaging.I recognize and appreciate the importance of lore. It can be exceedingly valuable in terms of your company’s self-definition, in terms of the pride your employees can take in your organization, and - yes - in terms of how your customers perceive and value you.  I’ve posted about this before, in Majoring in History, and in that earlier post, I asked, with respect to yet another customer with an awesome pedigree:

How closely tied is it to the day to day work they’re engaged in now? How relevant is it to their customers? Just what is the connection between their history and their customers’ business needs?

And these are the questions I found myself asking myself as I listened to that prospective client’s webinar. This is not an argument for discarding your history. It’s just an argument that your customers are going to automatically connect it to something that’s relevant to them. So think about your company, and ask yourself how effectively you use your company’s history.

So what if your company was the first custom application development provider in the world to embrace object oriented technology.

So what if your founder wrote the book on the Glass-Steagall Act

So what if 20 years ago Bill Gates gave your company a big, fat kiss on the lips.

So what?  If you can’t - or just plain forget to - let your customer know what the implications are for them in the here and now, it’s NO WHAT!

If your early embrace of object oriented has provided you with the ability to speed code, and bring your customer’s dream application to life better, cheaper, faster than they could do it themselves, then just say YES to history.

If your founder’s long-remaindered tome on Glass-Steagall has led your company to a richer understanding of the financial services industry which in turn lets you develop software that helps your customers’ IT departments deal better with regulations, then just say YES to history.

If that kiss from Bill Gates was so great that your company never washed its lips again, and now you’re on their super-duper, insider-info partner list, which lets you bring new OS-compatible products to market the instant the new OS is released, then just say YES to history.

You may be standing on the shoulders of giants. You may be perched on the haunches of midgets. But if your history’s supposed to matter to your customers as much as it does to you, you’re the one who’s going to have to come up with the why’s and the how’s, or you’ll be condemned to repeat a mistake that all too many companies make when it come to history: you’ll make it all about you, rather than all about what it means for your customers.

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