Posted on: 23rd April 2024, by Magrathea
As Oscar Wilde famously said, there is only one thing worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. A problem Magrathea has faced in the past.
If a business can have a personality type, then Magrathea is without doubt an introvert. We have always enjoyed sitting in the shade of our wonderful clients, quietly doing what we do best. It is no secret that we have never had a sales team or a marketing department. Instead, we have relied on our solid reputation for referrals and our industry involvement and contribution has been a great showcase to demonstrate our commitment and knowledge.
There is no doubt this has worked well for us and allowed us to focus on our strengths and, most importantly, do so whilst wearing scruffy t-shirts with dogs at our feet and (particularly for the techies) little need to actually speak all that often.
However, times change and as our values espouse, we have to evolve. With the mainstream migration to IP services, we have more competition than ever before but also more opportunities and use cases to serve. Therefore, it’s critical to our future success that we get better at telling the world what we can do and how we can support our clients to build on their own success.
It’s embarrassing to admit that once too often a client has sought service elsewhere simply because they didn’t know we have an off the shelf solution to their problem. Self-promotion has definitely been a big area of weakness for us.
But like all good introverts equipped with ambition and a growth mindset, we have embraced a plan that will see us take a number of small, and a couple of large, steps to deal with this weakness.
The first big step for us was to bring on board an experienced business development manager. Linda joined us late last year, having got 20 years’ experience in the tech industry, and is busy learning all about this sector. Her remit is to engage with as many of our potential and existing clients as possible to make sure they are happy with the service we are providing and help them do even more business with us. By supporting our clients through their own growth, we believe we can equally benefit by learning what they need and remaining relevant in the marketplace.
Another step, which may be obvious to those of you following our social media, was to push our MD fully out of her comfort zone and get her out speaking at events and networking across the industry. With so much passion for what we do as well as the wider industry, we can’t think of a better ambassador for Magrathea. And although Tracey has been on a personal journey to build confidence in this work, the whole team are proud of the results and positive attention it is bringing us.
And finally, the last significant step is increased promotion of what we actually offer. We still don’t have a marketing team so our clients may notice a somewhat ‘home-grown’ flavour to our campaigns, but we prefer to spend our money on product development (and cake) rather than pretty pictures – for now at least.
We are however fully committed to improving how we share what we can do for our clients over time and welcome any feedback on how we can better communicate and engage with you. We know that one size does not fit all, and some fellow introverts may not welcome a more extrovert approach that we now might be able to deliver! Just tell us how you want to work with us.
Meanwhile, we will continue to embrace our values of evolving, connecting and empowering – albeit in our uniquely introvert Magrathean way!