“Can Do” vs Have Done”
When you are telling someone about your service do you spend more time talking about what you can do or what you have done? What about when you are writing a proposal or answering an RFP?
Unlike Mark McGwire, you’ve got to talk about the past. Talk about what you have done, what problems you’ve solved for your clients, what pain you have eased, what solutions you came up with. Those are real tangible things that you can point to as successes.
If you go the other route and talk about what you can do, what do you have to point at? Unless your crystal ball is working really well that day, you’re not going to have anything that your potential client can look to for proof.
It is pretty cool if you have a bunch of stuff you can do – It is really much cooler if you have a bunch of stuff you have done.
Prospective clients tell us something about the project in initial stages. Based on their information, I try to categorize whether it is a ecommerce application or social network project or something else. Then, I sent them a pdf document which we have created for industry vertical or problem area client is looking for with the kind of work “we have done”. Obviously those pdfs can not be sent in every case, but for sales, it really help us to score those “have done” points. Integrating “have done” in sales process through templates of similar work you have done helps. Its important to continually work on these documents and update them with new projects.
PS: There is a trend we see every year. Every consumer application we have done requires simple to innovative integration with twitter API. So, having a two page document of every thing we have done with twitter API might be a good idea.