A Beard and a Dog
Today I was eating lunch at a sidewalk cafe with my dog at my feet, and a man walked up to me and asked me if I could help him. He looked sort of like a slightly disheveled yet surprisingly well-dressed homeless person, so I was curious what he wanted and asked him how I could help. He seemed confused and asked me what street he was on and where some other streets in the area were. I told him and asked him what he was looking for, and he said "my car - I lost track of it two days ago!" He then went on to say that he had Multiple Sclerosis and it made him forgetful, but that he could trust me with helping him since I looked trustworthy - because I had "a beard and a dog."
I was surprised and amused to hear him say this, but it made me think: what are the clues that we use to decide if we're going to trust someone? And more importantly for you and me, how will you decide if you trust us at ENKI to serve your business?
For me, I most often trust someone based on my intuition, and then secondary characteristics like their track record, their affiliations, their experience, knowing who trusts them, or simply knowing them in some way perhaps because we went to school together or worked together.
Since ENKI provides not just cloud computing but also operations services that effectively take the place of all or part of an IT department, it is critical that we be trustworthy, and that prospective customers trust us. Our business was founded on providing trust as the fundamental product, and our Enki Way defines how we go about it. But customers who come to us still need to know more than our intentions in order to trust us. Typical ways I see them trying to figure this out is asking us:
- How long we've been in business providing cloud (4 years: longer than any other cloud computing company.)
- Getting references by referrals (our #1 source of new customers is referrals!)
- Checking the company principals - such as me - out through social networks, bios, associations, etc. (For example, we get quite a bit of business from Cornell Alumni who are entrepreneurs and businesspeople that I meet through my Cornell connections.) Our founders' experience as the CIO of NetSuite has definitely brought trust to us as having a team that knows about reliable computing.
- Looking at the terms of the relationship that we offer, such as our 10x downtime guarantee, our rapid turnaround service SLAs, and our satisfaction guarantee - all of which show that we have skin in your game.
- How many customers/employees/locations we have.
- What technologies and vendors we use, presumably to gauge our judgment.
- and more...
These are all passive methods, in the sense that people use them without interacting with us. No matter what answer we give, this makes ENKI look a lot like other cloud providers (aside from the technical and service differences of our offering.) In some ways, they are like looking to see if we have a beard and a dog! Personally speaking, there are plenty of guys with beards and dogs that I'd find difficult to trust.
Instead, what we have found is that our best tool to convince people to trust us is... us. The majority of our customers' executives have met our founders at some point, even if they're based in other countries. We've even made early and late trips to the airport to meet customers on their layovers. And failing a personal meeting, a phone call with our extraordinarily gifted sales team or with one of the founders can tell you a lot about us. Each of our founders and partners is always happy to talk to propects about ourselves and of course, your challenges in securing cost-effective enterprise-grade computing for your business.
So if you find what we offer interesting, I invite you to call us. I personally will be delighted to speak with you. Even if you aren't impressed by beards or dogs!
By the way, I never found out the particulars of why that man was looking for his car. It was a strange story - strange enough that I will keep looking for him every time I go downtown.
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