When Customers Should Pay To Be Sold

"An RFID 'reality check' can ensure your organization overcomes the greatest barriers between your strategic goals and measurable value."

--Diamond Cluster International

Diamond Cluster's article about RFID adoption says almost as much about how to get customers to pay to be sold as it does about RFID. The paper is titled, "Achieving RFID’s Full Potential" and the authors are Darin Yug, Bill Gilliland, and Steven Legnine. It's currently the first white paper listed at the top of the firm's website.

The white paper does a thorough and thoughtful job of taking the reader through the minefield of implementing a technlogy that the authors openly admit won't be quite ready for prime time for a number of years.

Which, if you think about it, is really a great marketing strategy for a firm that has identified future RFID implementations as a hot market. Most technology white papers, by contrast, do their best to sell the reader on whatever technology the author's company markets. Those papers often have titles like: "The Five Essential Ingredients for X" or "The Perils of Not Having Y." While such papers follow a classic approach, and very often an effective one, there are times when circumstances simply won't let you make that strong a case.

What Diamond Cluster does instead is sell its expertise on helping organizations deal with a lot of potentially troubling issues -- rather than paper over those issues in hopes of enticing readers to just go out and buy anyway. The strategy is to get organizatons to buy the consulting firm's expertise well before adoption -- so the firm is strongly positioned when the time to actually implement something does arrive. In effect, what they're doing is selling you now on the opportunity to sell you later. Brilliant.

Almost any technology vendor can write a "reality check" white paper and more should.