During the SLA annual conference in Chicago in July 2012, the Content Division of the SIIA sponsored a roundtable discussion bringing together buyers and sellers of content products. The purpose of the roundtable was to facilitate meaningful dialogue about key trends in the industry affecting both buyers and sellers and to begin exploring solutions to the mutual challenges we face.

As the Director of Research for FreePint, a Content Division member company and frequent partner with SLA, I had the pleasure of planning for and leading this roundtable.

It was an opportunity to have, in real-time and face-to-face, a conversation I often feel like I’m having with one person at a time. Buyers and sellers of content products and services often complain about the same challenges and fret about the same technologies.

Too often, they resolve these issues for themselves, in isolation from their market or their suppliers. The result is a solution that misses the mark – and often wastes money as well as time.

The mobile example

The most obvious example of this disconnect between buyers and sellers came with the flood of mobile apps in 2010, following the launch of the iPad. Sellers were bombarding FreePint with requests to review their freshly minted mobile apps for our publications. But when we asked our buy-side customers about their interest in these, they were indifferent at best. Of all the things buyers were interested in during 2010, mobile applications of content products were nowhere near the top 10. Or even the top 20.

Here was a case where the sell-side had dived fully into a new area without having a critical understanding of the interest or even readiness of the buy-side to go there with them.

Clearly the industry is going mobile – but it took 18 months for corporate buyers to start to get to a similar level of interest in mobile delivery as the sellers were in developing these solutions. Those 18 months represent lost time and opportunities, as well as deep investment in product development that lacked a viable market.

End User Focus

Similar miscommunications and disconnects currently occur in another area of mutual interest for buyers and sellers: focus on the end user. Both buyers and sellers have intensified interest in meeting the needs of corporate end users, yet they rarely work closely together to come up with comprehensive solutions for addressing this mutual need.

How often are buyers and sellers truly collaborating, pooling knowledge, to better understand, serve and get results from end users? I suspect that this disconnect represents another significant opportunity cost, like the disconnect over mobile was more dramatically and visibly in 2010 and 2011.

Mutual Benefit

Getting buyers and sellers talking offers benefits to both.

Buyers get the following benefits:

• Purchasing improvements – Buyers that have closer relationships with sellers will also have better insight as to which solutions will best suit their needs… not to mention a bit of leverage to push for solutions that better meet their needs.
• Strategic planning – The more buyers understand the problems sellers were trying to address with product design, the better they can plan for inclusion of those products in their content portfolios. Similarly, they can better train and support users of those products on their strengths.
• Process engagement – Plugged-in buyers can inform and be informed by the product development process. Buyers who know that their seller-partners are working towards a particular outcome in a 24-month time horizon can plan along the same time horizon. That’s a whole set of variables buyers now have increasing control over or early warning on.

Sellers also achieve benefits:

• Getting closer to the buyer – Product development has always been all about the customer: anticipating and meeting their needs. Sellers can accomplish this by having frequent conversations with savvy buyers about the desired business outcomes of their content investments. At the same time, sellers have to understand technology, content or purchase requirements that buyers face or expect to face in the future.
• The right insight – Increasingly, sellers of content products and services may not be working with an information professional in an organization, but rather with a representative of a group of end-users. For example, the director of sales may be the first and last point of contact for a contract relating to a lead-generation product.

However, information professionals – whatever their current titles – have an incredibly important role to play in helping sellers understand their organizations’ needs. They are the professionals who should have a clearer, more strategic view of what the organization wants and needs with regard to content products, now and in the future.

In addition to insight from end users, sellers of content products and services are well-served by cultivating ongoing relationships with the information professionals who are no longer gatekeepers of sales. Even if a seller’s sales process does not require involvement of information professionals, they can help identify potential barriers and objections that even the smartest end-user would have no way of knowing.

Join the SIIA’s Content Division for future dialogue. Register your interest in notification about any upcoming Buyer-Seller Programming webinars, discussions, or announcements by contacting Jennifer Hansen.

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Robin has been working with FreePint since 2004, and, since joining full time in 2006, is responsible for strategic planning, product development, relationship management, research and communications. She currently heads the FreePint Research division.

Robin Neidorf ran a research and communications consulting business for 10 years, prior to joining Free Pint Limited. As a consultant, she focused on strategic planning, using information to make better decisions, and creating effective audience-focused communications across different media.

Robin has worked with a wide range of organisations in the for-profit and non-profit sector. She has developed online communities, publications and distance learning modules for a range of business purposes. She is the author of Teach Beyond Your Reach: An instructor’s guide to developing and running successful distance learning classes, workshops, training sessions and more (Cyber Age, 2006) and the co-author of E-Merchant: Retail Strategies for e-Commerce (Addison-Wesley, 2001).

Robin can be reached at robin.neidorf@freepint.com