|
Establishing metrics in areas where you want to cut costs or build sales gives you measurable goals to judge the success of your knowledge development efforts. Talk to the product support team. Identify common problems and the amount of support time per day or week required to deal with each problem. Knowing those problems, you can develop a help system, user guide, software wizard, or whatever else users need to work with the product without calling product support. Knowing the problems may also help your developers improve the next version of the product! Talk to the sales department. If your sales representatives have problems during the sales process, quantify those problems. Is there a point where sales are not made unless prospective customers talk at length with a senior product developer? If so, a white paper, technical overview, or multimedia presentation may replace the senior developer's role in the sales process at a fraction of the cost. If you don't have metrics that demonstrate the magnitude of problems in areas such as product support and sales, you may focus on cutting the costs of developing the technical publications. Cutting those costs is self-defeating if costs increase in other areas. Go to Make a Business Case. Return to Cut Costs & Build Sales! page. |
