Comment by davemel37 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by davemel37 | Hacker News Reader

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I humbly disagree with your theory that making money for a company is more valuable than saving them money.

As a marketer/rainmaker, I can assure you that I get much further with clients when I can cut their advertising and marketing costs, or cost per acquisition, than when I find them more profitable traffic and revenues.

My clients never scream, bring me the rain... They demand, "Bring Me More Rain For Less Money."

I think the dynamic going on is that people hate losing money, and when you find them wasted money they can save, they view it as "their rightful money,not something you got for them." In fact, saving them money that they were wasting can really rattle their ego, and make them feel like they were taken advantage of, and who wants to be the bearer of bad news?!

Making money for companies though is just not powerful enough to be the end all solution to rake in the dough.

Being able to find cheaper traffic and revenues to generate proportionately less traffic or revenue is a much bigger win. (i.e. if you make them $1000 at a cpa of $100 a customer... you are better off generating for them $800 for a $75 cpa... even though the rain is less, the cpa is better, which makes them look really good, and is a defensible place to be...

You're still way up the pointy end of the business though. You are directly involved in acquiring customers.

I think the OP was making the contrast more with people who try and reduce the companies admin overhead slightly by automating parts of the accounting system.

That type of thing is easy for a company to put off and involves getting through cultural change and threatening people's turf to implement. A harder path.

Agreed. My point was simply being a rainmaker isn't enough. You need to give your boss or client a defensible position to take about hiring you. One that makes them look good to their bosses, boards, etc... (i.e. lowering a CPA sells a much stronger fantasy than acquiring customers at a higher but acceptable rate.)

I was going to write the same thing: it's really really difficult to get clients when your pitch is "I can increase your revenues" because the average client wonders if you can deliver on your promises. But when you talk about saving money they are all ears.

When I was 12 a friend of my dad's was complaining about problems managing his warehouses and I offered to write him a program that would solve his problems and save him money.

That's how I got my first job, writing some code for $70 an hour, not bad at all.

Right now I'm working on a project that has a long list of clients (clients, not users) signed up and hasn't even launched.

Our catch? we are not only better than the competition, we're up to 40% less expensive.

Thanks for sharing. It's interesting to note that within a profit center (marketing), cost cutting is useful.

I think it depends a lot on your audience. If you're selling an IT system to an IT director, you can emphasize the cost savings. But if you're selling the IT system to a CEO you might emphasize how it helps the company's customers and leads to more revenue in the long run.

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