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Proving our Worth
Bonni Graham at the June Berkeley chapter meeting
by Joe Devney

"People don't understand what we do, how we do it, or why we do it." That is the first hurdle technical writers need to overcome in order to improve people's perceptions of the value of our services, according to Bonni Graham.

Many of the attendees at the meeting already knew Bonni in her capacity as the Director/Sponsor of STC's Region 8. This evening, though, she was speaking as an experienced technical writer and the founder of a documentation company Manual Labour. Her presentation was titled, "Psst! Wanna Buy Some Doc? Selling Content Development to Clients, Co-workers, and Management." She was there to talk about marketing for tech writers-often in the first person plural, to include both herself and her audience.

Marketing and selling don't come easy to technical writers, Bonni said. She cited several reasons, having to do with the profession and the types of people attracted to it-often introverts who are uncomfortable drawing attention to themselves. But we need to work on sales skills nonetheless-marketing ourselves and our work is important to our professional success. Too many people, she said, think that "we write documentation the way they wrote term papers in college," that is, late at night before the paper is due, with little or no preparation.

This perception of our writing skills and technical knowledge is inadequate. The work we do places us in a unique position between the engineering and marketing arms of a technical company, and the skills we bring to the job help us act as a bridge between the two areas.

More important, the value we add to the final product can contribute to its success or failure. Bonni said that the technical writing profession is at a crucial point in its history. To make her point, she first explained the "technology adoption bell curve." She described this as a bell curve with a long tail, that could be split into five stages: innovators, early adopters, mainstream, mature, and declining. She used the wired telephone as an example of a technology that has been through these stages in the last century, and is now declining as wireless phones gain more and more prominence.

The important point in this progression, she said, is the "chasm" between the early adopter stage and the mainstream stage. (This concept comes from Geoffrey Moore, a "guru of high-tech marketing," according to Bonni.) It is at this point that the technology must improve substantially in order to become widely adopted. The qualities that appealed to the first two groups-innovators and early adopters-will turn away mainstream buyers. New and slick and esoteric won't wash. Most people want the technology to work easily and well.

Technical communication as a profession is on the brink of this chasm, Bonni said. We have already sold our services to everyone who understands them. To cross the chasm, we need to create a "whirlwind of demand," to use Moore's phrase.

A company that had successfully crossed the chasm, said Bonni, is Microsoft. The use of Microsoft as an example we should emulate caused a noticeable discomfort in Bonni's audience. People objected that Microsoft reached is position by unethical means, by strong-arming, by monopolistic practices. This did not seem to be the message that people wanted to hear.

Bonni persisted. She acknowledged that Microsoft was "not a shining example," that it was indeed a monopoly, in trouble with the government for its marketing practices. But they weren't always like that, she pointed out. She wanted to talk about the earlier history of Microsoft, when they were still trying to establish their niche in the operating system market.

Her point was that the marketing was not aimed at consumers. They weren't offering a good or easy-to-use operating system. Consumers didn't see the marketing she was talking about. Their market in this case was the computer manufacturers. These companies made desktop systems, but the computer was a mere "paperweight" until it had an operating system installed. Microsoft offered an OS that could be installed easily and then sold with the computer. This is the market they aimed at, and in which they were successful.

The lesson she took from this episode was to "find a market you can satisfy completely, and then satisfy that market completely." Apparently aware of the discomfort that some audience members had with the idea of pushing a poor product, she said, "We need to find a way to satisfy the manufacturers while still getting good documentation through the system."

In terms of documentation written for technology companies, the ultimate goal is the satisfaction of the companies' customers. We need to speak to this in terms that our clients can understand: we need to address profitablity. How does our work affect the company's bottom line? Bonni gave a few examples.

Increases sales: One happy customer will tell seven other people; one unhappy customer will warn twenty others about the company.

Cuts costs: Improve the manual so fewer people call tech support. (But be careful in using this rationale, because some companies charge for tech support and so see it as a profit center.)

Increases the productivity of the software engineers: A technical writer can produce better documentation, at lower cost, than an engineer who is pulled away from development to write a manual.

On an individual level, Bonni recommended that each tech writer define his or her own "sustainable competitive advantage." That is, what do you bring to the effort that your competitor can't? She explained a few marketing concepts, but the most succinct piece of advice she had was, "Find out what is keeping the CEO up at night." It may be loss of market share, lowered profits, increased costs, or other factors. Then tailor your marketing pitch to solving that problem.

In the question-and-answer session that followed her formal presentation, Bonni was asked by a brand-new STC member how the organization can help in providing the statistics to back up members' presentations to clients. Who does the research? Bonni explained that because of the structure of the STC, they had little capital and little freedom to sponsor the necessary research. But the STC board is beginning to discuss how to get the research done, and how to publicize the worth of the profession. She will have more concrete information in the coming months.

Another audience member asked how to sell the services of the technical publications department to her corporate bosses, in a company that was facing layoffs. This answer to this question began with Bonni recommending that the questioner talk to the company CFO first, and led to her pulling out research and stories from specific projects she had worked on. In one case, reducing tech support calls by only 7 percent paid for the cost of improved documentation. And her company found that product returns for one company were for equipment that worked, but whose manual made setting it up too frustrating.

Bonni gave one final piece of advice: "We have to stop being the grammar nazis," she said, because everybody hates their English teacher. We need to be perceived as resources for the company, instead of scolds.