December 10, 2024
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Customer Preferences in IT Procurement and Reselling
Description:
I would like to learn more about the key factors that influence customer decisions when seeking IT procurement and IT reselling services. In particular, I am interested in understanding the characteristics that customers value most, especially when comparing identical products from different IT reselling companies. Additionally, I would like to explore how these values differ across various customer segments, such as state departments, higher education institutions, and private businesses.
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What is Maven?
Everyone with some kind of professional expertise!
Do you have a job? Have you ever had a job? If so, you gained knowledge that could be valuable to other professionals, and you should join Maven to find opportunities to profit from that knowledge.
Maven participants include individuals from every educational background, occupation, level of experience, and geography. Whether you are a physician, an electrician, or a race car driver, Maven welcomes you to sign up and participate in the Global Knowledge Marketplace.
But I don’t consider myself an “expert.” Why should I join Maven?
You ARE an expert. Simply by doing your job, you accumulate knowledge about a whole range of topics, products, services, technologies, activities, and people that others might find valuable. By providing access to people who possess such knowledge – people like YOU – Maven is able to help professionals make better decisions, while providing you with opportunities to profit from your own knowledge.
What kind of time commitment does Maven require?
None. Once you create your profile, simply go about your normal business and wait for invitations to consult; we will notify you when we have an inquiry that might match your expertise. You can always invest time in improving your profile and inviting others to join Maven, but you are not required to do so, nor are you required to commit any minimum time to consulting.
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Is Maven an Expert Network?
Expert networks are boutique research services for professional investors. They typically help hedge fund analysts gather information about publicly traded companies so they can trade those companies’ stocks and bonds. While expert networks can be used for legitimate equity research, they are also frequently associated with insider trading cases and even character assassination.
The term “expert network” itself is something of a misnomer, since these services are neither “expert” nor true “networks.” Some participants in expert networks are, in fact, experts (i.e. key skills, thought, and opinion leaders within their professions), but most are typical professionals who aren’t fully aware of the implications of their consulting with hedge funds. Moreover, the services themselves usually do not employ any technology, instead relying on human employees to match customers with consultants. Finally, there is little connectivity or community involved in the membership of a typical expert network – they aren’t really networks, just lists of company insiders with rudimentary profiles and contact information.
Expert networks also tend to focus almost exclusively on a single type of interaction, the short phone call, because the professional investors they serve are mostly interested in gaining quick data points on specific companies rather than developing a deeper understanding of specific technologies, products, and markets.
We don’t focus our business on hedge funds, because we don’t believe that exposing our participants to equities analysts serves their interests or those of our other customers (many of which are publicly-traded companies that do not wish to reveal their areas of interest to individuals who might be moonlighting for hedge funds). We consider this to be an enormous potential conflict of interest that we would rather avoid altogether. While one of our products, In-Depth Interviews, resembles the phone calls offered by expert networks, it only accounts for a relatively small percentage of our overall business, and we go to extraordinary lengths to screen for potential conflicts before brokering such interactions.
Furthermore, Maven is a true professional network. Both through our Knowledge Marketplace and our Knowledge Communities system, participants connect, interact with each other, and collaborate to address business challenges of all sizes. Our “expert” technology powers consulting interactions ranging from a few minutes to several months, and constantly learns and evolves in order to drive better matches in a clean and conflict-free environment.
In a way it is a shame that the term expert network has been adopted by the independent equity research firms, since the literal meaning of the term is actually a better fit for Maven!
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