Technology
IT services
Delivering and running technology for clients.
Four different buyers sit behind these four services: a founder costing a build, a CIO a year from renewal, an engineering head after a bad release, a COO deciding whether India gets an entity of its own. All four now ask a model first. Three of them buy through a process content can only influence. One does not, and that is where the opening is.
Where the answer is being lost
Procurement decides who wins. Content decides who gets asked.
A CIO a year from renewal asks 'What should a managed services SLA include' before drafting the spec. A founder asks 'How much does it cost to build a custom logistics platform' before deciding whether to build at all. Neither is looking for a vendor yet. They are fixing the shape of the requirement, and with it the set of firms that could meet it. The answers come from the largest outsourcers, from marketplace directories and from a decade of agency posts that repeat each other. By the time the tender goes out the incumbent renews, and the downtime stays on the books as a cost of doing business.
How we win this
The programme for it services
Take the vertical, not the service
A page about custom software development competes with every agency on earth. A page about what a dispatch-and-tracking platform costs to build, module by module, competes with almost nobody. We pick the two or three domains you have actually shipped in and write the cost, scope and integration questions for those, at the depth a CTO would test.
Write what procurement borrows
A renewal spec is rarely written from scratch. The CIO drafting it pulls severity definitions, credit structures and transition milestones from whatever they read first. If that material is yours, the requirement arrives shaped like your service and you are on the longlist before the document is circulated. This is influence at the top of procurement, not inbound, and we scope it as that.
Publish the number nobody has
Client work here is signed away in the MSA. The names, the architecture, the defect counts: none of it can be published. So we build something that can be. What a mid-market build costs by module. What a GCC seat costs in Pune against Hyderabad at the same role band. Published with the working shown, because a figure nobody can check is a figure nobody repeats.
Where the ceiling sits
Three of these four do not generate enquiries from content on their own. Application development is contested by thousands of identical firms. Managed services is decided by tender. QA is read by practitioners who recommend rather than sign. GCC advisory is the exception, and it is where we would spend first. Where you sit among them is what the diagnostic answers first, using your own buyers' prompts, before a page is commissioned.
The mix that carries it
Content
Answer and comparison pages
Cost, process, eligibility and comparison pages built for direct extraction, not for a reader who scrolls.
Content
GEO blogs and authority content
The definitive written answer to the questions your buyers put to an engine, structured so it can be lifted and attributed.
Foundation
Entity and schema engineering
Structured data and entity definition so engines know exactly what you are, where you operate, and what you are credible in.
Authority
Original data and benchmarks
Proprietary numbers, surveys and benchmarks — the most-cited asset class there is, because nobody else has them.
Distribution
Practitioner and executive content where B2B buyers and the models watching them both look.
Authority
Digital public outreach
Earned mentions, trade coverage and third-party citations — the corroboration a model checks before it names you.
The constraint we work inside
Most of what would prove this work is contracted away. Client names, architectures and incident data sit under NDA and master service agreements. So we publish method, cost structure and benchmark instead of case studies, and we clear every figure with you before it goes up. Procurement still runs on RFPs.
Specialisations
4 total
The pitch is different for each one, because the buyer, the trigger and the rules on what may be published are different for each one. Open the one that is yours.
A founder replacing a fifteen-year-old dispatch system asks 'How much does it cost to build a custom logistics platform'. The range that comes back was assembled from agencies who have never built one.
The question deciding this today
“How much does it cost to build a custom logistics platform”
- Who they sell to
- Companies needing custom software built to order
- Who signs
- CTO, product head, founder
- What starts it
- Product build, legacy replacement, in-house capacity gap
- Cost of staying invisible
- Roadmap stalls while the market moves
The answer that exists today is a rate card and a team-size table, drawn from marketplace directories and agency posts written to rank. Nobody names the integration work that eats the budget: the carrier APIs, the warehouse system that only speaks flat files, the address data nobody normalised. A CTO reads the generic figure, halves it in their head, and takes that number to a board which then underfunds the project. You have built that system twice. There is no record of it anywhere a model can reach.
What we would run
- 01Answer and comparison pages
A costed build page per domain you have shipped: modules, the integration work priced separately, what moves a figure from the low end to the high, and the version of the scope where it is cheaper not to build at all.
The prompt is a cost question, and a rate card does not answer it. What a founder needs before the budget conversation is knowing what moves the figure and why. The page that explains the movement is the one they come back to when the scope firms up.
- 02Entity and schema engineering
Entity definition that pins you to the domains and platforms you have actually delivered, with the services, locations and client size stated as structured data rather than implied by a homepage strapline.
A model with no way to tell one development firm from another selects the one it can describe precisely. Being the logistics platform firm is selectable. Being a software company is not.
- 03GEO blogs and authority content
The mechanism piece for your domain, written for someone who will check it: how allocation and routing actually decide a load, where the data model breaks under multi-leg shipments, what a rebuild has to carry from the old system on day one.
A CTO scoping a replacement reads for competence before price. One page that describes their problem correctly does more than a portfolio of logos they cannot verify.
- 04Original data and benchmarks
A published build-cost breakdown from your own delivered work, anonymised: hours by module, the ratio of integration to feature work, and how far estimates moved between kickoff and go-live.
Estimates are the one thing every buyer wants and no agency publishes. Real figures, even anonymised, are cited because there is nothing else to cite.
What we would not recommend
- Quora. A build price means nothing without a scope, so every answer sitting there is either a range too wide to use or a pitch in disguise. Yours would be read as the second one.
- Reddit. Developer subreddits treat agency posts as advertising and say so out loud. If one of your engineers wants to answer there in their own name, that is theirs to do. It is not something we would run on your behalf.
- Instagram. Every agency you are compared against already posts there, and the sameness of that feed is part of why the category reads as interchangeable. We would be adding to the problem your specialisation is meant to solve.
What a lead looks like
A product head at a third-party logistics company, six weeks into an internal build-versus-buy paper. They have read your module costing page and your integration piece, and they open with the number they got from it. They want to know whether their carrier mix changes it, and how long a discovery phase would run.
What we measure
- Named in domain-specific cost answers
- Entity resolved to your vertical
- Integration cost named, not just the day rate
- Estimate benchmark refreshed each year
What changes
The volume drops and the shape changes. A COO writes from Chicago having read your city cost comparison and wants to know what the first eighteen months of an entity build looks like. A CIO forwards your SLA page to procurement and asks to be added to the tender list. A head of engineering asks what your test evidence pack contains, because their QA lead sent them the article. Fewer of them, further along, already speaking in your definitions.
Start here
See who gets named in it services today
We put your buyers' real questions to the live models and come back with the businesses they name, the sources behind those answers, and the gap between that list and yours.