What now?
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Imagine you have written a nice, shiny product, ready for sale now. Everyone agree it's good and useful, but yet the customers are not willing to buy. Because its too hard to change habits of users, because it just does what it should, because no admin has time to set it up and maintain it. All these among many other similar reasons. Competitors offer a less complete solution but yet they sell. What you would do? Add more features? Ease restrictions on functionality?
I don't think this is a serious possesion, and the evil most likely comes from your hand. Colin J Davies, The Lounge
a) Ease usability. How much of an admin is really needed to set it up? Everything from shiny paper to a setup wizard is allowed here. Can you: but that's almost an attack on your competitors that might kick back: read their configuration settings, and use them as "setup defaults", to make conversion easier? b) Get a foot into the door Don't sell under value - it's almost impossible to get prices up again. But make it cheaper than your competition for certain customers (E.g. if you fight a product like WinZip with it's agressively cheaper licenses starting from 2 users: be cheaper for a single user, but recoup on 2-10 licenses. If you compete a product where discounts start at 10 users, be cheaper in the 2-9 user range) c) Go Demo If possible, make something people can try. d) Go Demo - yourself (depends on the type of application) Is there any business (or even consumer) trade show, where potential clients exhibit? Take your laptop, a set of demo CD's, and visit them. Be prepared - you don't need a booth, just the courage and style to walk them up and find out with one question if they are potential customers. You have <1min to find out if it's worth telling them more. (listening to their marketing 5 minutes, than making them listen to you 5 minutes is impolite and wastes both theirs and your time - and their time can cost them a big client) I wouldn't want to do this, but if you feel up to the task - it#s worth it!
Those who not hear the music think the dancers are mad. [sighist] [Agile]
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Andreas Saurwein wrote: Competitors offer a less complete solution but yet they sell. As Bill Gates has shown it is equally the marketing strategy and the product itself which supports success. One more reason why so many brilliant coders languish in back rooms and blindly ponder their relative lack of success. Your competitors are probably marketing their product better. But to be sure, name your product and name their product and then we can give you our view
Paul Watson
Bluegrass
Cape Town, South AfricaPaul Watson wrote: "The Labia [cinema]... ...was opened by Princess Labia in May 1949..." Christian Graus wrote: See, I told you it was a nice name for a girl...
Interestingly, I once stumbled about a "micro-study" of OpenSource fanatics about OpenSource software what they found (or at least claimed) was: Even in the "a little bit less than"-perfect solution usually get the widest use. (It just iterated things to prove the fact, no discussion of the "why"'s)
Those who not hear the music think the dancers are mad. [sighist] [Agile]
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Imagine you have written a nice, shiny product, ready for sale now. Everyone agree it's good and useful, but yet the customers are not willing to buy. Because its too hard to change habits of users, because it just does what it should, because no admin has time to set it up and maintain it. All these among many other similar reasons. Competitors offer a less complete solution but yet they sell. What you would do? Add more features? Ease restrictions on functionality?
I don't think this is a serious possesion, and the evil most likely comes from your hand. Colin J Davies, The Lounge
Customers are always happier with a 60% solution to their problems now than with a 100% solution a year from now. "Any clod can have the facts, but having opinions is an art." Charles McCabe, San Francisco Chronicle
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Customers are always happier with a 60% solution to their problems now than with a 100% solution a year from now. "Any clod can have the facts, but having opinions is an art." Charles McCabe, San Francisco Chronicle
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With such limited details on your product I can only guess as to a few strategies. Lets say you building an AV App, You should start looking for possible viruses that may exist in the future and start building protection against them. Then you can say "Our product has protection from the potential dangerous **future viruese** A majority of all "to buy" decisions are made on raising peopled emotions not on the logic. Later Logic is justified in why the purchase decision was made. But selling on Logic (technically better product) will cause very few sales. Anyhow since your AV product can now protect you from *future viruses* you should use disburance to raise the emotions of potential customers. eg Ask the customer, What are your current plans to do under a *future virus epedemic*. Make the customer feel insecure in not having your product. I noticed many replies here as to using "Marketing", well I believe if you want sales you should use "sales techniques". Marketing has many uses but for expanding a marketing base it can be more expensive than the results it creates. Regardz Colin J Davies
Sonork ID 100.9197:Colin
You are the intrepid one, always willing to leap into the fray! A serious character flaw, I might add, but entertaining. Said by Roger Wright about me.
In general we could boost sales just by burning enough money in the right places - that works with most products. But you got to have it. Almost all buy-decisions for our (and competitiors) products are done by ROI's and cost calculations. This eliminates the "like it, buy it, justify it later" buyer.
I don't think this is a serious possesion, and the evil most likely comes from your hand. Colin J Davies, The Lounge
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One problem the british film industry used to make - not budgeting enough for marketing of their product :( Trouble is, people don't know if your product is good or bad until they're heard about somehow, often from others. The tigress is here :-D
Trollslayer wrote: One problem the british film industry used to make Would it have changed anything anyway? :) Trollslayer wrote: Trouble is, people don't know if your product is good or bad until they're heard about somehow, often from others True, but what if they hear its good and still dont buy? :((
I don't think this is a serious possesion, and the evil most likely comes from your hand. Colin J Davies, The Lounge
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Customers are always happier with a 60% solution to their problems now than with a 100% solution a year from now. "Any clod can have the facts, but having opinions is an art." Charles McCabe, San Francisco Chronicle
Not true. They can have a 100% solution now, while the competition offers less. And even for the same price. So what?
I don't think this is a serious possesion, and the evil most likely comes from your hand. Colin J Davies, The Lounge
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a) Ease usability. How much of an admin is really needed to set it up? Everything from shiny paper to a setup wizard is allowed here. Can you: but that's almost an attack on your competitors that might kick back: read their configuration settings, and use them as "setup defaults", to make conversion easier? b) Get a foot into the door Don't sell under value - it's almost impossible to get prices up again. But make it cheaper than your competition for certain customers (E.g. if you fight a product like WinZip with it's agressively cheaper licenses starting from 2 users: be cheaper for a single user, but recoup on 2-10 licenses. If you compete a product where discounts start at 10 users, be cheaper in the 2-9 user range) c) Go Demo If possible, make something people can try. d) Go Demo - yourself (depends on the type of application) Is there any business (or even consumer) trade show, where potential clients exhibit? Take your laptop, a set of demo CD's, and visit them. Be prepared - you don't need a booth, just the courage and style to walk them up and find out with one question if they are potential customers. You have <1min to find out if it's worth telling them more. (listening to their marketing 5 minutes, than making them listen to you 5 minutes is impolite and wastes both theirs and your time - and their time can cost them a big client) I wouldn't want to do this, but if you feel up to the task - it#s worth it!
Those who not hear the music think the dancers are mad. [sighist] [Agile]
peterchen wrote: a) Ease usability. We did that and we still remove and automate more things. Reading competitions configuration does unfortunately not help. It does not sufficiently configure the system, because they just dont provide all necessary information. It just confuses the setup process. peterchen wrote: b) Get a foot into the door Don't sell under value - it's almost impossible to get prices up again. We are at a range where we easily compete with the others (less than 10$ per seat) - multiply this by the average size of customers (5000-25000 seats) which is a significant investment. And we demo as much as possible and whenever possible. Everyone is impressed. Do they buy? Nope.
I don't think this is a serious possesion, and the evil most likely comes from your hand. Colin J Davies, The Lounge
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peterchen wrote: a) Ease usability. We did that and we still remove and automate more things. Reading competitions configuration does unfortunately not help. It does not sufficiently configure the system, because they just dont provide all necessary information. It just confuses the setup process. peterchen wrote: b) Get a foot into the door Don't sell under value - it's almost impossible to get prices up again. We are at a range where we easily compete with the others (less than 10$ per seat) - multiply this by the average size of customers (5000-25000 seats) which is a significant investment. And we demo as much as possible and whenever possible. Everyone is impressed. Do they buy? Nope.
I don't think this is a serious possesion, and the evil most likely comes from your hand. Colin J Davies, The Lounge
wow - toughie! I was thinking at a smaller scale.... Not much I can come up with here (At the end of the day, I'm just a code monkey as well ;)) $50K deals are not decided by technical reasons. You need marketing to get in, even if it's only to fight the "I never heard of them" argument. I don't believe in a big budget, esp. if you want to outcheap your competition, so you need clever ideas. In the security area, isn't there some way to "challenge" your competitors? How many companies that big size are there that need but don't have the product - neither yours, nor your competitors? They might be easier to tackle. For those that have - well, you used "80% vs. 100%" security as figures: As I don't believe in 100%, lets say 80% vs. 90%: First there might be a reverse effect: "If they are cheaper they can't be better". Second, how much do the companies gain from the switch? A promised 10% security gain for: roughly the original purchase cost, plus installation and retraining admins. Further, buying your product would be admitting they wasted money on your competitors product. (Not so when they keep it even if it's inferior - that's the way beancounters work) Can you get "in touch" to the admins? They are easier to be convinced by technical reasons, and good chances are if an admin wants a toy he knows how to persuade management.
Those who not hear the music think the dancers are mad. [sighist] [Agile]
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Not true. They can have a 100% solution now, while the competition offers less. And even for the same price. So what?
I don't think this is a serious possesion, and the evil most likely comes from your hand. Colin J Davies, The Lounge
I assumed from your post that your competition beat you to the market with an inferior product. If so, your competition supplied enough of a solution that the customers found it acceptable. It will be hard to get them to change even for a better product. Software is usually a long term committment. People don't want to learn a new way of doing things even if it is better. "Any clod can have the facts, but having opinions is an art." Charles McCabe, San Francisco Chronicle
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wow - toughie! I was thinking at a smaller scale.... Not much I can come up with here (At the end of the day, I'm just a code monkey as well ;)) $50K deals are not decided by technical reasons. You need marketing to get in, even if it's only to fight the "I never heard of them" argument. I don't believe in a big budget, esp. if you want to outcheap your competition, so you need clever ideas. In the security area, isn't there some way to "challenge" your competitors? How many companies that big size are there that need but don't have the product - neither yours, nor your competitors? They might be easier to tackle. For those that have - well, you used "80% vs. 100%" security as figures: As I don't believe in 100%, lets say 80% vs. 90%: First there might be a reverse effect: "If they are cheaper they can't be better". Second, how much do the companies gain from the switch? A promised 10% security gain for: roughly the original purchase cost, plus installation and retraining admins. Further, buying your product would be admitting they wasted money on your competitors product. (Not so when they keep it even if it's inferior - that's the way beancounters work) Can you get "in touch" to the admins? They are easier to be convinced by technical reasons, and good chances are if an admin wants a toy he knows how to persuade management.
Those who not hear the music think the dancers are mad. [sighist] [Agile]
Yeah, I know. Its pretty simple to make small deals 1 to 100 licenses are easy(!) to sell. If it goes into thousands the rules change. Even if the Gartner Group or Ernst&Young recommends it, it does not mean they (the companies) buy it. The infamous Fortune 500 (and similar sized companies) have other measures. In this range they dont care spending 10.000$+ in an usability study and then deciding they dont buy it because it doesnt fit in their current policy. We could be more then happy to get 10% of all that dont have any product in this sector, the few which use the competition are not really worth to talk about. So a switch is not even worth to consider - neither for the buyer nor for the seller. And so far we have seen that admins in networks of that scale are just "employees", a wheel in the machine of IT. They have little influence. Dead end here :)
I don't think this is a serious possesion, and the evil most likely comes from your hand. Colin J Davies, The Lounge
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I assumed from your post that your competition beat you to the market with an inferior product. If so, your competition supplied enough of a solution that the customers found it acceptable. It will be hard to get them to change even for a better product. Software is usually a long term committment. People don't want to learn a new way of doing things even if it is better. "Any clod can have the facts, but having opinions is an art." Charles McCabe, San Francisco Chronicle
In fact the biggest competitor just copied the idea of our first release, removed all the complicated stuff and wrapped it in a everybody-can-use-it package. Many buzzwords, much vapor, not much value - yet it sells. :( I agree about the long term commitment, the bigger the investment the longer the commitment. As I wrote in the answer to peterchen, we would be happy to get a part of the companies who dont use any product at all, not to talk about the ones who use competitive products.
I don't think this is a serious possesion, and the evil most likely comes from your hand. Colin J Davies, The Lounge
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Thats easier said then done. A product which is sold by volume not by single license has pretty different sales mechanisms. And this is even more true when we talk about security products. Potential buyers seldom tell you what they want, because they dont even know it. Its like "Hey, I want something to enhance the security in my network, but it must be simple, cheap and require no maintenance." That simply does not exist. You may have one but not the other. And sacrifying security for simplicity? Price is normally not a matter - except when talking about obvious value for money. If you get 100% security for X$, how much you would spend for 80% security?
I don't think this is a serious possesion, and the evil most likely comes from your hand. Colin J Davies, The Lounge
Price is normally not a matter - except when talking about obvious value for money. If you get 100% security for X$, how much you would spend for 80% security? 80% security is no security, so it's worth nothing :) -- Looking for a new screen-saver? Try FOYD: http://digilander.iol.it/FOYD