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How Not To Sell Software in 2012

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Re: How Not To Sell Software in 2012

#101

Post by mtts »

raganwald wrote: post #17

There's no software priced between $1000 and $75,000. I'll tell you why. The minute you charge more than $1000 you need to get serious corporate signoffs. You need a line item in their budget. You need purchasing managers and CEO approval and competitive bids and paperwork. So you need to send a salesperson out to the customer to do PowerPoint, with his airfare, golf course memberships, and $19.95 porn movies at the…

This was even untrue when Joel wrote it in 2004. If you're a small to medium sized business either in 2004 or in 2012 you pay in this price range for:

- Site-wide MS Office licenses

- Site-wide Adobe licenses (around 3000 a pop, I believe, so that's a LOT of licenses before you hit 75,000)

- SAP Business One

- or another ERP package aimed at small to medium sized business (AFAS comes to mind, but I'm sure there are others)

- MS SQL Server

- Supported Magento installations

... etc

Re: How Not To Sell Software in 2012

#102

Post by zyeljanee »

Talking about sale of software, many people are searching for App Stores. What are the consequences behind this. Talking about sale of software, many people are searching for App Stores. What are the concequences behide this.

Re: How Not To Sell Software in 2012

#103

Post by flannell »

schnaars wrote: post #86
InclinedPlane wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Shut up and take my money!" applies at both ends of the spectrum. If a hundred thousand people want to give you $10 through an app store, it might make sense to figure out how to make that possible. If one person wants to give you a million dollars using an ACH transfer or through gold doubloons, you should probably figure out how to make that possible too.

I'll take 1 person giving me $1M over 100K giving me $!0 any day.

Until that 1 person goes elsewhere, then you have no business!

Re: How Not To Sell Software in 2012

#104

Post by arethuza »

schnaars wrote: post #86
InclinedPlane wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Shut up and take my money!" applies at both ends of the spectrum. If a hundred thousand people want to give you $10 through an app store, it might make sense to figure out how to make that possible. If one person wants to give you a million dollars using an ACH transfer or through gold doubloons, you should probably figure out how to make that possible too.

I'll take 1 person giving me $1M over 100K giving me $!0 any day.

Have you ever been involved in sales at that level? To say it is painful (on both sides) is an underestimate.

I'd rather that $1M revenue was split down into something more like 200 sales of $5K.

Re: How Not To Sell Software in 2012

#105

Post by hessenwolf »

wheels wrote: post #36

> Practically everyone who’s paying for software is doing so through an app store And how well's that working for them? • All of the revenue for the thousands of vendors in the Apple App Store together for 2011: $3.6 billion • Oracle's revenue alone for 2011: $36 billion Notice that decimal point there? There's a reason it's in a different place. I don't like the enterprise sales process – being on either side of it,…

It seems a rather narrow definition of 'practically everyone'.

Re: How Not To Sell Software in 2012

#106

Post by InclinedPlane »

schnaars wrote: post #86
InclinedPlane wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Shut up and take my money!" applies at both ends of the spectrum. If a hundred thousand people want to give you $10 through an app store, it might make sense to figure out how to make that possible. If one person wants to give you a million dollars using an ACH transfer or through gold doubloons, you should probably figure out how to make that possible too.

I'll take 1 person giving me $1M over 100K giving me $!0 any day.

There are pros and cons to both. Someone paying you $1M may start to act like they own you. Worse yet, if you don't have much other business, it might be true. Also, the process of selling will likely be long, drawn out, and complicated, wasting a lot of time you could use for development.

Also, it might be a lot harder to grow your business from 1 to N $1M buyers, whereas it might be comparatively easier to grow from 100K people paying $10 to 10M paying $10 or, say, 10M paying $10, 10K paying $1k, etc.

Re: How Not To Sell Software in 2012

#107

Post by dansingerman »

The problem here is a lack of fit between the vendor, who is geared up to sell to Enterprises, and the buyer who is not an 'Enterprise' business.

The Enterprise software sales process is about navigating big businesses' procurement processes, and helping the buyer build a business case that the enterprise will accept.

I'm going through this pain myself. I work for a startup, and some of the vendors we are talking to are clearly geared up to sell 'Enterprise' software to 'Enterprises'.

But I'm CTO of a small startup, and I just want to know what the damn software does, and how much it costs. There's no procurement process, probably not much of a (detailed) business case. I need to buy or build something, and I need to know how much it will cost to buy.

What I do think the writer is correct about, is that software selling is moving towards a self-service/appstore model (not that I see Enterprise software sales disappearing very quickly) and eventually the Internet is likely to disrupt it like many other industries.

All that said, I also found the Enterprise Software sales model really painful when I worked for an Enterprise level business ("Hello IBM, can I buy a database from you?" "Yes, please meet with our sales team of 24 people as a first step")

Re: How Not To Sell Software in 2012

#109

Post by ralmeida »

About trial versions, a strange idea has just occurred me: has anyone out there thought of offering a trial in two separate periods? For example: 15 trial days = 1 day now + 14 days starting whenever you want it to.

This is to solve the problem that when I stumble upon a service that has a trial period, I have a strong urge to see what it's like, but am afraid that I will forget about the service for n-1 days, when I will get an email telling me that the trial has ended and I haven't gotten around to explore it fully.

Say, for example, I want to try out a project management suite. If I have a split trial period, I can explore the features and overall feel of the product for myself on a day and then prepare my workmates to use it in a test project, and only start the second part of the period when we are ready.

Has anyone thought deeper about the advantages and disadvantages of this?

Re: How Not To Sell Software in 2012

#110

Post by jasonkolb »

patio11 wrote: post #14

Don’t automatically sign me up for a newsletter about your company or product when I give you my contact information. Ideally, don’t request my contact information at all until I’m giving you money. I agree with the first part -- always ask people for permission, probably by kicking them a sweetener (e.g. "1 month email course on X"). I have data that I cannot show you which is in you-could-run-your-company-on-just-t…

So who would you put up as an example of a company that's doing this well? I'd like to build a list but the enterprise market seems a little sophisticated for your typical list-building landing page.
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