How Not To Sell Software in 2012

Don’t require that I waste my time on a sales call – or, worse, in a “webinar” – before I can give you my money. Instead, provide all the information I need about your product on your website.

We'd love to. The truth is it is the customers who ask for demonstrations, walk-thoughs and tours of the software. I spent weeks training to learn how this software works, who it is a good fit for and who it is not a good fit for. It's simply not realistic to think every product can be explained on a website and comprehended without misconceptions. Also, a robust software suite has many, many user needs. Creating a web site which is custom tailored to each need type is a very high permutation.

Don’t make it hard for me to try your software. If I can’t play with a trial version or sandbox immediately, I’m moving on.

Don't assume you know how to use it and can make an adequate evaluation in that 2 - 10 minutes you will spend on the trial version. Also, the purchaser is often not the same person as the user. I want them on the phone as well to make sure they have the need and skills to utilize what I have to sell. If you buy something that is a poor fit, I may have your money now but you will bury me with support and complaints later on. That's not worth it.

Don’t hide your pricing behind a sales process, and don’t play pricing games. I can find and talk to your other customers basically instantly in order to determine what they paid for your product and if they’re getting the value they expected from it. I will do this. So just put the price of what you’re selling on your site and skip the games.

How much is a website? Just tell me how much it costs to build a web site and skip the games. /snark. How much is a house? It depends on if you are talking about an outhouse or the White House. I don't know what kind house you want when you are looking at our site. Also, if you could teach everyone to do that competitive research you claim to be able to do, I would appreciate it. If all customers could become as educated as you claim you can become before buying my stuff, I'd be printing money.

Don’t make me read a whitepaper in order to get essential information about your product. Put it on your website. In HTML. Not in a PDF, not in Flash, not in Silverlight or ActiveX or whatever. What your product does, on your website, in HTML.

That's just a way to collect your contact info to follow up. It is a poor method. I am in sales and I am not giving anyone my contact info for a white paper either. But if you are getting something of value from me, I want something from you.

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.

If you went through the white paper form mentioned above, you probably never read the text next to the submit button saying "okay to contact me". Businesses should not use this method, consumers should not patronize it.

Don’t make it hard for me to talk to a technical person at your company about the nitty gritty details of how your product works. If you don’t provide a forum for those discussions, someone else will, and you won’t control it.

Sure, you can speak with my development folks. You and everyone else who wants to know how we built what we built before spending a single dollar with us. Also, don’t assume that your sales person doesn’t know. Ask them. If they can’t answer your question, they should be able to find the answer quickly. If they can't, you just learned you shouldn't buy their product. Move on.

Don’t make it hard for me to pay for your product. I have a credit card. I also have a PayPal account, a Google payments account, and an Amazon payments account. Any of those are fine (although PayPal is not ideal). Any other billing process is not.

If I charge $10,000 for something, I'm not going to give PayPal a cut of that as well. Also, you having access to those payment methods doesn't mean you have the authority to use them. I've been burned by that quite a bit.

This should go without saying, but don’t cold call or spam me. If your product is good and meets my needs, I promise that I’ll find out about it.

This is just a pollyanna way of looking at it. Spam is wrong, nothing to debate with on that. But yes, I will cold call you if I identify you as someone who may need what I have. If you don't want my product, don't ask me to call later, don't refer me to the intern to while away the hours with pointless questions. Just say no, you are not interested. I will listen and be happy to move on to the next customer.

I have no real experience with big companies. Could you educate me on a few points? In particular, it strikes me as odd that these would be any different from consumer to small company to big company:

Don’t hide your pricing behind a sales process

Do people shopping for solutions for big companies not have any idea what their budget is? I understand there are always details to work out in the sales process on deals like these, but it seems to me that immediately knowing that your product costs five times what I'm supposed to spend would save your sales people some time.

Don’t make me read a whitepaper in order to get essential information about your product. Put it on your website. In HTML.

A web page with a URL that isn't a mile long seems like about the easiest way there could be to read about a product and share what you've read with other people in your company. Why would you not do this in 2012?

Don’t make it hard for me to talk to a technical person at your company about the nitty gritty details of how your product works.

I know a lot of times, technical people aren't the ones making the buying decisions, but is it rare for them to be involved? It seems like some easily accessible technical information could really speed things up when the purchasing guy asks the tech guy "will this actually work for us?", or is that not how things are done?

I can think of sensible reasons people would violate the author's other demands when smaller companies aren't the target market, but these seem universal. Since I might some day make things I want to sell to bigger companies, I'd really like to understand what I'm missing.

It's more akin to buying a house. You've got to find one of many that satisfies your unique needs. You've got due diligence to do. You've got negotiations. You've got an entire purchasing process to follow that is externally imposed. You may have renovations to make before you can move in and need estimates on that.

A website can cover generalities, but the reality is that enterprise products are big, complicated, and (generally) are not purchased by technical people, although technical people may be involved in part of the review process or requirements analysis.

The only process more complicated is selling to the government.

1. I want to see prices when I browse listings. This is fairly normal in real estate, even though prices end up being somewhat negotiable. Why not in enterprise software?

2. I want a decent amount of information before I even pick up the phone or write an email. If you were listing houses for sale, it would be foolish not to include some photos, the location, the size and number of rooms, etc.... I don't want this information in a mixture of PDFs, MS Office files, flash animations and such. I want HTML pages that are easy to read, copy data from and email to others.

3. If I'm buying a house, I probably want to see such things as inspection reports and maintenance records. These things should be fairly easy for me to get even if they're not on the public website.

Someone explained to me that one reason companies selling enterprise software are so eager to get someone on the phone to sales rather than browsing the website is that they then feel they have something invested in the process and are less likely to back out[0]. Having always been the nerdy type, this idea was very foreign to me, but it seems to be true from what I know of the average person. I also learned from an early age how to recognize and respond appropriately to salespeople trying to use emotional and psychological tricks to manipulate me. I sometimes have an unreasonable expectation that others will do the same.

[0]This is a variation of the sunk cost fallacy.