|
 The
Software Sales Pitch - Are you Savvy?
By Pete Johnson
It's a common tale: Some business need arises for
capability your IT department doesn't currently offer but there are
multiple commercial alternatives available and maybe even an open source
solution that can help you fill your gap. Then again, you could always
write the thing yourself.
Build? Buy? Both?
Here are some ideas that might help you decide.
The vendor sales team: Please give us your
money
Every 3rd party vendor has a bunch of really nice people
with friendly smiles and company issued button down shirts. While they
likely have great technical expertise and are easy to get along with, make
no mistake about what their job is: to get you to spend money. It actually
seems like a pretty neat job, you just sometimes have to take statements
these folks make with a bit of skepticism.
The typical initial presentation this group will give
includes an overview of all the cool features their product provides, an
architectural layout of a basic installation, and a slide showing an
explosion of company logos representing their install base. While this is
a nice starting point, these first conversations rarely go into enough
depth to allow you to make an informed decision. It's a good idea to get a
round of these from all the vendors you are considering before going deeper
with any one of them. For open source or build from scratch alternatives,
create a presentation that goes to the same level of depth so that all
possibilities are given equal consideration.
How do you go deeper in a way that will let you make a
decision?
Building assessment criteria: Spreadsheets
abound
Start by listing out the requirements that each group
that will be involved in running the end solution has. Business
constituents will likely have a list of features, IT staff might enumerate
specific technologies they may or may not want, support could want to know
about logging capabilities, and management may worry about the financial
stability of the vendors being considered. Think about the different
lifecycles of the various parties involved and total implementation costs
(machine acquisition and any post-sales consulting) as well.
Inevitably, your criteria will get placed into some kind
of spreadsheet scorecard that can be used to objectively measure the
different options against one another. Each criterion gets a row where it
is scored with some numerical range and weighted relative to its overall
importance. The decision makers in your company fill out scores after each
detailed vendor presentation and whoever scores the highest wins.
While this approach is a good one to take it's important
to remember that it is a guide, not an absolute measure. A spreadsheet
like this can help synthesize large amounts of information for easy viewing
but that doesn't mean that the weightings or scoring are perfect or that
non-quantifiable criteria might lean your decision on way over another. Be
sure to bring along a healthy dose of common sense when it comes time to
make a decision.
With criteria in hand, how do you go about getting enough
detail from the vendor to score it?
Use Cases and Being a Little
Mean
If you simply hand over your criteria scoring spreadsheet
to the vendors and say, "Can your product do this?" the answer will either
be "Yes" or "It's in our next release." A better approach is to look at
your criteria and come up with step by step use cases that represent as
many as possible. Then ask the vendors to demonstrate how each scenario
can be accomplished using their product. You still have to look out for
the "It's in our next release" answer, but you'll get a deeper look at the
product.
Give the vendor very little time between when they see
your use cases and they demonstrate how each is fulfilled with their
offering. This prevents some behind the scenes magic or that "special beta
version" from appearing during the demo that just happens to meet your
exact need but isn't in the full release yet. Shrinking that window of
opportunity puts extra pressure on the vendor sales staff to come up with a
demonstration, but you get a truer picture of the out-of-the-box
capabilities.
Summary
- Remember that those nice vendor sales folks are trying to sell you
something
- Think about different lifecycles and total deployment cost when
creating your assessment criteria
- A scoring spreadsheet is nice, but not a complete substitute for
common sense
- Build use cases from the assessment criteria and give vendors very
little time to implement a demonstration to get an accurate reading on what
their product can do
Until next time,
Pete Johnson
To
read more of Pete's work, visit nerdguru.net
|
Back to newsletter list
Perspective
