I’ve been back in a software product area since the beginning of June, and I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at product descriptions and literature. Not just IBM’s, mind you, but those of our competitors as well. This includes traditional, commercial “proprietary” software and commercial open source software.
Some of the descriptions of products in the industry are quite good, but many are pretty bad. They seem to range from “this is so high level that you have no idea what the product does” to “this has a long list of technical details that we hope impresses you even though you might not know how they could possibly help your business.”
I know, I know, different descriptions for different audiences. What you say to someone in development or the CTO should probably be different from what you say to the CIO and almost certainly different from what you say to the CFO. However, when there is only one, everyone suffers.
You need to know who your audience is (“segmentation”) and then shape what you say. Explicitly address your different audiences. It’s ok to say right at the beginning of each paragraph to whom you are speaking.
Here are a few suggestions, written from the perspective of a customer.
- First and foremost, the goal in acquiring software is to accomplish something. Tell me if your product will help me do that. This might be a simple yes or no.
- If I am a developer, tell me how easily your product will let me do what I wish and how it will make my life simpler and more productive. This new ease is in comparison to the previous version of your product as well as offerings from your competitors. Don’t overdo it on cute statements like “we make developers happy.”
- Match new or improved technical features to business value. “By doubling the amount of memory your application can use, you can now serve 25% more customers in the same amount of time and increase your revenue.”
- Regarding business value, stating how your software can help increase revenue (as above), improve security, increase availability, improve customer loyalty, decrease maintenance costs, and simplify integration with other parts of the business are all good things. If your software will help do none of these, why would I possibly install it?
- Don’t be overly simplistic about TCO (total cost of ownership) and TCA (total cost of acquisition). I can add up transactional, service, and support costs over 5 years as well as you can.
- Do, however, give me a way to compute the real return on investment from your software. Even if your TCA is $0, I may need to pay my people, your people, or a services integrator money to make it work for me. Give me examples based on real customers if possible.
- If I read your website and after 5 minutes I still don’t have the vaguest idea what your product does or why I might want to install it, you’ve failed. Start over.
- Separate promises of future functionality and value from what you can do right now. I’m interested in your roadmap, but I have problems to solve right now. Do not imply you can do more today than you can.
- Use graphics well to convey what your software does and the value it gives me. Don’t think that adding more tiny boxes with tinier print in them improves things. You are educating me about your offerings so I can make an intelligent and well informed decision. You are helping me make the case for acquiring your software within my organization.
- For emphasis: tell me how your software will make my organization better, more efficient, and more profitable, and how I can serve my customers better. If it will lead to great personal success for me, so much the better!
Wow,
this is insanely well timed posting – as I just moaned in Google+ about my experiences with – ehm – IBM websites and trying to understand, learn and get to try Websphere Process Server. The only reason why I bother to invest time to it, because certain customers have made commitments to Websphere platform and want to utilize existing investments.
There are really good ideas and nifty features in the platform, but it is impossible to get exited when all the good information is buried under enterprisey marketing speak and cornucopia of long documents. As a architect / consultant / developer type of character I want to get to the beef and testdrive and tinker with the product as soon as possible. Give me a good 10,000 ft picture and a working example – and let me get to work! I want to get excited!
Guys at Activiti ( BPMN project from Alfresco – http://www.activiti.org/ ) do it well, but then again they do not need to target to enterprisey folks – nor Enterprise Architects who fear coding. Their target audience is developers and people who want to make things happen and do not need same kind of artificial divisions of labour as in large enterprises – where you are not allowed to communicate otherwise than in UML diagrams and WS-BPELs.
And to be honest – like I said – there are interesting ideas and features available in the process server, once you get down to it, read samples and find the right places to look at. I am becoming mildly entertained about the idea of doing work with the software, or at least thinking that it can’t be worse than getting a root canal procedure. I am just annoyed that it took me hours to get into the state of being even mildly amused.
I’d like to get excited.
I’d like to feel empowered and see how I could be really efficient with the software.
I’d like to feel that someday also with commercial IBM software :-)
I think there is a lot of blame to go around, but it’s also true that improvements are always in the work. I was at a competitor’s site yesterday and I was really surprised at the jargon and technospeak that did nothing more than lead you to suspect you were in approximately the right area.
I didn’t want to pick on anyone in particular, but rather give some general guidance on how we can all improve.
You are so right – and your post is refreshing and sobering statement to anyone already established in the IT-sector. For startup-folks and up-and-comers – who still need to win mindshare fast, have these ideas constantly in their prefrontal cortex and also in their organizational DNA.
Everyone in the company understands and has to understand their value generation to the customer – and how their behavior affects it and the customer experience.
To be honest my moaning about IBM was unfair, as IBM is doing stellar job compared to numerous other players – who keep all the real information inside just their partner extranets and/or do not give anything substancial and actionable information about their products before customer commits into project purchase via a partner.
Fierce competition and protection of ipr are the normal understandable reasons why companies think they do need to behave like this. As long as they have good ratings in Gartner and Forrester reports, have vague big name client case studies and sufficient partner network as a channel to do implementation projects and sales – then business as usual looks good on the bottomline.
I’m currently doing project with another enterprise client with an exceptionally cool information management tool-suite and it’s maker behaves just like this. The tool is absolutely magnificent and after tinkering around with the APIs and documentation it also feels technically extremely solid, having good thinking and architectural patterns all around. However not even slightest bit of this information is available to outsiders, which means that marketing and even whitepapers are insanely high level — just like you said. Similarly pricing is not even discussed or hinted in any way, as it is calculated by red robed wizards based on magical formulas on project by project basis. List prices are only for reference and range from ridiculous to absurdly insane.
And even though I might exaggerate a bit, I truly wish that numerous enterprise IT-players would take your words to their heart. There are good reasons for the status quo, but the world is changing and we need to be more open, agile and innovate better together.