Why Your Product Demo May Be Worthless

For B2B vendors that are in the business of selling software, One common method of driving customers to your product is providing a time limited, demonstration version of that product.

This can be a great way to let prospects try before they buy. When done correctly and simply, It can give prospective customers a real world look at the basic features and functionality of your product.

While there is nothing wrong with providing demonstration versions of your software;

If you don’t do it right, don’t bother!

A story of the the demo that can only be used by experts.

I have been looking for a particular software tool for my organization. The market and vendors in this tools competitive space has hundreds of products, so it is not as if there is zero competition. In my research I found one vendor that had a product that looked to have the features I was looking for, and it also had a demonstration version of the product. My first thought was great!

I downloaded that demo and then looked on their web site for installation instructions. None.

I extracted the downloaded package and searched it all for installation instructions. None.

I called their sales team for instructions. None.

Let me give a little bit of background, this tool is not a stand-alone product that you double click the SETUP file and follow the bouncing ball until it tells you to click FINISH.

This software is a departmental tool that can be configured to use a few different Web Server products for the front end portions that people interact with, plus several different database products for the back end data storage. The installation and configuration of this type of software gets a little more complex as you have to get the pre-requisite components  (web server and database server) properly configured and set up first.

What happens?

I start the application installation, then get some cryptic error message that kills it dead.

Now, unlike my my previous rant about graphics and tutorials, at least software and servers are in my skill level!

So I have been able to overcome the errors and blow ups one by one to determine what is happening after the installation dies! I fix that one piece, try again, it dies again, I track down that reason, try again….

You get the idea. frustration. Hours of time wasted and I am not even at the stage where I can actually evaluate the product!

Would everybody keep doing this trial and error install? For a demo version of software? Probably not!

Who is the audience of your demo?

If the target market of your demo software is senior marketing, sales, or operations staff. Would they be able to try it on their own? Do they even have an IT team available for the hours of what I went through?

Or will this type of frustration have them just saying forget it?

The three choices; easy, difficult, and the hard way

The easy way to provide a software demo is to ensure that it is entirely self contained, no external dependencies at all. Everything your software needs is installed automatically.

A little more difficult is acknowledging the dependencies mentioned above, but at the minimum having explicit warnings and instructions on what is required, and what will be expected.

The hard way is the trial and error that I have been going through.

If you are planning your demonstration software the hard way – you probably have killed any benefit of your demo!

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Photo Credit Doug Becker via flickr

Real SMB IT: DNS, MX, What Is It? (And Why Should I Care?)

Could your business be kicked completely off the Internet?

The answer is yes!By kicked off the Internet, I mean invisible. Impossible to find.

So lets start with a little background.

At its most basic, all computers on the Internet communicate with each other with a unique number called an Internet Protocol (IP) address. As an analogy, just imagine this number as similar to a phone number.

But! when you visit a Web Site, or send an e-mail, you are using words, not numbers. you type in the www.yourcompany.com, or you send me an email by typing elliotross@company_name.ca

Since the computers communicate with each other via IP address numbers, and we humans prefer text and words, something is needed to translate those human readable words, into the machine readable numbers.

Enter DNS!

If you think of a phone book, you look up the words Elliot Ross which points to the listing for my telephone number. The domain naming system (DNS) provides a similar ability for our computers to translate human readable text we type into the machine IP address.

If you want to see this in action, simply open your Web Browser and paste these numbers into the address bar: 74.125.45.100

You will see the Google Web Site appear. (at least at the time of this writing!) I say at the time of this writing, because the machine readable number can be changed, and just like the phone book, If I change my phone number, as long as Elliot Ross is pointed to that new phone number – you won’t have any problem.

That little MX just stands for Mail eXchanger, in other words, when you send me an e-mail, that little MX tells the internet that to reach me by e-mail, “send that e-mail to this server over here!”

And Why Should You Care?

The first and easiest, if you think you cannot get on the Internet when you type in a company name, DNS problems are a common source of the issue.

But that is NOT what this is about

A SMB that I am acquainted with had an issue where an unknown individual tried to hi-jack that DNS information from them, and make it point to servers that were not associated with their business.

To continue with my phone book analogy, imagine that when you look up my name, the phone number that my name points to is yours, not mine.

So I would never get any calls.

Except on the Web, it is not missing some phone calls, it means that you completely disappear from the Internet. No Web Site, no e-mail. Nada.

There are checks and balances to make this difficult to do, but it goes to emphasize;

You must make sure all critical information about your on-line presence is owned by you.

Not your supplier.

Not your contractor.

That includes the contact information for your Internet domain and its DNS records. They may help you set that information up, but the contact name and information must be yours.

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Photo Credit merfam via flickr

Is Generation SaaS Here?

Treb Ryan at Sandhill.com posts the argument that this recession may be just the nudge required to push Software as a service (SaaS) over the tipping point of user adoption, possibly leaving installed software packages as a footnote in the history of the Internet.

I easily fit into most of the boxes that Mr. Ryan argues will spell the decline of the old school complex, application architecture.

….expensive, difficult to use, challenging to integrate and complex to install

Check, check, check, and check again!

I know I may sound like a broken record if you have been reading this blog for a while, but for those of us the SME space, there are still a few land mines that we have to beware of.

1) A SaaS provider of ours recently unilaterally changed the terms of our agreement. Will that have an effect on you if it occurs to you?

2) A lot of the providers in the SaaS space, and a lot of the reams of digital ink written about it are still very US-centric. What are the liabilities and jurisdictional risks we need to consider? As an example, if I, as a Canadian business, do business with Cuba – am I liable for a visit by the US Patriot Act police if my data is hosted on a SaaS vendor’s servers in California?

The SMB Takeaway

I am not saying that these are necessarily deal breakers, but a full evaluation of the risks, as well as the benefits are required to calculate if it is the best option for you.

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Social Media: Break Glass In Case Of Emergency!

A Facebook group with 4,200 members is complaining that your product ’sucks’.

And Twitter streams start echoing that complaint.

And to top it off, major media outlets such as the Washington Post start using those Facebook and twitter complaints to collect information for for news releases about the issue.

The thing is- all of these are not coming from your direct customer, but indirectly from your customers customer!

I think that this would classify as a B2B vendors greatest nightmare.

Bob Evans, at Informationweek.com points out that A Maryland school district with 22 high schools and a $4.1 million investment in an IT system from Canadian based supplier, Harris Computer Systems, had 8,000 students napping in gymnasiums because the software would not correctly generate the students class schedules.

At this point there has been no clarification of what the root cause of the issue is;

Is it a software failure?

An implementation failure?

But in the end, the reason does not matter!

The wide open world we call Social Media is amplifying and echoing a very negative view of the product. The Information Week article points out that a representative of Harris stated that they are assisting the school board in any way possible, but is that enough?

A look at the Harris Web Site does not reveal a blog or other method documenting how they are working to assist their customer in rectifying what is an embarrassing issue.

The transparency and immediacy of Social Media puts many organizations into the difficult position where their internal Public Relations teams are not fast enough, not relevant enough, and not transparent enough to attempt to undo the damage being done.

What makes this more difficult in the B2B space, is that our response must walk the fine line between transparency and blame.

I do believe there is a lesson here for other Canadian business in the B2B space, if this type of event happens to you;

Are you ready?

Do you have a transparent reaction planned?

If you don’t, you might just want to think about that.

Two notes about the above post, the above content was also posted to IT In Canada

And Second, Tim Walker at Hoovers challenged us to do our own posts utilizing the same Creative Commons image by Sherman Tan, challenge met!

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Photo Credit Sherman Tan via flickr

Saying It Clearly

An excellent post on the SMB IT Pros blog, titled; Say It First Say It Clearly

An excellent post, and something that I try to live by. Although I am 100% convinced that I am not 100% successful.

The context of the above article is that it can be too easy to craft words into proposals that outline risks and issues within IT environments. But perhaps are not explicit enough of those risks.

Those wordy documents can sometimes muffle the tone of what IT is really trying to say; If we don’t fix this, it is going to crash and die.

There is a caveat though, these type of calls rely on some experience, because everything in IT will crash and die eventually, the when is the hard part.

The SMB Takeaway

Sure – you might get another year out of that dieing infrastructure. And if the risk of loss is less than the dollar value of the replacement, feel free to but your chips on the table.

But be warned, if the dice roll against you – it was your decision, because at the end of the day, it is your business you are gambling with.

Gambling with your IT infrastructure?

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Photo Credit V1LL14N via flickr

Bruce Schneier On Passwords

Security expert Bruce Schneier passing on some password tips.

I failed a few

Bet you do too.

The Schneier on Security Blog

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Real SMB IT: Dishonest PC Repair

Venus Flytrap

Every couple of years somebody publishes an exposé on some class or type of service business that is fishing for honesty and integrity.

Disappointing as it is, it had to happen. The August 10 2009 print edition of Business Week (I could not find it on-line) had a brief note by Arik Hesseldahl titled; Shifty PC Repair.

Same idea, set up a basic sting operation where a machine has a known minor defect (in this case just a loose memory chip) and take the machine to various service outlets.

In this UK example, only one of six sting targets actually just fixed the problem. While some over charged for non-existent problems, some actually copied data off the machine. If that is a business machine with possibly confidential information, you see where that can go.

The SMB Takeaway

That behavior is deplorable. Period.

But to reduce that risk, as I have written before, planning for the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) when purchasing IT assets is critical in the small to medium enterprise. That means planning for the fact that sooner or later something will need to be repaired.

So here are two ways to reduce that risk;

1) When purchasing desktops or notebook computers, spend the extra few dollars for the vendors on-site extended warranty service

2) On out-of warranty older equipment, have a trusted local vendor that will do the work on your site, and have the repairs watched.

The key point here, they may be able to squeak in a little padding on the bill, but when they are sitting in your facility they sure can’t use a USB stick & grab your entire Quick Books database.

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Photo Credit Wikipedia

Do You Learn? Or Blame?

A hat tip Michael Krigsman at ZDnet for pointing me to an excellent piece by Sarah Jane Runge on organizations choosing to point the finger of blame when failure occurs.

Before I point you to Sarah’s post, let me quote Michael;

Smart leaders use failed projects as a springboard to improve future performance. Lousy ones abdicate responsibility by ignoring negative political behavior that perpetuates cycles of failure. What kind of manager are you?

Sarah Jane Runge; The Art of Scapegoating

They should instead be asking themselves where they messed up and analyze whether, why or how their IT investment and project decisions were under-analyzed, under-scoped, under-supported, under-communicated or under-trained.

The SMB Takeaway

If no one is accountable for an objective, a task, or a strategy – As Peter Drucker is quoted as saying; it is at best a a good intention.

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SaaS – When Policies Change, Are You In Or Out?

A Change In Policy

We use a hosted, online Software as a Service tool. It is not a huge or complex one, but use it for a key internal function.

As the possibility of the vendor going out of business, shutting down, or being aquired always exists, we negotiated at the outset that we wanted periodic copies of our data.

In this case, the vendor was simply supplying a raw backup of the database. In the event they did shut down, our development team could at least extract the data for import into any other tool that we wished to use.

A few weeks ago I stopped getting that data backup.

An email with their tech support was responded to with this;

Hi Elliot,

I am with XXXXX support. I tried to contact you few minutes back to discuss this issue and reached your voicemail. I left a voicemessage for you. Currently there are some changes in our company policies because of which database backups are not provided

The SMB Takeaway

Using software applications ‘out in the cloud’ has some benefits. But there are risks.

In this case our data backup strategy for our corporate data had the rug pulled out from underneath it.

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Photo Credit JM3 via flickr

Data Theft And Your Ex’s

A fairly scary eWeek revelation regarding theft of corporate data with a Symantec sponsored survey, performed by the Ponemon Institute.

The piece that I wanted to reference in this blog is this one (empasis mine);

Equally troubling from an IT security perspective is that almost a quarter of the participants had the ability to access data even after they left the company, with 32 percent of these respondents admitting they accessed the system and their credentials worked.

The SMB Takaway

That survey identified that almost 60% of individuals kept corporate data after leaving.

You can definitely make sure that they don’t keep it because they are still accessing your systems after they are gone.

Data Theft

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Photo Credit vernhart  via flickr