Tag: Sales
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Product Management Reading List
Inspired by Andy Nortrup’s thorough posting, I’ve dusted off my own recommended reading list. It doesn’t have reviews or feedback, just raw links. An interesting attribute of the times is that product management is recognized as an important function, but it’s not narrowly defined. That leaves a lot of latitude…
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Do I have a product here?
Sometimes I chat with people who are interested in starting a side business, or even leaving their $dayjob. That can be a really rewarding option if you’ve got the opportunity. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with not doing it! Some people simply don’t want to run a small business along…
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Offering Multiple License Models
I’ve written quite a bit about licensing software now, you can start here to follow the whole thread. In The Platform License Problem, I mentioned some free pricing as a hide-the-sausage technique. When there are multiple markets to find product fit for, and the vendor has a software base that…
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The Platform License Problem
In my other three posts about licensing, I discussed simple products. But what about platform companies? A platform company sells two types of products: the platform, which enables everything else, and the use cases which rely on that platform to solve specific problems. The key to the platform company definition is that…
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Licensing models, self-service style
In my other two posts about licensing, I suggested that flat rate pricing is best for customers, but impossible in enterprise sales because of the variable and high costs of making a sale. Those costs are difficult to understand if you haven’t been exposed before, but they are all too…
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Product Sales Metrics
So you’ve launched a product… Is the product selling? How’s ASP (Average Sales Price) after discounting, and is the discount larger than you expected? Deal size? Cost of sales? Are there measurable predictors for lost opportunities exiting the pipeline at each stage? Are there ways to accelerate the wins through…
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Multi-tenancy in platforms
If you’ve built a monolithic enterprise product, it is not sensible to convert it to multi-tenancy. You can sell a managed service provider (MSP), but you’re not going to get to software as a service (SaaS). Often no one wants to discuss reasoning at all, because the need to convert…
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Supporting Ancient Software
With another round of fixes to Windows XP, the time is ripe for bloviating about supporting ancient stuff. Every software vendor has to decide what to do about supporting what they used to ship, as well as the broader ecosystem around them. Operating systems, databases, service providers. Maximize use of…
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Land and Expand Packaging Decisions
Subsets of packaged content are needed in different system classes. If you’re pursuing a land-and-expand model, then you need to have a way to expand. One way is to ship a static monolith with features turned off. Another is to ship dynamic add-ons to your base product. Teams make these…
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How to manage a Proof of Concept
POCs as a concept are a response to customers getting oversold. As a vendor we’d rather skip the whole thing and trust our sales team to scope properly. As a customer we’d rather not spend time testing instead of doing. Sometimes they have to be done though, and it’s best…
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