Article
Turn a Client Site into Saleable Software
Product v. Service Marketing
Let's assume that until now you've only been marketing your services as an independent contractor. No matter how successful you've been at this, you'll have to change some of your tactics in order to create a successful marketing campaign for your new product.
As a starting point, consider what you have probably already been doing to market your services: selling yourself.
When you're selling your own services, you're essentially selling yourself. You need to convince potential clients not only that you are capable of delivering the technical capabilities they need, but also that you'll be able to communicate and work well with the in-house team. You have to treat every consultation as a job interview.
As an independent contractor, you're selling experience. You typically convince potential clients that you can do the job based on your previous work record. You need references, a portfolio -- anything that can prove you've done this work before.
Your scope will most likely be local, so networking is important. You attend trade shows, and make contacts within your field as well as in your target market. You want to be considered as a leader: you write articles for trade magazines, release white papers, and speak at conferences. This improves your visibility and gives you the credentials to convince people you know what you're doing.
That's all well and good, but now that you have a product to sell, it's time to expand your scope. It's time to go national. With a quantifiable product, it's a lot easier for people to see what they're getting before they make a purchase, but you've got to find your potential buyers first, and be able to hold their attention.
Product Marketing Considerations
In marketing your new software product, you'll want to consider a number of potential tools and tactics. The below comprise the basis of most successful online product marketing strategies.
Search Engine Marketing
Here is where search engine marketing really becomes important. If you haven't optimized your Website and collected some valuable inbound links, now is the time to start. You've got to be visible when people across the country type in your keywords.
In addition to the natural search, pay per performance advertising is a good way to gain exposure for your site. You can bid on various key words to have your ads shown, and then pay for every click or visit that originates from that listing on the search engine.
There is a lot of debate over whether it's better to focus on the natural search or pay per performance search. In my experience, I've found that a combination of both yields strong results. The good thing about search engine marketing is that it doesn't require a lot of commitment. You can experiment for a while to find the balance that works for your company.
Know your Customers
In order to meet the needs of consumers, you first need to understand those needs. If you have a product that caters to a specific niche market, you need to become an expert in that field. Let's go back to our original example of the bed and breakfast ecommerce module. Since you've worked with one bed and breakfast to create the software, you already have some familiarity with the target audience. Now you need to build on that. Attend national trade shows and conventions for bed and breakfast owners -- soon, you'll be a speaker. Read trade magazines, and start submitting articles.
Every industry has its own specific vocabulary; you need to be able to meet the needs of your target market and to answer their questions in their own language. The success of Tessitura's arts enterprise software has resulted largely because they had an in-depth understanding of their niche, and could communicate using a familiar language.
Document It
When you're marketing your services, you rely on your own credentials, a portfolio of past projects, and your references. But when you have a product, you can -- and should -- offer even more.
In addition to the marketing blurbs, advertising copy, and white papers, make sure you have product fact sheets and a functionality checklist. Differentiate between features and benefits. Explain what your product does, how it works, and why it's important. Make it relevant to your target market. Much of the success of Amazon.com can be attributed to its conscious decision to offer extensive product information. The more information and documentation you can provide for potential clients, the better your chances of securing their trust.
Find the Hook
Have you noticed the way every car commercial on television says that particular car is number one? Obviously not every car can be number one at everything, so how do they do it? Auto manufacturers spend big bucks to figure out what key feature they can use to sell their cars: number one towing capacity, number one in customer satisfaction, best value in a four door sedan... you get the idea.
What does your software do that no other software does? Look closely at what you offer, and come up with your own unique selling point. Remember: if it's something your competitors can copy, they will. The key is to keep innovating.
Put a Name to It
You probably never had to worry about it as a consultant, but now that you've got a product, you need a name. Branding your software helps potential customers understand, describe, and remember what it is they want. This is why we hear people say, "I'd like a Coke" much more often than you hear someone say, "I'd like a cold, carbonated, sugary, cola-type drink."
As you come up with the name, remember who your audience will be. Technical people may respond well to a product that sounds powerful and state-of-the-art; non-technical consumers might be more attracted to a product that sounds friendly and accessible. When Steve Jobs named his new company Apple, he immediately set his computers apart from the slew of technical-sounding brand names like IBM. Having such a simple and friendly name helped to change how people thought about computers, and encouraged many non-technical people to bring them into their homes.
However, it is also important to remember that, for the unknown company, it's generally better to go with a more descriptive name. Adobe Photoshop has become such a popular and descriptive name that Adobe has had to release a style guide regulating the product name's use as a verb!
Once you've narrowed down the options, and tentatively decided on a name, test it out. Ask colleagues, gauge the response at naming discussion groups, and ask people on the street what comes to mind when they hear the name. Don't make the mistake of sportswear manufacturer Umbro which, in 2002, unwittingly gave a new athletic shoe the same name as a gas used in Nazi concentration camps. However you choose to name your product, the keys are to make it relevant, and make it memorable -- for the right reasons.
Hire It Done
As your new company grows, you'll more than likely need sales people. It can be a strange feeling to pass off the sales responsibility to someone else -- after all, you made the software, it's your baby! But it's all a part of growing up as a company. As an independent contractor, you could hardly hire someone to help you sell yourself. If you had someone whose full time job was selling your time, you'd never have enough hours in the day to handle the business being generated.
Not so with software. One of the reasons you're doing this is because of the economies of scale available through product sales. No matter how many people you have selling your product, or how many licenses are distributed, you're not going to run out. When it comes time to expand, give your baby to the professionals and watch your margins increase.
Take it to the World!
Going national with a new software product is a pretty natural expansion. Marketing your software internationally, however, can turn out to be a giant leap.
Before you decide to open your doors to international sales, have a think. Does your software currently lend itself to international use? If the ecommerce site you built for the bed and breakfast business supports only your country's currency and tax system, you may need to do some major revisions before you sell the product overseas. Make sure also that you -- and your product -- are prepared for language barriers. Does the software support international languages and special characters? Does the user interface need to have multiple language versions? How will your office handle support calls from drastically different time zones?
None of these obstacles is insurmountable, and chances are that establishing an international market will be worth the trouble. However, when you're just starting out and testing the waters with your product, it's good to have a clearly defined and realistic scope for your marketing plan.
Making the leap from marketing your services to marketing your product need not be scary: you've already got a lot of the skills you'll need. The trick is just to build on that and expand your reach to take advantage of all the opportunities having a great product provides.
Releasing Your Product
Once you've developed your business model and created a marketing strategy, it's time to get your software ready for release. A lot more goes into an official product release than the work that needs to be done when you've developed a single module for a specific client.
Plan for the Future
As a contractor, you're generally focused on short-term deliverables. Ideally, however, this is a product that will be around for a long time. Now is the time to start planning its future. Building a roadmap for your software is a great way to establish where you would like to see the product go. Although a roadmap cannot predict unforeseen demands or technological advances, it is important to have some vision of what you would like to see happen.
Plan for Your Product
Think about the features you would like to add to the product in the next four or five years. The great thing about software is that you can continue to perfect it as time goes on. A typical plan would outline additions and features to be added for each quarterly release for the next four or five years.
Having a plan for long term development will not only help you stay on track, it will influence how you code the software now. If you have an idea in advance of where the software needs to be, you can facilitate now the capacity for added functions later.
Plan for Your Company
Once you've established a road map for the software, it's time to do the same for your business as a whole. Where would you like to see your company in five years? What steps need to be made to get there? It doesn't need to be ironclad, just a list of goals and the steps you plan to take to accomplish them. This plan will keep you from making too many detours in the development of your business.
Automated Testing
When you're developing a module on a contract basis, chances are you're doing the testing yourself. When you commercialize that product, and plan for quarterly updates for the next five years, it's time to think about automated testing.
Randall W. Rice of Rice Consulting Services, co-author of Surviving the Top Ten Challenges of Software Testing: A People Oriented Approach, emphasizes the need not only for product developers to have the right testing tools, but to understand how they work, and be able to dedicate the time to ensure they accurately check every aspect of the product.
Automated, or regression testing, does take time to set up, he warns, but pays off in the long run and ensures a higher quality of product. There are two distinct types of testing:
- Emulated User Testing
Emulated user testing is exactly what it sounds like: a computer is programmed to mimic a human user and automatically performs a hundred or so prescribed common functions to ensure that any new coding has not negatively affected the overall functionality of the product. - Unit Testing
Unit testing checks code behind the scenes on a micro level to ensure that all the product's moving parts are moving as they should.
Both types of testing are invaluable tools for ensuring all software components are operating properly prior to the release.
Nightly v. Continuous Testing
Automated testing can be scheduled to run on a nightly basis so that anything you do during the day has a chance to be tested before you start work on it again the next day. Automated testing can also be implemented as continuous integration unit testing. This, of course, requires more resources, but having newly written code tested every half hour means that you and your developers can fix problems sooner, while they're fresh in the mind.
Automated testing obviously saves developers a lot of time, but it also translates to a lighter product and customer support load further down the track. Automated testing quickly and efficiently finds problems that may easily be overlooked by human testing. In my business, we attribute our low instance of support requests to the fact that we run both continuous and nightly test builds automatically, to ensure that bugs are found before the software reaches our clients.
Managing the Product Release Cycle
The bad news is that, even with all this testing, there are bound to be some elements that don't work quite right, or things that you find you could have done better. The good news is that you don't have to release your product all at once: it's perfectly standard to go through a few versions of a product to get to the one you want to release to your general user base.
Alpha Release
On a quarterly release cycle, you can expect to spend the first two months strictly in development. After two months have gone by, you can issue an Alpha release either internally, or to a select few clients who are willing to try out the product and offer feedback. During this time, you can continue to add features, fix bugs, and implement suggestions that are offered.
Beta Release
After you've spent about two weeks improving on the Alpha version, it's time to release a Beta release. If you've kept the Alfa version internal, you might consider releasing the Beta to a few trusted customers.
This is the final step before releasing an official version, so at this time it's advantageous to implement a feature freeze in which no new coding is done. This will give your developers a couple of weeks to fix any remaining bugs and put the product through all the testing needed to ensure its quality. If you're not developing to the quarterly system we're discussing here, a good rule of thumb is to implement a half-day freeze for each week spent in development. So, if you've been developing your software for ten weeks, for example, implement the freeze five days prior to release.
Gold Release
Now you're ready to release the official Gold version your software! Whether you're releasing your product for the first time, or issuing an update to existing clients, most companies today don't even bother with distribution of physical disks -- it's generally considered an unnecessary extra cost. Once you've made a sale, (or notified your clients of a new release, as the case may be), users can follow a link to the download site and get started using the Gold version of your software.
Planning years' worth of updates and new releases can seem a very daunting task when you're just starting out. It certainly qualifies as uncharted territory for most developers who are used to contracting out their services. But it needn't be: the purpose to all the planning is to break down your goals into little, easily managed pieces. By taking the development of your software step by step, you'll achieve strong results and maintain happy customers throughout the life of your company.