Guest Post from Big Bang Sales Director - Kelley Burian

...cont'd from Part 1

What we hadn’t properly examined was our massively diverse current and potential customer base. This sounds like an impossibly dumb oversight, so I will explain. Most small businesses serve a specific industry, be it manufacturing, healthcare, retail, education or government. From there many get even more granular and cater to a specific gender, age group, financial status, etc. Our customers and potential customers, on the other hand, include any and all organizations with more than 100 computers running a Microsoft operating system. That’s it. Your company needs 100 computers, something most of us can’t perform our jobs without, and the most popular operating system in the world. So while our customers come in all shapes and sizes, the things that qualify them as our customer are really simple.

My critical mistake was not accounting for how differently those customers use those 100+ computers. We knew there would be special circumstances, because there always are, and we planned to work those out one-on-one. As we got going, we realized those special circumstances were less special than we thought. In fact, most have reported a scenario that was the complete opposite of what we anticipated. Education is a primary example and a large part of our current customer base. In general, each student is not going to have a school-issued computer in their possession, but rather use one in a smaller pool of shared PCs. We determined very quickly that requiring a license per user where a student is considered a user (not just staff and teachers) was maybe easy but not necessarily fair.

We did find that other customers loved the idea of the per-user model. Barring a rapid growth in employees (which rarely bothers anyone) or a merger, corporate licensing per-user is both easy and relatively predictable from year-to-year. It was also attractive because corporate environments are going to be far more likely to support multiple computers per user.

Lesson: One size does not, as advertised, fit all.

It was the kind of mistake that was good in many ways. While we are back to a per-computer licensing model as the default offering for both products, we now also have a plan for those UIUSD customers that a per-user model is more attractive. It isn’t as simple as I wanted, but at least it remains simple for the customer—As for the sales staff, well, that’s what we’re here for. We also learned a lot about some of our customers’ challenges this week, and that is always a good thing.

All things considered, I think we have achieved both mutually fair and as simple as possible, though it took us a few extra days more than planned. I lived, I learned, and now I just need to find a way to keep this from the boss.

I’ve made a huge mistake.

Guest Post from Big Bang Sales Director, Kelley Burian

I’ve made a huge mistake.

Some of you may recognize that as a popular line from the TV show Arrested Development. Unfortunately, my love for the show is not the only reason I’ve had that line running through my head all week.

I’ll back up. My name is Kelley Burian, and I am the Sales Director with Big Bang LLC. I am guest-blogging this week in place of our usual Thursday Big Bang Blogger, Nate Bauer. Nate is off tending to the needs of his newest offspring, who is thankfully happy, healthy and appears to have inherited her looks from her mother. (Nate’s joke, not mine.)

Back to my aforementioned huge mistake.

Adam Murphy has spent more than a few bytes writing about pricing recently, and that train of thought didn’t come from a vacuum. Just over a week ago, we released our new product for driver management in SCCM, the Universal Imaging Utility System Deploy Plug-in, or UIUSD. Much thought, research and discussion went into how to license and price the UIUSD, and we changed our minds on how to do so at least twice in the months leading up to the release date.

We had three specific goals in mind, which I have listed below:

1.       Set a fair price for existing and future customers.

2.       Set a fair price for us.

3.       Make it as simple as possible.

While admittedly the first two are the whole ballgame, the third was an important extension of #1. For those not familiar with enterprise-level software licensing, #3 isn’t easy to find. We often joke about the need for advanced degrees in both law and applied mathematics to purchase the most basic, everybody-needs-it-gotta-have-it software. How can the customer determine if they have received a fair price if they don’t fully understand how that price was calculated?

With those initiatives in mind, we took stock of what we already knew. It’s not as if we hadn’t successfully licensed software before. We have been doing just that for several years with much success. Our customers have been happy to pay the price we set for the software, and we were in turn successfully growing a small business. Yay capitalism!

So why not just stick with the tried-and-true? We certainly considered that, of course. The problem was, without getting into the specifics of each product, we developed two different pieces of software for two different kinds of customer. In the end, we decided to change things for this product based on what we learned from both market research and direct input from our beta testers—the few outside of this building that were knowledgeable on the software prior to its release.

Instead of licensing the software per computer, as we do with the UIU, we decided to license the software per user. In doing this, we aimed first to get in line with the growing trend of multiple computers per user. As these devices get more affordable and more mobile, a single employee may have a desktop computer in the office, a laptop at home and a tablet for travel, and a per-user model would only require one license for that one user. This model would also allow for quick and easy math on the part of the software buyer—the number of licenses you need is simply your number of employees. Easy right?

Find out why it didn't work out so well next week.