Anyone know what this is? Class? Anyone? Anyone? Anyone seen this before?
In a time when the GDP of the United States is running screaming like a co-ed in a horror movie, how does a company like ours induce people to buy our product?
You improve the product.
I’m not the one to improve the DotImage product itself, but I can improve the support to go with it. We offer phone support, forums, a knowledge base, and case submission, but it’s not enough. We’re adding two new things to the mix – personal introductory training for presales customers and webinars with varying topics and degrees of difficulty.
First step to the presales training is the game plan. Assess each individual potential customer for the problem they’re trying to solve, and what parts we can provide for the solution. It’s more than just answering the question “can DotImage do this?”; it’s asking “what can DotImage do for us?”
Second part is the webinar. Assess the global needs of our potential customers and… wait, that sounds familiar. Turns out, getting ready for the personal training is exactly the same as getting ready for the webinar. I have a demonstration program ready, pre-made snippets of code that I can call by typing a keyword and pressing TAB TAB (loving snippets – they are so easy to build, and Visual Studio can’t lose them like code dragged into the toolbox). The real difference is in the delivery; for the webinars, I have a script to follow, for the training, it’s a conversation.
I haven’t performed the first webinar yet, as we’re still working out the delivery method. I have delivered 5-6 personal training conversations with customers, and so far, they’ve been pretty successful on the sales side, and on the support side, the customers have walked away from the conversation feeling a lot more confident with our product. It also boosts customers’ confidence in our company that they can talk to a real live person (with people skills!) who can walk them through things (and open Visual Studio and demonstrate code, rather than talk hypothetically).
Doing my part in this economy, and certainly not taking any bailout money to do it.