
How Fog Creek learned to do sales part 2 - buzzcut
http://blog.fogcreek.com/the-very-most-basic-things-your-company-needs-to-know-about-sales-part-2-of-4/
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badmash69
What I find most inspirational about FogCreek is that they have managed to
survive and thrive in even in the face of powerful "incumbents" i.e. free
solutions that have a longer history.By that I mean that when the sales person
for Fogcreek for Version control s/w makes a sales call, he could be faced
with groups who are using either PVCS or CVS or SVN -- and yet he or she
manages to close that sale. I would love to know how you get past that barrier
to entry ? In more general terms, when if you are making a sales call to a
prospect who already has a solution which may be inferior but nevertheless in
production, how do you get them to switch ? When do you know to move on to
next prospect and when to further pursue the lead ?

~~~
m0nty
You should remember that the existence of open source or home-brew solutions
is not in itself going to prevent me (as a person who makes purchasing
decisions) looking at a paid-for version. For example, I use Dans Guardian at
the moment but am looking at Smoothwall to do much the same thing. I use
Amazon S3 + s3ql for backups, but also use Nasuni for the same thing. I can
make forms quickly and fairly easily with Django but prefer Wufoo for all
sorts of reasons.

I've been told by my manager to favour off-the-shelf solutions - he feels it
will allow us to hire more easily if I decide to leave. I prefer not to have
the hassle of writing software myself, or downloading and configuring often
very complex software which might not be that polished. Sometimes, I just want
a support person to call who can fix stuff quickly so I can get on with _my_
work rather than dealing with support issues. The people I work with are not
very tech-literate so I need software which even they can use easily
(otherwise I just end up doing their work for them).

There are many products I would never consider buying, and many top-rate open
source products I cannot live without. But if you can encapsulate your
expertise and knowledge in software and sell that to me and make my life
easier, I will cheerfully part with money.

~~~
JonLim
Going to echo this sentiment, however unpopular it may be. Free solutions are
great and make business a lot easier and/or cheaper to conduct. However, you
get what you pay for.

Your mileage may vary, but I have found that many free solutions offer some of
the worst support in the world. Even worse if you are trying to use their
software in a way that they hadn't intended.

~~~
beagle3
> However, you get what you pay for.

No. You get what you reward for.

While payment is one form of reward, many customers reward a vendor with
unconditional-repeat-business, in which case they usually get much less than
what they paid for, even though they paid dearly. They just didn't reward for
quality.

A lot of expensive products are pure garbage, and in those cases, you
certainly DON'T get what you pay for. The simplest example I can think of is
HDMI cable. They cost $30/6ft at RadioShack when on sale, and $1/6ft at Amazon
or MonoPrice. Customers pay RadioShack for it; what do they get? How is this
different than the general case, and how is this different than the specific
case of software?

~~~
JonLim
In context, I was referring to "getting what you pay for" from free services,
not so much the paid ones.

With paid services and products, you're aiming to get the best bang for your
buck, so obviously you would evaluate cost vs. output or some other measure.
As such, I would say "Hey, why is this HDMI cable from Radio Shack so
expensive compared to Monoprice?"

And blam, I've made the best decision in terms of value.

I think.

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prewett
This is kind of off-topic, but I've always wondered, the pictures in Joel's
articles (and this one, even though not by Joel) always seem to be completely
random. Am I missing some relationship to the content? If not, what is the
reasoning for having random pictures?

~~~
babakian
Joel has taken inspiration from Philip Greenspun, as described here:
<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000021.html>

