Saturday, February 21, 2009

Software Sales? Software is a Product?

I have spent some time in the software business, looking at tech commercialization and now in the health care field. My first love has always been process engineering, cost accounting and total quality initiatives as they relate to business operations. Most recently, I have jumped into a health care practice with the eye of improving the operations. The first thing I noticed was how broken the process was and how technology (software) simply confused and compounded the issues and never provided results as promised. The first thing we did was go BACK to paper and document the process. The very first thing was to watch the operations, literally sit and watch people work and ask naive questions. Spend a week just sitting and watching -- hard to do, but you will learn much more. Interestingly enough, if you ask someone how they do something, they will give you a detailed set of steps, but if you sit and watch you will see things they missed or little go-arounds they failed to mention.

So, this brings me to the notion that software is a product, or more accurately, my thought that it is NOT a product, but merely an enabling component of the process. What we need is a software sales person that is a process/workflow expert that can fix our process and then apply their technology. The opposite is usually true -- sales guy promises nirvana, operator is desperate and buys the hype, software is installed, process is worse, more complicated and takes a PhD to fix. That sucks.

My advice to early stage software companies is to invest in process (lean) expertise and go WATCH how your customers MAKE MONEY. Then document how your enabling technology will make them MORE MONEY. Stop with quotas, calls, etc. Put the customer's process first and the rest will follow.

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