Do You Mind If…?

Have you ever filled a super-long survey that “shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes?”

As marketers, we design questionnaire for qualification calls. Some questions are required by the sales team, some others by the company veterans. Questionnaires often turn out being a long and bothering list of questions; a key fiasco factor for any marketing survey.

Surveys should start with a brief product description, before asking maximum five questions. Gather only the information you need, and gather it as efficiently as possible.

1. Tell about the software benefit in (few) plain words
2. Follow up with a brief questionnaire
3. Be nice and entertaining
4. Reward the responder somehow. A paper of his interest would be fine.

Ethic of reciprocity: don’t do to others what you don’t want to be done to you.

Software and Sushi

Software and Sushi are two of my favourite things.

I like the customizability of sushi meals. There’s always a sushi meal that fits with my appetite. I also like the inexpensiveness of sushi. Or actually the inexpensive price per item. Three Euros for a Temaki, two for an Uramaki, etc. Low price per item means low pain in the buying process. Moreover I like the zenlike design of sushi sets.

Like with the sushi, some software editors offer component-based software, where clients choose from a “menu” the modules they need.

Sushi restaurants & software companies success factors:

1.     High quality components

2.     “A la carte” pricing

3.     Product design

Meaning Free

I was wondering whether software advertisings tell about customer benefits or not. Ads like: “Our software is flexible, it integrates with other software tools,..” seem more just senseless buzzwords.
Our customers are mostly engineers. They pay attention to the words we use more than we might think.

If saying “Our software is flexible” means that it adapts to changing requirements – like hardware requirements, then you could better say: “our software supports the A, B, C platforms and X, Y, Z operating systems”.