Dollars Are Not the Only Cost: Installation
Your prospective customer has conquered the hurdle of internally selling your product, and now they have it — a shrinkwrapped CD or a download URL. But there’s still a bit step between that and getting it installed.
In your company, the people who are building your product are people who could just pop open a console window and install it themselves. The people product managing your product are still perhaps only one step removed from that process (“Hey Michael, can you install this thing?” “Sure.”)
But the people buying and using your product may have relatively little power over how and when software gets installed/deployed. And, certainly, if your product breaks something, they’re not the first people who’ll get the blame. That will land on the shoulders of their coworkers in engineering or IT.
So, understandably, these coworkers aren’t going to be in a huge hurry to install your product.
It’s usually not even a conscious thing – these engineers aren’t cackling with glee trying to sabotage you and your product sale. (Well, maybe some are.) They just know they need to have certain bits of information before they feel comfortable installing any bit of code or software. And if you don’t make those bits of information readily obvious, they’ll say “when I have some free time I’ll read up on it and then figure out when we can deploy it.”
That time spent “reading up on it and figuring out what to do” doesn’t come cheap! One hour of an engineer’s “thinking about it” time may be nearly as expensive as your whole product!
Here’s what you do instead:
- Talk to an early customer (and their engineer) about the installation process. Ask what questions came up, what delayed them, what they had to stop and think about.
- If possible, ask to watch someone install your product, or be on the phone with them, listening as they walk through the process. This allows you to see for yourself the places where they hesitate, or ask a question, or start flipping to another tab to read documentation.
- For each question or hesitation point, figure out the information that would’ve made that go more smoothly. Ask yourself if there’s any way you could make this faster or require fewer steps.
- Figure out how long installation takes (if multiple steps are involved, figure out an approximate time breakdown per step). If you don’t provide this information, customers will almost certainly assume it takes longer. If a 4-step process took one of your customers 28 minutes, don’t you want everyone to know that versus assuming it’s an all-day project?
When you do a good job of this, you’re improving your overall product solution and making it faster (and cheaper) for your customer to get the value you promised them. When you don’t do a good job of this, you get customers who keep postponing purchases (or purchase and keep postponing installation, which earns you some revenues but not a satisfied customer.)
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