Innovation in Software

On the GeekUp mailing list, some business development advice was being asked for in terms of growing revenues and finding sales channels.

The advice being offered was to specialise: choose a niche and excel within it. Good advice, but the recipient started talking about the problems that come with specialising in CakePHP – a technology framework for rapid development of web applications – and I felt compelled to chip in with advice I think might be worthy of putting to a wider audience:

Don’t get caught in the trap of thinking specialisation means technology specialisation.

Business people don’t know about CakePHP. They know about e-Commerce, or customer forums, or customised marketing emails, or intranets where employees share knowledge.

Talk in their language, not yours.

When I go out and do sales, I talk about using Agile methodologies, iterative development, growing the technology base as revenue and budget allow. We use methods that ensure desired behaviour is captured and tested against cheaply, so changes in business assumptions are cheap to re-factor in the code – i.e. we reduce the cost of change to as close to zero as possible.

They couldn’t give a stuff what I’m actually saying is “we code Ruby on Rails with Cucumber, Culerity and RSpec tests”, because that doesn’t mean anything to them.

So, follow the market specialisation, not the technology specialisation when you speak to clients. Sure, choose the tech you like working with, but talk to your clients in terms of eCommerce stores, bold new ideas, e-mail marketing or super-slick brochureware sites as part of marketing campaigns.

Same as with selling anything: you sell benefits, not features*

All the big agencies I’ve seen thrive have chosen this style. The small guys seem to bang on about technology (or even worse “we only use GNU/Linux tools in production of your website”), and being able to do “anything” and get frustrated when people aren’t lining up at the door – the clients who like those shops generally aren’t the ones most of us want anyway.

* Before somebody points out that some gadgets “sell” on feature lists, that’s not what’s happening. When I say “this camera has triple 15 megapixel CCD sensors”, you might think I’m selling a feature. I know though that a geek who is into this price niche will likely transfer that feature in their head into “I can take really sharp pictures with good natural colour definition pictures with that camera”. I sold you a benefit via your own knowledge of the possibilities of the feature. :-)

It seems obvious, but most people miss it. Talking in the language of technology and features is a mistake I made for several years and am still struggling to deal with as I develop my new marketing material. The simple truth is, if they knew what all this BDD and Agile stuff was and why it was so good, they probably wouldn’t need our services. Now all I want to talk about when doing sales is business problems, issues and ideas and how to address them. Take heed, young grasshopper.