Subbu Vempati

10-Dec-19

We live in an era of information overload, and this only makes it super tricky to navigate to something relevant to YOU! There is a significant upside & a big downside of having access to a plethora of information on the internet.

There is a problem of Plenty for software solutions. Getting a personalized recommendation that’s credible and can be implemented immediately is very important in this digital age for anybody, particularly for Marketing and Sales managers.

A variety of factors challenges business managers. Search in the face of information asymmetry, getting the requirements and nuances right, and working within the team to get the consensus going…

Problem of Plenty

  

As you can see, given the sheer number of solutions, you should be able to find a solution whatever be the marketing or sales problem.

Yet, as per a report by Gartner

94% of the enterprise buying teams abandon a software search, at least once, for a variety of reasons.

Another staggering revelation is that

33% of the professionals who select and purchase a software product churn pretty quickly because it did not solve the problem they thought it would.

These are not fun stats!

Why is it so hard?

Unearthing specialized software solutions that meet business requirements is not easy

The latest Martech landscape map from   Chief Martec includes more than  7,000 marketing software solutions, and this landscape is continuously evolving. The abundance of solutions makes it possible but also challenging to find a perfect fit. How do you find that golden needle in this haystack?

Information Asymmetry

It is easy to be troubled with the flood of domain-specific or technical words. A lot of product information, from the software vendors, is full of technical jargon, features & functionalities.

Business managers speak the language of business goals, problems, metrics, so on. Availability of meaningful insights is a challenge too

This gap in “language” makes it difficult for the buyers (business teams) to discover the right solutions.

Top Lists Galore

There are a plethora of top lists out there, given any topic. Top lists, Quadrants, Waves, Categories. They all point one in different directions. Impossible to figure out what is right for yourself!

  

Getting the requirements down is not easy

A lot of times, it is unstated or assumed requirements that are incorrect or not met by the selected software that makes the solution unusable. Access to an assisted requirement development can be a big boon for business managers who are time challenged.

Not all functionality is the same

Context plays an equal or stronger role. It is the nuances that help make a software selection perfect.

Software purchase is rarely an individual decision.

Average B2B buying decision now needs more than five sign-offs. Software buying is more of a team sport. Getting many people on to the same page on requirements, and selection is a non-trivial endeavor

Which of these challenges did you encounter while deciding on a software?

Did you face a challenge not listed above?

Please leave your ideas in the comments section.

If you are still looking out for a relevant solution to this problem, do check out Cuspera’s AI-driven software discovery at

Cuspera.com

It can ease & accelerate the process of buying right-fit sales & marketing software based on expert recommendations and peer experiences.

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This case study is from an actual business user from a Fortune 500 company in retail heading the partnership business based out of Atlanta.

Background :

The business user manages a portal where partners can place order and is struggling with drop offs and low engagement. She wants to use “chat” to stay in touch with partners on the portal.

Business Need

The user starts on Cuspera typing “engage using chat” and we prompt the user to choose her goals and process from a drop down as shown in Figure 1 and 2 below based on business manager’s goal. Figure 1 depicts the results when the primary goal of the business manager is to enhance relationship with her customer using chat whereas Figure 2 shows the results when the primary goal is to acquire new customers.

Given her business context, we feel Zendesk, SnapEngage, Live Chat, etc are better suited for her business need of engaging with her customers as these are designed to know the customer well and engage with them regarding their previous orders, tickets etc.

In contrast, when the business user is interested in acquiring new customers, we feel Zoho SalesIQ, Pure Chat, Hubspot, etc are better suited as they are designed to capture customer details and feed them to you existing CRM.

Business Context

Similarly the business user specifies her size of the company, her department and her location to get personalised set of recommended solutions.

Adjacent Business Needs

Typical business user solves more than one process or has more than one goal while choosing a technology solution. As show in Figure 3, we prompt the user to choose other related processes, which her peers have also chosen along with her original business need. In this case, user chose communication management as another “must” process to be implemented and the recommended solutions are updated to those which are good at engaging with customer and also managing the communication with them as show in Figure 3.

Integrations and other Corp Requirements

The user is then shown a screen where she has to choose whether she needs integration and with what system. She can choose whether she wants custom report or analytics, the kind of data security and compliance expected from the system and the final short list of recommendations are shown to the user as in Figure 4.

What-if scenarios and final report

The final screen as shown in Figure 5, allows user to re-prioritise her requirements to choose a solution that best suits her based on her budget, vendor qualification, ease of migration, ease of integration, etc. The report can also be downloaded and shared with her team.

A technology solution is right-fit for you if it solves your business need as per your expected time horizon. The factors that determine the right-fit solution are how well the solution’s workflow is designed to solve your business need, how well it works and integrates with you existing technology stacks and how compliant is it for your companies policies such as privacy, security and business continuity.

Business needs

Business needs are hard to specify. A business manager looking for a technology solution has a business process or two that he wants to improve. He also has a goal in mind. For example, a sales manager who is looking for a technology solution to improve his “lead management”, either wants to capture leads more efficiently so that he can “acquire more customers” (a goal) or ensure that he converts leads better to “improve his revenue” targets (another goal). As every solutions is specifically designed to achieve certain goals based on its business process workflows, knowing the goal and process is important to choose the right solution. In Cuspera, we prompt you to choose the right goal for your process based on your chosen industry vertical and the keywords you type, in order to recommend the right-fit solution.

Business Context

It’s important to understand your business context — your vertical, whether you are B2B or B2C, you location, etc to find the right-fit solution. Every industry has subtle nuances that change the way process workflows are implemented, the way the data is captured, the scale expected, etc. and we need to know the context to find the right-fit solution. For example a lead capture software for B2B business and B2C business behaves very differently . Similarly the channels you use to reach your customers also varies based on your industry.

Enterprise ready software solutions are different than the ones meant for SMBs — enterprise ready software are typically more expensive and meant to be used in a complex environment and technical stack compared to simpler solution focussed on ease-of-use for SMBs. A right-fit solution is the one that is built with your business context in mind for your business need.

Company IT and Corp Policies

Last but not the least is to understand the existing technology stack in your company and how well the new tech solution needs to interact with existing stack. This includes the OS policies, network policies, DB policies etc of your CIO — are you a MicroSoft or an open source setup; Oracle, IBM or MySQL setup etc. We also need to know what other systems you are using — what kind of integration to you existing customer database etc. to recommend your right-fit solution.

Another important factor is also the vendor qualifications that the vendor of the tech solution needs to meet such as vendor’s size, location, compliance, stability etc. based on your companies procurement process.

The right-fit software solution is the one that meets your business need with proven track record in your business context and meets all your IT and Corp policies, which greatly increases your chances of successful outcome in your preferred time horizon.

In this fast paced digital era with shrinking business cycles, every business needs to choose technologies that can help them compete and deliver results.

Good news is that technologies are moving to cloud and solutions are available as SAAS( Software As A Service) and can be easily found and deployed.

Then, why are business managers struggling to find the right solutions? Why do lot of SAAS purchase by business managers result in churn?

Reason 1 : There are a lot of solutions to choose from

As the chart above shows, Marketing technology space has grown from few hundred to 10’s of thousands in just 7 years. Overall, there are now more than 50K SAAS solutions growing at an annual rate of 20% plus.

Reason 2: One Size fits all?

Traditionally, businesses bought software technology via the CIO’s offices, which involved CIO dealing with consultants or via Gartner Magic quadrants. This does not scale to individual business managers as their needs can be very different from each others and CIO led solutions are no longer possible for Marketing and Customer facing solutions as shown in Figure 2 based on report by Bain & Company.

Reason 3: Misfit, Churn and Time To Value (TTV)

Software technology vendors have traditionally sold their product using technical specification/features and not based on business processes they improve — business managers struggle to decipher the technical jargons to understand whether a solution meets their business need. Further, push sales from vendors result in misfit as the main incentive of the sales team is to sell.

The problem only gets more confounded once a business manager has shortlisted a solution that solves his business need, as this solution has to not only match the CIO’s and CFO’s specification for security and compliance but also work closely with the existing technologies in the company. Integrations, security and data compliance can take a lot of effort and time and can result in delay to deploy and eventually TTV.

Yet another reason for delay is due to the effort in implementing the technology in the existing workflow and the effort in training the staff. If a solution and its integration is not well thought through, there has be to significant effort and time in re-engineering the processes and workflows to suit the technology. This issue is exaggerated when business manager has a point need but ends up buying popular software technology which does lot more than his need.

In Cuspera, we are on a mission to help business managers find the right-fit technology solution for their business needs.