Well, the time is getting close now. Soon will be the official unveiling of the Easy Assets : Standard and Easy Assets : Enterprise packages. What this means for me is that I'm tightening the bolts on the application, finishing off user documentation, testing installs on any pc I can get my hands on, and redesigning my website with new marketing.
Something that many customers seem to expect you to have is a 1-3 page product datasheet that gives an overview of your company and the product. Being the marketing minor that I am, I recently dove into creating these for each version of my product. My goal was to convey a few messages:
The entire process from purchase to installation to use is very easy.
My product is based on modern technology unlike a lot of my competitors (there are some uuuuuuuugly applications out there)
There is a measurable cost benefit to using my product.
#1 and #2 are designed to get you in the door, but #3 is the key to selling software to the business people who actually write the checks. This blog and my own development expertise makes me confident about convincing developers that this is a worthy product, but oftentimes it is not developers who make the final decisions, so my product datasheets must be designed to sway your average business manager.
Personally, I believe that reaching business managers hinges on showing cost savings and more efficiency for their workers. This means I've had to go out and do a lot of research and find supporting evidence that Asset Management is worth your time and money. The trick is that the research can not come from anybody, it must come from someone trusted, a respected expert in the field.
I hit a home run with a public document I found on gartner research. For those of you who aren't familiar with gartner, they measure all sorts of market trends and make a lot of money compiling and selling information. Not all of their materials are for pay, however, so I spent a lot of time digging through their site checking out asset management studies. What I found was a quote that I have included in my product datasheets:
âAbout 90 percent of the sites audited by Gartner Measurement use marginal practices for hardware asset management. This situation increases the risk of poor system manageability, complex change management and below-average service levels. These risks can increase the total cost of ownership for distributed computing by
7 percent to 10 percent a year, or about $560 to $800 per user. Moreover, enterprises that do a poor job of managing hardware assets will likely do poorly in software asset management, which has even higher costs and risks.â
So there you have it, those of you who work for companies that don't track your assets, you're potential losing quite a bit of money in waste and time spent digging for information that my program puts right at your fingertips.
How did the datasheets turn out? Well they aren't linked to my main site yet because it's being redesigned, but I'll give you all a "preview".
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