When you give something for free (lost leader marketing or some "quick" support)
do you do this to attract customers or improve customer satisfaction or
some other reason? If for a positive purpose, does it work?
Or do you feel that it devalues your product or service and you only do it to
match a competitor or because you don't know how to charge for it but
somehow feel obligated?
I know this is an area that many of us who deal with SMEs (like most of the ACT! Consultants) struggle with.
For example, with ACT! 3.0 (Symantec) and ACT! 7.0 (Sage) the product was so flawed, many consultants felt obligated in doing free support to help customers who had purchased on their recomendation. Fortunately, that's not an issue now... but with competitive market providing "self-help" resources (even Sage provides some good free video training and this site), business decisions need to be made that either match the free offerings with the hope of gaining clients for more personally customised bespoke services OR do they need to justify the investment OR just hope the userstrust you enough and don't want to do the research?
Russ, this might make a useful idea for you to bootcamp with some ACCs to see what works... then, generalise it for a whitepaper for the SME users. From a business perspective, the ACCs are reasonably typical of a significant share of the ACT! user base.
When you give something for free (lost leader marketing or some "quick" support) do you do this to attract customers or improve customer satisfaction or some other reason? If for a positive purpose, does it work?
Or do you feel that it devalues your product or service and you only do it to match a competitor or because you don't know how to charge for it but somehow feel obligated?
I know this is an area that many of us who deal with SMEs (like most of the ACT! Consultants) struggle with.
For example, with ACT! 3.0 (Symantec) and ACT! 7.0 (Sage) the product was so flawed, many consultants felt obligated in doing free support to help customers who had purchased on their recomendation. Fortunately, that's not an issue now... but with competitive market providing "self-help" resources (even Sage provides some good free video training and this site), business decisions need to be made that either match the free offerings with the hope of gaining clients for more personally customised bespoke services OR do they need to justify the investment OR just hope the userstrust you enough and don't want to do the research?
Russ, this might make a useful idea for you to bootcamp with some ACCs to see what works... then, generalise it for a whitepaper for the SME users. From a business perspective, the ACCs are reasonably typical of a significant share of the ACT! user base.
Regards,
Mike Lazarus