02 Mar Sales and Delivery

Back when Simon and I were fresh-faced ECM consultants for hire in the US, there was a kind of customer meeting that we very quickly learnt to recognize – it was where the sales guy (apologies for the gender normative, but to be honest, it was more often than not an actual guy) had already spoken with the customer and decided, (perhaps unsurprisingly) that this strange unique business problem absolutely could be solved with our software, and now Gordon is going to show you exactly how in a tech demo…

(Awkward silence)

Ugh. Thanks Gary.

Enterprise software is mainly complicated because business is complicated – and as a result it’s amazingly easy to mis-understand what both the problem and the solution are. If you’re paid a big commission and you don’t want to pay too much attention, you could flat out lie about the software and chances are good that nobody will notice…

(I’m sure that this has never happened. It could though.)

From the delivery side, we’ve seen first-hand (also perhaps unsurprisingly) that you are unlikely to deliver a successful technology project when the customer thinks they are getting something else.

And so from that point on, in an effort to avoid awkward silences, failed projects and annoyed customers we’ve always taken a delivery approach to software sales.

What this means is that, at Dinode,  we will never demonstrate anything that isn’t a real, genuine usable feature that we think could help. No PowerPoint screenshots. No video demos. No hand-wavy roadmap future-gazing. If we don’t have a feature, we’ll tell you. If we have it, but we don’t think it will solve your problem, we’ll tell you. This way we get straight to the part where we figure out if we can help, and how we’re going to deliver it.

Because when it comes down to it, the potential of what we can do as a software company isn’t as important as your own potential to understand and solve your business problems.

That’s one of the reasons we set out to build a no-code platform – to help people create solutions that fit – not buy ones they’ve been sold to fix problems that don’t exist.