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Enterprise Software Should Be Fun

Where does it say that enterprise software has to be boring, complicated and painful to use?

Dave Concannon asks a much less rhetorical question in his blog post: Can Game Mechanics make Serious software “sticky”?

There are two things I loved about Dave’s post:

  1. He talks about being addicted to MUDs. (Who wasn’t right? Hell, I learned to hack away in C/C++ to build features on a MUD I used to love)
  2. He expands on the concept of “Braggable Moments” for “serious software”.

Dave defines “Braggable Moments” as, “…a shared action which elevates an individual user in status among their peers.”

What we often forget within the enterprise is that it’s a collection of individuals. It’s not a mindless hive. If it is, the company is in trouble. Each individual (or at least most individuals) should have a need to, and an interest in, standing out. That’s human nature. Doing so feeds the ego, makes people feel good and gets them recognition from peers and superiors.

Braggable Moments absolutely belong in Enterprise software

We’re seeing user adoption models change (going bottom up into an enterprise vs. top down), and soon, hopefully we’ll start to see the application of Braggable Moments and game mechanics inside Enterprise software. We don’t need to turn Enterprise software into Farmville, but adding game mechanics into Enterprise software can help address some of the key challenges: user adoption, training / user comfort, scalability and sustainability. How often have you seen a company purchase a piece of Enterprise software that takes too long to get rolling, is too hard to use, and never takes off? Game mechanics and Braggable Moments can absolutely help with those problems. And the Enterprise software companies that get that are going to catch on very quickly with users and buyers.

Take the Mystery out of Software Pricing

Pricing software isn’t a pure science. Far from it. But Neil Davidson does an awesome job of demystifying product and software pricing in his book, Don’t Just Roll the Dice – A usefully short guide to software pricing. The book is very short, and he’s made it available for free as a downloadable e-book. Just click the title above to download it.

You can also buy the book, which is exactly what I did. I just prefer to read things in print. It took me about 1.5 hours to read, but I know I’m going to reference the book regularly.

I’ve written about software pricing and web application pricing before, but Neil’s book is much more complete and practical.

The biggest takeaway (and critical reminder) for me is this: Software pricing isn’t about pricing. It’s about your entire business.

The pricing you choose has to be looked at, and derived, holistically from everything within your business. For a startup, you have to ask yourself, “What do we want to be when we grow up?” That’s going to ultimately dictate pricing.

Pricing is so much more than a number (or a few numbers):

  • Your price defines and impacts your brand.
  • Your price can trigger competitive awareness (and price wars!) that you don’t want.
  • Your price defines and clarifies to customers what you’re selling. Not specifically about the product features, but what you’re really selling beyond a collection of features packaged in software product.
  • Your price has to align with your sales and marketing strategy, or you’ll fail miserably.
  • Your price defines who you sell to. It tells the market who you’re targeting (and then you better understand why!)

Neil doesn’t provide a “Holy Grail” answer to software pricing problems. That’s because there is no Holy Grail. There’s no “one size fits all” answer to pricing. It simply does not exist. But there are definitely things that you need to understand, expectations you need to meet, and guidelines to follow. And you can get through most of the mystery of software pricing.

Don’t Just Roll The Dice will provide you with a very quick crash course on software pricing and a reference for when you’re working on this very challenging and critical issue.

Do Your Customers Link Value to Price?

A lot of people equate value with price. The higher the price, the higher the value must be, right? I’ve seen this repeatedly in the B2B world selling software to mid-to-large enterprises. It’s certainly not always the case, but it’s more common than you might realize. And it speaks to the possibility that you can increase your price instead of decrease it.

The drive in software sales is clearly to lower prices. Jeff Atwood asks, “Software Pricing: Are We Doing It Wrong?” His argument is that lower prices increase sales volume. He has a couple of good examples of this. And he admits this doesn’t work all the time, although it may certainly apply in high-volume sales to consumers. But ultimately this does lead to price wars that hurt everyone. When prices get too low, vendors lose interest in creating value, and customers get less valuable software.

I do agree with Jeff’s argument that experimenting with price makes sense. You can do so quite easily through targeted sales. Pick a target market, create a sale, build a landing page and drive traffic to it. Measure conversion and sales. Rinse and repeat.

I’ve written in the past on how to price your software product and it’s clear that there are many variables and very few absolutes when it comes to pricing. But one of the variables that’s rarely discussed of late is “value” or at least, “perceived value”, and whether or not people really do equate value with cost. And subsequently, how important is that to your business in terms of marketability, sales cycles, revenues, customer acquisition, etc.

What do you think?

About Ben Yoskovitz
I recently joined GoInstant as VP Product. GoInstant changes how we use the web, making it shareable like never before.

I'm also a Founding Partner at Year One Labs, an early stage accelerator in Montreal. Previously I founded Standout Jobs (and sold it). I'm a hands-on startup guy, helping companies grow successfully from the idea forward. You can reach me at byosko at gmail dot com.

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