Last month I offered advice on how to tell if your small business software isn’t working for you. Identifying an ill-suited system is a skill that will save you money and increase your productivity, but what if you’re just starting the software buying process? How can you avoid making a choice that you might regret later?
It’s all about asking the right questions. Here’s my tried and true method for figuring out if a new piece of software will work for a client’s needs.
Tap into available resources
First, make sure you’re taking advantage of the resources at your disposal. Every software company has a team of salespeople at the ready to answer your questions via channels like livechat and webinars. They want you to use their software, and it’s their job to show you how their software can meet your needs.
If you’re looking into a particular software platform, you don’t have to have all the answers before punching in your credit card. Start a conversation with the folks who have the knowledge you need — although, keep in mind that they’re invested in having you purchase their product.
Know how to get the answers you need
Now that you found someone to talk to, your next challenge is formulating the right question. This is where you have the biggest opportunity to avoid a software mismatch. Most of the time, small businesses are asking questions like these:
Do you have an integration with Mailchimp?
Do you support Quickbooks?
Can I import my lists?
All of these questions are asking if the software has a specific feature. But here’s the issue: there are many ways software can integrate with other platforms, or import a list. It can be awesome: maybe your list imports in less than 30 minutes with no issues. Yay! Or, it can suck: maybe it takes five hours to import your list, and when the data does show up, it’s incorrect. Boo!
The answer to a simple “does your software do xyz” question doesn’t get to the heart of how that feature works. So, how do you get informative answers? You use these three words: Show me how.
Asking instead open-ended questions like “show me how your Mailchimp integration works,” or, “Show me how I would use this with a team,” are surefire ways to elicit useful answers.
Why asking the right questions makes all the difference
Before I go into a software example, let’s look at another one we can all relate to very well: travel. I happen to be travelling around Europe with my family as we enjoy paternity leave, so it’s top of mind.
If I ask a travel service “Do you provide service from Stuttgart to Venice?” most of them will say “Yes, we do!” But we all know there is a very big difference between a direct flight, and an 8 hour train ride with changes.
We know instinctively when an option doesn’t work because we can’t imagine travelling that way. With two little kids in tow, and where naptime is still a sacred ritual central to my sanity, I’m not taking a 8hr train ride with changes. When I was traveling solo in my twenties, living next to the train station and consuming an endless stack of books, I may very well have picked the train. Not anymore.
Good questions help distinguish wins from workarounds
This analogy extends for software. And in software we won’t talk about transit time, we’ll talk about workarounds.
Asking a software vendor to show you how their system would work for you is your key to getting a real glimpse into your experience. You’ll more often than not know immediately if this feels like a win or a workaround. And you’ll know immediately if the workaround is something you can imagine you and your team doing, or not.
For example, you might ask a salesperson if their CRM software integrates with Mailchimp. If it does, you might go on to ask them to show you how. Perhaps Software Company A has a native integration that you have to set up once using an API key.
Maybe Software Company B also says they integrate with Mailchimp. But this time, it’s done through a third-party service. So you have to create an account with them, then connect both accounts together, then set up automation between two systems, then establish rules, and on and on.
Both of these are integrations. Software Company A’s solution will take five minutes and a few clicks – it’s a pretty clear win. Software Company B’s is more complicated, and could take an inexperienced person many hours to set up and manage, it’s a workaround.
Every software company markets their wins – those are easy to spot. Their workarounds? It takes a bit more digging to see those, and what feels fine for you may be a deal-breaker for someone else. In this example, maybe you only have one Mailchimp list, and you only do a monthly newsletter, so the difference between options A and B really only boils down to 30 minutes extra setup time. For a business that has 10 different lists, this workaround might be impossible to imagine living with.
Where should you begin?
If you’re looking to purchase new software to improve your company’s productivity and ditch manual, time consuming processes, I’m here to help. I often have conversations with software vendors on behalf of my clients, and I offer software assessment and demo services so wins and workarounds can be easily compared.
Instead of spending hours trying to figure it out on your own, let’s see if I can help you.