Southwest Fox - Day 2, Session 4

Steve Sawyer - Basic Marketing for Custom Business Software Services

I was particularly interested in this session to see what Steve has learned since his time at Geeks and Gurus.

Steve started out by describing the problem that we faced (and still do) as a small software development shop: How of you market yourself? How do you get in front of the people that need your services.

To illustrate the problem, Steve created the scenario where two people meet and after briefly discussing their occupations, one would say to the other "So I'd call you when..." For example, if one as a patent attorney, the other would say "I'd call you when I'm ready to patent my invention" Other examples would be doctors or plumbers where you could easily say "I'd call you when..."

For us as software developers, that is a really hard sentence for someone to finish. When would someone call us? Most people wouldn't know when they need us. Even if they have a problem that customer software could solve, they might not know it.

Even harder than that, is to be in the right place at the right time when someone does realize that they need us.

In terms of Marketing, Steve suggested a couple key requirements. First in terms of a message: Achieve Clarity. Be able to quickly define what it is you do.

Among other things, Steve suggested identifying your core competency. What do you do specifically that provides your customers benefits? What do you do that is hard for your competitors to imitate? What do you do that can be leveraged widely to many products and markets?

For the end of the session we had some open discussion (which is always as good or better than a scripted session) where we all shared some of our individual experiences.

Doug Hennig, Russ Swall and others recommended a couple books as well: Duct Tape Marketing and one that had Rain Making in the title, but I didn't right down the author and I can't be sure which of the book on Amazon is the right one. (I'll have to get the right name before the conference is over.)