• Sale is the very beginning of the project and mistakes at this stage are the worst. If you don’t work out the client’s expectations or miss the grades, you will find yourself on the path of a kamikaze. Reload the budget - you will lose the client or he will have a feeling of being deceived.

     

    To sell software well, you need to have solid experience in both development (technology, management and processes) and sales. These competencies are extremely difficult to combine in one person, and when they are combined, such a person is called the “founder of the company” or “executive director”. I know examples of companies in which the director does the initial processing of all development orders. Usually the growth ceiling of such a company is 25-30 people, and the director is overloaded.


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    I develop software for business and sometimes I want to shoot the sales department. Then I pull myself together, remember that it is these guys who bring money to the company, and programmers, in fact, hang on costs. At this point, enlightenment comes: salespeople have a different mindset, different skills, and, most often, a different education. And every day they have to deal with a bunch of objections from customers from the series "and one contractor from India promised to develop the exact same system in half the time and cheaper."


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    If the decision is satisfied with the customer, then the customer and contractor conclude an agreement on the development (or modification) of the software product. The contractor receives a source of financing work and may officially start the project. As a rule, the customer becomes more accessible to the contractor, and the development process goes to the development stage.

     

    The contractor must fix and place the technical solution agreed with the customer under the control of versions, which, along with the concept, should be a publicly available document, changed only for significant reasons.

    My experience says that you should not combine the concept and preliminary technical solution. The concept is not intended for technical specialists, and the technical solution is focused on experts. In addition, as I indicated above, the concept may have several technical solutions. And in the subsequent stages of the development process, it may happen that you will have to revise the technical solution within the framework of the current concept. No need to knock out the support points from under themselves, they are never superfluous.


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    After receiving the decision from the contractor, the customer must carry out his review for his part. In fact, he should get answers to the same basic questions:

     

    Does the solution correspond to the goals and objectives formulated by the customer?

    Does the decision of the concept consistent between the customer and the contractor correspond to?

    Is the solution implemented technologically?

    Does the decision fit in restrictions on the period and budget specified by the customer?

     

     

    However, it is more difficult to answer these questions to the customer. It is good if the customer has his own IT unit in which rather competent specialists work. More often, the customer is forced to attract independent auditors who analyze the implementation of the decision proposed by the contractor. Based on the expert opinion, the customer accepts or rejects the decision of the contractor.






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