Picking the Right Software

Searching for the best software for your business can be a daunting task. There are so many packages, with a dizzying number of features, that make it difficult to sort out the best.

Here are some tips for finding and selecting the right software.

Finding the products

Personal References: It’s always a good idea to talk to people in your industry about what they use.

Trade Associations: Your industry has organizations and web sites dedicated to giving you information.  These usually have information about software that is used in the trade.  But don’t stop here, these lists are often incomplete.

Search Engines: Beyond that, our friends Google and Bing can quickly find software packages – about a bazillion of them, at last count.

Review Sites: Most major software categories have sites dedicated to reviewing the packages in that area.  Sometimes these pages are lead-generation sites that make money from referrals, sometimes they are affiliate marketing that make money from sales, and sometimes they are just good information.

Organize  your findings

Once you start collecting information, you may want to organize it in these areas:

•  Definitions of of the capabilities that you may find in this type of software
• Discussions of what these systems can do for your business
• Narrative reviews of the main functional areas in major systems
• Feature checklists for system evaluation

The first two items are a little more subjective, and probably should be compiled with the language that fits your own situation. The next items, narrative reviews and checklists, can be downloaded from many web sites.

Read the reviews

Software reviews can have:

• Examples of how different features work
• Suggestions about how to put the features to use in real life
• Recommendations for best-fit situations

It’s helpful to weigh the objectivity the site. Vendor and implementer sites can be hopelessly biased, or refreshingly neutral. Sites that review multiple systems should be neutral, but sometimes the reviewers’ bias creeps in. And consultants’ sites (like Wasatch Software Consulting) usually have an agenda – since I provide implementation, integration and customization services, my CRM reviews are focused on the CRM packages I deal with: Salesforce, ACT!, Microsoft Dynamics, SugarCRM and Infusionsoft.

Checklists

A checklist to track your findings is vital for organizing and selecting the software.  The checklist can have:

• Tons of detailed features
• Wide scope
• A weighting matrix to rate the importance of features for different departments
• A scoring calculation to evaluate how well the vendors perform

Checklists can often be gleaned from the internet. But even if you do find a good checklist out there, I recommend that you clean it thoroughly. Remove the things that aren’t needed for your business, and add things that you think you want. For exaample, my sample CRM Evaluation Checklist has some items for Marketing Automation and Deployment Options, because I think they are important. Also, decide if you want to invest the effort in a ‘scoring matrix’, because it takes additional effort that may not be merited.

Vendor Information

Not surprisingly, the vendors can supply tons of information.  Educating prospects on the general capabilities of their type of software is part of their job.  To make this easier for everybody, be prepared with some basic qualifying information.

• Is the package going to be used by Marketing, Sales or Support?
• Is anything in place now?
• How many users will be needed at the start? After a year?
• What is your time frame for purchase?
• Are you the decision maker?
• Has a budget been approved?

Their job is to ask you questions about what you need and show you how well their software handles those requests. The more seasoned sales people will do just that, but newer reps on tight quotas will often plunge into showing demos and closing without trying to understand what you really need. In either event, this process works best if you you use this time to educate yourself about the generally accepted feature set in the type of software you are looking for.