“We can’t afford to spend time educating our customers.” This was the mantra heard in many enterprise software sales reviews during the deal-happy nineties, as VP Sales were urging their people to close more sales as quickly possible.  Guess what?  Those days are over.  If you’re in enterprise software today, you have to spend the time educating your customers. 
 
Most enterprise software is heavily dependent on the process in which it is being used.  There is no point in implementing new software if the process is not adapted to take advantage of new capabilities.  Just like you don’t need a spreadsheet if you continue to use a calculator to add up the numbers.  Process issues are the most common reason for software implementation failure and a major hurdle to sales.
 
Why is it such a big issue?
 
We are all creatures of habit.  Recently, I have been involved in a pilot implementation of marketing library software.  The software works great and does almost anything you could ask for.  Still, when salespeople look for a piece of collateral, they start out by sending the all familiar “do we have something about…” e-mail.  When directed to the marketing library, they can easily find what they’re looking for; yet, they need to be constantly reminded to go there.
 
Changing an existing process is a pain.  On a personal level, many people are simply afraid of change.  Getting a group of people, often from multiple departments, to agree on a new process requires leadership and a common vision.  It also takes time. 
 
For a large organization, training people to implement a new process is time consuming and costly.  If your customer has to spend just one day of training for each user of the new software they purchased from you, the cost of training can easily reach anywhere from twenty to two hundred percent of the software license cost.    
 
People do not know what the new process should look like.  It is much easier to complain about the existing process than to come up with a better one.  Anybody can see that running out of stock for a product that is currently advertised front and center is bad business.  If your software can support a process which will eliminate or minimize such instances, you can save your customer a lot of money and aggravation.  Unfortunately, no matter how great your software is, designing a process that will ensure coordination of promotions with product availability is not that easy. 
 
The difficulty of implementing a process change has direct implications on your sales.  I often ask software executives about the reasons they lose deals.  The common answer is that most sales are not lost to the competition but to the infamous “doing nothing.”  As a matter of fact, opportunities are rarely recorded as a loss; rather, they are just delayed and eventually evaporate.  Process paralysis is a major reason for this phenomenon. 
 
So what does it mean for you?  While you could wait for your customers to figure things out on their own, you would be much better positioned to be their solution of choice if you took the initiative to help them get the process right.
 
What can you do to help your prospects and customers?
 
Marketing: offer your customers opportunities to learn about the process
 
Create a knowledge sharing community for your customers.  Case studies, webinars, user group meetings – these are all great opportunities for your customers to learn from each other, from industry experts, and from your own company’s experts.  It is also a great opportunity for your employees to learn more and become process experts in their field. 
 
If possible, give your customers the opportunity to learn by trying.  In many cases, the software and the process are so tightly coupled, that it is difficult for the people involved to envision the new process without hands-on experience with the software.
 
Sales: it’s really consulting
 
Consultative selling has been around for years.  It is time to take it up a notch.  Your sales teams have to become agents of change, helping your customers create and articulate the vision for a new way of doing business.  I am saying teams because it usually takes more than one person to cover the range of knowledge that is required to affect any process change.    
 
Your early adopter customers have a vision for change; they look for you to be a partner in implementing their vision.  Later-stage customers are more reluctant to change existing processes.  They look for proven processes and blueprints for success.  Either way, you have to develop and deliver process expertise. 
 
To do so, you need to hire the right people to begin with.  Then you have to give them the time to learn and establish credibility with customers before you can expect them to close sales.  You should expect and measure incremental evidence of progress; but given enterprise software sales cycles, it could be a full year before you see closed deals.  To foster expertise, you would be better off splitting your territories by process and/or industry than by geography.   
 
Professional Services: become your own system integrator
 
In a recent speech at Software 2004, Romesh Wadhwani, chairman of the Symphony Technology Group, proposed that enterprise software companies would increasingly replace system integrators as the primary implementers of their software.  I am not sure it is necessarily an “either or” situation – I believe both system integrators and software vendors can play a role in implementation – but I agree that a software vendor must be directly involved in customer deployment to maintain first hand experience in the processes involved. 
 
Account Management: be consumed with customer success
 
Your ability to land new deals is highly dependent on the success of your existing customers.  You want your customers to be more than just references; you want to turn them into advocates of a process change and evangelists of your solution.  You want them to demonstrate tangible benefits that will make your prospects envy on one hand, confident in your ability to deliver on the other hand.
 
Yet, in most software organizations, nobody is compensated based on customer success (this is not necessarily unique to software companies).  Success in implementing change does not usually come overnight.  Allocating resources to work with your customers to ensure demonstrable success is a fundamental change that software companies need to make.  You can read more about it in our article “Is Your Customer's Success an Afterthought?” 
 
 
The Bottom Line
 
Instituting process expertise and investing in customer education is not cheap.  The cost of not making the investment is probably higher: expect more sales to evaporate as a result of process paralysis, implementations cycles to go longer, and references to be lukewarm about your product.  
 
I’m interested in your thoughts – how does your company manage the need for customer education?