When writing the book, “Software and Vendors and Requirements, Oh My!” (http://www.lupinepartners.com/books.html), I interviewed a dozen or so software sales professionals.

I thought you might find their thoughts on references interesting. I agree with some of their comments but not all. More quotes in later blogs…David

On evaluating the vendor…

“References can be very deceiving. In the product areas that I work in, people are currently using six different versions of our product. So when you talk to a customer and that customer says, ‘Oh we hate software company X,’ well they may be on a release that is six years old and they haven’t upgraded. Or if you talk to a client that is like, ‘We love it,’ well it turns out that their accounting staff has the latest and greatest version. And so I think you have to be very careful about using references because the value is limited at best and my opinion it really doesn’t gain you very much.”

“I think a lot of our prospects fail to ask for the current product notes because current release notes will tell you what enhancements have been fixed, what workarounds are there, and what currently doesn’t work in that release of the product. Everybody knows it exists, everybody does. If you own software today, you know it is out there. But what they want to see if this future product that we keep striving to hit, and we never hit it.”

“If I was buying software from our company I would tell my sales rep, ‘I am going to make the decision on your currently released product and I want to get as many report books, manuals and release notes as possible. I don’t care about your future releases because hopefully you are going to be moving in the same direction as me, but I need to find a product that I can implement today.’”

“Be very careful about asking for references. And also be very careful about asking the users of the software how it works. I’ve had mixed results with this. A lot of times as a salesperson you never really know what a customer is going to give you as a reference. So in our market—this may not be true in all industries—my experience is that everyone pretty much knows everyone else. There are exclusive and very private companies that don’t share and don’t associate with association meetings but in general, we all know our competitors.”

“You are very much buying a relationship with the vendor. You are very much buying a relationship with the software company. The software could be great, but also evaluate the software company for who we are, the kind of people we send out, the way we talk to you and treat you on the telephone, both pre-sales and post-sales. And that should be a part of the questioning when you call my references. How do you feel that they value you? Is it just the dollar they value? Did they love you before the sale and after the sale you are just a number? And this does matter?”