As I interview company insiders for clients to uncover the sales stoppers so we can “find it, face it, and fix it,” legacy systems—or any software that simply isn’t up to the task—are often mentioned.
I think this is a bigger problem than top managers realize, and it’s an overarching reason why software buyers are so skeptical.
Often, at the core of the problem are Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. They are intended to help manage core business processes across departments using a centralized database. They are supposed to serve as the “single source of truth” for all major functions of a company.
What a crock! This is the promise, and the promise is more often broken than kept.
The large enterprise companies can afford to attempt to use SAP or Oracle’s NetSuite to pull everything together. But even they struggle to make it work. Transitioning to a new ERP system is a major project that can take a year or two to fully implement.
Meanwhile, even these companies suffer from “more-than-one-system” syndrome during the transition. A year is a long time in the business world. Frequent, necessary changes and new decisions about how the information is categorized and used make the “single database” idea a moving target.
Mid-sized companies are hurting even more.
Most of them are still relying on a mashup of spreadsheets into which data is entered manually, legacy systems that don’t talk to each other, and now additional AI systems designed to carry out specific functions.
The mid-sized companies are looking to Microsoft Dynamics, Infor CloudSuite, Odoo, and Acumatica.
QuickBooks Online Advanced promises to be a “light ERP for very small businesses.” My interviews reveal that QuickBooks has limitations when complexity arises. Example: A company with three warehouses can see only the total inventory across all three warehouses, not the inventory in each warehouse. Now, there may be a solution in QuickBooks, but no one in the company has found it yet.
Odoo is far from intuitive. It often requires an Odoo consulting team to make even simple changes or integrations.
There is another problem, though, which I don’t see very much in the “press.”
It is very common for software developers to make false promises.
“Can your software do [this]?” asks the potential customer.
“No problem,” says the salesperson.
However, if he were being fully transparent, he would instead say, “Yes, the software can do that, but it’s so convoluted and unintuitive that you will have to hire one of our experts to set it up for you. Which means, of course, that you will be paying extra consulting fees on top of the base subscription price for the software.
“And, if I were to be even more transparent, I would tell you that our top managers are trying to increase our consulting revenue stream, so they are less interested in the software being intuitive and more interested in you hiring us to help.”
I’m not making this up. This is the reality for customers of a program which shall remain unnamed.
I have been working with software companies as a revenue system architect for years. I’m also, like all of you, a software user. Our whole company runs on the cloud.
These realities bother me. A lot.
How many times have you bought an application after doing extensive research and asking many questions, only to discover once you start using it that it is not going to be able to do something you really need it to do? Or that function is possible, but it would take a week to figure out how to make it work? Or that you have to hire someone to come in and help?
No wonder the Buyer’s Mindset when evaluating software (which consists of their desires, concerns, and questions) stalls at the “concerns” stage!
Who among all software buyers has NOT been disappointed?
I could tell you some Big Horror Stories, such as a mid-sized company that hired developers to piece together a “handle all our customer interactions” CRM system and spent more than $100,000, only to find out that the developers lied about the CRM system integrating with Outlook. They said it could, because they assumed it could. But it turns out it couldn’t.
This is a massive market opportunity for software companies that tell the truth. The sooner that happens, the better. It will be a win for the truth-tellers, the buyers, and the industry as a whole.
One of our staff members has built ERP systems for a living. I’ve been at the bleeding edge of tech for decades, and have done many revenue turnarounds involving improvements to complex systems.
We have other team members with application experience, and are connected to additional consultants who can help. Not to mention solid process optimizations.
If we do our “find the sales stoppers” work for you, we can recommend and implement solutions.
Text me at 401-423-2400 if you are trying to solve problems such as these.
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