Next steps

Richard Conyard · Oct 21, 2005

For those of you that have seen my post in the offers area it is obvious that I'm trying hard to build up the reseller side of things for our CMS. Being honest for trying hard read pulling my hair out ;-) and I am trying to think of next steps.

It's not all doom and gloom, since we're emerging from under the umbrella of our design company the CMS is going into new sites each month infact it is incredibly profitable for them/us, popular with the clients, etc., etc., etc. My problem is simply this, the software is written, but there is only so many sites one sales team can bring in and only so many designs one design team can do a month. So we're not reaching potential.

However, I am having no joy pushing it through other design companies. So for the next step any ideas, would you suggest I:
a) Forget resellers and concentrate on pushing work through my design company (probably involve taking on additional designers since they are busy enough as is)
b) Keep plugging on, eventually there will be the uptake
c) Try to pull together a bit of a war chest and go on a marketing spree (if so where/how?)

Any thoughts appreciated. Any unsolicited phone calls offering marketing services not appreciated. Any comments saying you might as well give up since there are open source/free solutions well I've seen them, used them and quick frankly we !"£$ all over them so no worries there.

Rob Holmes · Oct 21, 2005

Hi Richard I'd got for B and C together.

I've had a brief look at your systems a while back and believe you have a good product.

I don't fully know how it works BUT have you ever thought of offering it to web hosts so they can offer it to their customers?

Rob

Richard Conyard · Oct 21, 2005

It's been through the mill a bit since then Rob. It's still recognisable, but is a damned sight better. Also the enterprise version is out which IMnsHO gives offerings from Red Dot and the such like a run for their money (well features wise, their money and our money differ drastically since we're about a third of the price).

I have thought about web hosts, but I'll have to make a list of ASP supporting hosts. To be honest if I were to do this then I'd probably produce a "lite" version.

Stephen · Oct 21, 2005

I can understand why you have such a challenge, despite the fact that from the information I've seen on your web (and hence compared with opensource offerings) you have a great product.

Two things spring to mind:

Firstly, I think resellers need quite a bit of convincing to invest the time and energy needed to know your product is good. Some incentive I think is needed in this. Perhaps that they could try your CMS on their own site, or that they could pay for it on a monthly basis (with the first 3/6 months free), or perhaps even giving them a huge discount (50%/75% etc) on the first one they sell, to get them onto the bandwagon. I think once they realise they can make money out of it, and save time/hassle from clients, that's the big hurdle out the way. Second and subsequent copies should therefore sell themselves.

Secondly, some way of diffentiating your product more prominently might help. Whilst I'm sure your feature list is great and the overall quality/support etc better than your competitors, I think you need a big pull. One area I'm quite enthusiastic about (as we're developing something simple along these lines for our own use) is thick client CMS user interface. I'm not sure whether you have anything like this, but I know MediaSurface have recently released something. Focussing your reseller marketing on something like this might give them something to sink their teeth in, and clarify the differentiation between you and your competitors.

I agree that some marketing spree would really help, and think you could probably do something quite effective if you target your audience and your message clearly. (I'll leave that bit to the marketing gurus though!)

Hope this helps, and good luck!
Steve

SuffolkDesigns · Oct 21, 2005

I looked at you CMS and liked it, it is something we would consider offering if it was php and not asp

this could be one of the major hurdles as far as finding successful resellers goes, I for one would not want to get involved in transferring clients sites to a windows server (and am not willing to use things like chilisoft due to their cpu abusive nature)

Richard Conyard · Oct 21, 2005

Stephen said:
that they could pay for it on a monthly basis (with the first 3/6 months free), or perhaps even giving them a huge discount (50%/75% etc) on the first one they sell,

Currently it stands as this. First one they sell is free (less support once the site is live), and any reseller price is 60% dropping over number sold.

Stephen said:
Focussing your reseller marketing on something like this might give them something to sink their teeth in, and clarify the differentiation between you and your competitors.

I think this is where we need to do some more work. No point in having a good system if you're not telling people about it I guess.

Richard Conyard · Oct 21, 2005

vshosting said:
I looked at you CMS and liked it, it is something we would consider offering if it was php and not asp

this could be one of the major hurdles as far as finding successful resellers goes, I for one would not want to get involved in transferring clients sites to a windows server (and am not willing to use things like chilisoft due to their cpu abusive nature)

Glad you liked it, but PHP is not an option that we're considering. The .net version will be available early next year, and we have a Java version that needs to be revisited. A lot of people go down the PHP route because of it's tight integration with apache and its effectively free software when you distribute on linux. But with the DB required needing to be SQL server / Oracle 9i/10g / DB2 currently because of the data structures there is no open source db with the required functionality (although firebat is looking promising).

I think we'd probably be stuck on the chilisoft point as well since there is extensive use of bespoke DLLs and XML which I don't think chilisoft handles that well (if at all?).

JoyDivision · Oct 21, 2005

I think a .NET version will be good, ASP is getting quite out dated now and my opinion its not a nice language.

With the .NET version I also think you will widen your market becuase I am not aware of any other .NET CMS packages in existance.

The problem with PHP is there is far too many CMS packages which used it, so I think you're right sticking to the ASP standard on this one.

One of the things I was thinking of offering is off the shelf estate agent software but I am not sure how I would market it, I would probably offer it free in the hope of getting some revenue for customising it etc.

Richard Conyard · Oct 21, 2005

Joy,
.net still has a few problems IMHO, but hopefully we'll find work arounds for those. I know where you're coming from with the asp comments, but it doesn't have to be a nasty language. We adopt the Microsoft DNA architecture ( http://www.extropia.com/tutorials/dna/what_is_dna.html ), with our apps which means the ASP is kept to a minimum. All rendering is done in XSL, data logic held in the DB, bridging logic held in DLLs so ASP is just the glue on the front end.

In regards to the estate agent idea I would steer clear of that model. Vertial markets can be good avenues to addtional revenue, but estate agents are swamped with off the shelf software.

Rob Holmes · Oct 21, 2005

JoyDivision said:
The problem with PHP is there is far too many CMS packages which used it, so I think you're right sticking to the ASP standard on this one.

Joy bit of a side track but why do you believe thats a problem?

<back on topic>

I think a lite version would be good to offer - ever thought of having a system that generates static sites then you could integrate an ftp option and upload them to any server.

Rob

design@ews · Oct 23, 2005

How about trying to get an industry magazine to review it? By doing that you are advertising to people in the industry.

Richard Conyard · Oct 24, 2005

Are there any industry magazines for web design and development?

webdesignguy · Oct 24, 2005

Yeah there are a couple such as "web designer" and "practical web projects"
http://total-web-design.com/
Hope that helps

daveashton · Oct 24, 2005

Several problems here

1: VAR's comfort zone i.e. people sell what they know and is a core product to the business. If we can do well selling these anything else is a pain.

2: VAR channels start at the SD/ MD / TD but end up with the sales team and we are constantly asked to sell new services / products into our new and existing clients. So how will you keep yours top of our list? Oh and sales managers do not fire sales people who are hitting target if they do this by selling the existing product range.

3: If it goes wrong we could hurt our relationship with our clients. So why take a risk?

4: Why yours over anyone elses? ( no emotive language please)

5: How will you support them? Leads, marketing funds pre-sales etc?

6: Can we sell more of what we know if we sell your product? If so how?

Setting up a traditional VAR program takes lots of time and effort. It can be done even if you have a small client base but it is a lot of hard work.

Or run it as a Loss leader VAR program and look at the future not the now!

PS throwing moeny at it will burn a lot of money nunless well thought out.

esynetics · Oct 24, 2005

In my opinion the open source market is becoming more and more recognisable to companies which in turn I feel that the company having a website developed expects a lot more for their money. We currently use a php CMS and must admit have had no problems with it at all. Although having the in house ability to develop any type of custom module is obviously a major benefit.

DotNetWebs · Oct 24, 2005

JoyDivision said:
With the .NET version I also think you will widen your market becuase I am not aware of any other .NET CMS packages in existance.

Hi Joy

Here are two .NET CMS systems

http://www.rainbowportal.net/ - Open source C# CMS

http://www.dotnetnuke.com/ - Open Source VB.NET CMS

To make the most of them a fair bit of development work is required so they are not quite 'off the shelf'. Also until they are updated to .NET 2.0 they will not comply with 'standards' etc. I am not suggesting that, out of the box, they could compete with 'Colony' but Rainbow particularly offers huge potential as a CMS in terms of the number of modules and community support available.

The biggest advantage of course is they are free! People are often surprised to hear 'Windows' and 'Open Source' in the same sentence when describing a piece of software.

Regards

Dotty

Richard Conyard · Oct 25, 2005

Thanks for the feedback Dave.

daveashton said:
1: VAR's comfort zone i.e. people sell what they know and is a core product to the business. If we can do well selling these anything else is a pain.

True, I am relying on companies wanting to expand their offering.

daveashton said:
2: VAR channels start at the SD/ MD / TD but end up with the sales team and we are constantly asked to sell new services / products into our new and existing clients. So how will you keep yours top of our list? Oh and sales managers do not fire sales people who are hitting target if they do this by selling the existing product range.

Again you're right and it is causing us problems.

daveashton said:
3: If it goes wrong we could hurt our relationship with our clients. So why take a risk?

But if you're having to put a system in then you run the risk no matter what system?

daveashton said:
4: Why yours over anyone elses? ( no emotive language please)

This is tricky. Coming from a technical background I could put forward tones of reasons, but this is where I fall down since it is technical.

daveashton said:
5: How will you support them? Leads, marketing funds pre-sales etc?

Leads, pre-sales and sales support documentation. Those going for larger jobs we will also provide technical sales support to including going to the meetings with them if required.

daveashton said:
6: Can we sell more of what we know if we sell your product? If so how?

For a designer producing static sites certainly, it provides another string to their bow (and a powerful one at that).
For companies already selling another system we're talking about switching and on a feature/cost comparison we beat every other CMS I've come across.
For companies that have their own system in-house if they are not trying to resell their system through the first two groups then we are taking the headache away from them, whilst with our API allowing them to continue bespoke development in a framework that makes programming that much faster.

daveashton said:
Setting up a traditional VAR program takes lots of time and effort. work.

Tell me about it!

Thanks for the points

Stephen · Oct 25, 2005

Hi Richard

Seems to me that in your reply to Dave's point 6 you've identified a critical issue - segmenting your market.

Obviously it's proving hard work for you to tackle "all resellers", so why not target your message to whichever group you think would be most receptive/most valuable. e.g. "Resellers who are currently building static sites".

This way, you could clearly highlight the benefits to the people you're communicating with, and focus on the most beneficial relationships.

Hope this helps.
Steve.

Richard Conyard · Oct 25, 2005

DotNetWebs said:
http://www.rainbowportal.net/ - Open source C# CMS

http://www.dotnetnuke.com/ - Open Source VB.NET CMS

I had a look at Rainbow and it's actually quite a good piece of kit. It takes a little while to get it configured, but once up depending on your requirements it's fine.

OFF-TOPIC
I'm not anti-open source despite the occassional rant, but I do feel the adage is true:

Open source is only free if you don't value your time

For my pains I can't see the business case for making Colony open source. I may be missing something, but it goes something like this.
Multiple developers working on the system through different versions for two years
Marketing materials created
Technical authors writing manuals

At a casual estimate I would say the development of Colony has cost the company about £150K, but it would be a lot more if some of us doing it put in all our overtime etc. Now it's paid for itself several times over already, but if I open source it I lose all that hard work on the hope that I pick up a few contracts here or there or get support fees. I can't see the business case myself.

Richard Conyard · Oct 25, 2005

Stephen said:
Obviously it's proving hard work for you to tackle "all resellers", so why not target your message to whichever group you think would be most receptive/most valuable. e.g. "Resellers who are currently building static sites".

It does help, and you're right. I think the trouble is that I've spent so long developing the product and allowing the design company to market it to end clients to pay for it; I've not spent enough time focusing on the real goal which is to create the more valuable VAR network.

And I guess all the quick fix offers etc. in the world aren't going to help if there isn't the appropriate supporting material and channels.

SuffolkDesigns · Nov 1, 2005

It might help a bit if you put prices on your site, I don't know about others but I simply do not want to waste my time making an enquiry to get pricing when that information should be readily available on your site.

Richard Conyard · Nov 1, 2005

I think I am going to have to revisit the site in general. We've a full time copywriter starting next week, so I'm planning on abusing them a little to sort it out. Since this has grown out of our design/dev company most of the material you have seen has had to be put together by yours truly, and I must admit my skill set is a little light in some areas.

FYI. Standard edition (which the price is on there), retails for £2,500 - however partner fees are substantially lower.

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