Software Business in the Middle East

We have a potential customer whom we first contacted one year ago. At that time they got demo of our product, and we agreed to talk in a week to see if they’re interesting in purchasing. After that they started to keep postponing things. They normally asked to call one week later, or they were busy with some other issues, or their general manager was not available, and so on.

Couple weeks ago we called them again asking for meeting to show them the latest version. On the demo meeting they finally asked if we still had the same bugs as before – and finally I understood that the reason of endless postponing last year was the fact that they had found some problems in the software they couldn’t accept.

My partner then also confirmed that this behavior is typical for the Middle East – people avoid saying negative things. There are of course enough people who have no problems to reject your proposal and explain the reason, but it is very useful to learn that if your potential customer keeps things delayed, it is probably because there is a reason, and probably that reason is in your product.

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After graduation from the university I thought many times about getting another degree, like PhD or MBA.

But always these thoughts ended up with understanding that further studying would only be for getting a cool title and for having nice words written on my business cards. That’s really bad motivation to spend a few years of your life for further education.

Several years ago I suddenly found myself in situation when after years of programming I would need to manage a team of 7-12 people working in different countries separated from each other by 9 hours flights. The first thought was to go to some management training. My chief was wise enough to suggest me waiting until I make my own mistakes trying to solve daily management problems, and only then go to the training. That was really smart decision. Later on the training I was looking for the answers to my questions. If I went there just for getting a nice looking piece of paper that confirmed I’d successfully finished the management courses, I guess the result would be much worse.

Now I feel it’s time to start studying again. I have a lot of questions in my mind I need to find the answers for. There are also a lot of new knowledge that I need to discuss with others and formulate properly – hopefully in my next diploma.

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During the past month I’ve read several interesting articles about keeping your customers with you. Below is the summary of the most interesting ones.

1). I liked the idea to have follow up contact with your customer 2-4 weeks after purchase. In our software business it might be even simple e-mail sent to the customer asking if everything works fine and if there are any feedbacks. Software companies used to send subscription e-mails with their product news and upgrade information, but I’ve never received follow up e-mail from the companies we made a purchase from.

#link (sorry, it’s Russian)

2). If your customer requests refund, you might want to compensate somehow his time spent on learning your product. This way you might hope to get a positive (or at least not very bad) feedback about your software if he gets asked by somebody else. One of really unusual approaches is to offer your ex-customer a free license for your other product.

#link (sorry, it’s Russian again)

3). It’s common to send present cards to your customers before Christmas, but have you ever tried sending handwritten card? That would be much more remarkable then endless standard cards.

#link (the next link will be in English)

4). It’s not very obvious whether you would ask your user why she has uninstalled your product. For those who ask this question, you might want to try Uninstall Survey for Inno Setup (finally, it’s in English ). It would be interesting to compare the number of those who uninstall and those who leave a feedback to learn if feedback on uninstall makes sense at all.

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