If you had to come up with the most needed skill for a small business owner, what would it be? Would it be leadership? What about sales? How about organization or planning? Those are all needed skills for a small business owner but are not the one most needed.What about communication? Yep, that's a needed skill, [...]
In his book, "The Business of Software", Eric Sink talks about small ISVs, which are small independent software vendors who dream up a software product and then build it with the intent to market and sell it. He defines "small" as a company with fewer than 50 employees. There are a ton of small independent [...]
It's been just over a year ago that our company went all remote. What this means is that we gave up the centralized office and all work from our homes now. When I started my software company back in 1994, I was sharing an office suite with my best friend who was also starting his [...]
When we geeks get started writing copy for marketing our software, we go one of two ways. We're either really verbose as we try to bring our logical thinking process into the copywriting process or we're really terse and only state the facts.The best route is in-between the two extremes. The problem we run into is that when we come [...]
Over the years, I've gone from dreading coming up with marketing materials to market my software to really enjoying it. I think part of the reason for this is that I enjoy learning. My son-in-law says that when he learns something new, he gets a new wrinkle in his brain. He also says a lot of [...]
When you've sold desktop software for over 20 years, you feel like you have the pricing down fairly well. You understand all the variables and can predict cash flow based on sales because you know your numbers. If you want to move to a monthly pricing model similar to the software-as-a-service (SAAS) model, how do [...]
We discussed in an earlier post that you need to come up with your buyer personas. Once you've done that, every interaction your persona has with your company should be tailored to where they are in the buyer’s journey. What the heck is the buyer's journey, you ask? The buyer’s journey is the active research process [...]
Welcome to my site! I started a software company in 1994 and still own it today. That company is SherWare, Inc. Over the years I've tried, failed and succeeded at marketing and selling software. I've also dealt with handling company finances from taxes, lines of credit and recurring revenue. In other words, I think [...]