Posts Tagged ‘offers’

Last week I wrote about how a one-time investment of $500 could help computer companies — and Adobe — sell thousands more units this year.  What follows is a summary of the lessons all organizations can learn form that industry’s mistakes.

Lesson #1:  There’s no substitute for putting your customers first

It’s especially dangerous when you spend more time obsessing over your competition than you do thinking about your customers.

The bad blood between Adobe and Apple is a perfect example how this mistake can hurt sales. “Us vs. them” thinking can quickly permeate an entire organization, especially when your fearless leader is as vocal about it as Steve Jobs has been. In this atmosphere, can you imagine that a Apple marketer would even suggest a website graphic that says “Adobe CS5-Friendly”, no matter how much it would help sales? Can you imagine that Adobe would do anything that might accidentally help a software customer purchase a computer from Apple? Yet that’s exactly what they should both be doing — if they care about sales and customers more than they loathe each other.

Next: Lesson #2: There’s no substitute for talking to each other.

Or, Everybody Loses Except Mr. Singh and Me

Imagine that you are a manufacturer or retailer of computers, software, or computer chips. What if I told you that you could move tens of thousands of units this year — perhaps hundreds of thousands –  for a one-time investment of $500, most of which you’re already paying out in salaries?

Would you do it? Of course you would. So why hasn’t HP, Sony, or Toshiba? Why hasn’t Intel,  Adobe, or Apple? I’ll tell you how they should spend that $500. But first, the back story.

I’m almost certainly going to buy a new computer this year.  I don’t want to. There’s nothing wrong with our old ones.  But I want to upgrade to Adobe Creative Suite 5.  In order to do that, I have to replace at least one of our 32-bit computers with one that  will support the latest edition of the behemoth suite of apps for design, web development, and video and audio editing that is the Adobe Master Collection.

Theoretically, all I have to do is match the list of specs on Adobe’s website to a computer brand’s specs, and I’m done shopping. Right?

Wrong.

The Search Is On

Here’s where I looked:

• Online: Websites of half a dozen different PC manufacturers, and PC Connection, an online retailer. I found exhaustive specs, but either their language doesn’t match Adobe’s, or there are big gaps in descriptions of key components, like graphics and sound cards.  Everyone has “finders”, but they’re useless unless you fit into one of four broad buckets: road warrior, home user, gamer, or business user (by which they mean “people who use spreadsheets and PowerPoint™”).

  I tried Intel’s website, too, figuring that if I could nail down the processor, I would at least have a starting point.  But I ran into trouble from the home page.  Adobe’s site says that CS5 requires an Intel® Core™2 Duo processor. Intel’s website offers a host of brand names on its first few pages, none of them an exact match. I picked Core vPro, the closest match. A few pages in, I did find a Core 2 Duo, only to lose it again when I clicked on a link for laptop processors. A link that said “Where to buy” lead to an error message on a server in the U.K.

• Email. OK, I thought; I’ll tackle this from another angle. I copied the Adobe list into emails and sent them to sales departments of Sony, Toshiba, and Apple, among others, and asked which of their models met these requirements. Some didn’t write back. Some pointed me back to their website. One wrote that they couldn’t answer the question in an email, but that I should call the sales department. (When I did, they asked me if I was a road warrior, home user, gamer, or business user. Sigh.)
• The mall: Best Buy and the Apple Store. It was no surprise that the Best Buy clerk didn’t know the products well enough to guide me. (Although, when you’re in the right mood, it can be amusing to watch a Best Buy employee “answer your question”  by standing next to you and reading aloud from the card on the computer.)  The Apple clerks barely glanced at my list of specs.One recommended a laptop that didn’t meet the Adobe specs for processor, graphics card, or memory, but he said he was confident it would be fine for running the Master Collection, because he, himself  “does a lot of Photoshop” on that very same machine.

• Google.I’m not alone in this. Sadly, if you Google “best computer for Adobe CS5″, you get a lot of people like me. You can hear them weeping through their message board posts. “Won’t someone please tell me which computer to buy? Please? Pleeeese?”

It’s not surprising that there are so many of us out there. Love it or hate, it, Adobe Creative Suite is the preeminent software package for the world’s millions of print designers, web designers, illustrators, and many people who work in animation, audio, video, and film production. If even 10% of them are in my boat, that’s a lot of people who need new computers. Right now. This year. During a recession. We just don’t know what to buy.

Sarwan Singh To The Rescue

Just when I was about to give up, I remembered U2W, the place that fixed my laptop last summer.  I dug up the owner’s business card and gave him a call.

It took Mr. Singh all of fifteen minutes to solve my problem. He looked at the Adobe specs online while I was on the phone. He compared it to the specs he had for laptops, and said an Apple would be ok if I upgraded the graphics card. He suggested an HP model that would also work.

The Magical $500

If any one of those manufacturers or vendors had thought about customers like me, I wouldn’t have had to go through this exercise, and they’d be selling a lot more computers.  This is all they would need to make me and mine happy: a silly little badge like this one, placed on websites next to all the  computers that support Adobe  CS5.

That’s it. No one would have to dig, email, call, worry, or pray that they wouldn’t be making an expensive mistake. We customers would know what to buy in less than 5 seconds.  The only decisions left would be the size of the hard drive and the color of the case.

How I got to $500

• You need someone with a lot of product knowledge to come up with a list of products that meet the Adobe specs. Let’s say that in your organization, that person earns $150 an hour. It took Mr. Singh 15 minutes to think about which computers would support CS5, so we’re at $37.50.
• I spent another 15 minutes making this awful badge in Illustrator. A production artist would want a little more time to make a non-ugly version. Let’s say that this cost is $50.  Add $12 in case your designer wants to start with a stock illustration.
• Someone in your marketing or web department has to look at your site, decide where these badges should go, and communicate that information to the web developer. $80.
• The person who maintains your website places the image in all the right spots. $60.
• You run it through QC. $40.

You’re now at $219.50. To make this work, you need two more people: someone who will suggest the idea and insist that it happens, and someone who will follow through and make sure that it did happen. Take the remaining $280.50 and give each of them half of it as a bonus. You’re done. Hundreds of thousands, or millions, of dollars in sales, for $500.

But since, in the real world, nobody did that,

Let’s List The Losers

• Apple, Toshiba, Sony, HP, et al. They’re busily NOT selling computers to lots of people who really want to buy them.
• Adobe. They’re not selling software to people like me, because we don’t have the computers to run it. At the very least, they should have used the same processor brand names that customers will find when they shop.
• Me, and potential customers like me. We’re really annoyed that this is so hard to do.

And The Winners

• Mr. Singh. He understands the specs, he knows his own products, and he invested 15 minutes in me. When I do buy a computer, I’ll buy it from him.
• Me again. Uncertainty banished. Anxiety gone. I’ll never get my lost time back, but I can now buy a computer with confidence.

Next…

Larger lessons to be learned from this, no matter what your industry.