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Get Personal

Nick Nikijuluw - Data Access Europe

17 May 2007

Not the strongest or most intelligent will survive……only the ones most adaptive to change

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Visual DataFlex Personal

• Why– We need to increase our turn-over in product sales, now, and for the future.

• What– We need to focus on getting as many developers using our products as possible.

• How– Before making any sales- and marketing plans, we need to define our goals and

methods

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What does this mean - attitude/individual

• We must understand that for our success, we rely on the success of developers using our products

• We must believe that increasing this number of developers – almost at all cost – is key to our success.

• We must innovate and expand

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A new strategy on how to define a new strategy…

• Definitions of Product and Target

• Then:– Increase Visibility & Awareness

– Create positive Perception

– Generate contact & activate

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Definitions – The Product

• Focus on database applications

• Fast, mature, proven and robust

• Higher level, business oriented framework

• Flexible & Open

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Definitions – The Product - FYI

• Ease of Use is a priority. We change our focus from “can it do it” to “can it be done easily”

• Presentation is a priority

• Easier to build a complete application

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Definitions – The Target Prospect

• Knows programming

• Likely to be familiar with Access, VB, scripting types of languages

• Results oriented – looking for the right high level tool for the job

• Doesn’t want to deal with overhead/complexity of other languages

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Increase Visibility & Awareness

• We have to deal with some handicaps in this area. – We lack large funds to launch big and repetitive campaigns

– We lack resources to research and execute serious, large-scale marketing and sales initiatives

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Increase Visibility & Awareness

• Affordable wide-spread campaigns– Today’s technology and general publication mechanisms and standards

do offer some advantages which we have to adhere to, to benefit wide spread campaigns, that can be affordable, yet effective at the same time.

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Increase Visibility & Awareness

• Identify, target by response– The single purpose of “visibility and awareness” programs in our case is

that it is an initial introduction.

– This first introduction should be wrapped in either a message, or a (special) offer to the reader, that he will take the next step, which is seriously consider evaluating (or buying) the product.

– At this point we found our target, and we need to make sure we have the identity of this prospect, to address in future.

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Increase Visibility & Awareness

• Repetition– Unless the prospect requests to be “unsubscribed” from mailings, he will

stay in the leads-database

– We need to repetitively get back to prospects with information and campaigns to get them further to decide to use (buy) our tool.

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Create positive Perception

• Focus on developing database applications – alone

• Our tools are simple and transparent

• Applications built with our tools are fast and reliable

• Our tools are “open”

• The Visual DataFlex community is different; better!The Visual DataFlex community is different; better!

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Generate contact & Activate

• Initial follow-up is still mass-communication, and repeated

• Build in mechanism for second-level follow-up

• Contact should become increasingly more direct

• Activate prospect

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Activate Prospect

• Take away any obstructions– If someone seriously considers using our tools, we must define how we

can convince them, but also find out what would stop them from evaluating and buying it

– It is of strategic relevance to recognize that a prospect actually investing in learning our language exceeds the importance of the net profit of the first sale of a developer seat to that prospect.

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The Big Picture

• Product– The product needs to support people to “get started”

and it needs enhancements to deliver a full solution, compared to a “project”

• Marketing– Maintain simple and consistent message: “tools for

developing database applications”– Create demand by wide-spread, affordable

awareness & response programs in the media– Base business development on driving prospects

towards the companycompany/channels, and thus creating dialog, rather than specific huntinghunting

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Price

• Price IS an issue for new customers

• Lowering price for prospects is “cheap” way to lower the threshold to try and buy

• Low price is no (longer a) depreciation of value

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Community

• The DataFlex community is open, friendly and professional

• It is informal, and it is highly prepared to share

• Our community is enthusiastic about Visual DataFlex & Data Access Worldwide