RE: Great piece on marketing collateral

[Mailing List <mlist -at- ca -dot- safenet-inc -dot- com>]

John Posada sez:

> 1) Many companies, including mine, in the long run make more money on
> maintenance renewals and upgrades than they do on the 
> original purchase.
> 
> 2) They are continually approached by competition telling 
> them to dump X
> product and replace it with Y product. They need to be continually
> reminded why the bought the product and how the features are still
> better than those being proposed by the competition.

So, you are counting on those immutable claims of 
superiority to be true and valid for... how long, 
exactly?  Or do you publish updates for the claims 
and assertions pages in your documents, as often as 
your competition releases newer/better products to 
compete with you?

My documents don't self-update when the market changes 
around our products. I don't make business cases in my 
tech docs. Our Sales and BizDev people do that.  

If the product changes, I issue new documents. If it 
doesn't, then the only changes I issue are fixes. 
Sales people, on the other hand, are dealing with 
what's out there in the market right now, and they'll 
change their pitch and emphasis next week if it means 
latching onto a new trend, even if they're still trying 
to sell a product that was designed two years ago, 
built and documented last year.  If I put too much stuff 
in my docs about the specific business needs the product 
addresses, then it begins to look dated very quickly if 
the market discovers something new, or if Sales discovers 
a new market.

/kevin


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