4 articles tagged ‘Trust’

Target audience: Seek belief; leave proof to CSI April 11th 2010

Watch out if a prospect asks you to prove your story’s true. Instead, seek out an audience inclined to believe your story.

I developed applications for CICS on IBM mainframes in the 1980s. At that time IBM had a project to reimplement CICS using formal methods. Reading about the Verification Grand Challenge reminded me of that project.

An ambitious 15-year international research project, its goal is to create a large repository of useful code, verified to the highest standards of rigour and accuracy. An early case study applied automated verification tools to prove CICS is formally correct. For this they used the CICS Z notation specifications from the 1980s.

Apple: Get the meta-programming tools off my lawn! April 10th 2010

Apple’s walled garden is becoming a hermetically sealed world with a (secret) licence agreement to sterilise every input.

The clash of worldviews between Apple and developers took a turn for the worse this week. For the first time, Apple will be banning meta programming tools for the iPhone and iPad. Section 3.3.1 of the latest iPhone Developer Program License Agreement states:

3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).

Lessons: Selling tools to developers who hate tools March 19th 2010

Selling to developers who hate tools is a quick way to waste lots of money. We targeted the few whose worldview embraced tools.

As application tool vendors we convinced prospects with metrics and ROI. Adopting tools, we thought, was a no-brainer. Even so, selling to developers who didn’t want to use tools was difficult. Time and again developers successfully blocked tool adoption.

Our problem: their worldview didn’t include the idea tools are useful. Our solution: we focused on the 1 or 2 developers whose existing worldview did include a positive attitude towards tools.

Whether or not these developers had formal authority, we got our tool into their hands so they could reach their own conclusions. If they thought our tools worthy, they’d start spreading the word internally. Having someone who developers trust spread our story for us made all the difference.

Credibility: Not enough to approach prospects directly March 18th 2010

Prospects pay attention if they hear about you from someone they already trust. The bad news: that person can never be you.

Prospects won’t hear your advertising message; they simply are not listening. However, if a miracle occurs and they stumble across your product, you have a credibility problem: you don’t have any!

Website cutting-edge? Brochures tip-top? 30-day free trial awesome? Great, but it doesn’t change the fact we simply don’t believe what vendors say. Don’t take this personally. It’s not you specifically; we’ve all learned the hard way not to trust what vendors say.

So, prospects ignore your advertising and assume what you say is untrue. How, then, can you reach out to prospects and win new customers? Simple: personal recommendation.

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