Eat your own dog food

Whilst not sharing Larry Ellison's predilections for Pedigree Chum, I get the whole "eat your own dog food" thing. If you do not use your own products, why would you expect a customer to do the same?

We use the digital pen for our own note taking at meetings and for jotting down thoughts on products, development ideas etc. Customers see through immediately the salesman who does not get his own product and knows only how to walk through a canned demo. Their seeing you in front of them using your own stuff is very powerful. This is especially true of the digital pen, as it's simplicity and sheer usability shines when people see it being used for real, not in a demo. The same can be said for form filling on a smartphone, although it has to be acknowledged it is harder to do that in a customer meeting without it looking contrived, the context is not right. The smartphone apps work better when out in the field, after all it is mobile data capture we are talking about here.

If you should use your own products then it is equally true that you should buy your software in the same way. At Step Up Software, we are advocates of the Software as a Service (Saas) approach. The reasons behind this are perhaps best for another blog post, but suffice to say, we use a lot of Saas products, Google Apps for Business for email and productivity, Dropbox for document sharing, AWS for hosting, Tender for our support system and Github for our source code management. These all give us the same benefits our products give our customers, zero install costs, no hardware base, light touch, easy to deploy and use.

The sales message is so much simpler when you understand your own proposition in a real way and not as part of some powerpoint spiel.