Product Configuration and Pricing
Pricing software products and packaging the right features can be complicated. That's why GroundWork Open Source decided to engage Sample Analytics to design and implement a survey of existing and prospective customers and community members. Important price points were tied to customer buying intentions, and GroundWork is now armed with the data needed to confidently package and price its products.
From 2005 through 2008 Matt Lawton conducted, analyzed and presented the results of a series of studies on the profitability of Microsoft's partners in various countries in North America and Europe. These groundbreaking studies compared the business performance of specific types of partners of Microsoft with benchmark VARs, ISVs, system integrators, consultants, and distributors.
Open Source Software Community Research
Open source software is one of the most significant technology trends to emerge in the last 20 years. It has impacted software vendors' products, business models, marketing strategies, development processes, and distribution techniques. At the heart of open source software is a community of developers and software users. To date, however, very little is really known about the characteristics of these communities, how they differ from each other, what drives community members to participate as they do, etc. Matt has begun this research by conducting 3 studies to date with the help of the appropriate open source software foundations and vendors.
A critical measure of business opportunity for a technology vendor's partners is the pull-through of a partner's own products and services associated with the resale of the vendor's product. Matt recently completed a study, the first of its kind, that quantified the pull-through associated with the resale of branded Linux distributions.
Planning sales through the channel is tricky, at best. Usually technology vendors use historical data from their field sales representatives and channel managers to set targets and priorities for the next year. But are the current channel partners performing as well as they should? Which ones will deliver the most sales for a new product launch? Should a vendor recruit new partners or focus on existing partners? These questions can be answered with the help of factual data about channel partners - both current partners and potential partners. Matt launched a series of studies called Channel Intelligence to collect and report such data.
Understanding the true adoption of open soure software (i.e. beyond the oft-quoted metric of number of downloads), and what are the drivers and inhibitors of adoption, is important for any technology vendor that uses, distributes, and/or competes with open source software. In 2007 and 2008 Matt conducted research to measure the adoption of open source software in the USA.
Partner Identification and Qualification
One of the main requirements of any technology vendor that sells through the channel is to identify and recruit new partners. However, most partner prospects are ill-equiped to produce meaningful sales volumes. How can a vendor sift through all the potential candidates and focus on the top prospects? And just what constitutes a "top" prospect? Matt developed a process to research and rank potential channel partners based on detailed data about each prospect matched with detailed recruiting criteria from the technology vendor.