We’ve read the dumb company: how to avoid the fork in the road (part 1 and part 2) and dead company walking: avoiding the graveyard (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7 and part 8) articles, and the two installments of “we want to be a smart company” (part 1 and part 2), and we truly want to be a smart company, and we are taking the mistakes, and advice, to heart. Is there anything else we can do?

There’s always more you can do! However, there’s not much left to talk about that’s true across the board for all software companies. That being said, we can give you ten final pieces of advice that just may help if money is tight, leads are few, and sales are hard. Today, we’ll give you the first five.

01. Don’t Put Off Improvements / Hard Decisions You Know You Need to Do / Make

Fixing it later always takes longer than you think, and the timeframe multiplies the longer you wait! If you need to rip and replace part of the platform core for scalability, start as soon as you realize that it needs to be done. If your target customers aren’t educated enough to realize why they need your product, start investing in a series of educational content pieces of different forms to get them there. If you need to cut the marketing and sales deadweight, do so ASAP. The longer you wait, the more it hurts you and them. Doing it early allows you to give them a fair notice period and time to help them find a more suitable role.

02. Chop the Dead Wood — especially in Management & the C-Suite

Refocus the dollars on the developers, content creators, and solution-focussed sales people who are actually generating value. the doctor can’t say this enough. You wouldn’t believe how many startups in tech have been dragged into oblivion by an overweighted inappropriate management team (because the investors thought big names would bring success) — but if they aren’t the right people for the job, or the job isn’t even needed to begin with, nothing could be further from the truth … and instead of being the buoyant striders intended to get you across the lake, they are the cement shoes that sink you to the bottom.

03. Tell the Truth, No Matter What

Especially around what your product does today, and especially especially with respect to anything asked by a customer. Any individual with a half a brain knows that no product does everything, and any individual with a brain can be educated as to why no product should and, more importantly, why they don’t want some of the features the Free RFP vendors are promoting (because it’s not feature, it’s function, and, more specifically, the function they need to do).

The reality is that a good customer will value the truth, especially when they hear so little of it these days among the lies, damn lies, statistics, Gen-AI, marketing buzzwords and hogwash. Moreover, they know they probably don’t need everything they ask for and definitely not day one (as it takes time to learn modules and suites and use them to full effect). They also know that most of the “wish list” gathered from across the organization is just stakeholders trying to be useful and they really only want the functionality to do their daily jobs, and, more importantly, the stakeholders will be happy if that core functionality is done well.

So if you’re missing a few things, that’s okay. The customers know there will always be pain (if work was always fun, people would want to work for as little as they could afford to), so as long as you can relieve the majority of, and the most common, pain, those customers will be quite happy to suffer a little aggravation here and there instead of the cluster(f6ck) migraine they currently have on a daily basis.

04. Sales Channel Reconsideration

Look at how you are selling now and think about if that is how, or the only way, you should be selling.

If you are not doing partner/channel sales, maybe you need to do partner/channel sales. If there is a niche consultancy advising clients on a daily basis with problems that your solution solves, maybe you should be training those consultants on how your solution can be used to solve the problems, training those consultants on how to install the solution, and then putting a partnership agreement in place for those consultants to sell the solution for you to their clients for which it is appropriate.

If you are relying mostly on partner/channel sales, and they aren’t coming in fast and furious like you hoped, maybe you need to step up direct sales. In the right circumstances the right partners will do wonders for sales, but if they are consultancies, it will be highly dependent on what customers come to them, since most niche consultancies still have to take what they can get (while the Big X take the lion’s share of projects, even those which they probably shouldn’t because they are already so busy trying to support so many clients with digital transformation projects, because any consultant who turns away any work at a Big X risks getting fired). So even if your consulting/services partner is your greatest champion, you can’t always rely on them to be a consistent source of sales.

05. Rethink Partnerships

Regardless if it is part of your strategy or not and what partners you do, or don’t, have today. It’s rare for a company to get it right out of the gate, or for the strategy that is right out of the gate to be the best one down the road as markets change, directions change, plans change, etc. If things are going well, you follow the if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. If things aren’t going well, you evaluate and rethink it. Your strategy/partners could still be the right strategy/partners, and it just needs more time for the strategy/relationships to take off, or it might be that you need a new strategy/relationship.

No consultancies or complementary offerings selling your solution? Why? We’ve mentioned time and time again that no solution is everything to everyone, and there’s always a complementary solution or service that can add value, even if it takes a bit of work to identify it. So if you don’t have a services / implementation partner trained and certified to sell for you, why not? And if you don’t have relationships with one or more complementary solutions with companies with a complementary culture and value, why not? Even if it is only the odd referral, it could help … and if you’re going up against a suite, and your solution is not, it could definitely help. (After all, most customers who need a “suite” really only need a few key modules, at least for the first few years.)

Alternatively, if you only have partners who filled your ears with sweet nothings until you agreed to be a partner and then gave you sweet nothing once the deal was inked, they are NOT partners, especially if right after the deal was inked they decided to partner with another solution provider with a bigger offering and price tag and sell that instead. Those partners should be dropped faster than a radioactive potato and replaced with a new one.

Stay tuned for Part 2!