Software is the business tool of our time, no doubt about that. The toolset has such great promise and then the inflated marketing around it can make it seem downright magical!

Software solves a problem. You should be perfectly clear on what problem the software you are evaluating solves before you buy it. Don’t think features, don’t think integration, don’t think cloud vs. self-hosted, understand and be able to communicate the problem it solves. There will be resistance to this line of questioning. The sales process is way more comfortable with talking about solutions, benefits, advantages, than it is defining the problem. Talking solutions is expansive, defining the problem can be limiting (like this problem is interesting but not relevant to my business aka welcome to the end of the sales process).

For example; a web-to-print solution could solve the problem of making order entry easier on your customers and available to them in a self-service fashion. Web-to-print can also solve other challenges that really don’t have anything to do with print like enabling a large community to have access to approved content that can be “localized” under brand guidelines and then digitally downloaded. One of the ways web-to-print software deals get off the rails is that printer looks for web-to-print to solve pre-press issues or production issues when web-to-print is really a tool to solve a challenge for your customers!