Zvi Rapps | Marketing Writer
In today’s ever-changing world, growing your revenue while scaling your business, and maximizing your customer satisfaction, may seem like an impossible task. If you feel like a hamster pushing a spinning wheel, you’re not alone. Software licensing has become a key piece of nearly every modern business and getting it right can help you grow, acquire new customers, and outlast your competition.
In our whitepaper, How To Get Software Licensing Right The First Time, we offer you practical steps to take in order for you to succeed with your licensing project.
In this blog, we'll give you a sneak peek at our whitepaper, as we discuss the areas you should focus on first when undertaking such a project.
Narrow Your Focus
Software licensing impacts nearly every aspect of your organization. Licensing decisions can involve finance, order entry, IT, development, tech support, product management, marketing, operations, sales – the list goes on.
When guiding a team in how to prepare and conduct one of these sessions for the first time, we recommend focusing on three specific business elements: Business models, operations, and license enforcement.
Focus On: Business Models
When looking at your existing business models, consider these questions:
- How are you selling today and how will you need to sell in the future?
- Does the way you are selling match the way your customers want to buy?
- Would your sales team want the ability to sell per unit of time, based on consumption, or in other creative ways?
The idea here is to figure out how you can monetize your software in the best way for you, without compromising on providing a great customer experience. There is no question that your salespeople should have input here, but make sure to involve the entire team in this discussion. You might be surprised how many valuable ideas will come from other members of the team.
Once you understand a little bit more about how you are selling, how you want to be selling and the gap between those two, it’s time to take a long, hard look at your operations.
Focus On: Operations
When reviewing your operations, you should start by taking a look at your various ordering and fulfillment use cases. In most companies, there are usually only one or two people who fully understand what happens when a sales person places an order.
Your team will need to identify and review all of the different use cases in the ordering and the operational domain to understand your current process and customer experiences. You will need to consider all elements of the purchase process from initial interest and conversion, to add-on purchases, upgrades, maintenance renewals, and so forth.
It’s important that you take time to understand exactly what your customer goes through when buying software from you. If you don’t know what the whole process looks like, end-to-end, how can you find the pain points, and improve them?
Once you have reviewed and discussed your operations, you can move on to enforcement.
Focus On: Enforcement
After you’ve looked at both your business models and your operations, the next step is to start thinking about license enforcement. What is your license enforcement philosophy, and how strict do you plan on being?
In particular, you will want to discuss compliance versus software piracy, which are very different. Your decision will play a key role in your license enforcement implementation. Essentially, do you want to focus on intentional misuse (piracy) or unintentional misuse (compliance issues)?
For example, if your teams feel strongly that you need to prevent piracy at all costs and in all regions of the world, your implementation is going to look very different than if your corporate philosophy is one in which you simply want to put some tools in place to keep your honest customers honest.
These types of questions and discussions matter, as the different philosophies require two different implementations.
It's True- You Can Get Software Licensing Right the First Time
When companies begin their journey towards software licensing integration, it can seem like a vast and complex undertaking. The truth is, it is a tricky process, but there are also many steps you can take to get software licensing right the first time.
Software licensing sits at the heart of your business, and touches nearly every department in your company. Start by narrowing your scope and focusing on your business models, operational processes, and enforcement policies, and you should have a more effective and successful licensing integration.
To download and read the full whitepaper, and learn How to Get Software Licensing Right the First Time, click here.