Our sales team is trained to demonstrate the capabilities of our platform and assist people with the overall decision making process.  I periodically work in this capacity with prospects and wanted to share the following story about a prospect, we’ll call him “Joe”.

Joe is the owner of a mid-sized agency who tasked two other employees to assist him with evaluating various agency management systems.  During our first phone call, I quickly noted that Joe took great pride in the vast amount of research he compiled.  I answered a couple of his questions, setup his free-trial account and sent him on his way.  Via email exchanges, I sensed they were already committed because they were fully using it internally, but when I spoke with him during the final week of his free trial, I could tell something was bothering him, so I asked.  What it boiled down to is this: Joe built a feature matrix and our platform had “less check-marks than a competitor”.  He was struggling to come to terms with how AgencyBloc could still be on the top of their overall value assessment.

The number of features is not what makes software better or worse.  We think great software should bring maximum value with minimal learning curve or effort required by the user.  Experience is everything.  Joe and his team quickly adapted and integrated AgencyBloc because the experience was easy-flowing and comfortable, not cumbersome and frustrating.  As we consider improvements to AgencyBloc, we’re careful to not sacrifice ease of use for features that simply won’t be used.

Marketing people love feature matrices and I think there is a tendency to create any type of category possible that may have a corresponding check.  Choosing software based on feature-set alone typically results in hard-to-use software that isn’t adopted by your users.  If there is a moral to this story, I’d say it’s this - when evaluating software, take it for a test drive.  If your experience shows that you can quickly grasp the concepts and the majority of your needs are being met, run with it.