How many of you have had to do sales pitches for Zope as a platform to client or clients who have been reading magazines and understand that Microsoft .Net, Lotus Notes, Java XXXX or Macromedia Coldfusion are terms that they should be hearing, since journalist have been writing about those products? I had a terrible flue last week, but still had to do a pitch and come up with atleast a couple of points in my presentation. Hope these can help you, and hope you can give me some more. Pitching for zope is not a problem in my own company and some of the clients, who just want to get the job done. But from time to time client also wants to participate into the technology selected. Basic points - also from zope book: - Scalability - Open standards - Security - Management ( www ) - Programming ( dtml, Python, perl ) Other points - tested in real life ( examples needed with good figures - users, years, load ) - un-sexy ( not hyped, no need to hype - it just works ) - open source - licencing fees - no lock in - support - active community - books starting to be available - from developers point of view - easy to work with after understands what is it all about - objects are nice - nice - nice How have you made your client to see what you see in Zope? -huima
On Sun, 21 Oct 2001, Heimo Laukkanen wrote:
How many of you have had to do sales pitches for Zope as a platform to client or clients who have been reading magazines and understand that Microsoft .Net, Lotus Notes, Java XXXX or Macromedia Coldfusion are terms that they should be hearing, since journalist have been writing about those products?
...
How have you made your client to see what you see in Zope?
The clients I've shown Zope to have been most impressed by demonstrations of the ZMI and some of the simplifying products like HTMLDocument and such, allowing them to upload (via FTP/WebDAV) pages and have them inherit the standard headers and footers. This isn't, IMHO, the most important feature of Zope, but it is interesting that this is the thing that most of clients recognize as a Good Thing. In some ways, it might be better if they were interested b/c it was Open Source, or b/c it leveraged the Great God Python or such, but it works. It mirrors what I've noticed in other presentations: unless you're working w/a very technical client audience, visual things really stick out, and the ZMI is a nice visual understanding of how Zope sites can be managed. Good luck w/your client presentation, and feel better from the flu. -- Joel BURTON | joel@joelburton.com | joelburton.com | aim: wjoelburton Independent Knowledge Management Consultant
Heimo Laukkanen <huima@fountainpark.org> wrote:
How many of you have had to do sales pitches for Zope as a platform to client or clients who have been reading magazines and understand that Microsoft .Net,
Always the same question (to the customer): what does .net mean to _you_? Is it webservices? Is it soap? Is it the development stuff? As most of it refers to public standards, the implementation is unimportant - as long as it sticks to the standard.
Lotus Notes,
You mean "websphere notes"?
Java XXXX or Macromedia Coldfusion are terms that they should be hearing, since journalist have been writing about those products?
Basic points - also from zope book:
- Scalability [etc]
Obviously there have been other people working on this already: http://www.zope.org/Members/Kemalus/make_zope_decision by Töns -- Linux. The dot in /.
On Sat, 2001-10-20 at 19:51, Heimo Laukkanen wrote:
How many of you have had to do sales pitches for Zope as a platform to client or clients who have been reading magazines and understand that Microsoft .Net, Lotus Notes, Java XXXX or Macromedia Coldfusion are terms that they should be hearing, since journalist have been writing about those products?
I would like to suggest that a new mailing list be created: zope-marketing@zope.org <sarcasm> This suggestion is part of my ongoing attempts to fragment and destroy the Zope community. This new list will serve to isolate the companies who invest in promoting zope from their true target audience (ie. newbies who aren't convinced yet), and cause them to only craft messages that appeal to pointy haired bosses. This will inevitably lead to Zope becomming a mainstream offering, causing the community to wither and die, leaving only crappy commercial support available. </sarcasm> Seriously, a marketing and sales oriented mailing list would IMO be a Good Thing(tm). Michael Bernstein.
participants (4)
-
Heimo Laukkanen -
Joel Burton -
Michael R. Bernstein -
Toens Bueker