A critical moment: choosing or changing a project management tool

Healthy companies, groups which are self-critical tend to periodically reorganize themselves. It is an opportunity to improve both productivity and quality of work. In these moments, software surveys are done to select new software for project and more in general work management. It is in these phases that sometimes Teamwork is chosen. In the choice what most matters is how the software can “unobtrusively” map to the new organizational practices, and Teamwork in this can be great, because of its flexibility, scope, and the wide fit to the IT infrastructure. All this is explained in detail in the user guide.

Now it frequently happens that some software houses (which are about 8% of the companies that use Teamwork) like Teamwork so much that they consider distributing Teamwork themselves to customers, and contact us for that; we always say “fine”, but none has been very successful, and this is quite easily explained: if you have say 20 companies to which you provide software services, what is the chance that that very company will want to buy Teamwork?

About 2% of the companies that visit Teamwork site get to try it; and about 2% of those that try it get to buy it. And consider that all those companies are already in the critical situation of choosing a PM tool. So calling a company at random, what are the chances that they will be searching right then a PM tool? Slim, very slim. And the chances that Teamwork will fit them? 2% of 2%. So how many companies will you have to contact in order to have a good chance of making one sale? Many. Too many.

All this because in this scenario we are not using the power if internet of being found, instead of contacting known ones. If someone wants to offer software like Teamwork to customers, the best idea is to get a good presence on the web, maybe in a localized / specialized part, so that companies in search of PM solutions can get competent help. Just my two cents.