In my most recent post, I announced a new enterprise customer, a multi-billion dollar national TV network.

Question: How did they decide on A3 Modeling?

Answer: A3 eliminated their perceived risk of failure.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, when large enterprises make an infrastructure purchase, like a budgeting system, they are not looking to hit a home run by saving gobs of cash or discovering new revenue streams. They are simply looking to support “business as usual”; reliable, timely, low-cost access to decision making information. In their eyes, there’s no upside to implementing a budgeting system; however, the risk, the fear, the downside of an implementation gone wrong is huge.

Question: How did we eliminate the perceived risk and fear of failure? After all, we’re the small vendor… miniscule compared to Oracle and SAP with whom we often compete. Aren’t we by definition the risky choice?

Answer #1: We insist on configuring your system immediately during the pre-sales process.

By now, after 20+ years of product development, your financial model practically builds itself with A3 Modeling. When you evaluate A3, you can expect us to build your cube and log you in for a hands-on experience faster than the competitors will even grasp your needs! With A3 Modeling, see and experience your proposed solution for free, before you buy.

Answer #2: Just because you’ve chosen SAP or Oracle, does not mean your problems are behind you.

Transacting with the big, established vendor is every bit as risky… often more risky… than going with the little guy. See my popular White Paper on Big Vendor Risk which you can find here.

Answer #3: Take advantage of our Free Model – Click here to see how it works.

First: By insisting the customer take us up on a Free Model and send trial balance data, we immediately filter the looky-loos, the non-serious buyers. Those who eagerly sign an NDA and send us actual financial data are likely serious buyers.

Second: Our team and our product are optimized to configure Free Models. Going from a 500,000 record Trial Balance dump to a multi-dimensional cube, and then snapping on input models, reports and a colorful dashboard takes us as little as six person-hours! This is remarkably time-efficient by large enterprise sales standards in which typical prototypes can take a week or more, and the result is a paper-thin demo.

Third: We give the customer logins and a personal “walkthrough” of the entire application. They feel it, experience the performance, test out all the features. This step virtually eliminates any sense of uncertainty about whether our product and our team can deliver the goods.

Finally: We let our prospects know that everything built in the Free Model is theirs to keep. No charge. The solution is well along the implementation path before anyone makes a purchase. This is often the final straw. You can feel the relief, especially with teams dealing with an encroaching deadline, a sense of urgency.