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We encourage our potential customers to trial your products first, as they are able to see exactly what they are going get if they go ahead and buy a license.
Here are some guidelines for your trials:
1. Make your trial fully functional - do not restrict the capabilities unless you absolutely have to do so
2. Make your trial time out or expire based on the date of install or the date of first use
3. For straightforward products the trial should last for 10 to 15 days
4. For more complex products the trial should last for up to 30 days
5. Do not use a long trial period, like 3 months, as this will only delay your sales for 3 months too
6. Do not only rely solely on a pop-up or 'nag' screen to protect your software
7. Do not allow your trial software to work forever - it should time out
Summary - make sure you give your evaluators a fully functioning version of your software to play with as this will help them decide if the product is suitable for their needs, but in return do not let your evaluation last forever, as this will help the customer decide to buy your product sooner rather than later. To discuss this further please email: harryk@componentsource.com in our Reading office.
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| In March we once again set a record for software product sales globally, beating our previous record which was recently set in November 2006. The last 5 months, November to March, have been the 5 highest sales months individually in the 11 year history of ComponentSource. The growth rate was very impressive too, with sales up over 42% on the same month last year. Sales were good overall, but our growth in the Asia/Pacific region has been particularly strong recently. It looks like the launch of Vista, Office and .NET 3.0 has stimulated a lot of new product releases and that this has in turn stimulated the market to buy new products or new versions. So if you have not released a new version that supports .NET 3.0 or Vista yet or the new Office UI look and feel - then we would recommend that you do so as soon as possible. Likewise there are a lot of new products being released, some as Betas, to support new technologies such as ASP.NET AJAX, WPF and WF, so make sure you do not get left behind as these new markets start to develop. Finally if you have not done so already, we recommend that you test that your product supports UNICODE to enable it to display the Asian language character sets and also test that it works on the Japanese, Korean and Chinese editions of Windows. Sales are booming in the Asia/Pac region and if your product does not work there, then you will not be able to participate in that growth. To discuss this further please email: harryk@componentsource.com in our Reading office. |
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US News - Meet us at Tech Ed in Orlando, FL - June 4-8 We will be attending this major developer conference, so if you would like to meet us to discuss your current product plans we would be delighted to meet with you in person. Please email: chrisb@componentsource.com in Atlanta, GA or harryk@componentsource.com in Reading, England or scotts@componentsource.co.jp in Tokyo, Japan to arrange a convenient date and time to meet.
European, Middle East & Africa News - Renewed advertising campaign in Germany! We have recently renewed our advertising campaign in the German language edition of the MSDN Magazine (Deutsche Ausgabe). If you would like to reach potential customers in Germany, Austria & Switzerland please email: chrisb@componentsource.com in Atlanta, GA or harryk@componentsource.com in Reading, England for more details.
Asia/Pac News - Record Sales in Japan & Asia/Pac Again! We set yet another record for sales in our Tokyo office in March, beating the record we set only last month! The Tokyo office looks after our customers in the whole of the Asia/Pacific region - including: Japan, South Korea, PR China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Australia & New Zealand. For more information on marketing your products in the Asia/Pac region please email: scotts@componentsource.co.jp |
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