John Holland posted an interesting item about the selling process on www.eyeforsales.com that makes the point that few vendors have changed their approach to the sales process in order to facilitate the buying process. His observation, Introducing the Curious Buyer, is based on the growing use of technology by buyers to support their buying decisions, at the expense of the vendor’s influence and involvement. In the consumer world, we are all getting quite experienced at this. If I want to buy a commodity item or a new toy, the pattern is getting predictable; I log on to Amazon or other appropriate website, find the item and then start reading the reviews by previous purchasers. Opinion and real user experience are easy to find. A rudimentary knowledge of statistics and human behaviour supports this process. Bad experiences are more likely to be reported than good ones, and there’s always the worry that good reviews could be planted, but nevertheless, a bit of research can go a long way towards making a good purchasing decision. Finally I’ll do some price comparisons, and then decide from whom I’ll make the purchase. And that is a typical example of the buyer being empowered by technology; early in the buying cycle, there is no need for any interaction with a salesperson.
John Holland’s conclusion is that the traditional categorisation of buyers –‘looking’, or ‘not looking’, is complemented by a third category, the curious buyer. I’m not sure the term is quite correct because, by his definition, the curious buyer is not a buyer at all (well, not yet, anyway). The term represents that phase when we’re just interested to know about the products, the vendors and the industry. And this is the thing that caught my attention, because in the world of laboratory systems and software, it comes close to describing the purpose of this website.
The Integrated Lab was set up to provide a non-commercial forum for open discussion and the sharing of information about aspects of laboratory integration, but without promoting commercial laboratory products and/or systems – a community site for the curious scientist/laboratory worker? But what about the vendors, consultants, journalists, conference organisers, etc., who also form part of that community? Should the site be doing more to support the ‘curious’ in the pre-buying phase, and if so, how? And should it be offering opportunities to talk more about products and systems from a non-commercial perspective? Why not leave a comment to satisfy my curiosity?
I think it takes some of all of us to make the community. And, there will be questions that can only be answered well by some of each of the groups or insights that only each group might be able to provide. So, I think you do want to all of these groups to The Integrated Lab.
Then, as for how to do it, that is trickier, of course. For starters, there are already places to find lists of software vendors for various types of products, so I’m not quite sure you should start yet another one. But I think users would like to find just one place to look for products. If you happened to know of a specific place that was “best” for a particular category of software, you could possibly just suggest it instead of building your own. Of course, by having no control over the list, that “great” list might not be well-attended and might not stay very good. As such, you’d have to keep checking it. I suspect that’s why everyone creates their own and then most of the lists aren’t really all that great.
Or, if you don’t want product lists, at all, what about a “guest” spot where you post information about a product. Maybe you could regularly take input from a software vendor on their product (for very mature products, maybe it would merely be “what’s new” and not an entire list of features). Then, just post what you’re given with no editing but you could have a disclaimer that that’s what you’re doing — that it’s not your opinion. Actually, you could create a separate account for yourself so that it’s even clearer that it’s not your usual posting. Invite vendors to do this but only post one every once in awhile. That way, the readers don’t feel spammed with product information, but some readers might find it intersting or useful. Also, by doing it at intervals, it’s not necessarily a lot of work for you (as I suspect there could be times where you’d get inundated with quite a lot of them). Or, maybe you could make it a separate section from the regular blog. To be fair on the postings, make it on a first-come-first-serve basis. Thus, the 10th vendor to send you information is the 10th one in your guest series.
Even though that is “commercial” it’s done in a controlled way. I wouldn’t suggest allowing comments on these. If someone wants more information, they can write directly to the vendor. That way, we all see only the post and not any responses, so if we had no interest in the commercial items, it would only be an occasional posting.
Mainly, I think the objection to commercial items is when something merely turns into a series of advertisements, but with no other content. If you mainly have content, but only the occasional piece of product information, that would keep a balance.
These are just my musings — I hope some others will weigh-in on this. Personally, the occasional piece of product information wouldn’t bother me.
I’m one of those curious buyers, responsible for an ELN scouting and selection process at my company. We are in the wrapping up phase now, and what I definitely missed in this process is unbiased comparisons by independent third parties. I know there are commercial offerings out there, but they are quite expensive. I think the ELN/LIMS business is the only business where you don’t find independent assessments of products on the web. You might argue that comparing ELN systems is unfeasible because of the breath of functionalities they offer, but one could imagine comparisons on specific topics, for example: “how do the different vendors provide functionality for integration with third party systems such as ERPs”, “which products are strong in statistical processing of raw data”,… Likewise, vendor comparisons could be limited to certain business areas, i.e. we were looking for an ELN for a biotech company that spans both Discovery and Pharmacology. So, there might be very good ELNs out there for chemistry, but they are not suitable for us.
There has been a similar thread on the LinkedIn LIMS/Laboratory Informatics discussion to the question of product reviews. This is part of the comment I posted there.
In the laboratory world, product reviews don’t seem to be in our culture, although if you look around some blogs from academia, there is less reluctance to express an opinion! The underlying issue is often the subjective nature of a product review, and the fact that the product is an asset of your organisation, rather than something you own personally. Organisations are obviously very cautious about publicly endorsing or criticising a product, so it’s not surprising that opinions are restricted to grapevine-like communications.
In addition, there is considerable diversity between laboratories, and what may work for one organisation won’t work for another. We’re also a relatively close-knit community, and although there are inevitable tensions, the customer-vendor relationship can be very strong and is often considered a contributor to successful projects. This point is often raised in successful case studies presented at conferences. But it is very unusual to hear of an unsuccessful project, or for the vendor or product associated with the project to be named.
It’s not surprising therefore that product reviews for laboratory systems are impossible to come by. What is surprising is that there is little freely available information in the public domain on product comparisons; taking the published specifications of products to compare relevant features in order to help the curious get a better perspective on the alignment with their specific needs. Is this something we should be doing on The Integrated Lab?
I’ve just blogged some thoughts from a vendor’s perspective on educating curious buyers.
The easiest thing vendors could do to help curious buyers is to list prices on their websites. I hate it when I’m trying to get an idea what some experimental method costs, and for every piece of equipment, analysis, or other service, I have to call up a salesman who sees this as an opportunity to give me a pitch when all I want is ONE NUMBER.
I think that we CAN compare products. It’s quite a lot of work, but we can do it. I’ll speak from experience as this is one of the services that I provide. My advice is that you wouldn’t compare two products just because they have the same label. We would not compare a LIMS with just any other LIMS nor an ELN with just any other ELN. We would not do this just as we would not go to buy a car and just pick any few to compare, but would consider purpose, price, and that type of thing. It is the same with software.
For someone that doesn’t know how to separate the products, one of the early parts of the process is to determine “what type” of product you need and to find only products that are in that vein. Since LIMS carry ELN functionality, ELNs carry LIMS functionality, and we continue to merge and combine functionalities in our industry, it is important to stay somewhat away from the labels.
As such, if you want a system for your Clinical laboratory’s sample processing, go find systems that provides functionality that seem initially appropriate and compare only those. Or, if you have a chemistry lab where you want to replace the paper lab notebooks with electronic ones, go find products that seem to meet those needs. If you’re looking for some big combination, one-size-fits-all, that’s where it’s especially important to understand what you need to achieve.
Those are steps to take during the product selection process. What I’m trying to point out is that we really can compare products. Once, again, this is quite a lot of work and I’m not trying to minimize it. However, for end-user companies that have not been involved with these systems, before, and who do not want to pay an outsider to help them, it would be useful to find some type of area to get this type of information. But, to go back to John Trigg’s comment that we seem to shy-away from making public negative comments about software in our industry, until we jump that hurdle, it just won’t happen.