David and Goliath: How Software Companies Can Use Their Agility to Beat Larger Competitors

On how software companies can use their agility to beat larger companies - As small software companies, you may feel like you’re pulling out your slingshot to compete with someone else’s big guns. Take heart: your company’s smaller size brings a host of benefits that you can leverage into a competitive advantage on many fronts, leaving the giants envious of you for a change.

How? Smaller companies are naturally more agile, while large companies may be hamstrung by extensive processes, hierarchies, and legacy systems. Combine agility with the right software and solutions to manage your business and you end up with the flexibility to change gears on the fly, putting you at the front of the pack.

Here are several ways you can leverage your strengths to your best advantage:

Delivery and Licensing

Flexibility is the name of the game. Every customer is different, and their circumstances may change over time. In addition, marketplace demands change rapidly. Need to change from a large up-front sell to an ongoing monthly subscription? With the right business management applications, these changes are no problem. A system that is built to support the various software licensing models enables your company to easily adjust licensing structures and billing methods. From one centralized place, you can track things like contract start and end dates, modules and number of users, as well as which customers have on-premise versus subscription delivery.

With software companies, an integrated, cloud-based suite of business management applications can change the way you deliver your products and bill your customer. While your competitors are tied up writing new code and installing their enterprise resource planning software on local workstations, a process that could take months, you’re working swiftly in the cloud, making changes as needed to a customer’s licensing methods.

Pricing and Billing

You likely have clients on every type of billing method: monthly, quarterly, yearly, milestone completion, time and materials, or by project. In fact, you probably have clients with a combination of several of these billing methods. A system that connects time entry, contract management and billing allows you to say goodbye to disparate billing systems for each method and automatically combine billing methods on a single invoice. Then, with just a few clicks, you can review all of the billing and generate an invoice.

Integrating time entry with billing also can give you the ability to automate your pricing and billing. Want to offer various discount tiers? Customize billing by industry, company size, and number of users or modules. You can achieve all of this when time entry, billing and sales systems are integrated. In addition, you can offer your sales team flexibility in the field. By defining and setting costs and minimum thresholds, the sales team can offer discounts without jeopardizing the bottom line.

Collaboration is Key

Sometimes, you may feel that you don’t have the same resources a large software company has. When you implement an integrated, cloud-based suite of business management applications, you do. Such a system can be crucial to maintaining strong relationships with your sales channel partners. For example, you can offer an e-commerce portal where channel partners can enter leads, create opportunities, and find resources.

As a smaller company, you not only get to make your own rules, you can change and adapt those rules to meet your customers’ and partners’ needs. To enable this level of flexibility, you need the right tools and resources so you don’t feel like you’re battling Goliath alone.

GoVirtualOffice can support your competitive advantage by helping you find and implement integrated business information systems that provide the flexibility you need to level the playing field with larger competitors. Contact us or call 888-773-2123 to learn more.

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