Foundations: Selling Domino consulting to SMB

One of the biggest challenges in selling consulting services to SMB is helping customers to catch the vision of how Domino applications can help their business. For many of these people, their previous computer experience has been limited to reading their Hotmail, typing their invoices in Word and balancing their accounts in Excel. After they have bought Foundations and installed Symphony, the idea of spending an additional 'x' thousand dollars to develop a software solution for their business may well be the last thing on their mind.

Here's a way to expand their vision...

Back in the dim distant past Lotus (before they were IBM/Lotus) bundled up a set of basic Domino applications as a free download. Those R3/R4 applications are still available and, unlike Microsoft's 'rip-and-replace' application roadmap, Domino applications are backward compatible which means that these databases will run in the Domino version 8.x environment provided with Foundations.

Now don't think that I'm suggesting these databases will fit the bill for today's business environment - for a start, none of them are web enabled. What these applications will do is provide a discussion point for you and your SMB client to talk about what they could achieve with Domino, and since you were the nice guy who gave these databases to the customer for free then its only natural that they will turn to you when they want them tweaked. Then once you have engaged them in that conversation it's up to you to show the business benefit of a full system analysis and application development lifecycle.

These files shouldn't be mentioned in your first approach to your customer. I'd say they are best used after you've installed and configured Foundations and you're running out of excuses to call the guy. Ring him up one last time and tell him you've got a freebie. Send him the list of files and offer to install the ones he wants onto his server for free then call him up a fortnight later and ask him how he liked it.


Here's the list of applications:

1. Things to Do,
2. Requisition Approvals,
3. Application Tracking,
4. Book Reviews,
5. Budget Planning,
6. Call Tracking,
7. Clip Art Gallery,
8. Contract Library,
9. Correspondence,
10. Customer Service (five databases -- Product Design Problems, Customer Suggestions, Knowledge Base, Data Dictionary, Call Tracking -- as well as a sixth database with documentation),
11. Demo Room Reservation,
12. Employee Records,
13. Event Calendar,
14. Executive Briefings,
15. Expenses Reports,
16. Formula Catalog,
17. Forms Routing,
18. Electronic Library,
19. Icon Catalog,
20. Job Candidates,
21. Job Postings,
22. Sales Management,
23. Library Tracking & Training,
24. Purchasing Item Tracking,
25. Litigation,
26. Lookup Keyword Library,
27. Meeting Tracking,
28. Monthly Financials,
29. Engineering Notebook,
30. Patient Treatment Signoff,
31. People and Facilities,
32. Phone Book and Yellow Pages,
33. Presentations,
34. Race Results,
35. Real Estate Management,
36. Recipes,
37. Relocation Expenses,
38. Routing Tracking,
39. Reservation Scheduler,
40. Sell-through Sales Reports,
41. Shotgun E-Mail Communications,
42. Conference Suggestions,
43. Support Conference,
44. Support Center Call Tracking,
45. System Equipment Inventory,
46. Team Consolidate,
47. Team Room,
48. Tech Services Call Tracking,
49. Technotes and Tips,
50. Telemarketing,
51. Travel Authorization,
52. Values and Goals,
53. Wholesale Customer Tracking.

BTW: Has anyone, anywhere, at any time, ever used the recipe application?

My guess: probably not.
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