Summary:  The Buyers Journey to the best intranet software can be a bumpy ride. It diverges from the typical purchasing roadway, due to varying levels budget, security needs, and ease of use – not to mention the colossal impact that the right or the wrong decision will have on your day to day life. But fear not, great hero! We are here to assist you on your journey!

Sitting at my desk, I listen to one of our Customer Success Reps help to onboard a new customer on a web call. She’s explaining how to organize content within the architecture of the intranet. As the Product Manager here at IC, I usually blog about our intranet software and features, however today I am inspired to discuss a different matter: The Buyers Journey, from the initial recognition of a problem to the final purchase.

The Buyer Journey:
Capture The Best Intranet Software

Call to Adventure

There are many reasons why our hero might start searching for an intranet:

• IT person who maintained current home-grown intranet has left, and no one can update content
• SharePoint is too complicated to administer and is blocking the sharing of information
• Organization has out-grown network file shares, and needs better document management and search
• Need a better way of distributing company news than email
• Customer is looking to centralize administration of multiple systems within one platform (company news, document management, online forms, support desk, employee directory, calendars, etc.)

Our role is not to force the hero to start their journey but to promote the concept of intranets and let our hero know there are tools out there that can help solve their problems.

Meeting a Mentor

In the hero’s journey, a mentor helps the hero cross from the known world to the unknown world. This is the hero’s decision of if he or she should invest the time and energy into finding an intranet.

The hero often asks peers in their industry how they solve their common problems. We love it when new customers come from referrals, or from a recommendation for staff who has used our product with a previous company, as a base level of trust is already established.

We also play the role of mentor through the first discovery call. Online research of different possible intranets only gets our hero so far. Every vendor has a different set of features, and each implements these features differently.

The discovery call is all about us discovering what you need, and figuring out if we’ve got a good match. Our Business Development Rep puts it this way:

“Because we’re an out of the box solution with so many different features it’s not feasible to show them all on the first call. The discovery call is so that we can figure out which of our features will help them the most based on the challenges they’ve told us they are trying to solve.” – Rory Broderick, Business Development Manager

Trials and Failures

When evaluating intranets, our role is of that of helper, not adversary. The hero is going to face many challenges.

• Feature Comparison: comparing features between products
• Budgetary Resources: selecting a great intranet within budget
• Establishing Buy-In: managing expectations of multiple stakeholders

Feature Comparison

We help our hero get a true understanding of how our features will work in their environment. We do this through interactions with our Product Specialist. In cases where questions get technical, the Product Specialist can bring a technical resource into the call. As a helper, we are dedicated to doing an in-depth evaluation process up-front.

Budgetary Resources

If our hero goes with a SaaS (aka. Cloud) product, they are going to have to predict the staff growth rate over the next 5 years, as these solutions are typically more expensive as they charge per user per month, rather than a one-time licensing fee. If the hero goes with an on-premise solution (which we are dedicated to), there will be a larger upfront cost, which can exceed the yearly budget. We help heroes by providing easy to understand pricing, not charging for user growth, and predictable on-going costs.

Establishing Buy-In

The hero often faces internal challenges in implementing an intranet. We help our hero overcome these challenges by:

• Providing resources specifically tailored to different roles
• Recordings of any live demos that can be shared
• Additional demos to upper management when requested
• Current customer references to share their experiences

Revelation

If the hero determines we are the best intranet software for their needs, our role as helper continues. This includes:

• Installing the intranet on customer’s production server
• Help in importing users (connect to Active Directory)
• Help in connecting to email server
• Training sessions to help them start off on the right foot

We also offer a 30-day money back guarantee after installation. We can offer this because of our confidence in our in-depth evaluation process, ensuring our solution will be the best intranet software for our hero before they commit to purchase.

While you might not view yourself as a hero, you really are. Solving problems for the entire organization can be a daunting task. As one of many possible intranet vendors, we’d like to assist you on your journey, even if you don’t ultimately choose us.