Quick story. I got a call the other day from an MLS exec. We currently sell Cloud CMA and Cloud Streams in their market. Not a site license, just selling directly, one agent credit card number at a time. They were calling us to explore the possibility of doing a site license.
“Sounds good, lets talk.” , I say.
Later in the week we jumped on a call. So we asked, why the change in heart? Why a site license now? Two reasons. They have been hearing a lot of great thing about the product and they were noticing that a lot of agents were using our products in their market.
How did they know a lot of agents were using our products? Every MLS provider we work with gets a MLS Dashboard, that shows them the amount of signups, reports created, report types, etc. Boom.
A few things here are significant:
1. Most vendors are terrified of showing adoption stats, let alone in real-time, whenever the MLS execs want to see them.
2. We would likely have not gotten the phone call if we weren’t so transparent with this data.
3. Whether or not we get a site license, we are all good. We have users who see value in our products, and pay us.
I’m asked to give advice to new vendors entering the market on the best way to sell through the “MLS channel”. Some of their ideas involve a freemium model (horrible idea) or maybe offer their product to the MLS for a year at no charge and roll the dice later (another horrible idea).
I give the same advice to all of them.
Create a great product and charge for it.
If someone isn’t gonna pay you, then go back to the drawing board and make a product that they will pay for.
I’m not saying its easy, but if you want to be successful, its what you need to do. Embrace your stats, don’t hide them.
Amen.
Every attempt by Moore Data to crack the “end user” market through anything but a site license crashed and burned.
It wasn’t that the agent/broker product was not saleable, we could never figure out how to sell it retail.
Big vendors still don’t have the skill set to hunt at the “street” level.
Maybe that’s why dinosaurs died out…
JM
A hugely important factor here in your apparent model that vendors should learn from is transparency. Nothing makes me bounce faster from a company’s website than a contact info paywall to view their product demo and pricing. If you have a lead on your site willing to take the time see your product pitch or look at plans, why not let them rather than making them bounce over to your competitor?