Can Documentation Drive Sales?
Can good documentation drive sales? Yes, I think it can. What? You think I’m crazy? Well, not only do I think good documentation can have a positive impact on customers in need, but I’m also convinced that good documentation can have a positive impact on your bottom line.
We’ve already discussed how documentation can positively impact experience. I won’t revisit that reasoning again, but I think that it is relevant to this discussion simply because happy customers buy more stuff. In this post I want to look at one new reason: converting more customers during the buying decision.
Good Documentation Can Convert Customers
Certainly the majority of open source projects don’t write enough documentation, and more power to them because they don’t have to if they don’t want to. However, the projects that seem to bubble to the top (Linux, Spring, or Apache) all seem to have really great documentation. In the following section, we look at two positive examples closely.
Documentation helping commercial open source projects find more customers.
Alfresco builds an open source enterprise content management system. They are the commercial entity behind the open source project of the same name that sells services and support to customers who want a bit more than what the community can provide. Alfresco is an interesting example because they give their software away for free. Their value add is their knowledge and understanding of the product as well as the testing and certification they’ve provided around the open source code.
In the CNET article Open-source strategy: Documentation = dollars Ian Howells, Alfresco’s Chief Marketing Officer, states that 30% of their leads come from people who read their documentation and goes on to say:
[The] vast majority of our deals are fed by two direct sources: those who read our documentation and those who actually download and try our Enterprise code. Now, we also know that most of these people first start with our Community code (and often evaluate it for months, reading documentation and visiting our website in the meantime).
What does this mean? It means that if our demand generation software is telling us that someone has both read documentation and evaluated Enterprise, the odds of them buying support from Alfresco are huge. We want to be calling that prospect immediately.
Alfresco understands that accurate, informative, and helpful documentation gives them a competitive advantage and they’ve measured the impact. Take a look at this chart from the article showing time spent by visitors on Alfresco’s website:
The light yellow bits on the bar chart above represent time spent by visitors reading the documentation. Wow. This is a great example of how documentation can be a deciding factor in whether someone uses your product. When a user is deciding whether they want to invest their time in trying your software they will often look at the documentation asking themselves whether it looks like its worth the investment.
Documentation as the primary deciding point in selecting an open source project.
Developers are notoriously finicky about the tools they use. That’s why I picked this example from William Shields. William’s recent blog post highlighted his frustration JUnit’s horrible documentation. However, he found it difficult to switch because he had a good, if not perfect, understanding of how to use it. William goes on to say that a competing project’s documentation was so good that it became a deciding factor to motivate him to switch. He writes:
I am gushing like a schoolgirl over TestNG’s documentation. There are examples of how to integrate into different IDEs—not just Eclipse (my pet peeve as a diehard IntelliJ IDEA user). The user guide is detailed and extensive. There is even integration documentation for Ant and Maven as well as a migration guide for JUnit.
Documentation alone is reason enough I will in future choose TestNG over JUnit without exception where I have a choice.
JUnit and TestNG have very similar feature sets. Sure there are differences, but ultimately converting William to a TestNG user came down to the documentation. Why? Because good documentation removed frustration from William’s life, and that alone was the best “feature” TestNG could give him.
Let us know what you think!
We want to hear from you. How does your company value documentation? Is it a “check the box” task or is it viewed as a competitive advantage? Leave a comment below and let us know what you think.
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