No more than 20 questions :) and you will receive a full copy of the survey report.

I won’t lie to you: at the beginning of the month we had no intention of doing a survey on channel distribution in the software industry. Now we are.  More than that, we have put more and more effort into it as we were designing the questionnaire and it’s grown into this wonderful piece of research … It  became my baby project.

How has this all started? From a discussion about an ad we had to do for a reseller newsletter. We wanted to produce something different, not just a boring ad… but rather à la @Neil Davidson in his interruption marketing post. Well, we didn’t quite match Napoleon & the Hemorrhoids, nevertheless we did come up with something we believe is very useful and interesting to share with the world.

Picture taken during the "Casual Drinks with Avangate" Business Networking Event

I am sure that many of you participated to a wide range of events and noticed some good or bad practices.  I have recently been involved in organizing a business networking event for Avangate US office, so I put a lot of thought in it and also gained access to all stages of business event organizing, including feedback from participants.

In this post I will share some ideas from my experience as a business developer – ideas that work for a great networking event; in fact I think that these are the most important steps that must be completed to achieve the success and reputation you are targeting by organizing the event.

1. Have a self-explanatory name

Here in Silicon Valley there are tens of events daily. For the audience is quite difficult or time consuming to identify the right events if they are called like “Technology tools” or “International roundtable”; technology for what? Roundtable of whom? That’s why some events have audience and others have not.

Avangate Oval Table

Last night I woke up at around 3 o’clock and I couldn’t go back to sleep. When I cannot sleep I usually think of work. What I have to do the next day, what I left pending the day before and so on.

Last night though I was thinking of our oval table (I’ll explain what that is), picturing a constant flux of people coming at the table, sitting down with a problem and leaving with a solution and a maybe a to do list.

In our office we have loads of meeting rooms: a biggish training room and various other meeting rooms, with/ without projectors/ conference phones/ even a couple of cozy ones for up to four people only.

Avangate Phishing Attempt

Today we received reports from Avangate partners about deceiving emails they have received, in a phishing attempt to capture login information to access Avangate vendors and affiliate accounts.

These emails look like the one on the left and are not legitimate in any way, even if the Avangate logo and name are present in the email.

Please note that Avangate does not send automatic HTML emails with invites to login to update your account. Your billing information cannot be changed from the Avangate Control Panel as a security measure, everything is done through Avangate Accounting Department or your Account Manager.

If you receive such emails, please do not click on the link. If you think you have been a victim of phishing, please call (650) 963 – 5701 (US and Canada) or +31 88 0000008 (International), contact your account manager or use the feedback form in the Avangate Control Panel.

TrialPay Lead Follow-up integrated into Avangate platform

Everybody is complaining about low software sales since this crisis situation got on the front page. It’s easy to figure out why. The million dollar question now is how a software vendor can increase software sales or at least keep income on the survival level.

I believe the answer implies a bit of creativity on your side and openness to experimenting. The client is more and more difficult to convince into buying your software and that is why I propose to try out the TrialPay incentive, which is the big “GET IT FOR FREE” button.

For those of you who don’t know already, TrialPay gives you the possibility of offering your software product for free to your customer and in return receiving a certain amount of money (usually less than your list price, but more than the minimum you are willing to receive) by being a referrer for another brand inside the TrialPay network. And that of course, is way better than no sales.

I remember from my early days as an affiliate that waiting for the commission check to arrive, then cash it in were amongst the most annoying things of the affiliate marketing business.

It was annoying because you had to wait for the money to re-invest instead on focusing on growing the business. Wire transfers sometimes are subject to high banking fees.

Even with PayPal (PayPal made things slightly better for the affiliates), you still had to withdraw the money to a card (and that added some more fees) or to a bank account. My time working for software vendors showed it was quite the same for software vendors – waiting for the check to arrive or paying wire transfer fees.