I was talking with some resellers this week who were excited about how easy it was to sell SmartView into their customer base. The problem was, they said, that it was difficult to include services in the software quote because SmartView was just too easy to set up.

Now I took the ‘real easy’ part as a compliment – but I also understand the VAR’s need to

‘Add Value’ to the software they sell to their customers. It is an interesting movement in 2014 that the software should just install and work with no setup or effort. While this can be true I really feel that it is dumbing software down and often giving a less satisfactory experience. If all software is treated as a ‘app’ then we will end up with some oversimplified single function that won’t do much for software solutions.

So to add the value back to a SmartView purchase there are a number of things that can and should be done (by an end user or their VAR) to provide a better overall solution.

Here are some of the consulting/implementation tasks that should form part of a SmartView roll out: 

1. Task to Convert Favorites from SmartList: Review existing favorites, clean them up, rename them, delete old ones and only bring ‘good’ favorites into SmartView. I am yet to meet a company that has remained completely on top of all their Smartlist favorites.

2. Security: Use this as a chance to review SmartList/SmartView security. People seeing things they should not is often missed in SmartList/SLB. Even yesterday I found people at eOne looking at sales and margin numbers I would have preferred them not to see.

3. End User Training: While it is very self-explanatory there are a number of little tricks and tips you will only learn by receiving some training. Running tailored training to users will ensure they get the most out of SmartView for their specific role. With SmartView External you are exposing GP data to people that have often never seen it before. So training those people to understand what they are seeing is important.

4. Optimization: For anyone with a large data volume there are a number of things that can be looked at: 

a.    Care on setting the number of initial records returned e.g. 1000, or 10,000 etc. 

b.   Optimizing views and tables through SQL indexing on large lists.

c.    Using SLB to restrict the data in the base query (exclude those years people will never look at). Then using these lists in SV.

So as a VAR it becomes relatively easy to include somewhere between 8 and 24 hours of services with your SmartView quotation. By doing so you are undoubtedly offering a better solution to your customer. For end user customers it would make sense to set aside this time to complete these tasks if you are not engaging your reseller. 

Interested to learn more about how to sell services with SmartView or any of our other products? Please reach out to us at sales@eonesolutions.com and we’ll be happy to assist you!