You wouldn’t buy a house without looking around it, or a car without test driving it. Consumer tech such as apps are often free to download. So, with software being such a vital part of any business’ infrastructure, why should it be any different?
Trials offer the best insight for your purchasing process. Buying business software is all about solving problems. When a vendor offers you a trial of their software, you get to see if it does indeed solve a problem and importantly, how it is solved. You can use personalised potential scenarios, positive, negative or unique, to see the solution in place.
You also get value after the trial. Once you have used the software, you will have more substantive questions to ask your vendor, such as how you can integrate future strategies, how you can widen your user-base or explore additional use-cases. You are in a more knowledgeable position than you would be if you just asked questions without experience.
The problem is, most legacy vendors in financial services don’t offer you a chance to use the software directly. They still rely on the old way of doing things – the salesperson does their stuff (flashy demo, ‘Of course we can do that.’), you sign the expensive contract and go through the months-long implementation process.
Then, and only then, do you get to touch the software. That’s usually the point where you find out it’s not as user friendly as you thought, isn’t as technically capable as the salesperson implied, and ‘Of course we can do that.’ becomes ‘ah, that particular issue involves an expensive workaround.’
Put it this way, when the clients I talk to tell me about their experiences of buying legacy software products, ‘transparent’ isn’t a word I hear very much.
That doesn’t sound right to me – which is why at LemonEdge, we’re proud to be part of a new breed of startups coming into the industry to disrupt the status quo. One of the things we have done from day one is offer hands-on trials to our clients.
Vendors should be building trust with their clients from their very first conversation. The client should be able to get an immediate sense of their vendor’s company values. For us at LemonEdge, one of our values is transparency, and we believe actions speak louder than words. When you start a trial with us, you can immediately begin using LemonEdge locally, gaining hands-on experience, finding out whether it answers your challenge. As we build your specific use case out, you get to use the results on your locally-deployed platform within hours.
Sure, that means that there is nowhere to hide for us, but we’re okay with that. We already called out the need for transparent pricing in the industry. The industry is broken, and we want to fix it.
Our trials offer the ability to test in several key areas for portfolio management and fund accounting systems, including:
- Real-time portfolio optimisation through hierarchical fund and accounting data;
- Instant, unrestricted scenario analysis across your entire fund and accounts;
- Automated Waterfall distribution and fee calculations;
- Efficiently processes unstructured data;
- Capital Call/Event Processing
- Creating and running bespoke reports
- Communicating with the support team
Does your legacy vendor offer these facilities before you sign on the dotted line?
It should be so simple.
Trials let users see first-hand the value of the software and lets the vendor gain their trust. What’s not to like?
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