Usually a software product will have both pre-sales documents and post-sales documents.<\/p>\n
The pre-sales<\/strong> documents are used “before sales”, so the primary intention of pre-sales documents is to trigger the customer’s interests, so usually pre-sales documents are brief, succinct, attractive, fascinating<\/strong>, and\/or tailored for the certain customer, industry or solution needs. The target readers of pre-sales documents are somewhat decision makers<\/strong> or shapers, but not necessarily the end users<\/strong>. For example, fancy and brief slides, an executive summary, or a nice brochure is a pre-sales document.<\/p>\n On the other side, the post-sales<\/strong> documents are used “after sales”; the target readers are most probably the end users<\/strong>, so usually the post-sales documents are supposed to help the end user to understand deeply about the product, how it works, and trouble shooting. So usually post-sales documents are much detailed and technical<\/strong>. A product function explaining (specification, anatomy or some other words), or a detailed user manual is a good example of post-sales document.<\/p>\n Recently I met a problem when I was doing work to release a new version of my product (a big enterprise software) to the market. I found some documents were used as pre-sales documents as well as post-sales documents. We had much controversy, debates and arguments when we were reviewing such “dual purpose<\/strong>” documents. For the same paragraph, some marketing colleagues thought the words were OK since they were from a marketing\/pre-sales point of view; however some other colleagues did not like the words since they were from a post-sales point of view.<\/p>\n I believed the root reason of the controversy was the confusion by the “dual purpose”. After all, there are distinctive differences between pre-sales and post-sales documents, so I think we just should not<\/strong> place a same document as both pre-sales and post-sales document. I think it just does not work well. We should be aware of the distinctive different purpose, target readers of the two kinds of documents. We should not give a certain document “dual identity<\/strong>“. It should be for pre-sales, or it should be for post-sales. But never both<\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Usually a software product will have both pre-sales documents and post-sales documents. The pre-sales documents are used “before sales”, so the primary intention of pre-sales documents is to trigger the customer’s interests, so usually pre-sales documents are brief, succinct, attractive, fascinating, and\/or tailored for the certain customer, industry or solution needs. The target readers of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-product-management"],"views":7862,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.freemanding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.freemanding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.freemanding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.freemanding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.freemanding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.freemanding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.freemanding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.freemanding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.freemanding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}