How Techsmith Lost My Purchase Of SnagIt

Update [2] 23 June 2009: This post is getting a ton of traffic.

Why?

Update 23 June 2009: RB from support at Techsmith sent me an email explaining one way I extend the trial period for SnagIt slightly longer. Haven’t tested it out yet (just got up).

As I state at the end, I really like Techsmith’s Jing product and I totally recommend Jing as a replacement for Alt-PrtScr. I have considered upgrading to a paid version when I start making more videos. I use Jing maybe 3-4 times per week on average, and SnagIt (I think) is the next product up. What I’m really interested in is Camtasia, but I haven’t made a business case to spend the money yet.

What follows is an accurate description of exactly what I did, what I thought and how I felt written immediately afterwards. As I state below, if you’re a marketer, salesperson or on tech support staff, you cannot purchase such experiences for any amount of money!

Note to people untrained in sales: there is nothing personal below. No technical information at all… but purchasing decisions are rarely made on technical decisions alone. Emotional state has far more to do with purchasing decisions than technical feature sets.

I went to try SnagIt, what seemed to be an interesting little application from Techsmith. It’s been floating around my desktop for a while. The first time I started it up I was looking to do something simple, and was presented with too many options. So I postponed examination until I had time to thoroughly investigate. Which was yesterday.

Turns our my trial period was up. To use it I would have to purchase a license.

I never used it.

Not once.

Let me repeat myself so that it’s perfectly clear:

Why not?

I’m really, really busy.

That’s why not.

Now, I have some time… but my trial period is ended.

Ok. No problem. Go to Techsmith, poke around for a contact email webpage. I want to drop a note explaining my situation. Most companies will make reasonable accomodations when you politely explain your interest and the situation.

But I find this “Contact FAQ”:

1. Why can’t I use an e-mail address to send you a message?

Spam robots love to harvest e-mail address by looking at Web sites. Because of this, we were receiving close to 100 spam e-mails for every legitimate customer e-mail. This made us much slower to respond to customer mail, if we didn’t accidentally delete them with the spam. Using Web forms has been a huge improvement. We will respond to you from a real e-mail address that you can use to contact us in the future.

Here’s the deal, why they lost a sale, and why I’m writing this post:

1. The words “Contact” and “FAQ” should never, ever appear in this context together. Think about it. If you don’t get it, I’ll be happy to explain it to you. I’m expensive, but trust me, it’s money well spent.
2. Their complaint is EASILY solved using any of several technological solutions. Like Captcha. Or filtering known spam IP addresses. Really, for a tech company to offer this kind of excuse, I’m not buying it. It’s just laziness.

   Or, maybe I have it wrong and I’m not in their customer base.

   In any case, I’m uninstalling SnagIt.

So, is this article just a bunch of sour grapes?

No.

It’s an accurate description of my emotional state right now.

If you think that’s stupid, you don’t understand how critical emotional states are to making purchasing decisions.

Here’s my solution, which I’ve outlined in another (draft) article on There Is No Box: when you time bomb your product, make every effort you possibly can to ensure that people get a chance to really evaluate what you offer. Using contiguous blocks of wall clock time is stupid. Really stupid. Find a different way to measure time. For example, Ribbonsoft’s QCAD product uses 10 minutes of wall clock then starts the nagware functions. It’s effective.

For what it’s worth, I really like Techsmith’s Jing product. Totally recommend it. Might even upgrade to a paid version when I start making more videos.

Tagged as: Graphics, Time bomb