ProofOfValue Proof of Value
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What is a Proof of Concept or Proof of Value?
Technically and generally speaking, a Proof of Concept (PoC) is an engagement where a customer is looking to understand how a product or service can be used to solve a specific problem. A Proof of Value (PoV) is an engagement where a customer is looking to understand the value of a product or service in the context of their business. A PoC tends to be a little more technical and focused on the art of the possible, where-as a PoV tends to be focused on business outcomes, not just what problems can be solved, but what busiess value can be gained by doing so. In practice, the terms are often used interchangeably.
These are often technical engagements (although they don't have to be) which involved a product expert (often a Presales or Sales Engineer) guiding the customer through the process of understanding the product or service. This can be done in a number of ways, but often involves a series of workshops, demonstrations, and hands-on exercises. There is almost always some sort of formal document that shows what is going to be tested and validated through the process. This is often called the Test Plan, but it's often simply referred to as the PoC or PoV document.
Why does a PoC / PoV need to be customised?
One of the key complaints from end-users (customers) about engaging with sales people is that they don't listen, and they don't really care. Think about how many times you've seen a standard sales presentation been used, or a rehearsed demo that showcases all the different features but never actually addresses a particular issue.
The point of a customised PoC / PoV is to get you asking yourself "So what?" each time you talk about a specific product feature or capability. Get yourself asking "Why should they care?" each time you talk about your product. If you want a customer to see the value in your product, you need to make that value real. A customer PoV is a great way to formally align your product features & capabilities with your customers needs, requirements and perception of value.
How many times have you used a generic ROI / TCO calculator and a customer has just dismissed the results? It's because they aren't real to them! A customised PoV can align it to their goals, their environment, and as such, their perception of value! This is essential to getting a customer to see your product value.
I don't want a customer to see this site though
We agree! Use this site to curate, manage and build your PoV documents and engagements, then use our white-labelling facilities to present these under your own domain. Your customer doesn't need to know or care who we are, they want to focus their care and attention on your product and the value it can deliver to them.
Administrators can simply put in the subdomain you want to use, any necessary branding customisation, then we'll take care of the rest.
How do you prevent just anyone viewing my public PoV?
Every PoV is created with a randomly generated access ID, and a randomly generated access code. This means that even if someone knows the URL of your PoV, they can't access it without the correct access ID and access code. This is a simple but effective way to ensure that only the people you want to see your PoV can see it. If for whatever reason you realise an access code has been compromised (fat fingered email to the wrong client), just go in and request a new access code.
We use Excel / Google Sheets to manage our process, why should we use this?
Maybe we're not going to convince you to go all-in on a SaaS product. Maybe you're working in defence or federal and so can't share SaaS based data. Maybe you're just not ready to make the leap. That's fine, we're not here to force you to do anything you don't want to do. We're here to make your life easier, and if that means you want to use Excel or Google Sheets, then that's fine. Once you've finished creating your PoV / test plan, go to view it and then you get the option to export it to Excel. This will download your document as a spreadsheet (.xlsx) which you can then import to Excel or Google Sheets and use as you see fit.
We use a specific sales methodology, can you support this?
Everyone does things their own way, even if you're using the sames sales methodology as someone else, it may not be implemented the same. We've tried to accommodate for different scenarios, so while we call things a Proof of Value (PoV), you may call it something else. You have control to change the namings of test plans, tests, and even the groupings of the tests.
Hopefully you get the idea, call it what makes sense to you and your team. There's enough tools that require relearning or unlearning, we want to try make this as simple and easily understandable as possible.
We're using SFDC / Pipedrive / Excel to manage our opportunities & prospects?
As much as we would love top level integration to many of these tools, it simply isn't feasible. What we've done is allow you to put in a link to your preferred CRM / Sales tool so that when you're viewing your test plans here, you can just click a link and see the full details back in your native sales tool. Maybe we'll do primary integrations in the future, but we're not there today I'm afraid.
How do I join an existing company?
Ask one of the administrators to send you an invite. This will allow you to create an account and join the company.
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Send us an email and we'll fix this for you. You may have previously signed up, but we can only identify you by your email address, so you can't be a member of multiple organisations at the same time.
How do I delete my account?
Send us an email and we'll do this for you. We'd love to understand why, but we won't force you to tell us!
How can I learn more?
Sign up for an account, have a play, start using! Or, head over to our docs pages to read more about how to use the platform.
What analytics can we get out of the system?

We can see a lot of potential for usage analytics, but we know we haven't cracked it yet. We're collecting an calculating metrics in a few areas, specifically test usage, test results, how often plans are being used, and mappings between your products, features, and tests. We want your feedback though to make this better!

There is a lot of potential here, from looking at what tests are most popular, to what tests fail most. If you cross reference the data here to data in your CRM tool, then you can extract things like what tests and product features are involved in most deals, or even distribute this by deal size. There are a lot of analytics we'd like to enable for you, bear with us and we'll bring you something awesome!

What is proration?

In subscription billing, proration is a framework that allows consumers to make adjustments to their subscription plans, such as upgrading, and downgrading. It also allows subscribers to change the quantity of subscribed items or their frequency in a subscription cycle without distorting their billing.

Example: If your bill date is December 10th and you purchase a £20 per month subscription on November 23rd, you'll be billed for the period between November 23rd and December 10th. The prorated cost, in this case, is £11.33 (£20/30 days x 17 days). Instead of a full month, you only pay for 17 days of subscription.

Checkout how our billing partner - Paddle - describes proration (after all, they're the ones calculating it!).

When are scheduled tasks (analytics and such) run?

Traditional thinking is to run scheduled tasks at night to avoid disrupting users. The trouble is this doesn't factor in a global user-base, and certainly doesn't consider the potential carbon emissions.

This site is hosted in the UK, and running scheduled tasks in the middle of the UK day (usually between 3-5pm) is typically when the greenest energy is available on the UKs national grid. While we don't (currently) get incentivised to schedule around green energy availability, it is small actions like this that can help drive a greener environment.

The running of the maintenance scripts should have minimal (likely negligible) impact to users, so it makes sense to us to choose a time that is most optimally efficient for our planet. It also makes actioning any maintenance task alerts easier for us to manage.