When I speak to our CEO, who is in charge of our marketing processes, he keeps telling me that there are too many vendors like us in the IT world, and we desperately need to differentiate somehow to be spotted by anyone out there.

The “try before you buy” concept does not work anymore. Trying something is an exhaustive task. People cannot oblige themselves to toil that much. Worst of all, even after you’ve tried a lot, you may still be uncertain if that was a good experience or not.

That’s quite disappointing, of course, because we used to get quite positive impressions from customers who took time getting familiar with our tools. However, instead of lamenting further about recent shifts in customer behavior, I am going to send a straightforward message to the hesitant minds.

Below you will find the exact reasons why choosing us for a performance testing project is a wise decision. Just to clarify: this is not about why we are just good. This is about such features that other vendors simply cannot afford providing.

1. Try to find another company that allows reporting technical problems and feature requests directly to a decision maker. Yes, I mean myself. And many of our customers know that this is not a mere polite conversation about future versions. Sometimes new functionality is added to the products within days, not to speak about bug fixes.

2. A personal build with a fix provided in one day. This is not a miracle. This is how we work with issues reported by our customers. It can take longer ONLY if we cannot reproduce the problem, or it requires more coding time. The latter is quite a rare case. There are no permanent “known bugs” in our tools. This term is a complete nonsense for us, because if we know a problem, fixing it is the top priority.

3. We provide technical support on the general functionality of our tools. This means that you can ask any questions on how any feature works and get an answer in one business day (in fact, usually much sooner). In practice we go far beyond that and help customers create tests and interpret test results. We never suggest go reading help topics when asked questions. Our support goal is to familiarize users with the tools and help getting real results out of their work. Of course, we cannot repeatedly do all the work for our customers free of charge, but if you ask me how to parameterize a certain value in the test or what a number means in your test report, I will not reply with a price quite for that. If the question can be answered basing on the quick analysis of the customer data, we just do that fast and straight.

4. There are easy problems and there are hard ones. Sometimes we face situations requiring really sophisticated test design. However there are no unsolvable problems for us. We never leave customers alone with their challenges gracefully evading complex tasks. On the opposite, we like to be involved and work on the test implementation together with the customer. This does not mean that we charge for the full testing service in such cases. And this is where we are different: if you need help with a specific issue, we deliver the result as fast as we can (usually in 1-3 days for single session emulation) and charge fairly for the work done. No task can be too small or too big for us.

5. In case you hire us for a complete testing service, you don’t have to be an IT guru to understand the report we create after running the test and analyzing the results. This will not be just an output of the testing tool. We will describe all our finding and conclusions in clear and comprehensible form. Moreover, you will be able to re-run all the tests by yourself, because our testing tools are easy to use even for a nonprofessional. The hard part is the test design, but this is a distinct task, and we can always do it for you. Finally, after creating tests, we can provide additional specification on the test implementation for your own QA team. This will let you create similar tests in the future without our help. We do not keep know-how and make you pay us again and again. We want you and your team to get as much benefits from our service as possible.

In essence, this is how we work here at SolfLogica. If you like that approach, we will be happy to see you among our customers.

P.S. Let me know, if I overstated anything… looks like we are too perfect, which is not exactly my style.