April Dunford posted recently about how to incorporate marketing objectives into your beta program strategy. It's a good post, well worth reading, assuming that you're a company that sees betas primarily as product quality exercises (find bugs, get user feedback on design, etc.).
I also know that there are companies who have the reverse problem: they use beta for marketing purposes first. They know that customers get nervous when you don't have any beta, even a pro forma one. However, the bigger marketing goal is reference customers, which presumably pop out of beta programs the same way that flowers might appear after a rain storm.
In some cases, these companies have good relationships with a few customers who always have something good to say about the company. Even if the customer didn't actually give the beta version a good thrashing, they're willing to say something like, "We give a thumbs up to the product direction that we see in the next version." Beta, in this context, is a set of talking points for case studies, press releases, and other marketing materials developed for the launch.
If this is your company's way of handling beta programs, someone needs to be fired. On the product quality front, betas really do have value. Even the best QA team can't achieve the level of real-world testing that customers provide.
Even if you're not concerned about product quality, any company that treats beta programs in this fashion is taking two gigantic marketing risks:
- Ceding an ever-increasing amount of leverage to a small group of customers. Your go-to reference customers aren't stupid. They know that there's a quid pro quo, and they'll expect to be able to call in favors at some point. These acts of reciprocal kindness might take forms that damage your business, such as the prioritization of features that no other customer really wants.
- Confining yourself to a small market. What happens when you need a reference customer in the public sector, but all your go-to reference customers are in financial services? Or, what if you want to expand your portfolio, but none of the familiar reference customers are willing to recommend your ability to deliver value in a whole new technology area?
If reference customers are the flowers you want to prosper in your marketing garden, you'll have to suck up the amount of work it's going to take to cultivate them. Beta programs are one important step in the cultivation process, but the work is really ongoing—as your relationship with any reference customer should be.
[Cross-posted at The Forrester product management blog.]