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| Prospecting in the world
of software is not an easy task. How does a company
convince a prospect that the software they have
been using for the past many years is not as good
as the software you are approaching them with? Or
how do you assure them that your software is capable
of performing 100 times better than their current
software and in the end will save them from many
unnecessary headaches? |
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| The Minotaur Business System can not be
advertised on local television stations, nor can you play
an ad on current radio stations. There is the option of
setting up a booth at a tradeshow to try and bring prospects
your way, but are the people visiting the tradeshows really
the key decision making prospects you are after? Word
of mouth is another way any company will receive great
credentials and has always worked for Minotaur, but this
can not be the only source of prospecting that takes place. |
Searching the internet is another way prospects find us.
Using sites like Overture.com will bring prospects to
your site, but once they are there, you have no control
over what they do. You can not make them contact you. |
This brings us to cold calling and direct mailing. These
prospecting methods may appear to be "old school"
to you, but believe it or not, most of Minotaur's customers
were acquired in this fashion. The only problem with this
process is that it is a "hit and miss", which
means that you'll find prospects far and few between and
the process is very time consuming. |
Lately Minotaur has been attending several local networking
events to try and raise awareness of the services the
company provides and we have found these events to be
somewhat worthwhile. Please let us know of any events
in your industry that we would be able to network at. |
If you have any secrets on how you do prospecting in your
unique industry, let us know as Minotaur is always willing
to try new ways to reach prospects. |
As most of you know,
there are two types of Minotaur reports. Most reports
are simply informational. These types of reports
display on screen and can be directly printed from
the screen both in the console version of Minotaur
and the GUI version of Minotaur.
The other type of Minotaur report is the laser form.
These are generally transactional reports such as
purchase orders or invoices which are specifically
programmed for each customer and include company
logos and finer formatting than is available in
the normal Minotaur reports. |
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| These laser forms are programmed using
Hewlett Packard's PCL5 language and print appropriately
on PCL5 compliant printers (This includes most HP printers
and a variety of printers by other manufacturers which
emulate the HP printer functionality). |
Presently laser forms print appropriately, yet in the
console version of Minotaur there is no mechanism to display
these documents on screen before printing them. While
the new Minotaur GUI has the Image/Fax mechanism which
will display the document on screen, this Image/Fax mechanism
does not show the image exactly as it prints. |
A corollary of this was that the fax facility available
in our GUI product generally did not work for laser forms.
This is because most of the available third party fax
suppliers would simply fax a copy of a Windows preview.
If the laser form could not be previewed, it could also
not be faxed. |
In the past several months, Minotaur has been working
with a third party software product designed specifically
to properly preview PCL5 printing files. With this additional
technology in place, the Image/Fax mechanism can display
Minotaur laser forms exactly as they print. |
With reference to faxing, the Minotaur GUI system was
designed to allow faxing of documents to any fax software
that masqueraded as a Windows printer. This means that
when you wish to fax a document, you simply select to
print it to the fax "printer". The fax printer
will then ask you to type in the fax number to which you
wish to send the document. |
While this functionality is better than was available
in the console version of Minotaur, there is room for
improvement. Basically, it requires that a user recognizes
the destination of the document to be sent and manually
selects the fax number either by typing it in or by using
contact lists built into the fax driver software. This
works for one of situations but is not tenable for any
sort of batch fax processing. |
Again during the past several months, Minotaur has been
working with a third party fax software product which
provides a mechanism that bypasses the Windows printer
type of faxing. Essentially, it will accept a document
along with a destination fax number directly from Minotaur.
We have implemented this technology so it works with standard
Minotaur reports and we are developing a mechanism to
allow it to work with laser forms as well. |
If you are interested in acquiring a laser form preview
capability in the GUI version of Minotaur, or if you are
interested in acquiring a fax facility that is not dependent
on a Windows "fax printer", please contact us
to discuss your requirements. |
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