Thomas Otter

I recently bought a piano for my musical kids. Well, isn’t a piano in the traditional sense. It is a clavinova, to be precise, a Yamaha CLP 340.

I’m interested in music, but I’m not much of a musician.  My original plan was just to go online and buy something based on customer ratings and features. The kids’ piano teacher’s husband was horrified by this approach.  He offered to try out the various pianos himself and help me choose. We agreed a budget and off we went. After a couple of weeks, we settled on deciding between two models.Throughout the sales process, I kept being told that is is about the quality of the sound and the feel of the keys. It has lots of clever features too, but these don’t overwhelm. The fellow selling the piano didn’t really know how the electronics worked under the skin. He didn’t care either. “Listen to the sound; let that be the judge.” I saw the happiness that he got from playing, and that is what sold me. The whole process was without jargon.  It was all about the music.

photo via pixelbunny thanks!

Enterprise software marketing tends to talk too much about the technology for the technology’s sake.If it had been a software salesman I would have had an hour’s presentation before I actually heard the instrument. I’d see detailed specs of ohm and decibels, and about all the neat extras.  And the salesman wouldn’t have actually been able to play the instrument.

As an aside I now understand what virtualisation is, because I have heard it. This thing sounds like a grand piano because the patient folks at Yamaha have sampled thousands and thousands of grand piano notes.

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Category: software industry     Tags: music, sales, software

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