At some point in time during the past couple of years, vendors quit selling “solutions” and are now selling bags of parts. They have an app to do this part and a web site to do this. Their Windows-PC software manages this part on your desktop, doesn’t do Macs, iPads or iPhones. And your website? Well, they don’t know how to do that, but they are pretty sure it’s easy.
“Do you want to talk to our tech people?” the sales person asks.
And you talk to their tech people but the tech people only know how to screw in this part to that other part. They don’t know (or care) how the whole thing works. Their job is only to get you to understand how their parts works.
And you hang up, frustrated that nobody quite knows how all the parts fit together so you can just get on with the business of putting on your soccer tournament!
Our Advice: Quit buying parts from junk dealers, expecting to find the best deal on website hosting, scheduling, referee assigning or hotel rooming. Instead, focus your energy on providing the best overall experience to your guest teams using an integrated, comprehensive solution.
At TourneyCentral, all our modules — from team applications through scheduling and scoring to referee assignments — all work together. They were built by people who were tasked to create soccer tournaments, not just fill up hotel rooms or tweet out stuff. We’ve all been there and we continue to be there.
At the end of the weekend, you want your guest teams talking about how tight your tournament was, not how irritating it was to book a room or find a score. You want to deliver a fully-assembled tournament, not just a bag of parts.