How to sell SharePoint 2013 to a steering committee

A few weeks ago, I was asked to prepare a presentation on the reasons we should upgrade our SharePoint 2010 environment to SharePoint 2013.  It wasn't enough to simply say "it looks pretty", but that was obviously (what I thought) a key selling point, as the presentation was to be delivered to non-technical decision makers.  My presentation included a look at the improved social computing features, an improved way of deploying new custom developments (or apps), and one final slide just summarising some of the new technical features - Translation Services, Workflow Services, and "Minimal Download Strategy".

It turns out that the greatest interest from almost everyone at the table was these three technical points.  The look and feel?  Not of interest to most people, as we already have a heavily-customised and branded master page.  Others didn't like the social element at all.  But the last slide was the strongest for them, and I learnt from that to focus more on these parts.

I decided to carry out more research on these technical features to better sell the product.  Sure, the end users will probably appreciate the new user interface and ease of use, but if the business owners don't see a benefit, the users will never get to use it.

The next few posts will be my semi-technical findings on:

• Minimal Download Strategy (or, more generally, network performance improvements)
• Translation Services

Hopefully someone else researching SP2013 will find some interest in these features and help them also sell a very promising product upgrade.