As companies continue to figure out the true role of a Customer Success Manager(CSM), various aspects of the job keeping coming up for debate. As such the Customer Success Manager job is an overarching role that touches various functions such as sales, on-boarding, implementation, training, support, product while continuing to be the single point of […]

We have all heard and know about Buyer’s Journey. The process they go through from the time a technology need arises, all the way through the decision process, involving inputs from all the stakeholders, till they make  a purchase. While that journey has been analyzed and optimized and then some,  I don’t think SaaS companies […]

Selling Software-as-a-Service has created new challenges for companies around subscription billing, pricing and managing customer accounts. This has created a new category of software offerings called Subscription Billing. This post will outline the characteristics of a good subscription billing software.

Customer Success has become the mantra for software companies in the SaaS space to create a profitable company. I recently did a presentation to group of leaders from the technology space around how Customer Success is changing the very fabric of a software company. Customer Success is not a new term used for the erstwhile […]

This question was originally posted on Quora and I had responded. I am expanding on that answer in this post. As companies push firmly into a SaaS delivery model, providing ability to do a trial/evaluation has become table stakes. In the new world order of technology procurement, buyers are more educated and prefer to touch-and-feel […]

The world is shrinking and the traditional boundaries between Desktop, Client-Server, Web and Cloud technologies are getting blurred. While some of your business applications should be strictly on-premise, some have to move to the private cloud and some travel to the public cloud. The users community of today’s applications are spread across Product divisions Geographies […]

The traditional software (on-premise) sales model relies on the both direct and indirect distribution, leveraging the indirect Channel (the Channel) to build a loyal customer base and to generate a large portion of sales. Value Added Resellers (VARs), and System Integrators (SIs) play a major role in the evangelizing, demand generation, pre/post sale activities and […]

Software-as-a-Service business with all the virtues that it purports also demands that the service provider be agile. Agile, not only, in terms of the way product is built but delivered and managed. Unlike in the traditional software days, subscription revenue model requires that SaaS solution provider measure every process and continuously adapt based on the […]

As SaaS model firmly establishes itself as the go-to software delivery model, the metrics that companies need to track or manage their business to are different. Based on the sales model, user acquisition, pricing, revenue model, profit margins new metrics have become critical. If you are a SaaS business, here are few that you have […]

I was part of a small group of SaaS/Cloud leaders who got together to talk about Pricing strategies, organized by Lincoln Murphy (@lincolnmurphy). The group consisted of founders of early stage startups that were comparing notes with fellow startup leaders, on various pricing strategies that worked for them and virtues of each of them. Amongst […]

Open Source software and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) represent the two real disruptions in the arena of enterprise software. In the last decade both have experienced real success and challenged the inertia that persisted in the enterprise software controlled by proprietary vendors. New business models, Product offerings have provided consumers with choices on both the price-performance as […]

As SaaS increasingly becomes the preferred way for delivery and consumption  for all things software, incumbent on-premise vendors are feeling the heat to come up with their own version of SaaS application. Customers convinced of the  cost efficiencies of the SaaS model are resenting the hefty support contracts. The challenge of coming up with a […]

We all have had those moments where we run into this need to urgently mail documents to someone, overnight, international and on-time. Fred Smith revolutionized that industry by providing a reliable service that people bank on to have their documents delivered on-time to practically all the corners of the globe. That was 20 years ago. […]

2009 was a banner year for SaaS. With all the banter around Cloud Computing as an advancement in technology and it glories bandied around I would still be hard pressed to find a more compelling reason behind the larger success of SaaS – than the distressed economy. Companies with dwindling IT budgets ratcheted up the […]

Established companies venturing into SaaS business or newbies starting off as SaaS companies have to deal with a lot of new and evolving challenges. Everything that you can possibly think of is different with SaaS model. To say that it is changing the software business is an understatement. Starting with delivery model, architecture, sales, support […]

One of the key drivers of the SaaS model has been the transfer of risks, burden and costs of ownership from the software buyer to the software vendor. In a way, by adopting SaaS the customers are telling the software industry to get their act together and bear the risks for their own doing. For […]

“Cost Savings” has been the key rallying point behind SaaS sales strategy and has been credited with much of  SaaS adoption to date. Most SaaS sales pitches  highlight the cost savings in the areas of licensing, implementation, and on-going support/maintenance. Some variant of the following value proposition have made up the slide deck. Lower upfront […]

Automation of business operations drove the adoption of technology by companies to gain efficiencies and competitive advantage in the marketplace. With the operational areas automated, it led to the next imperative for companies i.e, leverage the large amounts of data being captured, stored, organized in various disparate business systems and deliver it to the right […]

Much has been written about the virtues of SaaS vis-a-vis on-premise traditional software in the last 4-5 years as SaaS made inroads into companies. My last post on SaaS Sales Strategy drew a lot of interest and also  brought queries from the sales community regarding how to contend with on-premise vs SaaS issue when trying […]

As recession rolls on and IT budgets get persistently scrutinized, new sales deals are tough to come by. Although SaaS companies are benefiting in this environment (relatively speaking) thanks to the low-cost subscription model, they should still be smart about adopting new SaaS Sales Strategies. The key tenet for selling a SaaS solution is that […]

In the last decade or so with Salesforce.com leading the charge SaaS has made deep inroads into every area of commercial business software. Starting with Sales applications then moving into other edge applications like Collaboration, Project Management, Document Management. In the last couple of years even core business processes like Human Capital Management (SuccessFactors) and […]

John Wookey, executive vice president of SAP On-Demand shared his vision for SAP’s SaaS strategy in an interview with  InformationWeek. Given the multiple SaaS/on-demand strategies SAP has presented to date this new one creates some confusion. In the past SAP has always portrayed Business ByDesign as its on-demand offering albeit making it available only in […]

I recently read a post from Sranama Mitra where she makes a excellent case for a impending SaaS consolidation wave. She initially posited that Intuit and ADP were due for acquisitions in the payroll, billing space. As if that was the nudge Intuit needed, it promptly announced a deal to acquire PayCycle. Now ADP it […]

One of the key concerns associated with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is and will be data security. The fact that your business data goes out of your network and resides in the software vendor’s data center should warrant concern. But with upfront due diligence and ongoing oversight, you should be able to get you past your inhibitions […]

Byron Deeter and Philippe Botteri from Bessemmer Venture Partners came up with 10 Laws of being SaaSy about a year ago. It was a corporate strategy for SaaS companies prepared in a slide deck. Bessemer 10 Laws Of Being SaaSy Fall 2008 Back when I came across this document in the SandHill Report, I had […]

Rapid Implementation, Quick ROI and Lower Total Cost of Ownership are the key tenets of SaaS. But until the product matures challenges abound. Here are five strategies to address them.

Dave Duffield’s SaaS startup Workday announced today that they closed a fifth round of funding – a whopping $75Million dollars. If you are a small startup desparately struggling for seed or Series A or Series C funding of a couple of million dollars, this news should feel like someone pouring salt on a open wound. […]

In the last two posts, I covered considerations to be made in Choosing a SaaS vendor and Technology Considerations. In this post I will go into the governance controls you should include in your evaluation checklist of a SaaS vendor. In this day and age of increasing governance and regulatory compliance mandates, the evaluation of […]

I covered the high level topics that you as an IT executive responsible for procurement of a SaaS solution need to keep in mind while choosing a SaaS vendor. In this post I will cover the Technology considerations to be made while choosing a SaaS vendor. As in the case of traditional software solution, identifying […]

As SaaS model becomes more mature and moves beyond Sales Automation into the more involved functional domains of Human Resources Management, Project Management, Supply Chain and Financial Analysis,  IT executives in companies now have to define the right process to procure SaaS offerings. While it is still a software that you are buying, the dynamics […]

In the regulatory climate we live in today, by adopting Software-as-a-Service/Cloud based services, business are confronted with two equally challenging choices. On the one-hand, SaaS provides companies with a controlled environment outside the control of their IT organization. The internal IT staff will have no access to the application, the data and infrastructure configuration that […]

Aravo – the Supplier Information Management SaaS vendor announced that General Electric has selected its hosted solution to manage the Supplier Information for 500,000 suppliers across 100 countries in six different languages. Here are couple of key things I take out of this announcement This is further illustration that large companies are increasingly making investments […]