Setting the right margins or discounts for partners is one of the questions we get most often. Pay them too much, and you are leaving money on the table; pay them too little, and they don’t have the incentive or budget to invest in marketing and selling your solution. In this section we will [...]
Part 9 of 9 Customer support takes on greater importance for SaaS solutions – clients can vote with their feet and go elsewhere if they are unhappy with a vendor or the perceived value of a solution, and churn rates go up. Customer support is also an important element of the on-going sales process, [...]
Part 8 of 9 We will look at sales compensation from a couple of perspectives. The first is if you decide to use the existing salespeople, but you want them to drive some level of SaaS sales. There are a number of things you can do to influence their behavior. Separate quotas. Give them [...]
Part 7 of 9 It can be very difficult to get traditional salespeople to focus on selling subscriptions. The reason is money. Salespeople tend to be “coin operated.” They are motivated by money and will sell the product or service that generates the biggest commission check. Given the choice of selling a project for [...]
Part 6 of 9 There has been a major shift in how marketing is done and it is being driven by what is called buyer-centric marketing. There are two main factors behind this shift. The first is the need to keep the customer acquisition costs as low as possible. The second is a change [...]
Part 5 of 9 Simply put, the churn rate is the percentage of clients who sign up for a subscription and stop paying, for whatever reason, whether they went to a competitive product or simply didn’t find a compelling need for this type of solution. There are a number of ways to measure churn, [...]
Part 4 of 9 CAC - Customer Acquisition Costs - are all of the expenses incurred during the marketing and sales cycle. These costs are the investment you make up-front and can be easy to underestimate. If you don’t measure it accurately, some of the other metrics become much less meaningful. Many start-ups underestimate [...]
Part 3 of 9 When I work with ISVs that are moving from on-premise perpetual licenses to Cloud-based subscriptions, or services companies that want to move from project-based billing to managed services contracts, the most frequently asked question is: “How will this impact my cash flow?” And it is a perfectly valid concern. The [...]
Part 2 of 9The first, and biggest, decision for any services company that is considering a repeatable IP business is how important it will be to them. Should it be opportunistic or strategic?By opportunistic I mean that you have some repeatable IP, but don’t want to make a big investment or disrupt your current business. [...]
Part 1 of 9 Many major vendors are encouraging their services partners to build repeatable IP (products) – Microsoft, Cisco, Salesforce.com and others. Of course, they are doing this out of self-interest, to make their underlying technologies stickier, and/or to drive consumption of Cloud services, but this is one of those times when the [...]
