Significance of SaaS marketing!

I was talking to one of the SaaS vendors and he was mentioning that their Sales & Marketing expenses were 75% to 125% of their new sales bookings. He was also mentioning that anything below 75% and anything above 125% is considered to be danger zones. I was relating this to one of my earlier posts on this “To SaaS or not to SaaS – An ISV’s perspective”.  In that post I had dealt in detail as to why ISVs may not be going for SaaS discounting the benefits of moving to SaaS.

This high percentage of Sales & Marketing expense adds another dimension to ISVs possibly not wanting to move the SaaS way. For them to be successful, it becomes extremely important for ISVs to ensure that their sales and marketing is cost-effective, for which they need to have extremely good visibility on their sales funnel and ability to predict and forecast accurately. Additionally, they need to identify metrics that would be able to measure the returns on every program that they do in the mix. Keep what brings revenue and throw what doesn’t in your marketing mix.

This also makes it necessary for the ISVs to have access to quality funding that will allow them to do increased sales and marketing spending towards achieving breakeven and eventually profitability. As more and more customers seek SaaS, this may not result in a level playing field as big platform players would be better positioned to offer them as opposed to non-funded setups. Else, you need to have substantial legacy revenue for you to easily move the SaaS way.

 

Enterprise software priorities

Most enterprises consider business applications to be their priority. Enterprises haven’t given importance to becoming information-centric all these years but it is visibly changing. Priority business applications are ERP, business intelligence and accounting apps.

Primarily, these business applications have helped organizations convert ‘unstructured information’ into a ’structured format’ that allows for easier management of business critical information. But, organizations have realized that this alone is not enough and there is a lot of knowledge that is available in different forms and buried in different processes across the organization. It becomes imperative for them to manage such content and capture knowledge to be efficient in their business.

This has prompted many enterprises to look at text mining tools that would allow them to do in-depth mining of ‘unstructured text’, both online and offline information, and convert them into actionable inputs for enterprises. This will include customer complaints, call center transactions, email communication etc. Though, this certainly is a few years away for this to become an enterprise priority.

Enterprises definitely have a taken a step in that direction where information-centricity will be sought, with other business applications and data mining application.

 

Enterprise software challenges

ISVs that engineer enterprise software face a number of challenges with respect to flexibility, scalability, extensibility, availability, performance etc. In my mind, the top three challenges that enterprise software face today are:

• Integration with third party software and IT systems
• Transaction types from different data sources and support for disparate client types
• High-volume transaction capability

If a software is architected keeping in mind these three challenges, most issues related to the enterprise software will cease to exist.

 

How do you get your customers to buy your product or service?

I’ve started writing a book on ‘how do you get your customers to buy your product or service?’ specifically with the B2B segment in mind. My writing is going to be based on the following, though not in the same order:

1. My writings will be based on the work that I did – with more focus on what one shouldn’t do rather than what one should do

2. I strongly believe in the fact that there is no such thing called the ‘right way to market’ – it would speak about the experimentation that is required and how to keep it low-cost

3. New age marketing tools like Social Media Marketing, buzz marketing etc.

4. Why is it so important not to lose focus on traditional marketing principles; for instance, value proposition and positioning statements remain sacrosanct irrespective of the medium that you choose

4. It would also have templates that would allow one to do their marketing plan

5. It would have practical examples with which one can de-risk their marketing intiatives

6. Series of interviews with marketing practitioners from different settings. These would also be covered in the book

7. Lead generation techniques, lead nurturing techniques and  its effectiveness

8. Thought leadership – it certainly is about thoughts?

9. Marketing ideas that you can take and implement immediately; ideas that wouldn’t take you more than 2 minutes to start implementing 

10. Taking it out of social marketing, specific focus is going to be on twitter – I am going tweet about this book as well effectively

I’d appreciate your comments and also appreciate inputs on what you would like to see in this book.

 

Social Media – Is it disruptive?

Social media is gaining popularity is stating the obvious. It has in fact become so disruptive that it is affecting businesses, and I want to take the example of Recruitment consultants. Their main revenues was in finding talents that hiring managers can look at.

What has happened now with the growth of social media is, internal recruiters of corporations have started using sites like facebook and linkedin, over and above the job portals and are able to scout for talents very extensively. This has put the brakes on these specialists whose ability was in identifying talents and qualifying them before the hiring manager gets to see them. Now this is getting compromised and for the recruitment consultants to survive, they need to re-invent themselves and start focusing on verticals, level of hire, headhunting etc. and you cannot survive by being just another recruitment consultant.

Social media is here to stay,  and for good enough reasons, it is helping individuals and companies in their pursuit. At the same time, it is pushing the limits on traditional means of doing business.

 

Meet the founders of Rediff, Naukri and Tejas

There is an exciting event siliconindia is organizing on June 6th (Saturday in Bangalore). It’s by far the largest and most exciting event of its kind in Bangalore.

It is your chance to know the building of companies like rediff.com, naukri.com and tejas networks as their founders come and share their journey with us. Additionally there will be 100 most promising technology startups showcasing their products. You can meet these entrepreneurs and also over 40 investors. To attend this event, register free at http://www.siliconindia.com/startupcity_09/index.html

Adding a few more:

• Watch live product demonstrations
• Get a peek into cutting edge technologies
• Lay hands on the best-of-breed solutions
• Meet young, energetic and passionate geeks
• Experience the culture of innovation in small companies
• Visionary keynotes
• In-depth panel discussions

Time: 8.45 am to 5 pm; Date: June 6, 2009, saturday; Place: Nimhans convention center, bangalore (near dairy circle)

 

Drive up the sales conversion

My customer called me into a meeting and told me that he has a peculiar problem and he wanted my opinion on it.  He said that his organization has a huge sales pipeline but they are not resulting in sales.  Where does the problem lie?

I have written a post on this in my company blog and you can view it by clicking here.

 

Thought Leadership Marketing

In the B2B Segment, traditional marketing is losing its ground and people are more and more looking at Thought Leadership Marketing towards differentiating their products and services in the market. Customers typically have started controlling the B2B messages and you need to be on the money to have an impact in your target customer space.

I have written a post on this in my company blog and you can view it by clicking here

 

Dimdim and Moodle to dance together!

I’ve been following this company dimdim for sometime now and it is getting better and better. I wrote a post earlier where I was suggesting that they should position themselves as a Live eLearning Platform with the features that they have. They have gone a step further by providing integration with Moodle, an Open Source Learning Management System. Moodle and dimdim dancing together will be irresistable. The reviews that I read about dimdim’s integration with moodle are also excellent.

I also see a number of projects displayed in sites like rent-a-coder, getafreelancer etc. where the requirements are integration of Moodle and Dimdim, Moodle+Dimdim+Joomla etc. There definitely seems to be a active community that has been positioning Dimdim pretty well. I would love to hear and write about the initiatives that dimdim has been taking with respect to their positioning.

Essentially, at this rate dimdim would become a necessary backbone of any unified communication strategy of enterprises.

 

Selling in a commoditized market!

Selling a product or a service becomes very challenging when the forces of commoditization are at play. It essentially boils down to cost play and the ones with a lower cost most likely will win the race.  I would like to take the IT services industry as an example.  I have written a post in my company blog and it can be viewed by clicking here