Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
JUNE 3, 2010
I'm sure there are hundreds of ways to sink a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company with poor marketing, but I want to focus on three that can be particularly effective. and not in a good way. 1. Spending money to lose money In this money-losing scenario, the SaaS company spends more on acquiring a customer than they can earn back in revenues from that customer.
The Angel VC
DECEMBER 26, 2010
Continuing my little 2010 portfolio review ( here's part 1 ), the next stop after San Francisco ( Zendesk ), Vancouver ( Clio ) and Berlin ( Momox ) is Edinburgh, home of FreeAgent Central. By launching a flurry of innovative new features such as multi-currency support or project profitability analysis, in 2010 the FreeAgent team has shown again who's setting the bar for online accounting.
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Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
DECEMBER 14, 2010
I like free stuff as much as the next guy. Just check out my t-shirt collection - all free giveaways from technology companies. In fact, many of these t-shirts have outlived the product or company they're promoting. (Remember Lotus Improv or Prime Computer?) I even use free software. I have free gmail and Twitter accounts, and nobody at Google sends me a bill for using the Blogger application that I'm using to write and host this blog post.
Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
FEBRUARY 28, 2010
In my last post, I went out on a limb, claiming that in a software-as-a-service (SaaS) business, customer support is actually a marketing function. Retaining happy customers and reducing defections through first-rate customer support is vital to SaaS success. So now that I've climbed out on this limb, let me go even further: In SaaS companies, engineers are marketeers, too.
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The Angel VC
DECEMBER 25, 2010
As 2010 is drawing to a close I’d like to take a moment to give you a quick update on my angel investment activities and more importantly, thank the incredibly talented and hard-working people who have made it such an amazing year. Since becoming a full-time angel investor in 2008 I’ve made 14 seed investments, with 4-5 additional ones being on the way.
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Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
NOVEMBER 27, 2010
Have you purchased a new car lately? You can find out everything you need to know about any make or model without ever stepping foot on the lot. All data on features, colors, and accessories are available from the manufacturers' sites, and detailed pricing information is readily accessible from sites like Edmunds.com. You can also find out about particular dealers.
Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
NOVEMBER 7, 2010
I've heard of CEOs delivering pizzas and Jolt Cola to software developers. I know about companies that have sent flowers to developers' families, with apologies for keeping them away from home on nights and weekends. I've even seen a company treat the entire development team to a week-long Caribbean resort vacation, all-expenses-paid. Why this largess?
Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
OCTOBER 25, 2010
In an ideal world, you'd all be delivering software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions so simple to learn and easy to use that customers would require no help. And you'd be so flawlessly reliable that users would never experience any service downtime or performance flaws. The fact is, though, most of us live in the real world, not the ideal world. And in the real world, bad stuff sometimes happens: Customers get confused, a feature doesn't work, service goes down.
Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
OCTOBER 8, 2010
There’s been a lot of consolidation in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) market lately, and I think I know who’s to blame: Wimpy. You may remember that he’s the character in the Popeye cartoons famous for promising “I’ll gladly pay you on Tuesday for a hamburger today.” Stay with me and I’ll explain. It’s easy for new SaaS firms to get rolling The SaaS model makes it much easier and less expensive for companies to build new solutions.
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ClinicSense is a SaaS platform that supports over 7,000 massage therapists who use it for appointment management, payments, scheduling, marketing activities and more. Despite having a relatively low payment failure rate, the company discovered that the failures disrupted the customer experience. This often led to churn as customers decided to cancel or abandon their account, preventing ClinicSense from realizing the full lifetime value (LTV) of its users.
Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
SEPTEMBER 28, 2010
My fantasy football league has survived an NFL strike, pre-Internet scorekeeping, and 30 years of trash talk. But we were nearly sacked this season by lousy software. A few years ago our league moved away from manually tabulating results. We got tired of checking the newspaper on Monday, Tuesday and sometimes Friday mornings, calculating scores with a calculator, updating the standings, adding the league Commissioner's colorful commentary, and mailing it out via U.S.
Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
SEPTEMBER 13, 2010
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts recently passed legislation prohibiting texting while driving. I’m hoping they’ll soon outlaw texting while walking. I just came back from a short, but harrowing drive that took me past our town’s high school, just after the end of the school day. The scene reminded me of old episodes of Mr. Magoo - kids fixated on the small screens of their mobile phones, thumbing away furiously on the mini-keypad, while wandering obliviously across heavily-trafficked intersect
Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
SEPTEMBER 1, 2010
Connecticut has no major league baseball team of its own, so it splits its loyalties between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees. The boundary between Red Sox Nation and the Yankee Universe meanders through the state in a fuzzy line that runs roughly northwest from Old Saybrook to Canaan. I grew up on the New York side of the boundary, and am still a devoted Yankees fan… though I’ve lived in Boston for more than 25 years.
Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
AUGUST 17, 2010
When I was an analyst with IDC, a very long time ago, I sat in on lots of vendor presentations on their products and strategy. Too many of them started off with a slide that identified precisely where the presenter and his group fit in the organization. It usually included a detailed topography, indicating the various direct and dotted-line reporting relationships within the department, within the division, within the group and eventually within the overall company.
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Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
AUGUST 9, 2010
I used to work in a place called "The Pit." I wasn't serving ribs and pulled pork at a barbecue joint that wandered north into New England. I was actually with one of the large mini-computer companies they used to populate the ring between Route 128 and Route 495 around Boston. The company put all of us marketing types into the far end of the building into a cube-filled area that was a 1/2 level below grade.
Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
JULY 27, 2010
Because of the unusually warm weather here in the Northeast, my neighbor's farm has already started harvesting corn this summer. They plant different varieties throughout the season, carefully timing each planting to ensure that one or another variety is available from mid-summer into October. Earlier this month, they were harvesting a butter & sugar variety called "Temptation.
Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
JULY 15, 2010
I read an article this morning about Greta Garbo, the famously taciturn actress from the 1920s and 30s. Her closely guarded privacy is so different from most of today's actors, musicians, athletes and celebrity chefs, who use Facebook and Twitter to skillfully cultivate a broad audience of "friends" and "followers," by letting the world in on their every thought.
Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
JUNE 18, 2010
I used to say that the only thing more painful than product naming is root canal. But a few months ago I actually had a root canal, and with the anesthesia and painkillers, it wasn't so bad. Product naming is now back on top of my "most painful" list. And the pain only gets worse when you're marketing both a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution and an on-premise application.
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Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
MAY 25, 2010
Who knew that software developers were such athletes? My code-writing friends are all talking about "scrums," "sprints" and "extreme programming." Though I'm sure some of these folks are spending time in the gym, I've learned that these terms actually refer to the agile development methodologies many are using to build software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions.
Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
MAY 12, 2010
From the "Ask the SaaS Marketing Guy" mailbag, here's a question on pricing from a software-as-a-service solution vendor: "My prospective customer is asking about the "break-even"point at which their software-as-a-service subscription payments would equal their on-premise license cost. They're asking why they should select a SaaS subscription option if they plan to use the application over a long period.
Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
APRIL 25, 2010
Often when I'm talking to vendors about transitioning from an on-premise model to software-as-a-service (SaaS) and there's an opportunity for Q&A, I get questions that go like this: "How do I market a SaaS solution that doesn't lure away my on-premise customers?" Or, "Can I structure the contract for my SaaS solution to guarantee the same large up-front license fee and on-going maintenance stream that I have with my on-premise offering?
Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
APRIL 15, 2010
We renovated our house a few years ago. The larger kitchen, new family room and the extra bathroom we love. The process of getting it built. not so much. Though resurrecting "construction nightmare" stories might be entertaining for you and even therapeutic for me, I'm actually prohibited from revealing any details of the experience per order of a legally-binding agreement with the original contractor.
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Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
APRIL 7, 2010
I was planning to write a blog post on how to capture the attention of prospective customers. The usual fare of practical marketing advice: How do you cut through the clutter to build visibility, establish credibility, and generate leads, etc? But I'm not going to write about that. Instead, I want to talk about a dancing lion. This particular lion is, or more likely was , a dancer in a Russian ballet troupe.
Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
MARCH 26, 2010
When it was operating at full capacity, the Ford River Rouge complex in Dearborn, Michigan had more than 16 million square feet of factory floor space, operated its own docks, ran an internal railroad of more than 100 miles, maintained its own furnaces to make steel and glass, and generated its own electricity. From 1927 through the 1960's, the sprawling complex and the 100,000 people who worked in it operated as a complete, vertically-integrated manufacturing facility: raw materials floated in
Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
MARCH 18, 2010
I attended the IDC Directions 2010 conference a few weeks ago. I listen for two kinds of things at these conclaves: big, industry trends and small, but useful, practices. On the "big trends," in a presentation entitled, " The Maturing Cloud: What It Will Take to Win ," Frank Gens explained that the most significant growth opportunities in the IT market will be in cloud computing and software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions.
Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
MARCH 3, 2010
In subscribing to software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions, customers aren't really buying a product ; they're buying a promise. They are not purchasing a finite set of capabilities to be delivered once the contract is signed, as they would with an on-premise license. Instead, the customer is expecting the SaaS vendor to deliver a service over the life of the subscription.
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Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
FEBRUARY 3, 2010
Just because Steve Jobs and Apple can go stealth, doesn't mean it works for most technology companies. Apple is the rare exception of a company that can roll-out a new product like the iPad in front of a global audience drooling with anticipation after keeping the device under wraps for months, although even Apple had difficulty containing leaks. Time was, this was standard operating procedure in the technology market.
Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
JANUARY 28, 2010
Most months I take only a cursory glance at each of my recurring bills: phone, internet, cable, electricity. If the charge looks to be about the same as I paid the previous month, I pay it. But for the first bill of the year, I make it a practice to look more carefully. Under this annual scrutiny, I saw that my January land-line phone bill included a $6.99 charge for "inside wire maintenance.
Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
JANUARY 13, 2010
A few months ago, when discussing which marketing activities work and which don't, I confessed " I do not know." Let me clarify. Actually I do have a few ideas. I'm not sure if they'll work for every software-as-a-service (SaaS) company, but they're at least worth thinking about. Importantly, they're relatively inexpensive to try. I was prompted to think about these low-cost ideas by a very thoughtful post from David Skok of Matrix Partners, entitled " Startup Killer: The Cost of Customer Acquis
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