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Aligning your SaaS Product Design, Marketing and Sales Strategies
When you think about your Software as a Service company sales, and marketing strategy you’ll need to consider the product complexity, who is your target customer segment, and what other players will be involved in the sale process(not full 4Ps analysis here). In each of the cases below different levels of effort and cost to market and sale your product(s) is needed. Partner recruiting is selling, which means, leads generation, sales cycle, value proposition, and some form of an inside sales team. Working with the channels requires investments, competing on VAR attention is selling, and the competition is growing with every new SaaS solution developed. Growing SaaS companies like HubSpot, Marketo, ConstantContact and more as well as giants such as Oracle have been already investing in capturing these channels. The alternative of going directly to the customers is not financially viable in the case of a small start-up company selling to the small and medium business(SMB). The complexity of the product will determine how long is the sale cycle, the onboarding process, and the need for Management Service Provider(MSP) participation. Considering whether the product should become a platform requires considering the implications on your go to market strategy like setting and governing the quality of the add-ons(certification) and pricing.
Here are some combinations to look at.
| Vendor Type | Billable Customer | IT Reasonability | Likely Exit Strategy | Product Strategy | Sales & Marketing Strategy |
| Startup | SMB | SMB owner | Building a cash cow – why sell? | Simple, limited functionality, self served | Online, inbound marketing |
| Large Enterprises | Corporate IT Department | M&A (sell to one of the big players: SAP, Oracle, IBM, Microsoft) | Perfecting one use case, or developing strong protected IP – proprietary algorithm | Direct sales. POC/paid pilot, partnering with other solutions. B2B marketing: thought leadership, trade show. |
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| Young growing company | SMB(<;2000 employees) | MSP/VAR | Going up the market, or M&A through Vertical integration | Building Platform as Service (PaaS), OEM(embed other products) Requires customization and integration with add-on |
Partner recruitment. Referral program. Working with partner on developing strong value proposition and go to market strategies. Sponsored conferences, Webinars. |
| MB | MSP/VAR | IPO, M&A | Become mission critical | Ad above and recruit strategic partners | |
| Large Enterprise developing SaaS | SMB | MSP/VAR | N/A | Medium complexity. Open API, web services, enabling value added services | Partner programs. Account executive to harvest strategic partners |
| Large Enterprises | Corporate IT Department | N/A | Hybrid between on premise and hosted | Direct sales, rebranding |
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I’m sure that there are other combinations of vendor and customer types, product, sales and marketing strategies. However, some combinations could lead to successful outcome while other be disastrous!
VivaStream – how to know “who to know?”- during DMA2011 conference in Boston
I’m going to the DMA2011 conference in Boston next week, and this year the focus is on Real-Time marketing. What could be more relevant than that?
Learning about the different marketing methods that are leveraging mobile, social, and real-time data will be one goal of this event and networking is yet another (not a side effect).
VivaStream is a startup that is building a real-time mobile app and web-site that aims to take networking during business events like DMA11 to the next level.
Before the event starts: you setup your profile, select the conference, browse the schedule, and press the Attend button for the sessions that you plan to go to. Any of your actions is broadcasted to the VivaStream stream telling others about you. VivaStream also offers a reach lists of relevant topics and you can select from one of the two following options: I’m Interested or I Can Help. VivaStream uses this information among other factors to suggest people that you should connect with. There are more useful features and details, but this is the basic.
During the event: Since this is my first event using VivaStream, I’m yet to see the real-time capabilities in action. As you can see in the picture above, VivaStream plans to share some of the statistics based on the information gathered from users’ activities, and to let us know about interesting presentations and spontaneously organized after parties – IN REAL-TIME.
After the event ends: there is a strong possibility to see VivaStream building a new professional social network for networking with a purpose, based on interest and need, and fairly quick.
VivaStream is a very busy start-up, but here are few suggestions for additional features that I would like to see:
- Show me my agenda (calendar view) built based on presentations that I planed to attend to.
- Allow users to enter topics
- Create multiple streams based on different activities (it could get too noisy in a single feed stream)
- Allow users to shout-out (for example: book signing now next to room ###)
- Check-in to a session (and maybe check-out, or leave a comment)
- Number of people interested in a certain topic (next to the topic)
- Number of people attending a presentation (next to the presentation)
VivaStream has the potential to become an important component of any business event. It is fairly easy to see the value to the event organizers that can learn in real-time about activities within the conference rooms as well as outside, the presenting vendors looking for leads, and for the consumers that are looking for relevant help and experience.
Now, I’m looking forward to see how it all plays out in real-time. Go Viva!
How to influence using Instagram
Instagram – if you haven’t heard this name before then you are in a similar situation as most people were 3 or 4 years ago when only few of us heard the name Twitter. Yet, Instagram marked the one million users milestone today! A fairly amazing accomplishment, showing a massive growth in record time, consider that the app debut date was October 6th this year.
This social network may not become the next Facebook killer, but it is definitely as viral as Twitter and may even threaten the later.
So what is Instagram? It is an iPhone app for sharing photos. The application consists of 5 tabs. Share, Popular, Feed, News and yours.
Share – you can choose either to take a new photo or to pick one from your photo library. The kick is that you can select from several built-in filters to process your photo giving it a little more color, ambient, anachronism touch, and more. You can also add short text to go along with the picture.
Popular – people can Like your picture (vote for it) or add comments. If enough people likes it your picture can appear in the popular tab. This is also a way to find people to follow and to vote on more pictures.
Feed – this is a feed stream of pictures from the people that you chose to follow.
Yours – your picture stream along with the likes and comments.
News – a trace of recent information about who liked or commented on your picture
Sounds simple? Well yes, very, exactly as simple as Twitter. If on Twitter people with interesting feed stream (links, celeb, insights – thought leader) attract lots of followers, Instagram users attract lost of followers in similar ways.
Means of communication on Instagram:
- Like and comments – Like is both a signal of appreciation to one of the the pictures and a call for attention to your newly posted picture.
- Screen shot – see here how to take a screenshot using your Iphone. People write a short message in Notes, the built-in iPhone app for writing text, take a screen-shot of the note, and post it as a picture.
- @instagram-user-name - you can reference other users using the @ symbol in the same way as you do on Twitter. Doing so will generate a small pop-up message on his/her phone and will add an entry to the News tab.
So how Instagram users lure new followers?
Method #1 – after few hours using the application you’ll notice that beautiful girls has a lot of followers. Some, significantly more than others. I will allow you to come up with your own explanation for this phenomenon.
Method #2 – artistic creativity. In Instagram I found many users with great picture streams. Some due to the places that they travel to, other due to great digital photography skills, and others thanks to the numerous iPhone photography applications that comes with photo enhancing techniques and creative filters. Some due to all of these elements.
Method #3 – teaching. There are few highly skilled photographers out there that are willing to share from their knowledge explaining about different techniques and tips to their avid followers.
Method #4 – challenges. People declares different challenges like the “Sexy Photo Challenge” (check @markpalmer)challenge that resulted with more than 500 pictures of men and women in different erotic poses (no porn). People then are encouraged to vote for their favorite picture and those are reposted on the challenge organizer stream. Can you see the business opportunity here? “Nike challenge – picture your most creative shot of your most worn-down Nike pare and win a …”.
Method #5 – increasing web presence – my friend Kathryn Jones (@unsaidtv) who is producing live streamed video plays on Better Left Unsaid TV is using Instagram to share pictures from the back scene or “the making of” the play.
Side note – one of the direct impact of Instagram is the growing demands for new photography iPhone applications. People are increasingly looking for more and more interesting filters and digital enhancement features to create new stunning images. I found myself buying more and more of those. Some of the users I follow on Instagram were willing to share (via screen-shot) about their most frequently used applications. Some has lots of them. I guess that this is very good for the mobile applications development market (and Apple).
Tip: There is a new web site (mashup – using Instagr.am unofficial API library) that provides statistics about individual users and their followers – very cool!
Summary – it is too early to tell what direction the Instagram team will choose to take the application at, but it is already apparent that there is a new and exiting platform that brings people to participate and communicate. It is also one of the few communities that exist outside the web and only in the mobile world (I know that implicitly there is a heavy use of the the web and data but there is no Instagram website – yet?!). Whenever there is a new communication platform (in this case Mobile social network) and avid participation, there is a room for influence, branding, and promotion. Bottom line, there is another marketing channel. However, above all, the Instagram team has provided us with a great new way to create, share, and interact with other people, i.e. to have fun!! If you decide to give it a try please stop by my Inst-stream @kerendg (same as my Twitter user name).
The influencer’s five qualities – S.W.A.R.M
In an effort to understand the new Influencers Marketing phenomenon, I decided to try and identify some of the influencer’s characteristics and skills. This information is based on my experience, observing several individuals whom are perceived as influencers by me and others in the online world.
I can envision few derived action items possibly taken following this information:
- Building influencer’s self training curriculum
- Learning to identify upcoming influencers
- Learning how to influence the influencers
The influencer – SWARM
I came up with the SWARM acronym to help remembering them, because it reminds me the metaphor for describing the human behavior following an influencer call for action; like a swarm of bees reacting to environmental change.
| Virtue | Underline Skills | Impact | Tasks |
| S – Storyteller | Know how to tell a good story. Hers and others. | Vision, Inspiration | Collect inspiring stories to share. Focus on possibilities and not on constraints. |
| W – Well-rounded | Technology, Marketing, Selling, and Communication savvy | Respect | Read outside of your domain. Work on turning week points to strength. |
| A – Ahead | Patience, Analytic, Confidence, Distinctive | Leadership | Be curious. Make very little assumption. Ask questions and look for answers. Reverse engineer. Try to write, and explain how it works. |
| R – Resist | Can see outside the common thinking. Extract signals from a lot of noise. |
Priorities | Read a lot before making an opinion or taking side. Read a lot to build solid baseline for comparing it with new information. Read Seth Godin – reading his blog posts regularly is a good training for counter thinking. |
| M – Motivating | Know how to break it all to manageable tasks so other can execute. | Education | Design a plan from one point to the next including tasks, milestones, and objectives. |
How can we use this knowledge for Influencer Marketing – ideas:
Your thoughts about influence?
What do you see as the key virtue and skill for becoming an influencer? How do you plan to find rising influencers in a new niche? As a marketer, planning to leverage an influencer’s call for action in order to convey your message, how do you plan to approach her?
Picture credit: umjanedoan
Twitter tip: treat yourself to a tweet
I want to follow more people on twitter so I can see more interesting tweets or gain more influence (if they follow me back) but I need to be patient!
Robert T. Kiyosaki wrote in his bestselling book Rich Dad, Poor Dad (not an affiliate link), “Pay yourself first”. In some way, what that he meant was the opposite of treat yourself first. Basically, it was about saving money first, and after making sure that this money is invested and yields more profit, then it is OK to spoil yourself buying luxury things. There are few other good lessons in this book but lately this one resonate in my mind when I think about following others on twitter.
In order to be twitscally (fiscally) responsible I’ll need to earn new followers first before I can go and follow more.
Why do I recommend this network building approach?
- It make you motivated to come up with better content so you can get more followers and then follow more great resources.
- It helps you to build a more reliable and sustainable twitter account. I find it hard to follow twitter accounts with high follow/following ratio (i.e. way more following than followers).
- It can help you to put a value for great twitter users. Example: I tell myself that if I’ll get two more followers I could follow one more (maybe an upcoming new thoughts leader in my niche).
And, yes, it takes more time in the same way as it takes to grow your saving account, but this is the way in my mind to build valuable network. A trustworthy network that can be leveraged for influence, community building, and revenue generating. Treat your followers following spread like your equity and build it overtime. Alternatively, having a twitter account that is follows lots of people, and very few followers is like having an over extended credit card account.
Does it make sense to you? Do you follow blindly? Do you have process for deciding whom to follow?
If you like this tip and want to learn more about building high value twitter accounts for marketing, selling, networking, influence or any other purposes please consider reading my eBook: Timing the tweet
And, yes, I know that it is almost Halloween: so treat yourself to a great tweet!
FriendFeed exposes the need for FeedFriend
FriendFeed is an application for sharing much of your online activity and for folowing others and their feeds. You can add up to 41 services as of today collecting feeds from each to your feed stream. The value of this is still in question but it is not the subject of this post.
Now, one can assume that if you share something in one place and many of your followers can see it, this should be enough to market your blog, but apparently it is not. One can assume that this could be a great time saver for a blogger marketing his recent blog post by cutting down the leg work going around and posting the blog post link in multiple places (some of the 41 options).
The reality shows the opposite. I still see some of this service’s heavy users going around adding the links everywhere including the same marketing shpiel. How I see this – ironically using FriendFeed. Because I follow them and run Twhirl on my desktop I keep seeing the same light-weight pop-up windows with the notification about those users’ activity and only the source is differnt.
I assume that the reason for that “busy working” activity is the fact that many of the target audience is not yet on FriendFeed and these bloggers can’t rely on the message to go around using FriendFeed service exclusively .
So, I see an option to change the direction of the feed as well – i.e FeedFriend. Having a publishing service that can add the blog post link with a message simultaneously to multiple services (41 is a good number) such as Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Jaiku, reddit and more.
It will be helpful too if FriendFeed or Twhirl will filter duplicate notifications so I will not see the same blogger market the same post per each Social: Network, Bookmarking or Status service.
Your thoughts….
Keren Dagan
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