
How to negotiate the long, slow, SaaS ramp of death [video] - marklittlewood
http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman-constant-contact-how-to-negotiate-the-long-slow-saas-ramp-of-death/
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arbuge
I've been scratching my head over how to sell a SaaS product to small
businesses for a long time - specifically the distribution problem (getting
the word out to them). I like the radio & seminar solutions she proposed that
seem to work for CC. Anyone else have any other success stories in reaching
SMBs that come to mind? Much appreciated.

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pinaceae
we are successful in SMB in our space with a SaaS product line.

\- it is a highly regulated industry

\- we can prove compliance and prove _ongoing_ compliance efforts

\- we can prove better uptime and security then in-house, on premise solutions

we do not dabble in other verticals, all our customer facing personnel is
fluent in this industries language.

funnily enough, true success in SMB only happened after success with top20
companies. SMB sales cycles tend to be a lot longer, as budgets are way more
constrained. once you have some of the big guys though, SMB starts trusting
you.

SMB in US is still easy though, we are now tackling EU and this is _really_
hard. if it's not SAP or some homegrown shit-solution built by the IT chief's
nephew, it is deeply suspect.

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daemon13
What industry are you in?

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pinaceae
we are targeting life sciences.

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adriano_f
I have to say, that was a good talk.

Not flashy, no bullshit, and she seens very down-to-earth and approachable,
for being the CEO of a multi-million dollar company.

A lot of what she said reminded me of "Good to Great".

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marklittlewood
Thanks Adriano. (I put the conference together). A good summary of what we try
to do at Business of Software. :-)

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mwetzler
From the perspective of someone offering analytics BaaS, I loved how she
pitched analytics! And also the education part. I think education will help us
bring analytics tools to more companies. By the way, if anyone needs help
instrumenting their funnels, I'm here to help :)

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ams6110
Interesting account of the rise of one of the leading email spam companies.

I found the constant interjection of "right?" into her speech to be really
annoying in the transcript. Probably would be something you'd tune out if you
were listening to the presentation. I guess transcripts are supposed to be
literally word-for-word, but it would be a lot more readable if those kind of
speech artifacts were omitted.

