Joel York

Tweet Me! SaaS branding has some unique challenges that aren’t covered in the average MBA program. As a new communication channel, the Internet has altered the rules of branding for almost every category of product. However, cloud brands that owe their very existence to the Internet often find that the message, the medium and the merchandise are a confusing tangle of clicks, words, sounds, images and experiences that is difficult to describe. I’m not going to re-hash branding 101, there are plenty resources available for that. I’m also not going to provide a fool proof recipe for creating killer cloud brands. Anyone who says they have that is lying. What I will do is provide some SaaS branding food for thought by exploring 6 key questions you need to ask before committing to your SaaS branding strategy. Because once you commit, it’s not easy to change. All brands, no... (more)

SaaS Profitability – SaaS Company is as SaaS Customer Does

Profitability, one would think, should come quite naturally to a successful, growing SaaS company.  But, SaaS startups have consistently struggled to reach profitability.  Unprofitable SaaS companies have gone public and remained unprofitable for years after their IPOs, even as they grow revenues into the hundreds of millions of dollars.  SaaS companies have eschewed economic convention, with management and investors alike calmly shrugging off the passe’ advice of their obsolete microeconomics professors who cry out in vain from their blackboards that “the role of the firm is to ... (more)

SaaS Benchmarks | Acquisition Cost and Churn Challenges

I routinely get asked questions like the following: What is a typical churn rate for SaaS? How much should I pay my SaaS sales reps? What is a good time frame to recover acquisition costs? A few years ago, the best answers I could give were simply based on my own experience and conversations with other SaaS colleagues. However, as SaaS has matured as a category, some high quality SaaS benchmark studies have appeared. Recent conversations with Lauren Kelley over at OPEXEngine highlight for me how SaaS companies across the board struggle with customer acquisition costs (CAC) and c... (more)

B2B Sales | The New Breed of B2B Buyer Series Part 3

Tweet Me! B2B sales has been transformed by the application of many B2C Internet marketing techniques, but there are limits to the Internet where I think B2C can learn something from B2B. For example, with so many cool, self -service real estate websites like Zillow, Trulia, and Redfin available online, why is it that the vast majority of people still prefer to use local real estate brokers to buy and sell their homes? Why not just do it yourself? Buying a home is complicated. All real estate brokers are required to pass professional certifications, and good real estate brokers sp... (more)

What Is SaaS? | Software-as-a-Service Myopia

It seems a little late in the game for me to be asking a question like “What is SaaS?” But, I’ve always harbored a few embarrassing little secrets on the subject and I think it’s time I came clean. There is a classic Harvard Business School case study called Marketing Myopia by Theodore Levitt that is familiar to every MBA student since the 60′s–the moral of which is not to define your business too narrowly lest you become obsolete. Well I don’t think software is going away any time soon and neither is service, but what about software-as-a-service? Between the rise of the cloud ... (more)