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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)
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)
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)
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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)
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)