Happy New Year from Amity!
This is the first Tattler Issue of 2015 – it’s going to be an exciting year!
Top SaaS Insights:
SaaS Pricing
The Consumerization of IT trend is transforming every aspect of the SaaS business model and it is dramatically lowering the Average Revenue per Customer of today’s SaaS companies. To win in this new environment, SaaS companies have to adjust their strategies.
“Consumerization of IT is an incredibly powerful trend for SaaS startups for three reasons. First, it exhorts startups to build better products which are easy to use and provide immediate value. Second, this trend demands the the sales process evolve from an education sale to an execution sale, from a push to a pull sales process, where customer support and success meaningfully reduce cost of customer acquisition. Buyers educate themselves with online materials and through product trials (perhaps some contact with support) before ever contacting the sales team, contrary to the traditional enterprise sales process where outbound sales dominates. Third, consumerization of IT enables SaaS startups to acquire customers far more cost-effectively than in the past, which means they need less capital to grow just as big.”
SaaS Trends
2015 promises to be an important year for the SaaS transformation. The SaaS Addict has some predictions for the coming year. What do you think are the most important shifts coming this year? Here is one of the Addict’s big predictions:
“More SaaS Apps Will Specialize in Specific Industries.
Industries like healthcare, manufacturing, and retail will be developing more apps in their specific fields. One of the challenges to this new approach is that it burdens the customer with a deeper, more complex experience to acclimate to. However, a benefit to specialized SaaS is that companies will have a built-in user base which gives them a head start when developing features. It also benefits enterprise customers. The reason that this trend is important is because consumers are demanding more apps that are relevant to specific needs. Generalized apps avoid getting too complex in any one area which can alienate consumers by not providing solutions they desire.”
Customer Experience Trends
While we are looking into our crystal ball, the Delphi at Customer Think have some predictions about what is coming in Customer Experience Management this year. Here are a few examples:
“Technology to enable the greater dissemination of unified, repeatable and personalized customer experiences.”
“Companies buying solutions will start becoming more aware of not just having the front end technology or output piece, such as just a website, but the overall digital experience platform – whereby the website plays a crucial role, but is just one part of the jigsaw that delivers true value and performance linked to experience optimization, digital media management assets and the need to be localized in order to do right by the customers and their high expectations.”
– Mark Lancaster, SDL
“The discipline and job role of CX Design will come to the fore. Consultancy and agency specialists will troubleshoot, implement and support what may be a new way of thinking for many organizations.”
Super SaaS Fundings:
Just half way through December and the funding rounds keep rolling in. Here is just a snapshot courtesy of CrunchBase.
Dato – Dato (formerly GraphLab) makes a complete platform for using scalable machine learning to build predictive apps raised $18.5M in Series B funding
Panaya – Panaya is a third-party maintenance provider offering a SaaS-based solution to reduce the cost and risk of making changes to ERP systems raised $25M in Series B funding
Apervita – A cloud-based platform for health-care professionals to do collaborative research, raised $18M in Series ‘A’ funding.
Stem–a San Francisco-based developer of an integrated cloud energy optimization solution raised $27M in Series ‘B’ funding.
Glassdoor –a community platform, provides information on companies’ work environments, salary details, reviews, interviews and job listings raised $70M in Series ‘F’ funding
Newest SaaS Services:
Product Hunt
Pick – The simplest way to schedule a time to meet
Keeply – Simplest iOS app for storing private information and media
Instafall – TweetDeck for Instagram
Productivity Products – Let’s make 2015 more productive
An Infographic of Interest:
Other Great Weekend Reads:
“Businesses trying to gain whatever competitive edge they can turned to big data and predictive analytics hoping to ‘exploit new opportunities and gain the upper hand over competitors’ according to TechRadar.” Are you falling for any of these 10 myths about predictive analytics?
There is a very straightforward and worthwhile message in this article and it’s all spelled out in the title: Managing Your VP of Sales – If It’s Painful It’s Going Well. “If done right, this role gives the entire company a reason to work harder as the sales VP reveals and strongly advocates for the customer struggle.”
This treasure trove of resources from Version One is such an important go-to list we just had to share it along with this exceptional post on building your user engagement pyramid. “Take a few seconds to think about it. What is the most important number to your business? What is the user activity or behaviour that you consider to be a measure of your success?”
In case you missed the latest from the Amity Blog: Key Metrics from Subscription Billing
Planning for 2015 underway? The Guide to Developing a Business Case for Customer Success will help you achieve your customer success mandate in the coming year.
Want something added to the SaaS 2.0 Tattler – let us know! And let us know your take on the SaaS 2.0 Tattler in general – we’d love your feedback.
Curated by the team at Amity using the outstanding tools provided by Product Hunt, BetaList and CrunchBase. We encourage sharing and subscribing!
The post SaaS 2.0 Tattler Issue 41 appeared first on Amity | Convert More Trials, Reduce Churn, Grow Your Accounts.