Software-As-A-Service Demand Generation : Position a Single Call to Action (6/7) and Measure, Refine, Repeat (7/7)

You have chosen and defined the personna of a Single Customer you would like to attract.

You have found that single customer online.
You have answered one burning question that single customer asks.
You have made a landing page where you speak as the customer listens.

You have engaged in a web conversation.

 

It is now time to position a single call-to-action.
Usually this call-to-action is a Trial proposal which is what best value a SaaS solution, or a Buy proposal if you are not offering a SaaS solution.

You must now Measure, Refine and Repeat:
The beauty of this 7 steps walk is that you can monitor the customer through the steps.
Your monitoring must be checked daily and used to refine the needed steps if not enough conversion ration is measured. You can revise the vocabulary, the value proposal, the impression selling positioning, the learn and learn-more processes.

You can and should repeat these steps with an other single customer, wether it may be an other target for the same offering or a new and different solution.

Software-As-A-Service Demand Generation : Engage in a Web Conversation (5/7)

You have chosen and defined the personna of a Single Customer you would like to attract.
You have found that single customer online.
You have answered one burning question that single customer asks.
You have made a landing page where you speak as the customer listens.

You must now engage in a web conversation which will drive that customer through your pre-sales process.
Remember that you speak with a web-centric customer, but that not all of them are pure web-centrics and so some of them would need either a live chat, or a phone call-back with someone during that engaged conversation.

The focus if to keep the customer's focus on your offer, and use impression-selling techniques to let him/her learn :

• the key and differenciating benefits of your solution;
• a price per user per month which will filter those customers seeking for a free AND great solution;
• all the informations which could prevent the customer to keep going;

You must engage the customer's trust so that he/she will enventually go to the next step.

Software-As-A-Service Demand Generation : Speak How the Customer Listens (4/7)

You have chosen and defined the personna of a Single Customer you would like to attract.
You have found that single customer online.
You have answered one burning question that single customer asks.

You should now have had that single customer landed on your dedicated micro-site web page.
You have 20 seconds to convince that customer that you are the one and best to be able to answer that burning question. Your landing page must use a graphics style, vocabulary, impressions selling techniques to exactly match the personna of your customer. The exact same way than a usual good sales people would do when facing the customer.

You should offer a moto, two or three value added arguments, examples of these arguments, and a matching testimonial. That single landing page will convince the customer that he/she should engage a conversation with you, preventing him/her to go back to the search engine results page.

Software-As-A-Service Demand Generation : Answer 1 Burning Question (3/7)

You have chosen and defined the personna of a Single Customer you would like to attract.
You have found that single customer online.

Now that this single customer has landed on your micro-site you should engage a conversation with him/her.
You have a maximum of 25 seconds to attract his/her attentation.

So you must answer One Burning Customer that single customer is asking himself/herself. One among the list of top ten daily critical questions you had listed when defining its personna.

That single customer must read a single message and understand that you will aim at answering its question in the best way possible - wich gets you back to your Blue Ocean Strategy work, differenciating from your competitors in the way you will answer to that burning question.

Software-As-A-Service Demand Generation : find that customer online (2/7)

Once you have chosen a Single Customer you must find that Customer Online.
 Remember that you should have focused on web-centric customers.

Those web-centric customers search for answers to their daily business needs through the web.
They type key words that match their personna, the one you shoudl have defined in step 1.
Rather than buying generic PPC keywords you should list all the sentences that Single Customer would use when searching for its answers, and buy those cheap - because very specific - lists of keywords. Looking at this recent survey you may want to concentrate on 4 words long sentences.
You should also think about offline media taht may be used to catch the attention of this single customer and bring him/her to your web site. An add in a vertically focused printed magazine, a dedicated visit card you may give during a trading fair are ways to help that single attention pay attention to your web messaging.
Do not spend time in evangelisating web-agnostic customers.

Optimize the conversion rates toward your web pages

• Appear On the first page

• 
  
   Do concentrate on Search Engine Optimization
  
  
  

• 
  
  Use 4 words key phrases
  
  
  

• Use multimedia marketing strategies

Software-As-A-Service Demand Generation : choose a single customer (1/7)

In deploying a Software-As-A-Service business model you first focus on optimizing the demand generation. You thus want to capitalize on the web marketing benefits to maximize the number of potential customers landing on your micro website and to convert them to buyers through a learn-try-adopt cycle.

The efficient web demand generation can be seen as a seven steps process.The first step is to choose a single customer.

As mentionned in previous posts, once you understand the successful saas offering, and are familiar with the SaaS user behaviors, you need to have a focused approach. You do not want to attract every web crawler to your web site, you want to attract those web-centric people who are looking for a solution which your SaaS offering would be the best one to select to solve their critical issue.

Choosing a single customer means that you must first profile that user, the one you want to consider your SaaS solution and say 'whaoo that's exactly the best solution I am looking for!'.

You first need to define its profile: characteristics, demographics, vocabulary, purchaser or influencer capability.

Choosing a single customer then means that you must list the top ten critical questions that customer is asking himself, using the words he would use, and he would like to be solved efficiently.

Create several personna profiles and a positionning canevas for each of them.
Design and publish a micro-website for each personna, the corresponding potential customer will then see your solution as its answer to its daily top needs.

We will explore the second step in an other post :
Software-As-A-Service Demand Generation : find each single customer online (2/7)...

Microsoft opens a cloud computing center in Taiwan

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer praised Taiwan and said the cloud computing center is aimed at continuing the strong relationship between Microsoft and Taiwanese companies built over the past 20 years.

"We wouldn't have low-cost, high-availability computing today if it wasn't for companies here," he said. The center will be a first for Microsoft in Asia. It aims to give Taiwanese computer makers a place to test out new hardware and software made to work with Microsoft products, including new cloud computing applications and services, a joint statement said.

Companies in Taiwan like Quant Computer have already started developing new hardware for the cloud. The company has been working with the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to develop new cloud computing and mobile technologies, a partnership called Project T-Party.

Taiwanese telecommunications company Chunghwa Telecom also signed on with Microsoft on Wednesday to adopt the Windows Azure cloud services operating system, and to offer cloud services such as Microsoft Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Office Live Meeting and Office Communications Online.

Strategic investments in Cloud solutions should not be a technologically driven approach

By reading that Gartner is citing Cloud Computing as the Number 1 technology area that should drive strategic investments I both agree and rise a warning flag.

I agree that this is where a company should aim at driving its strategy, Cloud Computing Adoption Jumps 320% This Year Alone, also relayed in Top 5 things about this years gartner symposium.

I disagree that this should be foreseen as a 'technological area'. Of course there are architecture design, security assessments, delivery capabilities that relies on technological bricks. But a company willing to successfully drive its business on using cloud based and Software-As-A-Service solutions should first think about it as a strategic and business area.

Technology is mature enough to let you build the solution you need.
The first step is thus to be sure about what your 'needs' are.

You start seeing communications about private versus off-the-shelf cloud architectures. This communication is driven by technology-focused providers.

Read back my first blog entries about the key success factors you have to focus on.

• You should see this as a challenge on finding what is the set of services that will differenciate your company from your competitors and allow you to generate growing recurring marging revenues;
• You should focus on micro-marketing this set of services;
• You should think about industrializing the provisioning of these services;
• You should aim at satisfying the SLA which you defined on each service;
• You should behave as a 'services operator', looking at Average Margin Per User and Churn rates;
  
• You should enventually rethink your channel management strategy.

Then and only then you may and should start thinking about technology. And if you are really business oriented and want to shorten your go-to-market with efficient margins you will enventually find that off-the-shelf SaaS pure players will offer you both the set of solutions you need and the capability of assembling these cloud services in the way you designed it !

Steve Ballmer: within 10 years all informations will be available electronically, nomadically and ubiquitously

Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft Corp., has answered questions from the French Developpers' community a fex days ago. During this session, which you can view here, he has been asked about 'what will it look like 10 years from now?'.

His answer is about a complete shift in the way we consume informations.

Look at the recent Google and Virgin America Press Release announcing that they will provide free wi-fi connection during the flights!

Look at the new 'Nook' device from Barnes & Noble, which is not only a new step in using electronic ink nomadic displays, but also a shift in applying the SaaS business model paradigm to books; you can buy, store, read whenever whereever you want. But you can also lend a book freely to one friend during 14 days like you would with a printed version....

Finally, invest some time in reading this: Mobile Web Is Taking Over the World (and Other Internet Trends). The focus of the presentation was on Mobile Internet and 8 key trends that Morgan Stanley has identified, including that social networking + mobile are driving big changes in communication and commerce.

What is- or will shortly be - your contribution to this great and quick shift?!

Are you already integrating these business models within your strategic plans no matter the market and positioning you may have today?

Now even the government has an appstore!

The United States have deployed an application store which aims at helping agencies to benefit from cloud computing software-as-service applications.

The push to promote cloud computing is part of the Obama administration’s effort to modernize the government’s information technology systems and to help reduce the $75 billion annual budget for federal I.T. in the process.

I whish that other countries would also create such an appstore and promote the SaaS solutions as both a green contribution and an IT optimization solution! This may be the spark which will enlight the SaaS market growth.

Focus your energy on the Try-Buy conversion process

SaaS is about micro-marketing. After conceiving a Blue-Ocean strategy you already worked on several communication canevas which will drive targeted customers toward your dedicated mico-websites.

As a SaaS solution provider - being an ISV or a SaaS marketplace portal - you need to spend time and money on processes which maximize your recurring margins.

Focus your energy on the Try-Buy conversion process!

Optimizing this conversation rate means:

• your blue-ocean strategy works
• your segmented targets find your micro-site when they seek for a solution
• your communication canevas convince them that your SaaS solution is their answer
• your positioning and trying cinematics ease their decision to try your solution
• the trial phase demonstrates that the benefits you exposed are the one they are looking for
  
• your SaaS solution is adopted by the 'about-to-be' customers
• the trial scenario and data matches their business needs
  
• the trial-to-production environments are seen as a single and same SaaS solution
• at the end of the trial the customers have already found how to satisfy more than 90% of their initial needs and expectations

Focusing on the try-to-buy process will drive efficiency and maximize your recurring margin. You will achieve a high conversion rate while at the same time reducing the future cost of your help desk support. Calls to your support team will drop significantly after 30 days if customers experienced a great try-to-buy process. When seeking for a long-tail business model you will thus increase the number of users without increasing your operational support cost at the same rate.

You will then get a rising number of satisfied customers which thus will also help you optimze your churn rate!

A different conception of customer satisfaction

In traditional software business customer satisfaction is a backoffice duty.
You first have marketing, then product development, then support which focuses on listening to lost or unsatisfied customers and do whatever is achievable to keep them using the software.

With Software-As-A-Service customer satisfaction and marketing should be merged in a new highest priority focus: customer partnering.

A customer should be seen as a partner. Who better knows which functions to develop? Who better knows how things should be organized within the user interface ? Who do you think between a marketing team focusing on market studies or end users are the best qualified to help you develop a successful solution?

This is a tremendous shift in how the roadmaps are conceived and developed.

Why this was not already done?
Because in traditional software roadmaps take time.
Because in traditional software the solution is conceived to be as wide as possible, meaning that there are a lot - too much - functions so that each user should be able to find those he is looking for.
Because in traditional software cost of customer acquisition can be compared to chasing for the top 10 chart goal to get enough visibility to sale enough copies.

With SaaS you can - and should - engage a conversation with your potential and existing users.
With SaaS you can - and should - adapt your solution within days and not months.
With SaaS you can - and should - offer different flavours of your solution to each 'niche'.

SaaS is the way to listen to customer's needs and satisfy these needs in a very short term and cost efficient process which can be easily refined.

Customer satisfaction is your top priority! With SaaS perceived quality is an ongoing and permanent process. Do not use traditional marketing anymore, do not guess what the market needa are! Ask them and focus on producing the needed functions as fast and as efficiently you can. This is also why you should delegate and work with SaaS dedicated partners who can help you with a SaaS platform, SaaS information system, SaaS billing system... Focus on what you are the best at!

A different conception of Software Development

Software-As-Service should not be treated as a technological or architectural topic.
SaaS should be seen as a prism through which usual ways of doing IT should be rethinked.

Take the example of Software development. I have been involved in software development for more than 25 years since my first programs in peek and poke Assembly language! At that period of time optimization of the software was not a recomandation it was mandatory. My first computer only had 1 Ko of RAM!

Then software started to being 'fat'. Why? Because developers and software editors did not care about using a lot of memory or disk space. Their manual had to say that to run this software you would need such hardware characteristics, and the user had to care about it! You did not get the latest computer, so do not blame me if your software runs slowly...

SaaS will eventually reverse this process.
SaaS involves software editors to run their software on virtualization platforms.
SaaS involves software editors to pay for those investments, and the power consumption is eating their margin if not taken seriously!

Until now we have seen a lot of new computer langages being invented, and a lot of web technologies too. I bet that the number of development langages and methodologies will lower and that this will not be a factor of richness diminution. End users will get more stable, more efficient and more adaptative programs if you give them the power of mashing-up the functions they need. To make that happen fficiently you need to simplify the way you develop and maintain a large common factor so that pieces developed by a large number of developer would fit together.
The HTML lego for software could be Web Services and the execution paradigm would be SaaS.

Why would you need to keep on developing web code? An application is better developed, stronger, more efficient, more reliable if developed on the basis of an operating system whatever it is. Webg is great for visualizing and interacting, for letting the end user mash-up and create their 'own' interface.
I bet that with SaaS the software editors will find it more efficient to develop software the way it was before - efficiently - and as 'heavy clients'. Then use the SaaS to virtualize those applications and let them run whenever and however the end users want to use them. Simply splitting up the 'heavy clients' into 'heavy functions' would be the path to follow. Each 'heavy function' being usable as a single piece, being integrable into whatever web interaction technology you would need, being insertable wherever you would need.

SaaS will help developers to reconnect with their users and this will radically transform the way we have seen the computing industry until today.

Web-Agnostic Buyer

By contrast web-agnostic users do not rely on the Internet as a central component of how they live.

They may make use of the Internet for email, or occasional online shopping – but when they have a problem to solve, their instincts to not drive them to a web browser to find a solution.

Web-Centric Buyer

Web-centric behavior describes individuals whose have fully integrated the Internet into their daily routine. For these web-centric users the Internet is central to:

• How they consume information
• How they interact with others
• How they find and buy products and services
• How they solve problems

They recognize the increased efficiency that the Internet provides relative to these activities and have embraced it.
They have integrated the Internet into both their personal and professional lives – at home, at the office, even when mobile.

Business-As-A-Service did you say?

I dont want to introduce a new acronym. There are too many of them out there and it is confusing.
I aim to set a new space of thoughts so that we can ask ourselves questions like what is... how do we... why not... what to do what not to do... to melt business processes and IT solutions as a single Business-As-A-Service paradigm.

Here is what the IBM's Program Director of SOA Requirements in the IBM Software Strategy division said on his blog last summer:

• AaaS - Architecture as a Service
• BaaS - Business as a Service
• CaaS – Computing as a Service
• CRMaaS – CRM as a Service
• DaaS - Data as a Service
• DBaaS – Database as a Service
• EaaS - Ethernet as a Service
• FaaS - Frameworks as a Service
• GaaS - Globalization or Governance as a Service
• HaaS - Hardware as a Service
• IMaaS- Information as a Service
• IaaS – Infrastructure or Integration as a Service
• IDaaS - Identity as a Service
• LaaS - Lending as a Service
• MaaS - Mashups as a Service
• OaaS – Organization or Operations as a Service
• SaaS – Software or Storage as a Service
• PaaS - Platform as a Service
• TaaS – Technology or Testing as a Service
• VaaS - Voice as a Service

I'm going to add another one: BlaaS (Blog as a Service)!