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SaaS Needs a Single Point of Purchase

landshark.io

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Re: SaaS Needs a Single Point of Purchase

#91

Post by encoderer »

alangibson wrote: post #79
encoderer wrote: post #75

There’s merit here but one challenge is that such a service is just another revolving line of credit for the company. Another credit card. Finance would likely want it locked down as well. Ive had a lot of success shaving hundreds of thousands off aws budgets and my first tactic is always to create mental awareness that every terraform apply is a virtual swipe of the company credit card. In big companies, making it h…

That's not a tough but to crack. It's pretty straightforward to build a feature that sets limits by team, business unit, etc.

Budgets are important but mindful spending is even more important.

Re: SaaS Needs a Single Point of Purchase

#92

Post by stiray »

bauerd wrote: post #11
Jugurtha wrote: post #3

This is a pretty established distribution model often called "bottom up" approach, and it's particularly relevant to enterprise sales where you allow the users to start using the software without friction [something that was proper to "consumer" applications] and then allow management to pay for that software, or users to pull their corporate credit card and buy what their budget allows. One turn-off for us for machi…

>One turn-off for us for machine learning products was going to the website, wanting to try the software, and then finding a button that says "Schedule a demo" or "Schedule a sales call". Share the sentiment but both of us are likely not the target audience for these kinds of funnels then. Decision-makers who go down the "talk to our sales team" route are more likely to sign big enterprise-y contracts in the end I gu…

The interesting thing here is that until I say "go" no one will "Schedule a demo" or "sales call" to them. While I will absolutely not do it for a fishy firm - and by putting something like that on the site they automatically get into "fishy firm position" - you would like to convince me with words instead of facts to buy your products and waste my time. No, thank you.

Show me the facts, and leave my mind to decide what it is, not lie to me what you think will make the sale. It is just a waste of my time.

Re: SaaS Needs a Single Point of Purchase

#93

Post by alangibson »

mtnGoat wrote: post #83

Sounds more like certain purchasing departments need to modernize, not the other way around. IMHO. Not being able to use the right tools for the job, because some bean counters don't like complexity, is silly and shortsighted.

I've never heard a better plan for failure. "Hey $10B company, I'm gonna need you to modernize your purchasing department before we go any further."

Re: SaaS Needs a Single Point of Purchase

#94

Post by alangibson »

Ennis wrote: post #90

These types of marketplaces do exist but it is very difficult to justify using them. Why pay a significant margin (15-30%) so that we can use a pre-existing billing mechanism inside AppExchange or Azure or AWS. It makes more sense to maintain your own billing system and buyer journey. If the margins go down to 5% then it becomes interesting to give up that control.

I don't think marketplace is the metaphor I'm looking for. A single purchasing portal that takes maybe 5% to keep the lights on is more like it. A PayPal or Stripe set up by a SaaS consortium just to remove friction from the industry might be a good approach.

Re: SaaS Needs a Single Point of Purchase

#95

Post by alangibson »

OliverJones wrote: post #86

Oh come on! Big companies! and Atlassian! Being hard to do business with is so 1980s. FWIW, Stripe.com supports ACH (Automated Clearing House electronic funds transfer in the US) as well as payment cards. So a SaaS can take that kind of payment too, without lots of hassle. I haven't investigated Stripe's worthy competitors' ACH offerings, but they surely have them too. And, big company purchasing departments can defi…

It's not that can't set up a credit card or do ACH, it's that they won't. The reasons usually have to do with financial controlling rules that I can't begin to fathom.

Re: SaaS Needs a Single Point of Purchase

#96

Post by alangibson »

Fission wrote: post #71
alangibson wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. Resellers are very hands on and high touch. I'm talking about something more like a pass-through payment processor than a reseller. Quotes in this case are as trivial as a PDF generator that just inserts the fixed price into a commercial offer template. As it stands, you wouldn't believe how hard it is to pry something like that out of a typical SaaS vendor.

I'm a maker of satchel.com. This is one of the core problems we aimed to tackle. In doing so, we've actually build out _exactly_ this. There are still some crucial obstacles to ensure robustness, but I'd love to get your feedback nonetheless. Could I ask some questions over email? I can't find yours, but I'm at andrew@satchel.com

Sure, I'll email you.

(And thanks for reminding me that I need to add my email to the site.)

Re: SaaS Needs a Single Point of Purchase

#97

Post by alangibson »

mperham wrote: post #87

You can't do a traditional quote, PO, invoice, receipt purchase process when you're selling $99/mo. It just doesn't work. That process makes sense when you're buying and shipping pallets of physical inventory for 5-6 figures. It makes no sense in our SaaS world today.

True story: a previous employer would not bother issuing POs for less thank 2000 euro, so we couldn't even think about buying anything that was too cheap

Re: SaaS Needs a Single Point of Purchase

#99

Post by alangibson »

jariel wrote: post #82
dagw wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They buy toilet paper, cleaning fluids, pens, envelopes that way. I can assure you they do not (at least not in any company I have worked). They have pre-approved suppliers for all those things that are well integrated into our invoicing system. Adding a new supplier to that list is a major process. If I need a new one off hard drive I can either either ask IT to order it from the one approved computer component comp…

Yes, of course many things are purchased through contracts. And many things are not. Every company buys stuff from Staples/Costco/Wallmart, one-off parts and supplies. The article mentioned having a 3rd party for the billing, indicating probably some kind of larger purchase, it's odd. Commercial Banking usually provide Amex/Visa linked accounts with limits, for a variety of things, it's not a new idea.

> Every company buys stuff from Staples/Costco/Wallmart, one-off parts and supplies.

They have vendor relationships with them. The amount of stuff they're putting on the credit card is a rounding error.

Re: SaaS Needs a Single Point of Purchase

#100

Post by GordonS »

mtnGoat wrote: post #83

Sounds more like certain purchasing departments need to modernize, not the other way around. IMHO. Not being able to use the right tools for the job, because some bean counters don't like complexity, is silly and shortsighted.

As someone who works in the enterprise space, I fully agree with you.

In every enterprise I've ever worked at, the purchasing process is a nightmare - it invariably takes months at best to purchase anything, and the bureaucracy, meetings and wasted time will cost you your soul. When you add up all the wasted man-hours it takes to purchase a $100 app, it will easily run to an order of magnitude more - at best.

Once you've been through the purchasing grinder once, you will do just about anything to avoid purchasing anything every again.

So no dammit, the vendors don't need to change - the bureaucracy-ladel, rule-ridden, time-wasting purchasing departments need to!

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