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SaaS Needs a Single Point of Purchase

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Re: SaaS Needs a Single Point of Purchase

#101

Post by cwp »

hobs wrote: post #84
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.

Yeah, telling your customers that they should modernize is a great way to let someone else sell to them.

OTOH, telling an entire industry to reorganize to accommodate your internal processes is also a fools errand. Just imagine the dilemma this puts on the growth team: "Hmm, spend 1000x effort to land this one customer or fix an obscure bug in the signup page and get an extra 1000 self-serve customers this month. Golly, I don't know..."

Re: SaaS Needs a Single Point of Purchase

#103

Post by alangibson »

GordonS wrote: post #100
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 y…

I agree with you in principle, but they're not going to reform because reform is in they eye of the beholder. For them everything is fine. They don't care how many gray hairs it costs you.

Given that, it seems to me wise to look for ways to make purchasing less nightmarish without needing to reform several thousand large bureaucracies.

Re: SaaS Needs a Single Point of Purchase

#104

Post by jen20 »

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…

This might be true but there are many engineers with decision making power. My pet hate (and a virtual guarantee of "no deal") is when I'm forced to talk to a sales person who is all hair-gel and swagger [1] who knows substantially less about their own product than I do.

[1]: https://gist.github.com/CumpsD/696599d1bd4cd472a056586967293... - this is about (UK) external recruitment companies, but the same applies.

Re: SaaS Needs a Single Point of Purchase

#105

Post by qppo »

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…

In my experience the reason this is done is because customer acquisition is manual and the "schedule a demo" button is used for lead generation, and the reason it's all manual is because onboarding/support is high touch and you're not sure who the customers are yet.

Free demos are my nightmare. I really don't have that much time to split between fixing existing issues, adding critical features for paying customers, and supporting or troubleshooting for users that aren't paying anything. That's not to say at a point in the future the organization could have the capacity for a sick free trial, it's just that free trials cost money.

Re: SaaS Needs a Single Point of Purchase

#106

Post by pembrook »

GordonS wrote: post #100
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 y…

This is why any smart Saas company is charging, at minimum, thousands of dollars per month for medium-large sized customers.

They know the purchasing process will be the same headache regardless of whether the product costs $100/month or $10,000/month.

If the company is large and the tool enables collaboration and time-saving, $10,000 is literally a rounding error for a company with 500+ employees in comparison to the potential value delivered.

When I see B2B Saas companies with pricing plans that top out at $50/month, I want to pull my hair out. They are leaving so much money at the table and simultaneously starving themselves of the revenue needed to grow and build a long-term business.

Re: SaaS Needs a Single Point of Purchase

#107

Post by alangibson »

pembrook wrote: post #106
GordonS wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 y…

This is why any smart Saas company is charging, at minimum, thousands of dollars per month for medium-large sized customers. They know the purchasing process will be the same headache regardless of whether the product costs $100/month or $10,000/month. If the company is large and the tool enables collaboration and time-saving, $10,000 is literally a rounding error for a company with 500+ employees in comparison to th…

So true. I wouldn't even try to sell an enterprise to-do app for less than 2000/month. The headaches of selling are baked in no matter what you are building.

Re: SaaS Needs a Single Point of Purchase

#108

Post by eli »

GordonS wrote: post #100
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 y…

Unfortunately legal concerns about data privacy are pushing enterprises towards MORE of this stuff, not less.

Re: SaaS Needs a Single Point of Purchase

#109

Post by joshuak »

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…

Yeah, I've done enough fine dining in my professional career to know that "schedule a ..." means a low value product pumped up by dedicated sales.

Even if an actual product value exists after accounting for spin, the gated access means high training cost which in turn means vendor lock-in.

"Schedule a ..." ticks all the wrong boxes. Except for dinner, dinner is often quite good. In fact maybe they would get more traction with "schedule dinner."

Re: SaaS Needs a Single Point of Purchase

#110

Post by alangibson »

coward8675309 wrote: post #89
dagw wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It just seems like the author is looking for a band-aid instead of the real problem; a heavily bureaucratic procurement system in their company. Sure, but as someone who works at that sort of company, we happily give lots of real money to companies that solve that problem for us. As recently as a few month ago I wanted to spend 1-3 thousand dollars pr year on a SaaS product. The problem internally was never exactly h…

I was CTO at a company that got bought by an enormous company with these sorts of procurement processes. I mused with my engineers multiple times about a company that would simply do billing process arbitrage.

You've made me wonder if there's some way to arbitrage the billing itself so that neither party needs to pay anything.
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