KEEP IT SIMPLE
SaaS and Business Intelligence are CIO Priorities
As the role of the Chief Information Officer evolves to become the Chief Intelligence Officer (or as the IT Exec track is called at Dreamforce Europe this week, Chief Innovation Officer), InformationWeek has published 8 Trends in IT that CIOs Can’t Ignore.
According to Accenture’s Kishore Swaminathan, the consulting firm’s chief scientist,they are:
- Cloud Computing
- Light Systems (another name for mashups I believe)
- Business Intelligence (due to “an increasing demand for actionable corporate data”)
- The Always-Connected User (which can be very dangerous while driving on the 101 and not exactly family friendly)
- Social Networking
- Dramatic Growth in User Generated Content
- The Forever Beta Approach to Software (there goes the saying, “ship happens!”)
- Sustainability (aka Green Computing (if it can avoid the backlash that Seth Godin predicts for Green Marketing I guess)
Sounds like there’s a need for easy to learn and use SaaS business intelligence solutions that can easily mash-up with other applications, allow you to easily collaborate and share information with your colleagues, and consume very little energy from IT.
Here’s a Podcast from the Boulder BI Brain Trust that talks about just such an idea…
posted by Darren Cunningham at 12:52 pm
5 Signs You Need Better Sales Analytics
I few weeks ago I wrote an article for Salesforce Times called Signs Your Sales Pipeline Might be Based on Fiction or Fantasy. Here are 5 Signs You Need a Better Approach to Sales Analytics:
posted by Darren Cunningham at 3:25 pm
Can You Answer These Questions About Your Sales Pipeline?
“Don’t expect what you can’t inspect.”
If you’re managing a highly transactional sales organization, it’s critical that you have visibility into what’s coming into your pipeline, what’s going out, and what’s changed. And you need to be able to see the trend over time. Here are some of the questions you must be able to answer to ensure your sales pipeline is not based on fiction or fantasy:
New Pipeline Since the Beginning of the Month, Quarter or Year
- What’s new in the pipeline since the beginning of the selected time period?
- What % of the pipeline is new for this period?
- What % of the new pipeline has closed within the same quarter historically?
Pipeline Fluctuations in the Current Period
What moved out? What’s stuck?
- What % of the current period pipeline moved out to future periods?
- Is there a pattern? (e.g. particular sales reps, products, industry verticals, etc.)
Where has the pipeline shrunk?
- What % of the current period pipeline shrunk?
- Is there a pattern? (e.g. particular sales reps, products, industry verticals, etc.)
Where has the pipeline grown?
- What % of the current period pipeline grew?
- Is there a pattern? (e.g. particular sales reps, products, industry verticals, etc.)
Pipeline Velocity
- What % of the current period pipeline is stuck in its current stage?
- What % of the current period pipeline has progressed to subsequent stages?
Pipeline Size and Shape
What are your conversion rates and sales cycle times?
- Lead to opportunity
- Opportunity to demo
- Demo to quote
- Quote to close
What % of your current period pipeline is above and below the thresholds of average days to close for deals that end up being won?
- By industry vertical
- By sales rep
- By competitor
What % of your current period pipeline is nearing the threshold of average days to close for deals that end up being lost?
- By industry vertical
- By sales rep
- By competitor
What is the pipeline for the remaining month, quarter or year?
- Next 30, 60, 90 days, etc.?
What is the % distribution for early stage versus late stage opportunities?
- By region
- By sales rep
Are there some possible quick wins?
- What are the dynamics of new versus repeat business?
- How many days to close for new versus repeat business?
- What is the current period pipeline for new versus repeat business?
If you’re a Salesforce.com customer, be sure to check out the LucidEra Analytics Gallery on the AppExchange for examples of these and other best-practice sales analytics. Also register for next week’s webcast with the Milestone Group on The Science of Selling - How to Maximize Sales Success with On-Demand Analytics.
posted by Darren Cunningham at 6:55 am
Coffee with Ken and the Weekly Review
No, he wasn’t Keith Olbermann’s Worse Person in the World on Tuesday - that was NPR’s Ken Rudin. Actually, our Ken was this week’s featured guest on Selling Power’s coffee break online videos. The 5 minute videos are:
- How Analytics Accelerate the Sales Cycle
- CRM Analytics and Sales Productivity (Part 1)
- CRM Analytics and Sales Productivity (Part 2)
Here’s a quick summary of this week’s action on the Keep it Simple blog:
- A summary of what it takes to deliver Successful SaaS Business Intelligence: Simplicity, Focus, Platform Power, Customer Success
- Are you simply automating a broken process? - the first video in the series appears on Selling Power
- CRMBuyer and McKinsey highlight SaaS innovation
It’s a big game for the Sharks at home tonight in San Jose. Keep your fingers crossed…
Have a fantastic weekend!
posted by Darren Cunningham at 8:08 am
New Twists Causing a Business Intelligence Boom
Part Two of the CRMBuyer BI Boom Series was published on Monday. The article begins with this strong introduction:
“The new, agile players in the business intelligence market are breaking out the bag of tricks to challenge the dominance of established firms. Among the advances they are pushing are on-demand software, visual reporting and ease of use that cuts business users’ reliance on IT assistance.”
The innovation that SaaS is delivering within the IT industry was also highlighted this week by the good folks at McKinsey & Co. As Abhijit Dubey, associate principal for McKinsey, told attendees at the Interop conference in Las Vegas: “The stakes are very high!”
Some of the key points from the McKinsey survey:
- Companies deploying traditional software spend 60 to 70 cents of every dollar invested on software over a five-year period on the underlying platform driving the applications. For users of SaaS, that amount drops to 20 to 30 cents on the dollar.
- A SaaS deployment holds the potential of significantly higher platform productivity and faster time from creation of a service to actual consumption by the end user.
posted by Darren Cunningham at 9:36 am
Are You Automating a Broken CRM Process?
Check out this 5 minute video Q&A with Gerhard Gschwandtner at Selling Power. It provides an overview of how the right approach to sales analytics can help you you optimize the sales process and maximize sales performance. This is part 1 of a 2 part interview with Ken Rudin.
posted by Darren Cunningham at 11:11 am
Successful SaaS Business Intelligence
I wrote an article last week for Salesforce Times called, The Keys to SaaS Business Intelligence Success. As Ken Rudin stated in last week’s InsideCRM interview:
“Much of the reason that many customers historically haven’t been able to fully harness the capabilities of their BI solution is because traditional BI solutions have been very complicated to deploy and maintain, and very difficult to use.”
The four keys to SaaS BI success are:
- Simplicity
- Analytic Applications Focus
- On-Demand Platform Power
- Customer Success
You can also check out the PowerPoint summary on Slideshare.
I’m interested in your feedback on this topic.
posted by Darren Cunningham at 12:33 pm
Another Busy Week On Keep it Simple
This week saw the return of Nate and Ken. Actually, Nate chimed in last Friday with this late post about there being No Stop Signs in Business, so I should cut him some slack.
Here are the highlights of the week:
- BI Boomed on CRMBuyer with a new series on the emerging players in the market
- Nerds got their revenge thanks to the growing importance of metrics not hunches in sales
- LucidInsights dropped sales management best-practice hits
- The Sharks crushed the Flames in Game 7 and LucidEra got some props from JMP Securities
- Ken Rudin answered some tough questions at Stanford about Selling SaaS in the Enterprise
Speaking of questions for Ken, be sure to also check out his Q&A with Chris Bucholtz over at InsideCRM. As Adam Killam noted at Salesforce Times:
“It was also interesting to learn more about how the company got its start: another example of former Salesforce.com / Siebel staff leaving to found start their own empires.”
I’m not so sure about LucidEra being an empire, but it is an interesting article!
Have a fantastic weekend!
posted by Darren Cunningham at 4:45 pm
Selling SaaS to the Enterprise
Yesterday, I had the great pleasure of being a guest lecturer for a class being taught by Chuck DeVita at Stanford. The topic was “Selling SaaS to the Enterprise.” I was impressed with the questions that the class asked. I’ve included a few of the questions below, with my answers.
Q: Are you a SaaS company, or are you a company that sells a solution delivered by the SaaS model?
No one should have as their main market positioning that they are a SaaS company. 7-8 years ago it was cool to have your key marketing message be that you were a SaaS company, because it was such a new approach, and it was a way to attract attention. But that’s not the case anymore. It reminds me of the client-server revolution long ago. For several years, many companies referred to themselves as a client-server company, but that eventually died out.
Fundamentally, thinking of yourself primarily as a SaaS company is confusing your value proposition with your differentiators. When you’re talking to a business user, what they care about is how life will be different and better for them after they start using your solution. That’s your key message — that’s your value proposition. There’s nothing in there about SaaS.
Where SaaS comes in is when you talk about your differentiators, after you’ve established the value proposition. In LucidEra’s case, first and foremost we are a company that delivers a Business Analytics solution that lets people answer the key questions they have about their business. We give people the ability to see what’s really going on in their business, so they can find issues and correct them before it’s too late. Once the customer understands the value of analytics in general, then we can focus on why they want to buy an analytics solution from us. That’s when we talk about the fact that unlike traditional BI and analytics vendors, our solution is simple to set up, doesn’t require IT resources to maintain, has minimal risk because they don’t have to make capital and personnel investments up-front, etc.
(Caveat: For people in IT, it’s true that sometimes the SaaS model itself can be the value proposition — their lives will be easier because they won’t have to build, deploy, and manage a complicated on-premise solution. But for business users this is rarely the case.)
Q: Are SaaS sales cycle shorter than traditional enterprise sales cycles? If so, why?
It’s not always true, but usually SaaS sales cycles are shorter for two main reasons. First, if you have to do a proof-of-concept, it’s certainly faster than the traditional approach because you don’t have to install the software and test to make sure it’s working correctly before starting the POC.
But, there’s another reason that can be more fundamental. Traditional enterprise software solutions are associated with long, expensive deployments that require a lot of testing and strategic planning by the management team before a decision is made to move forward and buy the software. So, everyone gets involved in the decision — sales, marketing, IT, etc. And, of course, there’s a direct correlation between the number of people involved in a sales opportunity, and the length of the sales cycle.
SaaS can often give you the opportunity to sidestep this process. For example, in our case, traditional BI initiatives evoke images in the customer’s mind of a big, complicated solution that requires a big, complicated sales cycle. So, we don’t position our solutions as BI solutions. We positioned our first analytic application as a sales productivity accelerator that’s simple to use, simple to set up, and simple to buy. Because we emphasize simplicity to the customer, it gets reflected in the sales cycle. There’s no perceived need to have multiple execs sign off on the decision, since there’s minimal risk and minimal effort to get started. Again, the key is to focus on the SaaS offering as being a simple solution that only needs a simple sales cycle.
Q: Customer renewals are critical to the success of a SaaS company. What have you done that’s different from a traditional company to maximize renewals?
Focusing on renewals, and not just the initial sale, requires a culture that is focused on ensuring customer success, not just sales success. There’s no one thing that creates a company’s culture, but rather it’s a collection of smaller tangible things that help create and reinforce a culture. In our case, there are several things we’ve done to create a culture focused on customer success. For example, long before we had our first customer, we created a Customer Success Team (CST) to focus on doing whatever it took to ensure that a customer had a very positive experience using our solution. Initially, our CST team incorporated what would traditionally be called professional services, customer support, and training. This meant that there was one team that would handle all of a customer’s needs after the sale to ensure their success.
Then, we realized that a critical part of a customer’s success was being managed by our presales people during the sales cycle and during a customer’s trial of our solution. So, we took the non-traditional step of moving presales out of the sales team and into the CST group. So, now the CST team has the ability to manage the entire customer success lifecycle — both before and after the sale.
Whether or not this is the optimal structure for our CST team, I can’t tell yet. But, I encourage everyone to experiment with ways to increase your focus on customer success and reinforce it as part of your culture.
posted by Ken Rudin at 1:11 pm
Tuesday’s Big Winners
There were lots of battles on TV last night. The biggest one might have been over who gets to watch what at our house. While the Sharks were taking it to the Calgary Flames in Game 7, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s songs were getting slaughtered on American Idol. While Hillary Clinton was declaring victory in Pennsylvania, the Phoenix Suns couldn’t overcome a third quarter thumping from San Antonio. I have to admit that I missed most of the pivotal 2nd period in the Sharks game - my wife’s a big ALW fan, but because she’s also from Phoenix and following the primaries closely, we managed to suffer through our ADD together.
Here are my Top 3 plays of the night:
- Jeremy Roenick’s outburst sinks the Flames
- John King’s reference to the “lunch bucket” voters on his magical map of Pennsylvania
- The kid with the dreadlocks admitting he didn’t know “Memory” was sung by a cat on American Idol. (I think Andrew Lloyd Webber was the big loser in that contest!)
And speaking of Tuesday’s big winners, yesterday LucidEra announced that we’re one of JMP’s Top 100 Privately Held Software Companies. The report calls out Business Intelligence as a category (along with Application and Infrastructure Software) and notes that, “While the major vendors in Business Intelligence have been consolidated, some high-growth private companies are racing to become the new leaders. These private companies are adopting new models like open source and on demand and driving new technologies.”
posted by Darren Cunningham at 8:38 am
Ken Rudin is the CEO of LucidEra. He co-founded the on-demand business intelligence company in 2005. Ken is a veteran of the rapidly growing software as a service industry with over 7 years of experience as an executive with leading on-demand software vendors. These include roles at Salesforce.com, at Netsuite (as an advisor), and at Siebel's on-demand division.
Darren Cunningham is the Director of Product Marketing at LucidEra. Prior to joining LucidEra he was the Category Director for salesforce.com AppExchange Analytics and Data Management. Before joining the on-demand world, he spent over 7 years at Business Objects.
Nate Bride is a Senior Account Executive at LucidEra. Nate has over 14 years experience in building, training, and running sales teams. Most recently, Nate was the VP of Sales at Abso, a leading provider of talent management solutions. Prior to Abso, Nate ran Sales Effectiveness at Salesforce.com. Nate is married with two young daughters and lives one hour from Lake Tahoe.