Churn and SaaS
SaaS companies are faced with copious amounts of advice about pricing, monetization, funnel management and all the different things used to describe the processes involved in attracting, gaining and maintaining customers. One of the big areas that companies think about is that of churn – or how many customers “drop off” and stop using the [...]
SAP Business Suite on HANA, Because Big Data is a Stupid Term
I spent a lot of time last year talking with vendors about big data and it’s ramifications for both the tech industry and the economy at large. Often these conversations centered around one or another vendor’s use of the big data term as the buzzword de jour, regardless of whether anything they do even vaguely [...]
Forrester Confuses “Best” with “Most Accessible”
I’ve got a love/hate relationship with the traditional analyst firms. Their people are incredibly smart and very thorough, but sometimes in their search for massive levels of details, they miss the very point of technology. A good case in point is the recently released Forrester Enterprise Cloud Database Wave report.
Xero Rolls Out Some More Network Effects and Faces Some Criticism. Some Lessons on Viral Strategies
Xero rolled out a new update this week which included some interesting and valuable features. The introduction of online invoicing is a bit of a watershed, rather than opening emailed PDF’s, customers whose suppliers use Xero can click on a URL which takes them to an online invoice. SO far so good – saves paper, saves [...]
Customer Metrics for SaaS Companies
One of the key pieces of advice for SaaS startups (actually all startups really but in this case of particular relevance to SaaS0 is to measure everything. Over the last few years a number of different solutions have been developed which allow companies to measure different parts of their business
Moving to the Cloud – External Business Considerations
CloudU Notebooks is a weekly blog series that explores topics from the CloudU certificate program in bite sized chunks, written by me, Ben Kepes, curator of CloudU. How-tos, interviews with industry giants and the occasional opinion piece are what you can expect to find. If that’s your cup of tea, you can
The Futility of Meaningless Business to Business Surveys
Some of you might know that I run my own company, and we have Amazon.com as an outlet for our awesome products. In 2011 we decided early on that we wanted to use Amazon-New-Detail-Page (Photo credit: kokogiak) FBA, Fulfillment By Amazon for our products that were top selling to help customers who were upset about [...]
On Privacy, and Software Vendor’s Access to Customer Data
A mini firestorm broke out recently when 37Signals posted about their 2011 growth statistics. As part of the post, 37Signals told the world that the 100 millionth file to be uploaded to their software was the picture of a cat. Naturally those who subscribe to conspiracy theories got all fired
Dropping Costs While Still Providing Support–A SmartPayroll Case Study
Over the past couple of years I’ve spent a reasonable amount of time with Asantha Wijeyratne, CEO of SmartPayroll, a New Zealand Payroll provider. I’ve been interested to talk to him, partly because he’s a lovely guy with an interesting business ethic, but also because his business is growing rapidly,
Salesforce for Quickbooks for Salesforce for Quickbooks….
Owning and running a bunch of small businesses, I have a real appreciation for just how important it is for SMBs to have a handle on their customers and deal flow – CRM, a concept foreign to many SMBs only a few years ago has become, with the growing importance of social media, a critical [...]
The Social CRM Oxymoron
The temptation was great of course, a few years back, to invent Social CRM. There was a lot of buzz about Social, social people, social companies, social employees and social customers. It wasn’t a great step from that last one to Social Customer Relationship Management. Last year I piled all that up on the Social [...]
Getting Past Passive
Okay, this is a bit of a rant, but here goes… I was reading this article this morning, and one sentence stood out: “Peter Drucker once said that ‘the purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer.’” The purpose of a business is to *create* a customer. As in actively bring to [...]
