
What is SaaS? | Software-as-a-Service Myopia
It seems a little late in the game for me to be asking a question like “What is SaaS?” But, I’ve always harbored a few embarrassing little secrets on the subject and I think it’s time I came clean. There is a classic Harvard Business School case study called Marketing Myopia by Theodore Levitt that […]

B2B Blog Strategy | Ten Be’s of The Best B2B Blogs
Blogging is one of the easiest, cheapest and most effective ways to engage the New Breed of B2B Buyer, yet so many B2B blogs miss the mark. Here are ten “be’s” of the best b2b blogs. It isn’t the first top ten list of best B2B blog secrets, and no doubt it will not be […]

Customer Self-Service | The Holy Grail of SaaS
One hundred percent customer self-service is the holy grail of SaaS. Everyone looks for it, but it is never found. Even if your product is simple enough to provide complete self-service purchase, you are unlikely to get away with complete self-service support, because you can’t hang unhappy customer’s out to dry or you will ruin […]

B2B Sales | The New Breed of B2B Buyer Series Part 3
The new breed of B2B buyer and B2B sales rep are engaged in an information arms race. Today’s B2B sales rep that fails to become a trusted adviser is at best irritating and at worst irrelevant.

SaaS Benchmarks | Acquisition Cost and Churn Challenges
What is a typical churn rate for SaaS? What is a good time frame to recover CAC? As SaaS companies mature, high quality SaaS benchmark studies are appearing.

Cloud Channel Challenges – SaaS Channel Compensation
The SaaS subscription model shifts risk from the customer to the vendor. Shifting risk back onto SaaS channel partners can put them between a rock and hard place.

SaaS Best Practices | SaaS Inside Sales Benchmark Report
The BridgeGroup recently surveyed 115 North American technology companies with a special focus on SaaS inside sales metrics and sales compensation for SaaS companies. As SaaS sales organization, metrics and compensation have all been recent topics here at Chaotic Flow, and since it’s always best practice to test theory with reality, I thought I’d share […]

SaaS Startup Strategy – Three SaaS Sales Models
Choosing the right go-to-market sales model for your SaaS startup can be a make it or break it decision. Choose right and you grow smoothly from seed funding to A round to B round and beyond. Choose wrong and you spend precious cycles chasing your tail as cash runs out. While most B2B SaaS startups […]

SaaS Metrics Guide to SaaS Financial Performance
I’ve wrapped up the highlights of my SaaS metrics series into a tidy SaaS Metrics Guide to SaaS Financial Performance. Like the original SaaS metrics series, this reference guide presents simple rules-of-thumb and graphic visualizations that capture the dynamic relationships between core SaaS metrics and SaaS financial performance. It is NOT a comprehensive overview of […]
SaaS Sales Commission Calculator for Long Term Contracts
Since my post entitled SaaS Sales Compensation Made Easy, I’ve received a number of inquires about how to adjust SaaS sales commission percentages for very short and very long term subscription contracts, e.g., renewal periods of 1 month vs. 2 years. Clearly a 2 year contract paid in advance is worth more than a monthly […]

SaaS Product Marketing – Upgrade and Upsell Strategy
I think it would be hard to overemphasize the importance of upgrades and upsells in SaaS product marketing. In an industry where free trials, freemium versions, bargain basement subscription prices and simply hoping to recover customer acquisition cost with first year revenue are the norm, few things are sweeter than a customer that actually […]

The Cloud is Dead – Long Live the Cloud!
Recent weeks have brought a bewildering number of competing claims around SaaS and cloud computing. On one hand we are debating whether the SaaS experiment is over, IaaS is just an incremental advance in hosting technology, and the cloud is just hype. While on the other, Gartner estimates SaaS is now 10% of the enterprise […]

Cloud Channel Disruption – Little APIs, Big Transformations
It’s old news that the Internet has disrupted channel structure across numerous industries. So why go on about the channel now? Because, cloud computing is transforming the Internet as a channel. The evolution from Internet applications that service people (SaaS) to Internet applications that service other applications (cloud computing) transforms the Internet from a direct […]