I’m starting a napkin series – short posts on back of napkins. Here’s the first one for you. I’ve met a friend of mine recently, CEO of a 50-employee company. He was enlightened by the Crossing the Chasm theory as David Balazic of Consalta presented it on a SaaS business workshop and told me a great learning which I’d like to share with you.
Startups are born into the Cloud era and they feel as comfortable with it as my 3-yr old with the touch screen. What’s the psychology behind this other than evolution and the cool behavior of generation X/Y folks?
Luck is when an incredible amount of preparation meets opportunity – says Peter Zaboji of EEF (European Entrepreneurship Foundation). Marton Szoke (or as locals call him, Marci) has been invited by Peter to Prezi’s new HQ in Budapest for a breakfast and Q&A where Marci shared his story and lessons of becoming an entrepreneur and talked about the recent acquisition of his business, IndexTools by Yahoo! Exciting stuff …
I swear that this isn’t an ad – you know that I’m a neutral blogger. But I found these guys and can’t not mention them. What they do is something that Google does tries for several years now using Google Website Optimizer, now part of the Google Content Experiments suite. What Google offers is to create several versions of your website and test – based on visitor clicks and statistics – which version of your site “guides” the most visitors to where you want them to go. WalkMe complements this tool with something that’s been missed for a long time. With the combination of these two tools, you can take your website’s conversion to the next level.
If you’ve done market segmentation workshops in the past, you know that it is typically an interactive, engaging and rather exhaustive and fun exercise. One of the difficulties as a facilitator though is to capture the thought process: which markets, which niches, what’s the strategy of moving from one to another and so on. LEGO SERIOUS PLAY makes market segmentation workshops super fun. It turns the exercise into a game and what’s even better, you don’t have to take notes as the LEGO creations will carry the idea, the details and several metaphors.
Three recurring themes that I pretty often hear from my clients:
“But David, can’t you see that this SaaS thing will cannibalise our licensed product’s sales?”; or
“What will motivate my sales people to sell zero-upfront-revenue SaaS Vs high-revenue licenses?”; and then comes the:
“We have tried, but almost none of our Customers want to move to the Cloud”
This is surely a dilemma and if I have no good answers to the questions above, I can close the shop today … And I won’t close the shop as you’d guess … If this dilemma exists, that’s a good indication of a lack of segmentation or an issue with sales incentive plans. Keep reading if you’d like to learn how to split eggs with bare hands …
One of the key difficulties my clients encounter in their Software-as-a-Services journey is the transformation from being a product company to delivering services. The analogy I often use is to turn a grocery store to be a restaurant. I have met several ISVs who literally just swapped their grocery store logo to a restaurant logo, purchased a few chairs and tables and sit back relaxed, saying that they are ready to run a restaurant business now. Obviously, this doesn’t work – the transformation has to happen in the core of their business and everyone and everything involved has to support the new model of delivering quality services to their customers. In this post, I’ll show you a rather unusual perspective to delivering services – and you are to judge of how this viewpoint applies to you.
