There are a few businesses out there that have managed to achieve the nirvana in a key part of their sales cycle: moving customers from trial to purchase without needing a salesforce to assist with that conversion. The financial models of these companies are extraordinary. Examples of this include SurveyMonkey, ZenDesk, and SquareSpace.
Examples of the financials
Once you have looked at these financials, you will realized that getting to a touchless conversion is like achieving nirvana. Clearly one of the most expensive parts of the entire sales process is the sales force, and by eliminating or dramatically lowering that cost, these companies have been able to achieve extraordinary levels of profitability.
Observation: Customers like to sell themselves
Where does this break down?
What kinds of products/services are suitable for touchless conversion?
Is there an interim step that you can use in your sales cycle to take advantage of touchless conversion?
Use a simpler sub-set of your product/service, then upsell
Theory: Easier to upsell an existing customer
I believe this is the business model of the future and call these companies SAAS 2.0.
There are several more examples: Freshbooks, 37Signals, Mailchimp. A good directory is: http://www.thesmallbusinessweb.com/
There are a couple of pre-requisites for these types of business models to work:
1. Your pricing needs to be at creditcard level, needs to start as low as possible and can not be more then Max 499 USD per month.
2. You need to have a true multi-tenant architecture and be able to automate instant provisioning of the service. If not your infrastructure and operational cost will be to high.
3. Your product needs to be easy to understand and self-explainable
4. You need to be able to generate large volume of leads
This business model was not yet possible when companies like salesforce, netsuite, succesfactor, workday started. They all had to pioneer SAAS with more or less 'traditional sales models, just a new provisioning model.” In the next 10 years SaaS 2.0 business models will also penetrate large enterprises. They will deliver the same functionality, against 70% lower prices, with no long term contract and since customer acquisition is touchless, their people are focussed on customer retention rather then customer acquisition.
I have to disclose that CEO and founder of a SaaS 2.0 company called Mirror42 http://www.mirror42.com
I believe this is the business model of the future and call these companies SAAS 2.0.
There are several more examples: Freshbooks, 37Signals, Mailchimp. A good directory is: http://www.thesmallbusinessweb.com/
There are a couple of pre-requisites for these types of business models to work:
1. Your pricing needs to be at creditcard level, needs to start as low as possible and can not be more then Max 499 USD per month.
2. You need to have a true multi-tenant architecture and be able to automate instant provisioning of the service. If not your infrastructure and operational cost will be to high.
3. Your product needs to be easy to understand and self-explainable
4. You need to be able to generate large volume of leads
This business model was not yet possible when companies like salesforce, netsuite, succesfactor, workday started. They all had to pioneer SAAS with more or less 'traditional sales models, just a new provisioning model.” In the next 10 years SaaS 2.0 business models will also penetrate large enterprises. They will deliver the same functionality, against 70% lower prices, with no long term contract and since customer acquisition is touchless, their people are focussed on customer retention rather then customer acquisition.
I have to disclose that CEO and founder of a SaaS 2.0 company called Mirror42 http://www.mirror42.com