On a rainy afternoon I drove down for a sales presentation to a plush office of a large multi-million dollar private company.
Since we moved our marketing online, we have been getting a steady stream of leads from various online sources (search, adwords, twitter, facebook, word of mouth, blogs etc.) so going for a personal sales visit has become rare. Larger companies are comfortable doing business the traditional way - meeting face to face and knowing who they are doing business with. That's absolutely fine and I respect the way they do business. Most interesting, I always learn a few new things while leaving the conference room.
[I take a seat in a conference room]
"Well, I have compared your SaaS product with a few others in the market and I have pretty much narrowed down that we will be using your service" the IT Guy said.
At this moment, I was thinking - wow, this is easy. The first sales meeting and these guys are telling me that they have already picked my solution. Can't get better than this. The product had passed the feature and simplicity test and what was left to close the deal was them seeing me and knowing who they are going to be trusting with their data.
The IT guy continued "So, I assume you have adequate backup and retrieval measures for our data, right"?
"Yes, ofcourse. All your data is backed up daily and DeskAway also provides an export/backup mechanism through which you (as the account owner) can download all your project data to your personal computer", I replied.
The IT guy seemed content with my answer. "And what about security? How secure are your servers?" he asked. At this point I told him everything about our security (which is also mentioned on our site) and how we make sure everyting runs smoothly.
Most people here try to negotiate on price (even though its so inexpensive!), but suprisingly it never happened that day. The CEO was looking intently as we completed our conversation. The IT guy was comfortable with what we were offering him. Though he was losing control of the application (since he was outsourcing something to a SaaS provider) he was reducing the cost & not to mention the headache to implement the same solution in-house and then worry about upgrades, uptime etc.
"So, what happens if you sell your company tomorrow. What happens to the service that we have committed to?" asked the CEO.
This question actually threw me off-guard. Obviously, if we do get acquired, the first thing we would take into account would be our customers and make sure they are taken care of with the same level of service and response times. I told him that we would make sure that they would always be in good hands and commitement to client satisfaction is something we take really seriously.
"But, who will train our staff if we implement your solution? he asked. My answer to that was simple. Our solution was built with simplicity in mind and it does not require exhaustive training. Most of our larger customers use DeskAway in a small team first and then expand the team as more and more people get used to it. It's a self-learning, easy to use tool. It's not complex, old-school software. For us, adoption is the key and hence we have tried to mix the right combination of simplicity and feature-richness.
After a few minutes the CEO leaves in a hurry and I am again left with the IT Guy. I knew that if I had more time with the CEO I could explain him a little bit more about SaaS and how things are different compared to on-premise software and what he has experienced so far.
While I was in the car, I gathered my thoughts and here are some points that I jotted down. Even if they decide not to signup as a paying customer, I had learnt a few good things (some points were re-enforced again) about SaaS:
- IT guys are not the always the bottleneck in selling a SaaS solution.
- Larger companies would need a new pricing & sales strategy to get them on board a SaaS solution.
- Security, backup and business continuity is of utmost importance.
- If you price your app correctly and demonstrate value, you save a lot of headache and time with price negotiations.
- Larger companies could want to pay for your solution by cheque (instead of an online credit card payment).
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