SAAS – What’s In It For Vendors?

SAAS promises zero upfront cost, freedom from maintenance and relief from headaches of updates, and so on. These are all benefits for customers of SAAS. What’s in it for providers of SAAS? Shorter sales cycle is the most obvious benefit. Because buyers don’t need to incur huge licensing costs while signing up for a SAAS … Read more

3 Ways To Make Events Memorable

Retail industry analyst RSR Research notes in “The Lasting Effects Of Shoptalk” that the new event in Las Vegas differentiates itself from other events by featuring “Full-out breakfast, lunch and dinner” that were accompanied by “impressive spreads of snacks and beverages throughout the day.” And goes on to remark, “These may seem like trivial things, but for someone … Read more

Indian IT Industry Might Produce A Fortune 500 Corporation Next Year

The unthinkable has happened – the entry barrier of the FORTUNE GLOBAL 500 list has actually come down. Yes, the last company in the latest FORTUNE GLOBAL 500 list (published in Fortune magazine dated 1 August 2016) posted a revenue of US$ 20.923 billion compared to US$ 23.720 billion turned in by its counterpart last year. Expressed … Read more

Whose Customer Am I?

I read the following question on Quora recently: You buy a pen from a store. Then, are you a customer of that store or pen manufacturing company? Normally, my answers on Quora are rather short. After seeing this answer by Quora's founder @adamdangelo, I no longer worry about whether my replies are too terse. https://t.co/V6UqD1qinA … Read more

Don’t Ask Your Customers What They Want When You Design A Product

One perennial question that startups – and even product managers of established companies – ask us while designing a new product is whether they should ask customers what they want. Our standard answer is NO! Only a services company asks customers what they want. When a product company does that, it can prove counterproductive – … Read more

3 Ways To Get Approvals For Case Studies From Reluctant Customers

In Right And Wrong Ways Of Using Case Studies, we saw when to use case studies and when not to. Let’s now assume that a technology vendor has reached a certain stage in the sales cycle when it is appropriate to use case studies. Building an inventory of ready-to-use case studies can be a challenge when … Read more

Just Because Customers Can Find Their Own Solutions Doesn’t Mean They Will

There’s lot of data in the public domain. Buyer 2.0 is Internet-savvy. So they will help themselves to all that information and find solutions to their pain areas by themselves. Ergo salespersons should stop trying to sell solutions to potential customers. This is the sum of essence of one prevailing school of thought in B2B … Read more

Payments Solutions Provider Bolsters Sales Appointments

Here’s our latest success story: Payments Solutions Provider Bolsters Sales Appointments Metrics-driven Campaign Management boosts Inside Sales performance While managing this Payment Solutions Provider’s marketing campaign, we noticed a sudden drop in volume of appointments set by its Inside Sales team. Among the reasons proferred to explain the problem were “holiday season”, “people are busy … Read more

Scoping Can Make Or Break A Deal

Whenever they’re asked to sweeten a deal, most vendors respond with a discount. They don’t have to. In Five Ways To Sweeten A Deal – Apart From Discount, we gave several alternative tactics for sweetening a deal without dropping the price. We illustrated some of them with our interactions with the following vendors: Acme Accounting: … Read more

IT Company Creates Product From Services

Here’s our latest success story: IT Company Creates Product From Services Product management delivers manifold value from IP assets During the course of 10+ years of its existence, this IT company had created a midsized services business. While executing engagements in a few select domains, the company had gathered massive expertise and built proprietary frameworks … Read more