App as a “Form” Feb 08 Jason Moore

Sign-up forms on your website are a critical component for any successful SaaS company.  Are you paying enough attention, or are you putting the responsibility on your prospects to navigate rough waters?

Taking this thought further, most SaaS applications are an in-depth form with specific functionality wrapped around it.  With that thought in mind, how much time is spent during the development process thinking of the interaction with your SaaS as a conversion opportunity?

This post from the Conversion Room Blog is geared towards your website forms, but the information is extremely valuable when it comes to application design, as well.

Our HelpDesk Ticket software is a very clear example of the “app as a form” concept.

The thought of each interaction with our HelpDesk as a conversion opportunity is brand new to me.  I’m hoping to get feedback on this concept to flesh it out further.

One complication that many SaaS products will encounter is their highly configurable nature.  Taking into consideration your clients’ desire to add more and more fields to your standard form will certainly increase the amount of care needed for pre-launch design.

How will the conversion rate change when too many custom fields are added?

Will the intended “simple” feel of your application be lost once a local administrator has their say?

How can you preempt this common behavior?

Thinking of our application as a conversion calculator for organization’s support structure is interesting (to me).  What would our conversion funnel --for brand new clients-- look like from logging in through work order request completion?

Hunters and Gatherers (sorry, Seth) Feb 03 Jason Moore

Note: I apologize to Seth Godin for a post of similar names on the same day. I felt like I was in the Twilight Zone when I saw his post in my reader this morning.  I kept the “Gatherers'” part even though his “Farmers” is probably more accurate due to the active nature of farming versus the passive nature of gathering.a

Hunters and Gatherers are roles that are critically important to every civilization throughout history.  Your organization (expecially your sales team) is no different.

The key to successfully building your sales team is identifying up-front who on your staff fits each role as both are needed.

Gatherers are task-oriented and better suited to cultivating your current client-base for up-sells, cross-sells, and farming for referrals.  They are people who are better suited in roles of consistency.  Gatherers are able to identify potential trouble areas and apply the right amount of care to get them back to a healthy state.  Meticulous, observant, and patient are key attributes for your Gatherers.

With bigWebApps HelpDesk ticket software, it is vitally important to maintain our referral percentage above 90%.  This is the lifeblood of any SaaS model. SaaS Churn is discussed from a mathematical stance by Joel York in a recent post on his must-read Chaotic Flow blog.

The continual revenue stream from renewals affords the company stability for those periods of drought that your company is certain to experience.  Are you making sure your Gatherers are getting the praise that they deserve?  It is easy for them to be over-shadowed by the glitz and glamour that comes along with your Hunters’ new business.

Hunters, on the other hand, are not naturally gifted at the tasks necessary for cultivating your current fields.  Hunters are restless folks who excel at tracking moving targets.  The challenge of finding the right spot, establishing a valuable working relationship, and bringing them in as a client is what motivates them.  Hunters must be challenged in a different way than Gatherers.  Going to the same fields each and every day throughout the year not only doesn’t excite them; it demoralizes them.

Hunters have the ability to boost overall morale at a company.  At bigWebApps, we intentionally communicate “big wins” throughout the company in an attempt to let them know that without their specific services, the Hunter would not be able to perform.

Growing our business with both Hunters and Gatherers for our HelpDesk ticket software is vital for the future of the company. 

Renewals are for today.  New business is for tomorrow. (note: this statement is being contended internally. more to come in a future blog post)

bigWebApps is currently looking for Hunters for our Atlanta office.  If you are interested in hunting with us for our HelpDesk ticket software, click here to see the job description.

Photo Credit: The Library of Congress. Click on the image to see their Flickr photostream.

Response Message Box and Next Step Dec 14 Jason Moore

My absolute favorite type of upgrade to any of our applications is when we make current functionality simpler to use for our clients.  Improving efficiency is at the core of everything we attempt to build here at bigWebApps, and it’s even more exciting to me when we don’t have to build a new feature to accomplish this goal.

Response Message

The improvement that was published this past weekend that fits this bill is to how response messages are sent to the end user and technician of a ticket.  Prior to this update, there were three separate boxes to send a message or add a log entry.

As illustrated in the screenshot to the left, this functionality is now combined into one control.

To add a log entry without sending any notifications, simply uncheck all parties associated with the ticket represented in the list.

If there are multiple technicians associated to your ticket, then they will be listed out one-by-one in the technician line.

Help Video for Response Message can be viewed here.

Next Step

Next Step is a new functionality added to the HelpDesk to give your support staff better visibility at a quick glance beyond the subject line of a ticket.

It’s hard to see in the limited space of this blog, but the highlighted text in the capture above (highlight added for emphasis) is additional text separate from the subject line. 

An example of this in a real world case would be if you have a ticket for a printer issue.  You have determined that the print cartridge is bad, and you have ordered a new one.  You could add a Next Step such as “waiting on print cartridge delivery”, so when you are looking at your worklist you immediately know where that service request stands.

Help Video for Next Step can be viewed here.

I would love to hear any feedback or questions you have about these two features… or anything else to do with our products and/or company.  Send us an email to support@bigwebapps.com or call (866) 996-1200 x 2 for support.

Love your SaaS!

Related Tickets (Sub-Tickets) Nov 19 Jason Moore

We are excited to announce the release of Related Tickets (also known as Sub-Tickets) for the bigWebApps HelpDesk!

Click here to watch a two minute tutorial video.

(NOTE: Some of the formatting on screenshots below is different than in the video. The screenshots are from our beta site and are the newer format.)

Click the “Related” tab to see all relationships that this ticket has with other tickets in your system.

On the Master ticket’s Related screen, you will see the two sub-tickets associated with it.  From this screen, you can also “Find existing ticket” to add more ticket relationships.

 

On one of the Sub-Tickets’ Related screen, you can view that it has a relationship with a Master ticket and a side-by-side relationship in the “Related Tickets” section.

NOTE: Currently, two Sub-Tickets under the same Master ticket are not automatically “Related”. This is currently a manual relationship that is set.

 

Once again, we are excited about having this base-line functionality for sub-tickets available to use now.  We will be working on further functionality of this feature in the near future.

If you have any questions or would like to provide your input on possible enhancements, please send that to support@bigwebapps.com.

Love your SaaS!

Client Value to Acquisition Cost Calculator May 19 Jason Moore

Inspired by Peter Cohen’s blog post about How Much Marketing Spend is Enough, the calculator below will help you determine what your client acquisition cost is compared to their lifetime value.

For business owners, this tiny piece of data is one of the most critical bits of information that you should track on a consistent basis.  If you don’t know this number already, check your performance below.

If you are in early stages of starting a business, this is definitely worth the time.  It is also imperative that you are brutally honest about your numbers.  This is not the time to present the hopes & dreams numbers that you used with your potential investors.

If you have not started your business yet, use the calculator below with honest projections.  This will help you get a feel for where your price needs to be to survive IF you are able to deliver the number of clients that you hope.

Tips for using the calculator:
-Type numbers in the BLUE fields only
-If this is your first year, the first two sets of numbers (New, ALL) will be the same
-If you are not a recurring revenue model, the Avg. lifetime of clients will be 1
-Include salaries, commissions, and marketing spend in the Sales/Mktg Costs
-This is not an end-all to all costs.  You must also have solid budgets for R&D, Operations, and other important aspects of your business worked out.

 

After using this calculator on bigWebApps’ 2008 numbers, I was very pleased to see a 2.40 score.  Due to a few big deals early in 2009, our number is an unsustainable 6.78 which should correct over the course of the year.

What’s your score?  Have any feedback?

Is Your Idea Key to SaaS Success? Apr 03 Jason Moore

You have probably already guessed that the answer, in my estimation, is no.

You may be able to garner some attention from friends, a few dollars from friends and family, and a decent amount of attention from local media outlets.  But your idea is worth zero without execution.

Below is, in my order of importance, the list of the key ingredients to you achieving success (you define what that is) with a SaaS company.

1. Sales – This is intentionally separated from marketing in this context.  Until you receive money via your product you are still only in possession of an idea.  Selling can be defined in many different ways, though, so it does not have to be a direct sale to a client.

Seth recently wrote about finding 10 people who want/need your product enough to take you up on your offer.  Once you have ten, find ten more.  If you’re lucky, the first ten will be finding ten more at the same time because your product delivers as promised (or more).

Some of you may feel that this is marketing. But that’s one of the main problems with a non-sales culture. People are extremely comfortable when they feel they are “marketing” but icky when it’s called “sales”.  If you have a product that is going to positively impact your potential clients, then you are doing them (and yourself) a grave disservice by not getting it into as many people’s hands who need it.  If you get uncomfortable about telling someone you know about your product, then your sub-conscious may be telling you that you are over-promising.

2. Relationships/Support – the misconstrued dream that many people entering the SaaS world have is that once you build the application and it works well, all your clients will understand it, adopt it easily, hand over their credit card, and never cancel.  Okay, maybe when it’s put like that you deny that you feel that way.  But you’re only lying to yourself.

If anything this group could have been lumped in with sales because as a SaaS model company, your relationships with your current clients is your on-going sales model. This does not have to be a time-intensive process if you implement the proper tools and controls, but it does take effort.

37signals are masters at this.  They have a recent post on exactly how important their customer’s experience is to them.

We had a recent post here about how the relationship goes well beyond your customer service rep.  It is also the responsibility of your billing people, marketing people, collections staff, everyone!

3. Operations, a.k.a. Bootstrapping – if you are going to survive, you better have the purse strings drawn tight on unnecessary expenditures. No matter how good your sales and relationship teams are, the person in charge of your outgoing expenses can cut the jugular at any second.  Once it’s cut; lights out.

NOTE: I am aware that there are a few companies out there like Facebook and Twitter that can bleed money for what appears to be forever. Go buy a lottery ticket instead.

4. Technology/Your Idea – this section does not include all technology involved throughout your company.  It’s impossible to separate any one department from the general term “technology.”  The idea here is that your idea, although the basis of the business being started, is not the most important piece to your future success.  Obviously, you need a viable concept and the development chops to build it (whether on your own or hired), but without the key pieces in place your application is just another piece of unused software… but delivered over the web.

 

Photo Credit: Kyle May

4 Steps to Growing Your SaaS Marketing Mar 30 Jason Moore

As a follow up to our earlier post on 3 Keys to SaaS Success, we have had some great discussions on “What next?” Once you have your application built with the three self-reliant tools built in for your clients, how do you find your clients?  First things, first.  Initially, your clients will not magically find you.  Let me be clear.  Your product is great and you have architected a beautiful design, but without some marketing efforts you and your product are just Dust in the Wind (go ahead and listen while you read the rest).

Whether you are bootstrapping the project on your own or have funding from your company, taking the proper steps will save you time, money, and effort when it comes to today’s marketing environment.

The four steps are as follows:

1. Built-in tools for self-reliance – as mentioned in the previous post, without this relationship between your clients and your application, all other efforts will be more expensive and time-consuming.  So even though these tools are not necessarily “marketing” items, they are critical for your word of mouth to ignite.

2. Build a practical and clean site – your website is critical to your business as a SaaS company, but it is not critical to break the bank on it.  Once you have your basic site built with concise copy (with whatever tone you want to set as your company’s voice), a place where someone can self-signup for trial or paid account, and a feedback loop then you are ready to launch.

Other free tools that are available to increase your presence on-line while keeping costs low are Ning (for community-oriented communication), Wordpress (amazing how customizable it is today), and Google Analytics (see next step).

Your best friend at this point will be your ability to get your voice out to the places it needs to be.  This could be online (Twitter, company blog, discussion boards like on LinkedIn, etc.) or in real life meetups where you (aghast) shake hands with people and develop relationships OFFline.  You (and other employees) are the company.  And people like doing business with people.  Getting involved in your community whether it be local or virtual is the absolute best way to drip your name into conversations.

3. SEO/SEM – Once you have your site up, and you have been able to drive some traffic to the site, start measuring.  Optimizing your site to see what has been effective and how you can climb up the search engines with targeted keywords.  Once you have some income sprinkling in, start dabbling in paid SEM.  Be ruthless on your money going out, though.  If a particular search term or ad is not producing revenue there is ZERO reason for you to continue to put money towards it.  As more accounts come in the door, add more money to what is showing success.

4. Spend money on targeted efforts – For the most part, spending money on advertisements outside of SEM should be done after you are cash flow positive. Money spent in this fashion is better served as brand awareness as opposed to lead generation.  There are many avenues that have little to no cost involved that will generate more leads for you in the beginning.  And without the first three steps covered well, money spent on advertising will more than likely lead to very high abandonment rates when you do garner someone’s attention.

 

You already know about these four steps, and you are possibly participating in some or all of them today. Have you evaluated the strength of your base lately? Did you start buying advertisements and pay-per-click Google ads prior to honing the copy on your site?

One of the dangers that of putting too much effort into step 3 prior to step 2 is translating your data incorrectly.  When you start measuring your sales funnel the abandonment rate could be much higher due to your copy and website flow instead of the effectiveness of the ad.  Changing the ad could be counter-productive.

The order of your efforts is just as important as what the efforts are in many cases.  I would love to hear your thoughts on this subject.  Have you had success with a different order?

Three Keys to SaaS Success Mar 23 Jason Moore

I am very fortunate to be in a community that has a great entrepreneurial spirit. Being in this community, I get to hear a lot of ideas for projects that people want to turn into businesses.

Outside of the standard requirements for any business to succeed such as revenue model, marketing and acquisition costs, and so on; you also have three key areas where the relationship between your potential clients and your application must work together seamlessly.

As has been pointed out countless times on SaaS model success, the real key is scalability.  The following three attributes of your application will have huge impact on whether scalability is something you will be able to achieve.

1. Self Setup – Self Setup is the most important “feature” that your application will need to scale your business. Once you have targeted beta clients, immediately start working with them to design how they will be able to get running on your application without you. The self setup should start immediately after someone clicks the “Free Trial” or “30 Day Demo” button on your website.

One of the major differences between SaaS and traditional software is that setup process begins prior to your sales process does.

2. Self Signup – As you are getting launched, sales/signups are not as critical to be automated as setup is. If you are manually having conversations with people through the sales process in the beginning, you will learn what the roadblocks are to purchasing your product. The knowledge that you gain throughout this process will be invaluable to writing effective copy and to designing your site’s sales flow to best suit your potential customer’s needs.

This is closely related to self setup because your potential customer’s experience during that trial period will be the first impression that he remembers when making the decision whether to type in their credit card number.

Self signup is the actual transition between trial and paid. If you plan on launching with a freemium model, this transition period will be laced into your application when your customers hit feature/size roadblocks. Offering them compelling reasons to upgrade, and more importantly, an easy way to act upon that decision could decide your success. Once again, automation on this is not a requirement to get started if you are looking for the specific reasons why people are not buying.  But implementing this should be early in your timeline.

3. Self Help – Prior to launching your product to beta and then full production, it is critical to have dead-nuts simple avenues for your customers to reach you.   But you do not need to be in self-help mode just yet. This is primarily due to the fact that you won’t know what problems/questions your varied customers are going to have until they have them.

It is absolutely critical to have the record button pushed at all times. When it comes time to start writing the self-help material for your application, you will be able to quickly reference your real world feedback ensuring the help material is focused on problems that real people have instead of on problems that you “think” they might have.

photo credit: purplepigswithfigs

Seth Godin Nashville Mar 05 Jason Moore

Contrary to how it looks, Seth and I did NOT meet in a photo booth at the county fair.

Seth Godin was in Nashville yesterday for the Country Radio Seminar to speak on how the radio industry has an opportunity to adopt the new world of marketing and thrive (not just survive) despite recent hardships.  As many of you know I am not in the radio business, but I was not going to let Seth come to Nashville without me in attendance!

Justin Davis (@jwd2a) and I show up at 7:30 am to get in line for tickets going on sale at 8.  Much to our surprise, we were still the only people in line by the time 8 o'clock rolled around.  What!!  This is Seth Godin, people!

Needless to say, it was an absolutely GREAT morning filled with surprises (lanyap - Pat) and unadulterated inspiration.

Justin and I took our seats around 8:30 for the 10:00 start to make sure we had good seats.  Reference the line mentioned earlier, and you know this wasn't a problem.  Right at 9 o'clock is when the pleasant surprises started.  It starts with a one-song concert by an up-and-coming female artist from Texas completely rocking it out!  Who needs coffee?

Next up were presentations approximately 10 feet from us by John Rich (of Big & Rich, Musik Mafia) and Randy Owen (Alabama).  For those of you who know nothing of country music, I don't think it's too far of an over-statement to say that Randy Owen is similar to country music fans what Bono is to everyone else.  Next up was a short two-song concert by Phil Vasser.

Let me remind you again that we went into this room expecting to wait an hour and a half just to see Seth speak.  So let's get to some brief notes on Seth.  I will preface this with saying that it is extremely difficult to boil down Seth's message and keep any meaning.  He is masterful at spreading a message in a brief and direct manner.  If you haven't read his books you really should no matter what position or field you are in.  His messages stretch your brain.

The two tidbits that stuck out the most from his presentation were:

• One way to grow your business in the new world of marketing is to follow this cycle:
• Be remarkable --> Tell a story to your customers --> They spread the word --> Get permission (then repeat)
• The key to this method is that you actually have to be remarkable before telling the story and getting word to spread.  Far too often, people/companies want to tell the story of what they intend to do not what they have done or are doing.  Your story won't spread without substance.
• If you are in an industry that is struggling with the paradigm shift, you have a choice between the following two.  What do you think is best for you?
• "Yesterday lasting a little longer; Tomorrow coming a little sooner"
• "Yesterday" is what your industry was built on and is probably what they/you are hanging onto today.  "Tomorrow" is everything that your trade organization is fighting.

Is it risky to be the outlier and reach for "tomorrow" in your organization or industry? Probably.  But if you are no longer employed by your current employer if five years do you want the reason to be that you walked lock-step like you were "supposed to" then were laid off when the looming downturn came?  Or do you want your story to be that you did what you knew needed to be done; got fired; then continued your personal transformation and changed how you perform your old job with another company (maybe your own)?

In closing, I would like to thank the CRB for bringing Seth to Nashville.  His message is vital to the livelihood of your industry and it's refreshing to see that someone there is embracing it.

Gratitude: Make It Sincere Feb 27 Jason Moore

We have had an on-going discussion around the bigWebApps virtual water cooler about the abuse of the word "thanks."

People say “thanks” when they’re not actually thankful for the other party’s action.  At this point, it's almost a substitute for "goodbye."  And due to this, it is greatly cheapened.  I agree with the other party in that regard.

But it's been taken a step further in that saying "thanks" puts you in a “position of weakness."  I whole-heartedly disagree.

Here is a post by Seth Godin that happens to be quite timely to our conversation.  I'm posting the entire post since it’s so short (as Seth does so well).

 

Do you deserve it?

Do you deserve the luck you've been handed? The place you were born, the education you were given, the job you've got? Do you deserve your tribe, your customer base, your brand?

Not at all. “Deserve” is such a loaded word. Most of us don’t deserve the great opportunities we have, or the lucky breaks that got us here.

The question shouldn’t be, “do you deserve it.” I think it should be, “what are you going to do with it now that you've got it?"

 

When someone takes time out of their day to share with us a bug in one of our applications or watch a webinar where we are spouting off about something we created, I  am deeply thankful for that person doing so.  What motivated that person to spend their time from a busy day to share with us?  And more importantly, how/what can we do to deliver something to them that makes our next event with them go on their “can’t miss” list?

If that puts me in a position of weakness, then I will gladly serve that role.

In closing, I would like to say that you taking your time to read this trivial email is appreciated by me.  If it was worth your time, I look forward to the next opportunity you give me to chat with you.

 

Photo Credit: http://flickr.com/photos/psd/