The Virtual and Personal Sale
July 25th, 2008
Viva la Saas
Right - that is a pure Coldplay rip-off, but I just saw them last Friday night in San Jose, and I see some parallels to my experience at the show and a recent experience selecting another SaaS product.
SaaS for Marketing Automation
We recently did a system selection for a Marketing Automation tool to augment our ability to manage campaigns and leads at Ingres. We had a best-practice team of people from across the business and IT – marketing, IT, and sales operations. We built our requirements and understood our constraints. Given our SaaS based sourcing strategy for enterprise business applications, we considered a fairly broad list of SaaS Marketing automation vendors, and prepared a concise but thorough requirements summary.
The Virtual Personal Sale
Some of the prospective software/services vendors visited us, and others held our meetings and demos online. Near the end of the process, one of our team in Marketing discovered that a trusted colleague had recently selected Vtrenz. Though we were at the finish line, with one vendor in the lead, we decided to pull Vtrenz into the process. In less than 4 working days, we had demos, answers to our requirements, and had a combination of both on site and web meetings with business and technical founders. There was a fast personal rapport developed as we made preparations to close the deal and begin what has been, as promised, a rapid implementation and time to benefit.
In this increasingly virtual world with our global and widely distributed work forces, Vtrenz still managed to sell us personally on their solution and make contact.
So How in the World is this Like Coldplay?
As a music aficionado, I had a similar personal experience in a crowd of more than ten thousand at the Coldplay concert. They launched their recent album, Viva la Vida, online before their tour (virtual), but sold the material very personally at the concert - I had good seats, but friends of mine sitting much further away expressed the same feeling. Chris Martin, the lead vocalist and band member, went beyond so many performers, to engage the crowd, move with the music, and make the audience feel a part of the show. He got the crowd riled up in several sing-alongs, the band walked into the audience to play several songs, and at the end, ran up the side of the floor and up to an exit platform near the back of the venue, to play additional songs. They ended the show with closeups of them playing on a huge high definition screen just behind the stage, with neon confetti butterflies falling from the ceiling! A very large crowd really experienced an intimate, personal live show.
While selecting a SaaS vendor the presentation doesn’t usually end with neon butterflies, today’s world is all about the virtual, and the personal.
July 25th, 2008 at 2:48 pm
Thanks for the kind words Doug. We look forward to working with you and helping Ingres take their lead management/automation efforts to the next level. Really enjoyed your analogy and experience at the Coldplay concert - and now we’d like to think you’ll be able to make some great music of your own with your ‘lead management instruments’.
July 28th, 2008 at 10:12 am
I think the SaaS model forces vendors to be on their top game. As you mention the SaaS delivery model allows vendors to setup product demos and walk throughs very quickly, allowing the purchaser the ability to quickly get a sense of product quality, company support and etc. from a large number of vendors, in a short period of time. Before SaaS the review process took so long that most companies were only able to bring in what they believed to be the top one or two vendors, now with SaaS, companies have access to an incredible variety of solutions,,, forcing vendors to be on top of their game. The best naturally rise to the top, as you have seen with Vtrenz.
July 30th, 2008 at 11:34 am
Doug - I enjoy the blog and I think you make some terrific points. The SaaS model affords the customer a tremendous amount of freedom when evaluating solutions, and that freedom is extended into the life of the solution, once the selection is made. I touch on this a bit in my latest blog post - http://www.compensationmanagement.com - and would love to hear your feedback. - Chris Cabrera
August 21st, 2008 at 10:21 am
I love this post Doug. Great analogies. I wish presentations would end with neon butterflies! (-: