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.
