Great SaaS Blog: Boasso on Business
I found a great blog tonight: Boasso on Business run by Ken Boasso.
It’s a from the trenches view of generating revenue for Software as a Service (SaaS) vendors, and certainly worth checking out.
Here’s one of Ken’s pieces of advice if you are selling software:
re-purpose the company’s marketing efforts to stress the services as business process solutions (as opposed to technically-oriented tools)
Ken is exactly right. In the case of Web Office solutions, companies are not going to buy blogs or wikis. Instead, they are going to buy something that is geared exactly towards their business problems.
I work in a firm that offers consulting services and I am currently leading an effort to deploy an internal blogging solution. However, I never tried to convince executive management to buy into blogs. Instead, I looked at what we do, as a consulting firm, and convinced them that we need web based tools to communicate about subjects that directly relate to our business. We need People Pages, Project Pages, and Client Pages.
To use Ken’s terminology, the blogs were described internally as business process solutions.
I think this point needs to be emphasized over and over again. This is especially true for young startups started by engineering talent- they tend to assume that the use case for their solution is obvious to their audience when clearly it is not. They forget that their market is not just IT-savvy engineers but real-life business people that may not be tech savvy.
-Anshu (http://wisezen.blogspot.com The Business of Software)
OFF TOPIC: BLOGGING’S DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD
My point about blogging is that it is at once an incredible tool and a massive distraction. I started off wondering what was driving all those new readers to my site (thanks again, Rod), and I found myself jumping from one site to another getting cau…
I agree that blogging is a two edge sword, but it is a great way to share knowledge and get a few laughs now and again. It also helps prospective clients learn a little about our passions and persons, if you will, I think that it is still a valuable tool that we need to use.