Driving High Velocity Pipeline - Experience, Engagement and Delivery

It's been almost a year since I starting blogging about the role of Experience in the new Cloud Go To Market strategy.  In my post on Bridging to SaaS Success; A Basic Blueprint, I said:  

Go To Market Tactics: E -> E: Evaluation to Experience. Today's go to market mix, pricing, channel and promotion is built to drive evaluation and transaction. Successful service go to market requires a shift to tactics that drive experience and satisfaction. Successful SaaS organizations shift their go to market tactics and investments and become experience, not product marketers.

I then expanded on these thoughts with my post entitled SaaS Go To Market, Why Experience Rules:

"Today's customer has little patience for White Papers, datasheets, detailed feature function product specs and the like. They may attend a webinar, but the next step is experience. Even for large organizations with complex buying behavior, the expectation of SaaS is easy, accessible and meaningful experience of the service, either through demonstration instances, trial or freemium models."

 And while the proof continues to mount that this is the case, each additional post I do on the topic inevitably invites some heated Twitter and or blog comments.  I've enjoyed debating the topic at conferences as varying as the Goldman Sachs Cloud Computing Conference and the Silicon Valley Cloud Computing Meet-up Group's Talk Cloudy to Me all day meetup.

Today I want to add another layer of detail into my V3 High Impact Go To Market Model, on how to use Engagement and Experience to drive impact.  Velocity is a function of Delivery, Engagement and Experience, simply V=D*Engagement*Experience.

The HIGHEST velocity go to market programs, tailor their delivery to channel of communication and buyers place in the buying cycle.  Content Rules, a popular book in marketing circles today, spends a lot of time focused on just this, and for me it is necessary and recommended reading and very good stuff.

However, in my experience, Content Rules fails to take on the other 2 variables in the equation, Engagement and Experience.  In order to drive Engagement, a strong Viewpoint and Value position must be staked out and communicated.  Then, this must be married with Experience driven delivery.

For a long time, I've been calling most White Papers YAWNERS™, Yet Another White Paper Nobody Ever Reads.  The reasons are two fold, first, the White Paper format and typical writing is simply not engaging, because in 99% of the cases it has no compelling viewpoint, it is, usually simply a LONG WINDED DATASHEET.

Secondly, as I've stated ad-nausea, products are evaluated, services are experienced.  We have truly moved from a products to services marketplace, and low experience vehicles, even with good engagement are just not enough.  If we put these together in a simple 2x2 matrix, we see the emergence of what are truly high velocity programs.

In the upper right we see high velocity programs such as Trials, live demo instances and the like.  In the bottom left we see low velocity deliverables such as whitepapers and datasheets.  And while there is a role for these low velocity deliverables, high velocity marketing spend will heavily weight high Engagement and high Experience programs and deliverables.

In my final post in this series, we tie together Viewpoint, Value and Velocity with the traditional marketing and sales funnel, and see how this framework can create High Impact and growth. 

Find Your Glider Bike - Paths to Successful SaaS Transitions

I am constantly surprised at how much my 4 kids teach me, but sometimes it's really cool!!!

Owen, my youngest is a typical 3 1/2 year old boy, energetic, physical and fearless. He's been riding on a glider bike for the last year, and loves to blast down hills with his feet in the air, scaring the daylights out of his Dad.

For those of you unfamiliar with glider bikes, it's basically a pedal-less 2 wheeler that you propel like a scooter with your feet. I've been watching him scoot around on his glider wondering how he would do with pedals, would he need training wheels at all?? Would he be faster than his 3 older siblings at getting on a "real" 2 wheeler? (they all transitioned from training wheels at ages between 5 and 6, one with virtual ease, one with a few tries and one with 6 months of struggle. )

On Tuesday this week, the answers became clear. Owen said, "can I ride Addie's bike?". I said, OK sure. Owen hopped on, I gave him a little push and he was off pedaling, with the balance already second nature. Amazing, 3 1/2 and riding a two wheeler already with NO teaching, no back breaking run alongs, no leaning the wrong way for balance.

So, what did I learn? First I kicked myself for not having glider bikes for the other 3, oh well. Second I marveled at the effectiveness of learning balance and pedaling separately, and how it eased the transition in a way that training wheels fail miserably at. Third, I learned that the boy is crazy fearless, but I kinda already knew that from his accumulated trips to urgent care and many other sorties in playgrounds and parks.

This episode got me thinking about transitions, especially ISV to SaaS transformations, and how to ease the pain and difficulty. Certainly, doing this requires a good deal of fearlessness and courage to change mindset, organization and tactics, as I've blogged extensively about. However, I think most organizations can find a glider bike or two to help speed the transition and avoid losing organizational balance in the process.

For example, one client of mine who has been incredibily successful with this transition, was already selling their product in subscription mode 90+% of the time. Perpetual to Subscription is a huge and often challenging business problem. However, for this client, it became a glider bike to SaaS. Pricing drives many sales and customer behaviors, my client rode this glider right into the SaaS model.

Another glider bike to SaaS might be your go to market model. Do you focus on customers getting a taste of your product through download or guided demos? This focus on direct product experience can be your glider bike to SaaS success.

What other glider bikes are out there to help speed this business transition? Would love to hear your stories...

In the meantime, we will be shopping for a new bike for Owen this weekend, and hopefully not going to urgent care!!!

Cheers
Ken

Hybrid Service Delivery, 2 yrs later...

I posted this vision piece 2 yrs ago. I still think we are a ways from realizing this vision, but I think it still rings true....

Thoughts?

http://www.zdnet.com/news/new-hybrid-delivery-security-architecture/211127

“In the past, CIOs deployed their own self-contained application architectures on their own servers and storage systems. This old model is giving way to a hybrid application architecture that combines hosted functionality with in-house applications running on consolidated and virtualized commodity servers. We believe that this transformation will drive efficiencies across the full stack, from business processes to physical infrastructure, while increasing IT's ability to meet new demands in a rapidly changing business environment.” - Kishore Kanakamedala, Vasantha Krishnakanthan, and Roger Roberts, McKinsey Quarterly, 1
Commentary--Software as a Service (SaaS), virtualization and integrated IT appliances are creating new and powerful service delivery models for IT managers to leverage. One only needs to look at the success of SaaS companies such as Salesforce.com and WebEx, the robust growth of integrated appliances in spaces ranging from security to data warehousing, and the meteoric rise of VMware’s adoption in the enterprise to see that all these models deliver significant “utility-like” benefits and cost savings.....