Another Way SaaS Changes Everything

Grazed from Xconomy. Author: Matt Fates.

There are a lot of “new rules” in enterprise software sales. We discussed many of them in depth at a recent industry forum: it’s now a buying process and not a selling process, the steak dinner and golf game are out, the length of the sales cycle has shortened, and so on. Many of the new rules can be traced to the shift to the cloud. With much quicker proofs of concept and shorter implementation times, enterprises can realize software’s value (or lack thereof) much faster and with less pain.

Even Microsoft, provider of the most widely used on-premise software suite, has made a huge push in recent years around cloud-based Office 365. Senior sales folks at Microsoft tell me that 75 percent of their accounts are now buying varying amounts of their cloud services. Like other vendors, Microsoft realized that the IT managers of today and tomorrow are increasingly partial to implementing SaaS-based (Software as a Service) resources, rather than installing and maintaining on-premise applications…

But with the growing acceptance of the cloud, SaaS-based vendors face different hurdles in their efforts to grow. One major change has to do with what defines a sales win—it’s not enough for a customer to sign on the dotted line. In the shelfware days, enterprise software vendors could sell a 1,000-seat annual license and get paid—whether the customer used the product or not. The software could collect dust if the customer decided not to use it or found a better option. Even so, the sale was final…

Read more from the source @ http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2013/06/05/another-way-saas-changes-everything/