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I had an interesting briefing with Bill Soward, CEO and Greg Schneider VP of Marketing at Adaptive Planning the other day, which I wanted to share. In the spirit of full disclosure, I will let you know that I worked with Bill years ago at Edify but I have been very impressed with what he has done at Adaptive Planning.
The original purpose of the meeting was to finalize a SaaS business profile but what I thought was even more interesting was their company’s approach to building a SaaS sales pipeline, especially in these tough economic times. I have heard many executives talk about reducing the barriers to sales but Adaptive Planning is really going to the extreme in terms of test drives and transparency for their prospects.
Having run sales, I can tell you that sales reps always have a lot of excuses why prospects aren’t buying and I know there are plenty of excuses to be had these days. What I think we can all learn from Adaptive Planning is that by addressing these potential sales objectives earlier in the sales process, you can build in more predictability and ultimately more sales into your SaaS sales process. Here’s what they have done…
The New Improved Test Drive
30 day trials are no longer new and innovative, they are table stakes for SaaS firms trying to sell their software. Adaptive Planning is no different. They offer a 30 day trial but they also offer…
- A Hosted Express version, which is easy to set up and start to use. This is managed and maintained by Adaptive Planning and is free to use. Most of their prospects have opted for this approach to their trial.
OR
- Download the software for FREE, forever. You can go to SourceForge and download the source code and the Adaptive Planning Express product. To date they have had more than 79,000 downloads. Many of whom will become future paying customers. So if someone says I am not sure that your software will do what the marketing literature claims, just tell them to download it and use it.
Over-Educating Their Prospects
Bill and Greg agree that it is important to provide their prospects with as much information as possible and allow them to select what they need as part of their sales education process. This is also part of the company’s approach to relationship transparency, more about this in a minute. So part education building blocks consist of;
- A Resource center which is a collection of information like collateral, white papers, archived webinars and case studies. Most companies provide this type of information library.
- Pre-recorded video demo where the prospect can get a guided tour of the software, which isn’t really breaking in new ground but can be helpful for busy executives.
- Live Webinar demo, where prospects can interact with Adaptive Planningt team, again this is nothing new.
- On-line Training, which allows you to go into more depth around the product, which I think is a great idea. Because you always have the deeply technical buyers who need deep domain information.
- On-line Price List, this isn’t new for some of the newer SMB SaaS applications like 37Signals or FreshBooks but I think for this type of application this is quite a different approach.
- Online Community is another great idea. Using social networking to build a strong community around not only your products but also your company. Adaptive is using the Jive Software platform to provide chat threads, videos, blogs, polls and best practice advice. They even offer private collaboration spaces where customers can share best practice ideas privately.
By combining all of these building blocks, it gives the prospective buyer almost every way to learn about and evaluate Adaptive Planning’s software.
WYSIWYG Transparency
Bill spoke about having a transparent relationship with their prospect and ultimately their customer. They feel that their open information approach provides a prospect with virutally every way to experience and learn about their products, support, pricing and company. This is a powerful differentator when buying software but more importantly when a prospect is shopping for a vendor relationship. The reality is that today’s software buyer is more sophisticated but also realizes that their relationship with a software firm is typically lasts between 5-7 years and that they really do want to ‘try before they buy’. For Adaptive Planning their transparent approach is paying off.
Lowering Customer Acquisition Costs and Building a SaaS Pipeline
A term you hear a lot about in the SaaS world is CAC or Customer Acquisition Costs. This is basically the cost of finding, qualifying and signing up new customers. In the enterprise software world, where you were getting large up-front payments, you could sell with a team of sales professionals. In the SaaS world, where you are getting paid over time, it is imperative to sell using as close to a self-service sales model as possible and I believe this is what Adaptive Planning is doing. What I like is that they are not just cutting costs, they are putting everything out there in a transparent, logical way for their prospects to make their own decisions and self-qualify. There are still people at Adaptive Planning who will sell you software but only when you are ready to buy, which saves everyone time and money.
So far their approach appears to be working because they have more than 400 customers and continue to do well even in this recessionary environment.
Updated on February 2012
Company: Host Analytics
Started: 2000
Located: Redwood City, California
Geography: Global
Markets: Financial Performance Management
Products: Performance Management Suite, Budgeting and Planning, Financial Consolidations, Scorecard and Dashboarding, Reporting, and Host Analytics Decision Hub (External content)
Customers: AT&T, NexTag, Crocs, Thule, Otis Spunkmeyer, Schumacher
Website: Host Analytics
Blog: Host Analytics Blog
Recent News:
Host Analytics Introduces Packaged Cloud Integration for ERP
Host Analytics Named Red Herring Global 100 Award Winner
We asked Jon Kondo, Host Analytics Chief Executive Officer a few questions about his business and his view of the SaaS market in 2012.
Did you start out as a Software-as-a-Service company?
We started out as a founder and angel investor funded, on-demand service in 2000, that enabled our customers to run our innovative budgeting and planning solutions on a hosted application. We launched our SaaS based service in 2005 and expanded our solution to include a comprehensive and integrated Corporate Performance Management suite. In 2008, we secured our first round of venture capital funding and introduced editions of our SaaS solution targeted to the needs of small to medium sized businesses, departmental enterprise users, public sector and non-profit organizations.
Why do your customers buy from Host Analytics?
Host Analytics helps organizations streamline the performance management process, align the planning process with business strategy and effectively measure performance and manage change. As a SaaS delivered solution, Host Analytics customers realize fast time to value through quick implementation of solutions, the highest levels of user adoption, effective empowerment of business users and a continuous flow of Host Analytics provided solution innovations and improvements. Businesses relying on error prone, complex and inefficient spreadsheets for budgeting and planning experience improved productivity and effectiveness by converting to Host Analytics’ integrated suite of corporate performance management solutions.
Host Analytics’ “Excel in a Browser”, user interface style, minimizes the learning curve for finance, accounting and managerial professionals and helps to deliver fast time to value. Businesses with complex performance management requirements find Host Analytics solutions to be cost effective, easy to learn and fast to implement while delivering the required corporate performance management functionality when compared to legacy in-house and on-premise license based software solutions. Host Analytics is the only SaaS-based integrated Corporate Performance Management solution suite available for businesses of all sizes and industries.
What do you see as the key trend emerging in the SaaS industry?
The biggest story in Cloud is the impending impact of Cloud computing. The combination of Cloud based corporate performance management and Cloud computing will make “Plug and Plan” a reality. “Plug and Plan” budgeting and planning is an integrated approach to business planning. Data from multiple sources like ERP, HCM and CRM systems is quickly and transparently integrated into a Corporate Performance Management solution to extend and optimize budgeting, revenue planning, financial consolidation and score carding processes. This allows businesses to convert their planning from an annual or semi-annual event to a continuous process of timely and current adjustments.
What is your outlook for 2012?
A new year brings new opportunities for businesses to excel, as long as they have the right tools to do so. One of the longstanding barriers to business success, however, is dealing with increasingly unpredictable economic conditions. Some companies have begun to turn to financial planning to combat the uncertainty and enable better business success.
In fact, a recent survey by Dimensional Research explored the correlation between strategic financial planning and business success, with 72 percent of businesses surveyed reporting better business results through financial planning. However, the survey also found that sophisticated financial planning capabilities that can drive business results are still lacking in many organizations.
Financial planning will play an important role for businesses in the new year, as well as many other factors. The following is a list of the top predictions for businesses around financial initiatives in 2012, compiled by Host Analytics, the leading provider of SaaS corporate performance management (CPM) solutions.
Top Predictions and Themes for Finance in 2012
The Cloud CFO: A modern breed of CFO to bring finance to the cloud for larger and mid-size enterprises.
The role of CFO will become more strategic than ever before through the adoption of cloud computing. Finance departments from the world’s largest global organizations will reap the benefits as they catch up with mid-market businesses and enterprises already integrating the cloud into their strategic financial processes.
Next year’s business climate will push corporate finance and CFOs to take on more important responsibilities in planning and decision support for potential risks and opportunities. This trend has already begun. Sixty-four percent of businesses revealed that the CFO is more likely to be involved in strategy discussions now versus five years ago, according to Dimensional Research.
Organizations, large and small, will struggle to deliver business advantage if they are not enabled with the tools and processes to conduct strategic financial planning and analysis.
Financial Landmines: Financial missteps to have greater consequences.
Economic uncertainty and the clock speed of business will continue to accelerate in 2012. The penalties associated with the risks of missteps will increase greatly, leading to a constant struggle for companies to keep up with their accelerated pace.
Planning for the future and anticipating alternate decisions depending on the potential business drivers in the economy will not only be a necessary evil, it will be a main driver for all companies. The most successful companies will blend self-reflection of internal operations with external benchmarks and economic indicators to better anticipate the volatile swings in the economy and use advanced planning techniques to monetize those risks and rewards.
Business Introspection: More business self-reflection with business intelligence applications.
As businesses begin to realize the necessity to plan for future/alternate decisions based on business drivers, the need for business applications that shed light on their inner workings will greatly increase. Interest in and innovation around finance and business intelligence technologies will surge, especially as more vendors offer their solutions via the cloud.
Business users will be more comfortable consuming applications as services, if one of the main drivers is business agility—because the cloud means data and applications are always available and up to date. Cloud finance and business intelligence applications will significantly increase the performance of organizations.
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