Thoughts from my journey

As promised, here is the second tip from Chris Yeh, VP Marketing of PBWorks about freemium sales models for b2b and SaaS.

Knowing of the advantages of free trial / freemium models, I agree that companies that are making the adjustments towards those sales models have an advantage in today’s online market where users can pick their products without a moderator (sales person) and pay for it only it it’s valuable for them

Similarly, Chris believes that the way to business success is establishing a trial for its product. This way customers feel they’re not taking a risk by buying a product but they test it first and understand how the product works before paying for it and this is tremendously important for building up a Successful contemporary business.

In his blog post: Bought vs. Sold (Why Jive is a dinosaur & Dropbox is the future), Chris compares 2 types of companies that have similar revenues achieved it in very different ways. The first company is Jive software and the other is Dropbox.
Jive is a 10 years old traditional enterprise company who spent millions of dollars in marketing and still not profitable and on the other hand there’s the 5 years old Dropbox, who has 40 employees already and a hundred millions in revenue.

To read the full transcription of the video, click here

Video Transcription:
I’m Chris Yeh. I’m the VP of Marketing for PBworks, which is a SaaS company that does collaboration software for various markets like advertising agencies, law firms and, of course, general business.

Well, it just so happens that I wrote an extensive blog post about this, comparing Jive Software with Dropbox, two companies which, interestingly enough, have almost the same revenues, but have achieved them in very different ways. Jive is a traditional enterprise company that was started almost 10 years ago and has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in marketing to get to where they are today and are still not profitable.

On the other hand, we have Dropbox which was started in 2007, has something like forty employees in a hundred million in revenues and so where I really see this going is that you know, certainly the tradition enterprise world still applies to large complex products but the ability to get a trial going, the ability to get people to say, okay I’m not taking a risk by buying this product, I know that it can deliver for me, is tremendously important for building up the business, so somebody like Dropbox or somebody like PBworks who offers the ability for people to really understand how the product works before they have to make a six figure commitment I think and that’s the way to go.

I’ve conducted an interview with Chris Yeh, VP Marketing from PBWorks and thought it would be interesting to share.

As you know, I declared more than once that the customers are kings which means companies should be able to understand their customers behavior and trends and interpret it correctly into customer engagement level in order to know which customers to focus on later at the funnel.

Chris explains why customer engagement is so important when using the land and expand strategy – for example once a large company is starting to use their services their goal is to have that company to use them more and more and eventually to spread into an enterprise wide deployment.

So tracking and enhancing the customer engagement level is very important. The metrics to know that could be i.e. how much a user is using the products, how many usage days they have per week, the total volume of transactions, etc.

I agree with using those metrics in measuring customer engagement and every company should pick the right metrics for its business. At the same time, there are acceptable metrics that every SaaS company should use which are elaborated in our SaaS Business Metrics Survey Results. Using those metrics  will not only show the engagement level but the whole business overview which every successful SaaS business should act upon.

Tomorrow I will post another tip by Chris about Freemium Sales Models for B2B and SaaS.

To read the full transcription of the video, click here

Video Transcription:
I’m Chris Yeh. I’m the VP of Marketing for PB Works, which is a SaaS company that does collaboration software for various markets, like advertising agencies, law firms, and of course general business. Customer engagement is super important to us because a lot of times we have, what we call, a land and expand strategy.

So often times a large company will start to use us in just a small group, maybe just one team that’s using PB Works to be more effective. And what we want to do is to have them use us more and more to bring in more and more people and eventually to spread into an enterprise wide deployment. So what’s very important for us is to be able to track and enhance the level of customer engagement, how much they’re using the product.

We look at things like how many days per week are they using it. We look at things like what’s the total volume of transactions and things that they’re doing and all this is really important for our marketing and for business in general.