We are super excited to be co-hosting an event with Mikael Blaisdell, one of the pioneers of customer success management.
We consistently hear from our customers and prospects that they would like to meet other customer success management professionals so we decided to partner with Mikael and make this happen!
We will start in San Mateo/San Francisco Bay Area on Thursday evening, April 5th in San Mateo, CA from 7-8:30 PM.
The second event will be in the Boston, MA area in May, followed by another in Seattle, WA in July. Meetings in other cities are being scheduled.
What to expect? We look forward to mingle and discuss what will the future of customer success management look like? What will drive the customer success manager role to develop and mature? What do people see as best business practices in Customer Success Management? As teams and programs mature, what levels will be a part of the progression?
Mikael Blaisdell, Publisher of The HotLine Magazine, will also be presenting a visionary and provocative look at what the future might hold.
The sessions are free, and open to all CSM professionals and SaaS/Cloud company CxO’s. Advance registration is required, and space will be limited. To register, please click here or put the following in your browser: http://forumsf040512.eventbrite.com
The Future of Customer Success Management: A Look Ahead — SF Bay Area CSM Meetup
Mikael Blaisdell: The HotLine Magazine
Sponsored by: Totango Inc.
Thursday: April 5th 7-8:30
Auditorium; Keynote Systems Inc.
777 Mariners Island Blvd
San Mateo, CA
Advance registration for this FREE event is required, and space is limited.
Use this link to register: http://forumsf040512.eventbrite.com
Agenda
7:00 Doors open for registered attendees; Refreshments & Networking
7:25 Welcome
7:30 – 8:15 Mikael’s Presentation and Q&A
8:15 – 8:30 Totango Customer Engagement Tips
Come have a snack, meet your fellow CSM professionals, and stick around for some customer engagement tips from yours truly.
Here is the additional interview promised from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference.
This time Jessie Wilkins, Director System Engagement for aiim speaks about how will the future of the enterprise information management will look like.
As mentioned a lot in this blog, nowadays the customers are kings, customer engagement is taking a royal place in web applications and the interaction between the business and the customers and between the customers themselves is highly important for any successful SaaS business.
Jessie mentions that for decades the world have been focused on “system of records” which is actually focusing on documents.
These days the focus is on conversation, interaction, Facebook “likes” and it’s called “System of Engagement” where individuals engage with each other, organizations engage with customers and partners try to develop more collaborate ways of working together.
Tomorrow I will upload an interview from the Sales 2.0 Conference. This time Darren Suomi, VP Sales at HootSuite will give a tip regarding social media channels in businesses.
To read the full transcription of the video, click here
“My name is Jessie Wilkins. I’m Director Systems of Engagement for Aiim. Aiim is a non profit trade association. We do market research, networking events, industry analysis, standards development and training. We did some research earlier this year, and to try and determine what the future of enterprising information management looked like.
And what we determined was that for decades we’ve been focused on systems of record, all of those databases, repositories, share points, et cetera – that every organization has. They’re focused on documents and now we are starting to focus more on conversations, interactions, Facebook likes – and so we call those systems of engagement.
Ways in which individuals engage with each other, organizations engage with their customers and their partners and try and develop more collaborative ways of working together. Our research and research from others including Mackenzie, Forrester and Gardner, all suggest that organizations that use these tools effectively are more profitable, their market leaders are gaining market share, they can streamline their processes, but too many organizations don’t know how to do that.
And so, we’re here to hopefully provide our strategies, processes and plans for how to do it more effectively.”
If you’re part of all the excitement around Dreamforce 2011 be sure to come and meet us. You’ll recognize us right by the Tango dancers (what can we do, rhymes with Totango…).
We also thought that this would be a great opportunity to introduce Totango to a wide audience of SaaS sales and executive teams. For that end we’ve started a twitter campaign at www.totango.com/win-ipad2. People who help us spread the word may win a new iPad2 and more importantly will be able to use Totango to get meet their quota.
If you’d like to schedule sometime to discuss Totango in more details please write me at guy@totango.com
If you’re part of all the excitement around Dreamforce 2011 be sure to come and meet us. You’ll recognize us right by the Tango dancers (what can we do, rhymes with Totango…).
We also thought that this would be a great opportunity to introduce Totango to a wide audience of SaaS sales and executive teams. For that end we’ve started a twitter campaign at www.totango.com/win-ipad2. People who help us spread the word may win a new iPad2 and more importantly will be able to use Totango to get meet their quota.
If you’d like to schedule sometime to discuss Totango in more details please write me at guy@totango.com
Today we’re announcing our $3.8 million Series A financing as well as opening our service to the public with a free beta offering.
I wanted to give a bit of a personal perspective to what is being announced today and put it in context.
In early 2009 I was looking for the next opportunity. Cloud computing in general and Software-as-a-Service specifically were continuing to rapidly gain ground and it was clear that almost every aspect of the software was undergoing massive change: how software is delivered and consumed, bought and sold; everything was changing.
It was clear that while SaaS presents enormous opportunities for vendors, it also introduces new challenges. Much of the focus in the industry has been on the technical aspects of these challenges: how to build scalable, high-performing, reliable multi-tenant services. But while these technical challenges are interesting and important, we felt that not enough attention was being given to the business side. In SaaS, the customer engagement model is fundamentally different.
The SaaS Customer Engagement Challenge
Most SaaS companies put their services in front of potential customers on the web and allow for a self-paced evaluation process. The sales process is no longer controlled by the companies’ sales people. However, sales teams do need to keep up with the high volume of evaluating prospects and make sure the users find what they need to make a favorable buying decision.
Most SaaS pricing models are based on subscription or usage, which allows customers to stop using — and stop paying for — the service at any time. That, plus low switching costs, mandates that SaaS companies constantly monitor customer satisfaction and improve the value that is being delivered.
In addition, the engagement between customers and the business is indirect. There are almost no customer visits, minimum sales calls, and most of the interaction between clients and the business is usage of the service. This no-touch and low-touch engagement model creates a wide gap in how companies understand their customers.
But there is one huge advantage SaaS companies have over their traditional counterparts — they can measure the actual way in which prospects and customers use their products. That is, if they have the tools to properly track and analyze such activities.
Helping SaaS Companies Understand Their Customers
So we set out to help SaaS companies understand their customers through their actual interactions on the service. It also quickly became clear for us that [1] customer facing staff — sales, customer success and others – are looking for practical and actionable solutions [2] based on this information, and not YAD (or yet another dashboard, as it is often referred to).
Before we wrote a single line of code, we talked to more than 50 SaaS companies, trying to validate our initial assumptions. It was clear from these conversations, and especially from the fact that many companies have developed homegrown tools that crudely attempted to address this need, that we were on to something.
Those homegrown solutions were developed, well frankly, half-ass, without a long term strategy. As a result, there was constant friction between the business users who need the information and the engineering team, which was already barely keeping up with its core product development responsibilities.
The Totango Solution
We created the initial version of Totango, and worked for almost a year with a number of SaaS companies of all sizes and industries in a private beta. From this we learned (and are still learning) how SaaS companies would like to analyze and act on customer usage information.
Today we are publicly releasing the first solution we developed through this process. It is a set of tools that help sales teams increase their effectiveness by improving the conversion rate of evaluating users into paying customers. We’ve built this by spending many days at the offices of our initial clients to learn their daily routines and practices so that we could provide the missing tools they’ve been looking for. The initial results with these private beta customers were amazing, and we feel very confidently that it is time to share our solution with a wider audience.
For now, the product is free. And although we will announce pricing in the coming months, we are planning to always offer a free tier.
When it comes down to it, we’re a SaaS company ourselves and we know first hand how important it is to get people up and running in minutes, so we’ve made sure Totango is as simple as can be to get going.
You can read our official press release here.
Two days ago I had the pleasure to tell the story of Totango to Justin Vincent and Jason Roberts of Techzing. Techzing is very active podcast for hackers. Jason and Justin operate in the space and also cover it on their show which makes their questions and interest really genuine.
Justin started to experiment with Totango by integrating his successful enterprise twitter platform Pluggio into Totango. BTW, if you’d like to see great implementation for ramping up customers on a non-trivial service, I would highly recommend to subscribe to Pluggio.
Please listen to the show and let me know what you think?
Who doesn’t like it when the bar tender pours an extra glass of fine wine ‘on the house’?
Every time it happens to me, my emotional attachment to the establishment grows, and it makes it that much more likely that I’ll visit again.
I tend to have the same feelings when I receive monthly emails from amazon AWS about new features and cost reductions, and a recent email I got from Beanstalk announcing a bunch of new services all included within the same package I’m already paying for. It’s a great way to create loyalty for subscription services.
Constant increment to value and service level improvement without additional costs is probably one of the biggest benefits for SaaS customers. It is inherent to the subscription/pay-as-you-go business models. The power is in the hands of the customers who can always decide to cancel their subscription. SaaS vendors must constantly innovate and create additional value to keep their customers happy.
SaaS vendors, frequently monitor a metric called Customer Life Time Value (CLTV). How much revenue does my average customer generates over it’s life-time. However, this metric can also be seen from the reverse perspective, how many months does my average customer continue to see value from my service such that they are willing to continue paying for the service.
It is also a key benefit for software vendors. Success comes from focus on the customer-lifetime value, which can only come when you truly understand customers and their changing needs. Anyone who developed software products knows how easier, more productive and more enjoyable it is when you have than organizational knowledge. With SaaS you have no choice but to develop it.
These type of customer/vendor relationships are healthier and thus last longer. As long as customers are getting real value they will pay for the services they are consuming. In the old, on-premise applications world, customers had to pay in advance for a service/product they didn’t really use yet. This up-front payment created a dynamic where application vendors where focused on the initial sales, and decision makers where focused on making the first initial buying decision. You can clearly understand why the new model is better for both sides. The new conversation between vendors and customers is about constant value creation, delivery and consumption.
Another great benefit which comes from both SaaS business models and the web based delivery model is a much faster value creation cycle. The motivation of the SaaS vendor to create value faster, combined with the opportunity to manage a single version of the service enables rapid cycle times. Customers are getting new features and functions which create value much faster.
Shorter customer commitments and business model flexibility presented by SaaS promotes healthy relationship between vendors and customers which revolves around value – simply win win!
