Connecting the Islands

It's time businesses move beyond spreadsheets and connect the islands within their organizations. The islands exist in all organizations where different processes and tasks are performed in separate and disconnected systems, lacking connectivity and context. Connecting these islands can improve business visibility dramatically, get operations running effectively and help managers make better decisions quicker, thus, be sharper and much more efficient. When running our operations we should ask ourselves: Do we know who is responsible? What has been promised by whom? Where are the relevant documents? When will results be delivered? What changes were made and when? We use Excel for almost everything, planning, budgeting, execution and control. We schedule with Outlook, communicate with email, report into different systems.

We are working on islands.

One of the most difficult issues in running an organization is setting priorities. Aligning priorities with current challenges and a dynamic reality requires a panoramic view and a profound understanding of the dependencies between the different activities. Having a higher level of visibility puts everyone on the same page.
Using Clarizen will help you connect your company's islands and streamline processes in a systematic way that creates operations accountability and a continuous improvement process. A great company is a company that can sense and effectively respond. I have no doubt that using Clarizen will make your company be a better company with happier customers, more involved employees and increased profitability.

Built to SaaS

Running a SaaS business is a profession in and by itself. In this post I would like to share my views on the key core elements of running a SaaS company. I would first state that the most important part is the understanding of the limitations of your own organization and knowledge. You need to understand that the main question you should be asking yourself is: how do you know that you are making progress. Staying open and receptive to the market is important for any company, however, determining the most relevant Key Performance Indicators(KPI) and measuring the right metrics is crucial for a SaaS company as the market changes all the time and the customers behavior in not consistent and very hard to predict.

The business model is driving most of the key metrics where the ratio of the Customer Acquisition Cost(CAC) vs. the Customer Life Time Value(CLTV) dictates the validity of the model while the ratio of the CAC and the Initial Customer Contract Value (ICCV) is dictating the level of funding necessary. The ICCV depends on the combination of the number of subscriptions sold to a customer, the average price per subscription and the prepaid term. Understanding the dependencies between the different elements of the CAC like the cost of a lead and the conversion ratio to customers will drive the overall marketing expense. The CLTV will depend on the ICCV, the expected renewals and the expected organic expansions less churn and will provide a strong indication about the scalability of the model.

The overall go-to-market system has four key elements:

1. The traffic creation that includes the online marketing (SEO,PPC, affiliates…) PR and others.

2. The registrations process whose target is to convert visitors to leads via the website, landing pages and targeted content.

3. The sale cycle that involves inside sales(hunters), sales scripts, webinar demos, the service itself and selling techniques

4. Renewals & expansions that utilize the customer success team(farmers), customer interaction via the web and of course the service itself.

All of these activities are supported by an analytics system that can drive continuous optimization of all four processes. It is critical to have managers responsible on each of the objectives of traffic, registration, selling, renewals & expansion with clear definition of the target objectives with a strong link to compensation.

I welcome your thought as this business is new and still developing.