Bad SaaS nearly killed my fantasy football league

My fantasy football league has survived an NFL strike, pre-Internet scorekeeping, and 30 years of trash talk. But we were nearly sacked this season by lousy software.

A few years ago our league moved away from manually tabulating results. We got tired of checking the newspaper on Monday, Tuesday and sometimes Friday mornings, calculating scores with a calculator, updating the standings, adding the league Commissioner's colorful commentary, and mailing it out via U.S. Postal Service. (I did mention this league has been around for 30 years, right?)

We moved into the modern world with a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application that automatically keeps track of rosters, scoring and standings. We chose this particular web-based fantasy football league management application mostly for its simplicity. It had enough functionality for our purposes and, more important, it was easy to use. It was perfect for guys like me that spend less then 3 minutes per week on it, and only for 16 weeks per year. We've even been willing to pay an annual fee for the application to avoid the advertising clutter that comes with the “free” services.

Don't forget who you're selling to and why they buy from you

Apparently, our SaaS provider forgot about who they were selling to and why we were buying. Sometime in between last season and this one, they larded up their application with non-essential functions and a cluttered user interface. Lots of radio buttons and drop-down menus, a smattering of drag-and-drop, and an array of timers and alarms that didn't seem connected to any particular action.

Which brings me to our league's near-death experience. All these changes made it extremely difficult for us to conduct our player draft for the season. Only through extraordinary patience, an exhaustive search of the site’s FAQs, and lots of trial & error, did we finally complete the process... just moments before the start of the season.

Keep it simple and avoid surprises

Listen up, SaaS providers!

1. Don't load your application with lots of bloat-ware that most people don't use. One of the reasons people buy SaaS applications is because they're easy to learn and easy to use.

2. Keep user interfaces simple and easy to navigate. Avoid needless clutter. This is especially true for applications that are used only occasionally.

3. Avoid wholesale changes to the user interface. Make changes gradually. The SaaS delivery model makes smaller, more frequent releases practical.

4. If you are going to make major changes, provide your customers ample notice beforehand. Customers don't always like surprises.

5. Think about offering guidance to your customers on how to navigate the new interface or use the new features. Provide a short instructional video, for example.

6. Stay in touch with your customers. Listen to what they want and pay attention to what they do. The ability to monitor user behavior is one of the great advantages of SaaS.

A bad user interface is bad for business. If you make your product hard to use, you should expect lower revenues, a longer sales cycle, higher support costs, and lower retention.

An accessible user interface doesn't mean limited functionality

I'm not saying that you should omit necessary functionality. But if you think high functionality requires a complicated user interface, think again. At a Mass Innovation event earlier this month, I saw a sophisticated screen-sharing application, JoinMe, with a control panel that looks like something from an old cassette recorder. They called it “ridiculously simple,” and it was.

I’m happy to report that we did navigate our way through the SaaS provider's poor user interface and our Creep Football League lives on for another season. It’s too early to tell how my team, the Out-of-Staters, will fare, but we’re already looking at new SaaS solutions to manage the league.

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A post-script to this story. A few days after I published this post, Constant Contact, a SaaS provider I work with to publish a monthly newsletter, provided an excellent example of how to notify customers in advance of changes to the user interface.

Dear Peter,

As we told you recently, we've improved the editing tool that lets you create and format your email newsletters. You should see it in your account in the next few days.

Here are some things you should know beforehand:

Check out the tutorial and FAQ about the improvements so you can get a jump on using them. Important! Be sure to read our recommendation about copying some of your campaigns in the blue box to the right.

It looks a lot like the previous editor, so it should feel familiar to you. It's now just easier to use.

Just in case, we've set up a special dedicated support line for you to call if you have questions about copying your campaigns or using the editor. That number is 800-275-3019.

Again, you will have the new editor in your account very soon. Thank you for your patience as we bring this new improvement to you, and thank you for being our customer. We're here to help you get up to speed with a better way to build your emails.

Important note: Older browsers do not support some of the technologies used in the updated editor. For the best experience, if using IE or Firefox, please upgrade your browser to the latest version.

Sincerely,
The Constant Contact Team

SaaS let's you see where you're going

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts recently passed legislation prohibiting texting while driving. I’m hoping they’ll soon outlaw texting while walking.

I just came back from a short, but harrowing drive that took me past our town’s high school, just after the end of the school day. The scene reminded me of old episodes of Mr. Magoo - kids fixated on the small screens of their mobile phones, thumbing away furiously on the mini-keypad, while wandering obliviously across heavily-trafficked intersections.

On behalf of all my fellow parents and drivers, I wanted to yell, “Look up! There’s a real world out here, and if you’re not careful, it can really hurt.”

NIHITO

The same advice applies to marketers. You need to look up from the screen and talk to customers and prospects to understand what’s really going on. It can be too easy to focus entirely on what's happening inside your company. I know; I've been there. But as one particularly useful marketing course I've taken explained, “NIHITO”: “Nothing interesting happens in the office.”

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) should make it easier for marketers to avoid this hazard and closely observe customers’ behavior. Because customers are using the application online, it’s possible for marketers and others to see exactly what they’re doing. Though you need to be careful about observing individual behavior, you can see, in aggregate, which features customers are using and which are they avoiding. You can see periods of peak demand, identify particular kinds of users, and see other useful patterns. Along with whatever other analytic tools you're using, this information on product usage can be extremely useful. Don’t ignore it.

Executives at companies that have made the transition from an on-premise application to a SaaS solution point out that one of the most valuable benefits they’ve gained is a better understanding of their customers’ behavior and needs. They have established a much closer, ongoing relationship and a built-in feedback loop. They can much more easily track what's working and what's not.

The result is better focused product development, more attentive customer service, and more effective marketing. For the business, it means greater efficiency, lower customer acquisition costs, and higher renewals.

It also means you’re less likely to make mistakes. Or if you do make a misstep, at least you’ll see where you’re headed before you stumble into real danger.

SaaS marketing lessons from the New York Yankees

Connecticut has no major league baseball team of its own, so it splits its loyalties between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees. The boundary between Red Sox Nation and the Yankee Universe meanders through the state in a fuzzy line that runs roughly northwest from Old Saybrook to Canaan. I grew up on the New York side of the boundary, and am still a devoted Yankees fan… though I’ve lived in Boston for more than 25 years.

This long-standing dedication explains my recent pilgrimage to Yankee Stadium. (That, and the fact that getting tickets to see the Yankees play the Red Sox in Fenway Park in Boston is about as easy as securing a seat on the space shuttle.) Joined by two Red Sox fans (my son wearing his Youkilis jersey!), an Oriole fan and a fellow Yankee fan, I drove to the Bronx to see the Yankees play the Detroit Tigers in a day game.

I came back with a sunburn on my nose, a renewed appreciation for the new Yankee Stadium and – surprise - a couple lessons that are useful for software-as-a-service (SaaS) marketers.

Market the entire experience

Not being particularly familiar with the Bronx, I was worried about parking on game day. Not to worry. Immediately upon buying my tickets online, I was directed to a site to make parking arrangements. It automatically recognized the date we’d be attending a game, presented a selection of parking lots adjacent to the stadium, and allowed me to reserve and pay for a guaranteed parking spot.

Along with the bar-coded reserved parking permit, came driving directions, relieving me of my second concern: how do I get there?

And I received a reminder about parking and directions in an email the day before the game.

Someone within the Yankee organization has actually thought through the entire fan experience. It’s much more than the game that goes on between the foul lines. It extends into the parking lots and up the Major Deegan Expressway.

SaaS marketers should think the same way. The user’s experience with their solution is much broader than the features and functions that they’ve built into the product. It extends to the way the solution is sold, deployed, accessed, configured, supported, upgraded, and renewed. SaaS providers should market all of those benefits - the entire customer experience - as part of their value proposition.

Establish an on-going relationship

The day after the game, I received a “Thank you and Game Recap” email from the Yankees. It included the box score, links to video highlights, and a schedule of upcoming games. They also asked for feedback on my experience.

Lesson two for SaaS marketers: Stay in touch with your customers. Loyal, connected customers will provide useful input on product enhancements, serve as more valuable references and advocates, and will be more likely to renew their subscriptions.

By the way, the Yankees beat the Tigers that day, 11-5.

VP of Trust and other new SaaS titles

When I was an analyst with IDC, a very long time ago, I sat in on lots of vendor presentations on their products and strategy. Too many of them started off with a slide that identified precisely where the presenter and his group fit in the organization. It usually included a detailed topography, indicating the various direct and dotted-line reporting relationships within the department, within the division, within the group and eventually within the overall company. Managers reported to directors, reported to department vice-presidents, reported to division vice presidents, reported to group vice-presidents, ad infinitum.



The slide (actually an overhead foil) accompanying this discussion of "where we fit in the organization" usually depicted a complex "box and lines" organization chart. But for all its vastness and complexity, a 3-D model of the entire solar system situated within the Milky Way galaxy would have been more appropriate.

Having been exposed to this mind-numbing ritual so early in my career, you might understand why I'm afflicted with a bad case of MEGO ("my eyes glaze over") when it comes to corporate titles and organizational structure.

A Vice-President of Customer Experience

But my interest in corporate titles was piqued recently. Moderating a panel of cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS) industry CEOs at the AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford, the moderator, Jeff Kaplan of THINKstrategies, asked the participants to discuss cultural and organizational issues particular to SaaS. Swayne Hill of Cloud9 Analytics talked about the need to build a culture and organization that delivers a positive customer experience every single day. In line with that goal, he explained that, even before he hired a VP of Sales or a VP of Marketing, he brought on a "vice president of Customer Experience."

Given that for most SaaS companies, customer satisfaction and retention is vital to success, putting an executive in charge of delivering a high quality customer experience makes perfect sense.


In fact, the SaaS business model may require re-working a few other titles:

• The "Vice President of Customer Support" could be more aptly titled the "VP of Customer Retention." An important part of the job, after all, is about keeping customers satisfied so that they renew at the end of their subscription term. Most SaaS companies that can't renew a high percentage of their customers can't succeed.
  

• The traditional "Vice President of Marketing" role might be better re-labeled as the "VP of Trust." In a SaaS company, the job of marketing is essentially to build visibility and credibility among prospective customers in order to attract their interest and win their trust.

• The "Vice President of Product Development" role could be re-labeled as the "VP of User Experience." SaaS customers aren't buying just product features. They're signing up for the entire experience and they expect satisfaction throughout the entire life-cycle from purchase through deployment, configuration, use, and renewal.

• The "Vice President for Legal Affairs" or "Chief Counsel" might be better called the "VP for Expeditious Purchase." A good part of their role when it comes to contracts is keeping the purchase process simple and consistent.

• The "Vice President for Sales" is really more like the "VP of Care & Feeding." Because SaaS companies need to be especially frugal with their spending on customer acquisition, successful selling means carefully and cost-effectively cultivating and nurturing prospects through the sales pipeline. Maintaining an army of sales reps and sales support engineers is an expense that many SaaS companies cannot afford.

In the SaaS model, not only should certain titles change as job functions change, but some departments might best be merged into others or eliminated entirely. This whole issue of org charts is getting a whole lot more interesting.

Putting Marketing in "The Pit" is bad for SaaS

I used to work in a place called "The Pit." I wasn't serving ribs and pulled pork at a barbecue joint that wandered north into New England. I was actually with one of the large mini-computer companies they used to populate the ring between Route 128 and Route 495 around Boston. The company put all of us marketing types into the far end of the building into a cube-filled area that was a 1/2 level below grade. I walked down 8 steps to get there, and the windows looked out directly into mulch and tulip stems.

Before it was occupied by the mini-computer maker, the building housed a brewery; I suspect "The Pit" was the loading dock.

Not only were we half-underground, but we were isolated from other departments. Sales was on a different floor. Customer support was in a different building. Product development was in a different town.

Isolating marketing from the rest of the organization surely didn't help the prospects for the mini-computer company. (They disappeared years ago, and the building is now occupied by a medical device manufacturer.) But that kind of organizational separation would be especially bad for a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company.

Marketing connected to Sales and to Product Development

The need for a close connection between marketing and sales is critical to cost-effective customer acquisition. This will likely be a SaaS company's largest single on-going expense and efficiently converting leads into opportunities into wins is essential to success. That requires close coordination between marketing and sales.

But there are other necessary connections beyond the obvious one between marketing and sales. SaaS companies typically enhance their solutions more frequently than on-premise solutions, so a closer relationship is needed between product development and marketing. Marketing needs to know what's coming through the pipeline. For one thing, that helps them handle the accelerated product introduction calendar. But it also lets marketing share the product roadmap as part of the effort to win the trust of prospective customers.

Product Development connected to Customer Support

And there are groups besides marketing that need to be tightly wound into this web. The SaaS model works better when the product development group is well-connected to the customer support group. They'll have a better understanding of customer needs and can respond more quickly and accurately with product enhancements. It's one of the key benefits for companies moving from on-premise to a SaaS subscription model.

Sales connected to Legal

The sales group would do well to be closely connected to the legal department. Under the SaaS subscription model, sales delayed through protracted contract negotiations amount to lost revenues. Sales executives should clearly understand the standard contract and know which items are negotiable and which aren't.

I could draw out other connections across different departments, but you get the point. Successful SaaS companies requires close coordination across the entire organization. Isolating groups from one another is a bad idea, especially if you shove one of them into "The Pit."

Too many choices aren't necessarily a good thing

Because of the unusually warm weather here in the Northeast, my neighbor's farm has already started harvesting corn this summer. They plant different varieties throughout the season, carefully timing each planting to ensure that one or another variety is available from mid-summer into October. Earlier this month, they were harvesting a butter & sugar variety called "Temptation." This week, they started bringing in "Montauk." I don't know what's they'll bring in after that.

Whatever they're picking at the time, I buy it.

Not so with the lettuce, though. All the varieties seem to come in at the same time. Standing in front of open crates of green leaf, red leaf, oak leaf, romaine, buttercrunch, bibb, Boston, black-seeded Simpson - never mind the escarole, dandelions and other roughage - I'm stumped.

Too many choices. It's not always a good thing for farm stands... or for software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers.

Too many choices makes it more difficult to buy

SaaS is confusing enough as it is. In case you doubt this, peak into the over-heated debates about the precise definition of SaaS that erupt every few weeks on discussion boards. Adding to that confusion with lots of options doesn't help.

When prospects are confused, they usually don't buy. Or at least they don't buy until they are educated and not confused.

Collateral that explains the basics of SaaS to uninitiated procurement professionals can be very helpful. (See "Getting deals unstuck from legal and procurement.")

Better yet, keep it simple. Avoid the temptation to create a multi-page menu enumerating every possible permutation of feature, delivery mode, support option, installation method, ad nauseam.

Revenue now beats revenue later

Delayed purchases aren't good for any vendor, but they're especially harmful for SaaS providers. Under the SaaS business model, the costs of acquiring a customer are paid up-front, while the revenue comes in over the life of the subscription. The wider that gap between up-front payments and stretched-out revenues, the greater the strain on cash flow and the need for deep pockets.

Besides delaying purchases, too many options can also make it more difficult to support a SaaS application. If each customer has a unique configuration, it's more difficult and costly to maintain each customer. Upgrades, conducted one at a time, are a nightmare. The potential advantage of maintaining a standard deliverable, deployed to all customers, is squandered.

With too many options, something is likely to fall through the cracks for some number of customers. The result: customer dissatisfaction and lower renewals. Most SaaS providers can't survive low renewals. (See "SaaS Renewals and the Multiplier Effect.")

Believe me, as a marketer, I understand the appeal of "choice." Thirteen varieties of freshly-picked lettuce, displayed side-by-side, are beautiful. But I usually end up just buying the corn.

Greta Garbo would be a poor SaaS marketer

I read an article this morning about Greta Garbo, the famously taciturn actress from the 1920s and 30s. Her closely guarded privacy is so different from most of today's actors, musicians, athletes and celebrity chefs, who use Facebook and Twitter to skillfully cultivate a broad audience of "friends" and "followers," by letting the world in on their every thought.

Personally, I'm more comfortable with the Greta Garbo approach. On personal matters, I try to be careful about sharing "too much information."

This reticence doesn't really work for businesses, though, and it's especially inappropriate for most software-as-a-service (SaaS) businesses.

Quite to the contrary, SaaS providers can often benefit from more sharing. Social media can be used very effectively to communicate with customers, prospects, analysts, and even employees about the company's plans. These companies should be actively using LinkedIn discussion groups, blogs, and other communication vehicles.

These newer forms of communication are particularly useful because they allow a conversation between the company and the customer. Unlike more traditional press announcements or web site postings, which are one-way proclamations, blogs and discussion groups allow comments and interactions. The audience can talk back.

I also like the more personal nature of these conversations. The participants sound like real people, not disembodied corporate entities. They have personalities.

If you listen, you can learn something

Participating in these on-going conversations can help SaaS companies in a few ways.

For one, they can help a company establish trust with its audience. As I've written about before, in subscribing to SaaS solutions, customers aren't really buying a product; they're buying a promise. This requires that the customer trust the SaaS vendor to deliver the service reliably, protect the customer's data, provide support, and enhance the service regularly. (See "Winning customer trust.") When done openly and honestly, talking and sharing usually helps a vendor build that trust.

An open conversation can also help a SaaS company to build better products. The feedback gained from customers and prospects can be used to enhance existing services or develop new ones. Think of the conversation as a kind of electronic suggestion box. Remember, of course, that someone should actually read and respond to the suggestions.

I've heard executives who have moved their companies from a traditional on-premise model to SaaS explain that one of the most valuable and unexpected benefits has been their ability to better understand what users want and to respond more quickly and accurately.

An open and on-going conversation between the SaaS provider and its customers can also boost the likelihood of renewals. The business model for most SaaS companies depends on high renewals to recover the initial customer acquisition costs. (See "SaaS renewals and the multiplier effect.") Conversations provide a mechanism to discuss forthcoming enhancements, service changes, or other plans under consideration. It shows customers a roadmap so they can make their own plans. It can give the SaaS provider a heads-up if there's likely to be push-back on proposed changes. And by the way, don't be at all surprised to hear candid negative feedback, along with the plaudits.

I've worked with a number of SaaS companies to take advantage of these new mechanisms to open and maintain a conversation with their customers, prospects and others. They do it not because it's cool and makes them feel like celebrities. They do it because it has a measurable positive impact on their business.

Greta Garbo was a wonderful actress, but probably would have been a lousy SaaS marketer.