Subscriptions, Social and CRM
“Who is the customer?” It’s a great question and one that my managers liked to ask when I was a young sales representative. Like all great questions, it got to the meat of the matter with an economy of words that impressed as much by the brevity as for the meaning. The customer’s identity is [...]
Sense and Respond, Operating a Social Business
Over the past several years I’ve spent quite a bit of time looking at the impact of several change factors, including the application of social web driven ideas into business, the impact of mobile, cloud, and socialytics and a few…
SAP, Ariba, and SuccessFactors — By the Numbers
Please excuse our back-of-the-napkin math, but while we’re waiting on hold to join the SAP/Ariba analyst call, we thought we’d share some quick arithmetic on SAP’s recent cloud transactions.
SuccessFactors
2011: 1,578 employees, sal…
Facebook’s Next Business Model
VC Chris Dixon muses in a recent post that Facebook has yet to uncover a business model that will support its IPO valuation and drive future growth in that valuation. As he puts it: Facebook relies on an old internet business model: display ads. Display ads generally hurt the user experience, and are also not [...]
"Late" to the Cloud?
It’s a statement that I hear often lately, as more traditional software vendors start to invest in cloud computing, that they’re "late to the cloud". Of course many of those who are saying it are "pure play" SaaS vendors that…
Freemium Mechanics
I read an interesting blog post by Ruben Gamez titled Why Free Plans Don’t Work. If you are interested in freemium business models or any of the variations on the theme, this is well worth reading however I take issue with a couple of points. First and foremost, Gamez uses a statistics breakdown (in %) [...]
CLV, Cohort Analysis, and Survival Curves
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is an important metric in any SaaS business, it explains the potential for profitability and more directly the extent to which a company should spend to acquire customers, measured as Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). Custora is a company that provides an analytics platform specific to customer value and survival, which is [...]
Online Business Model Innovation
The Internet is enabling some very innovative and creative twists on traditional business models. Back in the day (you know, 1995ish) businesses made money simply by selling a product or service directly or perhaps indirectly through a distribution partner. Value…
The Cloud, ERP and the Channel Partners
Cloud solutions are impacting application software ecosystems. Channel partners will need to change several aspects of their businesses to optimize their revenues and profits.
Time to Ask the Adult Questions for Social Business
You all know uber-smart Sameer Patel. If you don’t, you must. He tweeted something yesterday that stuck with me through my excellent meetings and phone conversations (if I talked to you yesterday, please consider yourself thanked for restoring my faith in technology and business – it was a most awesome day as Bill & Ted [...]
