SaaS: Who’s Driving Your Community?
People say that marketing for “cloud services” are really over the top right now – selling a lot more promise than can be delivered. If that’s true, social media is somewhere out in the stratosphere of hype – pushed into orbit by leaders like Twitter and Facebook - I’ve heard many people say if they were trying to avoid reading yet another article on the wonders of connecting to “communities” on the web.
If that’s the case for you – I hope you’ll set your prejudice aside and listen to our podcast this month on Haut Tech Conversations. You can download the show and listen to it at your leisure. Our guest was Jonathan Hyland, the Client Relationship Director for iCIMS, a leading SaaS provider of “Talent Management Systems.” Jonathan is deep in the trenches of the user community at iCIMS because he is responsible for managing the client renewal pipeline, user satisfaction, user advocacy, and maintaining visibility of the value proposition their services deliver.
I enjoyed this conversation because social media is still a widely misunderstood subject among SaaS and Cloud Service providers. Many see everything social as an unnecessary and noisy “distraction” that is a waste of resources and time. I understand their point of view because if they come from traditional software marketing, support, and sales environment, they are part of a legacy that rarely focused on end-users or tried to foster communications among them. And if you’ve ever tried to sip from the Twitter fire hose, you can probably understand their discomfort with jumping on the band wagon.
We covered the many sides of communities in SaaS including:
- Inbound Marketing – Getting found by vertical and best practice communities while building up a presence for your brand and the services it provides.
- Marketing to the Converted – Retaining subscription renewals, up-selling, and evangelizing your existing end-users and the key stakeholders that drive client adoption.
- Product Management – The balancing act that comes from involving end-users in driving product development without crossing into crowd-sourcing and losing your strategic direction.
- Support - Leveraging the community to provide best practices and support while continuing to be strongly involved in providing assistance and guidance.
And finally – how a community relations director can keep from looking like a product shill, serve user needs, retain subscriptions keep the sales funnel full and have time to take off for vacation in a 24/7 product world.
I think the take away from this conversation was very interesting and I don’t want to spoil it for you – but we found that “being social” is a lot more hands-on and face-to-face than you might think. It really is still true you need to be balanced between social tools and more traditional face to face approaches than you might think.
Joining Jonathan on our panel was Jessie Kliza, the Business Development Director for Apprenda and Peter Cohen of SaaS Marketing Strategy Advisors, who also happens to be one of our fraternity of Haut Tech Irregulars.
Our Special Guest -
Jonathan Hyland, M.A., PHR – Client Relationship Director at iCIMS. Jonathan has a background in Industrial and Organizational Psychology, graduated with honors from Monmouth and finished his graduate work at Hofstra University. He started as an intern at Questus but moved up quickly when he came to iCIMS. He now carries responsibility for managing the client renewal pipeline and upsell opportunities, ensuring client satisfaction with internal advocacy, and the development of marketing materials covering the value proposition of the iCIMS platform. In that role, he works with user communities at all levels for iCIMS. You can find Jonathan most days on Twitter and read some of his thoughts on his jaHRd blog.
Our Panel –
Jesse Kliza – Director of Marketing at Apprenda, the creators of SaaSGrid, a distributed SaaS platform that eliminates the difficulties of building and delivering Software as a Service. Prior to joining Apprenda, Jesse was Community Evangelist and Product Manager at SaaS ISV, Autotask. Among Jesse’s many contributions while at Autotask, he was responsible for the creation and oversight of the Autotask Community – which won a coveted ITSMA Marketing Excellence award in 2008. Jessie can be found on SaaSBlogs, Appenda’s best practice blog for the SaaS community and his Twitter feed.
For those who are not aware of SaaSGrid, it is a service that greatly reduces the barrier to entry for SaaS by overcoming significant technical hurdles like multi-tenancy and grid scalability, while at the same time providing “out of the box” application services like metering and monetization, billing and subscriber management, and much more. Scio is a Premier Development and Implementation Partner for SaaSGrid.
Peter Cohen - Peter is the founder and managing partner of
SaaS Marketing Strategy Advisors. His firm provides expert guidance to help companies effectively market and sell software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions to enterprises. The firm’s clients includes several large, well-established clients, looking to enhance their SaaS marketing practices, as well as smaller companies that need guidance in launching a new SaaS solution to the market.
Peter has more than 25 years’ experience developing and implementing successful marketing strategies for technology companies, including Computervision, Lotus Development, IBM, and Authoria. Peter has spoken on the topic of SaaS Marketing for the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council, and written for widely-distributed publications including MarketingProfs. He publishes a monthly newsletter and a blog, both entitled “Practical Advice on SaaS Marketing.”
So – you can download the show, you can subscribe to our feed on iTunes or use the widget below. And if you would like to comment here or catch me on Twitter – we’re always interested in extending the conversation.
