One of the subtleties is that a plan defines a billing relationship, a services relationship, and a marketing promise, and these three things do not necessarily have to sync with each other. This is very counterintuitive to most teams.
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Very, very few SaaS companies have a really good understanding of user behavior when those three actors are different people. It breaks *all sorts* of assumptions which are baked deeply into e.g. metrics tracking, etc.
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The simplest complicated adoption case, of which there are many variants: Team lead has a business need for something. They ask around the office. An IC suggests your software and signs up for a free trial. They loop in team lead, who makes buying decision.
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Team lead *probably* has a purchasing card (depends on your industry and geography) but very well might need to loop someone from IT or accounting in to actually buy the thing.
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Annual discounts: great for cash flow, even better for churn; if you price month-to-month you should almost certainly have them. The easiest offer is "1 month free"; 10% off or 15% off are easy to communicate, too, but uptake on these offers is similar in A/B testing, so...
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Easiest two variants on annual discounts: a) Do them, but also send people an email after they've activated (achieved material use of software) saying "Hey want free money? Upgrade to annual; save
$X." b) Do them, but also send an end-of-year promotion email about them.Show this thread -
The incentive for the end-of-year promotion email is (for relatively small businesses) booking the expense before end of year saves them a bit of money on taxes and (for relatively more sophisticated businesses) "Your budget: use it or lose it. Why not use it?"
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"Patrick, are you assisting people in defeating their purchasing departments?" *cough* Never. *cough* Really: $249/$499 exist as price points specifically to do security research about the bounds for no-signature-required p-card limits while allowing $10k+ software sales.
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(In related news, enterprise purchasing departments and enterprise sales are basically in an uneasy state of codependent evolution with each other. Their iterated game is ultimately prosocial, and neither can exist without the other, but they have to be tactically adversarial.)
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End of conversation
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You’re brilliant. I wish you’d capture these tweet storms in more permanent forms like blogs.
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And, in many cases, all of the above != the person who actually uses the SaaS
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