Affiliate Marketing helps SaaS & Web Apps

What if you knew exactly what your Customer Acquisition Cost was going to be?

That is just one benefit of using Affiliate Marketing in SaaS to Accelerate your growth!

Find out the other benefits as Jack Born tells us How Affiliate Marketing helps SaaS & Web Apps in our conversation.

Did you know companies like AWeber, Evernote, Loop11, BigCommerce, SuccessFactors, LessAccounting, SurveyGizmo, and Unbounce are leveraging the power of the Affiliate Sales Channel to accelerate sales right now?

Whether you've considered creating an affiliate program for your SaaS or Web App - or not - or you currently have one, you NEED to watch my conversation with Jack Born.

Jack is the king of Affiliate Marketing and the go to guy that many of the top marketers turn to for finding and recruiting an affiliate salesforce, including World-Renowned Google Adwords expert, Perry Marshall.

Jack shares a TON of awesome information with us about how to get a MASSIVE online Salesforce working to send you customers.

- Lincoln
(972) 200-9317

The 7 Types of B2B SaaS Freemium

Freemium use in B2B software & SaaS / Web Apps / Cloud companies - startups or not - is evolving and I wanted to take note of where we are at today. Where we’ll be tomorrow I can’t tell you, but I guarantee it will be different.

Learn what the 7 Types of Freemium in SaaS are.

- Lincoln
(972) 200-9317

Was OfficeDrop forced into Freemium by Mobile App Users?

Healy Jones, VP Marketing at Officedrop, told me exactly how leveraging mobile apps made Freemium the right strategy for them.




>>> here's our conversation on SaaS Freemium

If you aren't familiar with OfficeDrop, it is a really cool SaaS startup out of Boston that started out with the ethos of "web only"... no installed software.

Healy goes into great detail about how they eventually started to use installed software on PCs and Macs to extend their cloud service - they have to integrate with peripherals like document scanners - and then moved into mobile device-native apps.

And that was what CHANGED EVERYTHING!

They realized mobile apps weren't just an extension of the product functionality, but also a distribution channel to new customers.

While that sounds great, what they found forced them to make some massive changes... including adopting the Freemium model.

Healy also goes into detail on how they avoid commoditization in their pricing - especially around storage - and the surprising results they saw when they added a Free plan to their pricing page... it was not what they expected to happen.

Then we round out this amazingly awesome and mind-blowing conversation with some ideas on how to fire up your Free Trial conversion rates.

This is an awesome interview that you will learn a SUPER HUGE TON from and I can't wait for you to watch it.

- Lincoln
(972) -200-9317

Your Product Won't Sell Itself! My Interview w/ Copywriting for Geeks Author Marc-Andre Cournoyer

Is Writing Good Sales Copy still Important? For SaaS & Web App companies it is EVEN MORE IMPORTANT than ever before!

With all of the noise out there, the better your sales copy the more likely you are to stand out from the crowd.

This is why I interviewed Marc-Andre Cournoyer, author of "Copywriting for Geeks" and have shared it with you on the Sixteen Ventures site.

In this interview Marc-Andre talks about how to get into a sales-oriented mindset, why "geeks" - or more technical-oriented folks - might not immediately gravitate toward wanting to "sell" their stuff... and why that is absolutely critical if you want any level of success with the products you build.

Marc-Andre goes on to talk about how good Sales Copy can help sell your products, exactly how he found out the importance of writing good copy and how it basically CHANGED HIS LIFE.

From reading his book, I know that Marc-Andre is as big a fan of Robert Cialdini's book "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion" (he does a great job of breaking down Cialdini's work and making it applicable to web copywriting in his Copywriting for Geeks book) as I am.

So during our discussion I asked him to give us an example of something you can do right now to improve your sales processes using some of the "Weapons of Influence" from Cialdini's book.

Marc-Andre takes the ball and runs with it, focusing on the Social Proof "weapon" and even shares some techniques to get that BEFORE you launch your product or service.

I hope you enjoy,

Lincoln
(972) 200-9317

Pricing Change & Freemium conversation with Assistly

Well... it has been a while since I blogged here, huh?

Earlier this week I interviewed Assistly's SVP, Marketing Matt Trifiro via Video Skype and he spilled his guts for you about why Assistly changed their SaaS pricing strategy, adopted Freemium, and set out to disrupt the market... all at the same time.

==> watch the ~40 minute interview here

Some of the things you'll learn from Matt in this 40 Minute interview

• Whether Assistly is just trying to acquire free users to sell to a company that will monetize them or are they using Freemium to drive revenue?
• What the #1 metric SaaS vendors must focus on for long-term success
• How to use behavior-driven In-App Marketing to effectively segment customers rather than up-front self-selecting market segmentation
• Why SaaS companies shouldn't look at Amazon Web Services as the sales model, but at the Amazon.com e-commerce
• How to create a system for pulling users into the app deeper to grow Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
• Why they moved away from tiered pricing
• How Assistly moved the pricing / buying decisions to further in the app and extended the "funnel" into the product
• And much more

There is also an .mp3 of the conversation on that page if you just want to download it and listen to the conversation on your iPod.

I hope you enjoy,

Lincoln

An Honest Response - Managing Expectations & the Fallacy of Deliverables

A potential client contacted Sixteen Ventures to ask for a consulting quote. After quickly providing them with a quote for a Quick Start session they came back with this question:

Thanks for this but before we can proceed I need to understand what we will achieve! I appreciate we will have to do a lot of the research/work, but in terms of developing and getting a handle on pricing and revenue forecasting for us. What will the end result be.?  How far along the road will this take us and what if any additional consultancy and cost is likely to be required.

This was a great question - and an obvious one that I had neglected to cover in the quote. I didn't appropriately manage expectations. So the following was my response... probably my most honest, from the heart response that really tells the whole story... and I thought I would share it. Guess what? They signed-on as a client. Enjoy...

Your questions make perfect sense. I wouldn't sign-up for something either without knowing exactly what I was going to get. While your question is straight-forward, unfortunately the answer is - I'm afraid - "it depends" - here's the straight dope...


There are two areas where we really add value:


1. Education - the "Ah-Ha!" moments we create for our clients that derive directly from our exposure to >100 SaaS companies – especially around Revenue Modeling and Pricing


2. Our position as an external 3rd party (with some market expertise, too) to ask "why are you doing it that way?" or "have you thought out doing it this way?"


All of the spreadsheets, reports, presentations, we've put together as deliverables are so violently trumped by the process of getting to that point - the process of exploring, educating, and discovering opportunities, markets, ideas, strategies, and tactics - as to simply be an afterthought. By the time the PDF hits the inbox of our client, the value has long-since been delivered... the final report is *simply* the fulfillment of a contractual obligation that the client insisted be a part of the engagement up front because that is how they are used to working. Consultants come in, listen, go back to their cave and come back with a report. No transparency into process, little value during, and *maybe* some value in the report. But often not - the final "deliverable" is just a cookie-cutter analysis they got paid to develop once that they did a search-n-replace to add your company name.


When we deliver something at the end it is literally a recap of everything we went through, covered, discovered, and uncovered during our engagement. Useful? Sure. Valuable - "it depends" - the value was created much earlier over the course of the engagement - its value is mostly as a form of archival tool.


So what can you expect from this type of engagement? Education  Guidance, Sage Advice, to have your underlying assumptions questioned (often the source of much of the homework), etc. How far down the road that gets you depends on many factors not the least of which is your willingness to accept someone questioning your progress and to engage in the process required to move you further down the road.


Honestly, though - we don't often move people down the road... we shove them into the ditch and make them really uncomfortable while they climb out. When they do climb out, they are often on a different road heading in a different direction, going after low-hanging fruit, recognizing new opportuntiies, etc. with the goal of eventually getting back on the road we pushed them off of. Often, one engagement is all you need with us... we've had some come back for a second one. We give you the tools you need to succeed on your own. I'd make a bad chiropractor - I fix you on the first visit! 

You should follow me on Twitter @lincolnmurphy

Thoughts on the Ending of the Sixteen Ventures Quick Start Program

At Sixteen Ventures we work with about 80% early-stage startups and 20% big companies - in terms of client volume. It is certainly offerings like the Quick Start program and Pricing Page Tune-Up™ services that lead to the disproportionate numbers of small startups vs. large clients. Of course we're pushing those heavily because these services give us an opportunity to help very early-stage companies that would otherwise not be able to afford guidance from a consulting company so deeply entrenched in the SaaS world. And we're building our future "big company" clients from the ground up. I happen to love this strategy and really enjoy working with the startup founders.

Startups that work with Sixteen Ventures get the benefit of working with a firm that is also working with the largest SaaS companies and the largest Legacy Software companies moving to SaaS. But it goes both ways - we also get to bring the lessons learned from the small, agile startups to the larger, slower legacy companies. We are in a great position to help both both ends of the market and it is my intention to keep it that way.

As you know, we announced that the Quick Start program is going away and we won't accept sign-ups after 7/18/2010, which means if you want to work with us in this way - if you think you can benefit from this - you must sign-up before then. You just have to sign-up before then - we will work with you on your schedule, at your pace.

But, the great news is that the Quick Start program will be replaced by multiple offerings more aligned with the way our startup clients want to work and the expected outcomes. I am VERY excited about these changes even though exactly what the new offerings will look like has yet to be determined.

If you like working with Sixteen Ventures, and me, in bite-sized pieces, think you would (and believe me - you would), or know of someone that would, sign-up for the Quick Start program before it ends on 7/18/2010 - we just don't know when the other offerings will become available and you don't want to miss out!

I'm @lincolnmurphy on Twitter