SaaS University consists of five tracks currently broken into 29 online courses.
These sessions provide some of the best and most timely discussions and analyses of building and sustaining Below is the current curriculum.
Imagine you are at work. It is nine in the morning and you have a meeting scheduled at noon across town. Your car, just as it does every morning, has checked with the calendar on your phone and is monitoring traffic data as you go about your day. When it notices major delays on your typical route it searches for the best alternative. Once it finds the best option, it sends an alert to your phone and computer to advise you that traffic conditions will require you to leave 15 minutes early in order to make your meeting on time. When you get in your car to leave, the alternate route is already loaded and ready to go.
Consumers are increasingly demanding this integrated device experience, and in order to achieve it we need a paradigm shift away from viewing devices as individual worlds unto themselves and start thinking about them as mobile nodes within a much larger information network that can harness the power of Big Data.
This eye-opening session will provide a future into the new world of connected devices and their integration into the Cloud.
For SaaS companies, it is no longer an option to ignore the value of user-facing analytics. Your customers want access to meaningful data within the product they regularly use, and with Cloud BI, it has never been easier or faster to bring it to them.
Successful data-driven companies improve customer retention, create competitive differentiation, and close more business by giving customers answers to pressing business questions with embedded analytics.
For ISVs, embedding analytics into their product are growing at a faster rate due to higher customer retention, larger average deal sizes and broader adoption of their product across an entire enterprise. ISVs are seeing returns on their investment quickly that impact not only the bottom line but the way they operate as a business.
Join Eileen Boerger, CEO at CorSource Technology Group to learn how to develop an ROI-focused embedded Business Intelligence strategy. Key takeaways include:
SaaS systems, by their very nature, create communities of customers who can collectively interact with each other and your company on a 24/7/52. In SaaS, the application is the social network. But to benefit from it, you must prepare to manage and leverage the application network to the maximum extent. Failure to do so will first damage, then destroy, your ability to compete successfully in SaaS.
This course will examine in detail the potential power of SaaS communities and explore:
This topic and session is of critical importance to all SaaS companies. Plex systems understanding of the value of community has allowed the company to transform its development group into a profit center. The company manages over 100K feature request per year and does it without traditional product management.
Watch and learn from one of the most interesting and timely sessions you’ll ever attend.This topic and session is of critical importance to all SaaS companies.
Customer churn rates, freemium conversion rates, infrastructure costs, customer acquisition expenses along with other metrics combine to drive the success of your SaaS business.
Measuring and improving the right metrics can help focus a business on the key issues. Spending time tracking and improving the wrong metrics can drive your business in the wrong direction or at best waste time. In this session you will learn:
You will also learn about the operational metrics needed at both the company and functional level to drive good overall results and improvement of the key overall metrics. SaaS companies should be measured differently than traditional ISVs and understanding this can make the difference between success and failure with your first SaaS offerings. Learn about the differences.
Using improvement targets and metrics can be a great tool to improve your business. Case studies will be presented which give examples of how SaaS companies have used measurement and metrics to improve their business. There are also many tools available to measure various aspects of a SaaS business and some examples of these will be discussed.
If you are interested in things like why it makes sense to measure customer churn separately from account growth when looking at revenue metrics or want to understand how to measure customer engagement and its relationship to churn this is a course you need to take.
Customer churn rates, freemium conversion rates, infrastructure costs, customer acquisition expenses along with other metrics combine to drive the success of your SaaS business.
Measuring and improving the right metrics can help focus a business on the key issues. Spending time tracking and improving the wrong metrics can drive your business in the wrong direction or at best waste time. In this session you will learn:
You will also learn about the operational metrics needed at both the company and functional level to drive good overall results and improvement of the key overall metrics. SaaS companies should be measured differently than traditional ISVs and understanding this can make the difference between success and failure with your first SaaS offerings. Learn about the differences.
Using improvement targets and metrics can be a great tool to improve your business. Case studies will be presented which give examples of how SaaS companies have used measurement and metrics to improve their business. There are also many tools available to measure various aspects of a SaaS business and some examples of these will be discussed.
If you are interested in things like why it makes sense to measure customer churn separately from account growth when looking at revenue metrics or want to understand how to measure customer engagement and its relationship to churn this is a course you need to take.
Customer churn rates, freemium conversion rates, infrastructure costs, customer acquisition expenses along with other metrics combine to drive the success of your SaaS business.
Measuring and improving the right metrics can help focus a business on the key issues. Spending time tracking and improving the wrong metrics can drive your business in the wrong direction or at best waste time. In this session you will learn:
You will also learn about the operational metrics needed at both the company and functional level to drive good overall results and improvement of the key overall metrics. SaaS companies should be measured differently than traditional ISVs and understanding this can make the difference between success and failure with your first SaaS offerings. Learn about the differences.
Using improvement targets and metrics can be a great tool to improve your business. Case studies will be presented which give examples of how SaaS companies have used measurement and metrics to improve their business. There are also many tools available to measure various aspects of a SaaS business and some examples of these will be discussed.
If you are interested in things like why it makes sense to measure customer churn separately from account growth when looking at revenue metrics or want to understand how to measure customer engagement and its relationship to churn this is a course you need to take.
Iovation processes over 7 million transactions per day which are fed into an OEM’d Reporting system. In this presentation Kurk will go over the environment that we have set up to allow us to grow to keep up with the business as well as be highly-available.
Iovation recently completed a project to upgrade their reporting system from a single Oracle database using WebFocus 7 to a multi-datacenter, multi-server Postgres backend with WebFocus 8. This reporting system is used for external reporting to customers and for internal use as well.
We’ll review some of the reports that we produce for our customers and the reports/portal that we use internally. We all have challenges and Kurk will speak to some of the ones that we have and discuss the future plans for reporting.
Dyn CTO Cory Von Wallenstein has done the research and found there is a much higher return on investment if you prevent your customers from leaving.
For example, Von Wallenstein found that Dyn had a recapture rate of 73 % on Monday through Friday but that percentage dipped to 56% on Saturday and Sunday. Despite this, many of Dyn’s services expired on the weekend. It was a quick fix to change this so they expired during the week, thereby increasing renewals.
He will then discuss the different strategies he implemented to combat these problems that led to great financial success. These strategies can work for any SaaS business to increase revenue and profitability.
Your free trialists and paying customers are talking to you with every action they take (or don’t take) when they use your SaaS application. They are telling you:
The beauty of SaaS is that you can actually listen and respond. By instrumenting your application, you can collect detailed usage and business event data and analyze it. During this session, we will provide examples of how SaaS organizations today are gaining this insight and how they are leveraging it to better serve their customers, focus their development efforts, and improve their product and profitability.
Getting your enterprise SaaS agreements closed can sometimes make the difference between an ok quarter and a great quarter. However, these deals are getting harder and harder to negotiate and close. So what do you do?
This course examines negotiating strategies and provides many practical tips/techniques that should dramatically help get these deals signed. There are no guarantees, but there are methods to dramatically speed up this process.
Sure, SaaS and other cloud services offer a wealth of opportunities – but along with those opportunities come a few potentially nasty legal risks. Service providers can minimize their legal risks by taking certain precautions and using a simple, well-drafted customer agreement (and no, not a recycled software license agreement).
This session will answer questions such as the following:
By the end of this course, you’ll understand cloud legal issues better than most lawyers do!
aaS and mobile applications in some cases address different markets but in others combine and converge. In this session, Jan Aleman, CEO of Servoy, analyzes:
Four separate, real case studies detailing how SaaS and mobile companies met challenges in the areas of:
Moving to SaaS and/or mobile? Then you’re going to have to rewrite your software whether you want to or not. How do you manage the process without driving your company’s collective brain insane? How did one SaaS company succeed in this strategy?
Analyzing the costs and risks of transitioning. If you decided to build your new system from scratch, you’re the main technology provider. Are you up to the task? Can you get it done in a timely fashion? Go the outsource and third party component route and you’re now orchestrating an effort you don’t totally control. Where are the main risks? How did our case study reduce them?
Facing the fact that you’re wrong when you think your UI is a thing of beauty and a great fit to mobile or SaaS applications. It’s not. How did one of your peers deal with this ugly reality?
The changing demographics you’ll need to face when you move to SaaS and mobile markets. And the growing SaaS/mobile connection. Will you repeat the experience of the on-premise firm that built a SaaS version of their product, almost by accident brought it to market, and signed up a thousand new customers in 90 days?
Or can you do better?
Michael Reeves and Kenneth Gee of BDO will provide an update on current revenue recognition rules and best practices associated with SaaS providers. It will provide a foundation in the basic accounting model and also discuss current trends important to all using a SaaS model.
Vital financial information for any SaaS firm.
Choosing a CRM is unfortunately not a simple task.The most fundamental issue is the balance of features/capabilities with ease of use which will determine success or failure for the implementation.
In this presentation we will discuss the most important aspects to consider when choosing a new Sales/Marketing management system for your company. Key topics that will be covered include:
The ongoing migration of CRM systems to the cloud and the most popular choices available.
Selecting the right marketing, sales, and operations tools that best fit the way your company does business is not a decision that should be taken lightly.This fascinating presentation will name names and enable you to make the right decision the first time.
In this session, Chris Holbert, CEO of SecuraTrac will focus on how SecuraTrac designed and developed their mobile health and safety apps. Specifically, he will review how SecuraTrac approached the development of their apps and selected the right architecture.
The design considerations span such areas as customer usability to security of personal health information and feature delivery to regulatory constraints. The architectural decisions that must be made are greatly influenced by the decisions made during the design phase and often are affected by the decisions to be made around how the app will be marketed, sold and supported.
Will the features be delivered entirely by the app or will they be delivered from the cloud using the app as the gateway to the cloud-based features or will you employ a hybrid architecture.
What is the best architecture for your app and for your service?
The session will examine SecuraTrac’s:
A powerful look into the future for your company.
The growth of SaaS is shaking up software user design in ways not seen since the introduction of the graphic user interface (GUI) to the masses by Apple and the first Macintosh.
Many SaaS companies when making the transition to SaaS make the mistake of simply porting their existing applications to SaaS via various approaches such as terminalization, virtualization, and abstraction layers that provide an on-demand infrastructure on which an existing application interface is hastily placed.
This course will examine the direct and negative impact “old school” UI design can have on your bottom line. Detailed before and after case studies will analyze:
If you’re currently transitioning to a new SaaS system attendance at this session is a must.
Transitioning to SaaS is not a one-time, all-or-nothing event. Even in a simple scenario with one product, an ISV must manage a dichotomy of customers: its new/transitioned SaaS customers vs. its existing on-premise, licensed software customers. This complexity increases dramatically when an ISV has multiple products, each of which may leverage different GTM, pricing, delivery & technology models.
In this session, enterprise SaaS strategist Stephen Williams will examine how ISVs can continually manage their entire portfolio of products to deliver the optimal mix of business models given constantly evolving markets.
Topics include:
A valuable session of particular interest to companies who need to manage dual on-premise/SaaS product lines.
Building and growing a SaaS business requires a deliberate strategy around leveraging a connected operations model to gain insights into customer, business and product interaction.
SaaS businesses are increasingly buying into the benefit of analytics, but struggle when it comes to the specifics of what to measure, the specific customer interaction points to measure these at and how to integrate the various sub systems like lead management, billing, support and the product itself to bring a unified view of the SaaS operations.
Over the last 4 years of building SaaS applications in a B2B environment, it has become clear to that having this unified view of operational metrics is a critical element to scaling SaaS business to drive high CMRR and lower Churn.
During this session, Opstera founder and CTO Ranjith Ramakrishan will analyze and explain how successful SaaS companies can:
In the Softletter SaaS Report, 79% of SaaS companies reported they had integrated analytics into their services. Learn how to use the inherent power of SaaS analytics to strengthen your business and revenue.
As any SaaS executive can tell you, it is vital to make your customers successful otherwise they will not renew their subscriptions agreements and a high churn rate will put you out of business quickly. The question we often get is how do best-in-class SaaS firms ensure lower churn rates and higher levels of customer satisfaction?
In this session you will learn how leading SaaS firms are increasingly focused on building and delivering products to their customers that are not only fast to adopt but also easy to consume.
Key topics covered in this course include:
Montclare in this course also provides tactics and real world examples of how SaaS companies have not only created products that are easy to adopt but also training services that have been designed to increase retention and encourage consumption.
Softletter’s SaaS research provides the industry with the standards and benchmarks by which SaaS technology providers measure their business operations and compare their financial and operating metrics against their peers.
During this presentation, Softletter managing editor Rick Chapman will examine key metrics dealing with:
And much more.
For most SaaS, companies the most underutilized asset is their current customer base. When we review financial statements, only 10% to 20% of the revenue is coming from current customers; this should be much higher.
Often messaging focused on customers is how to use or benefit from their existing service. We will discuss messaging and offers that help you customers expand their horizon and buy additional solutions and services. Your customers or four times more likely to buy from you than a new prospect.
In this presentation, we will focus on breakthrough ideas that you can implement today to upsell and cross-sell your customers and significantly grow your revenue by 50%.
This presentation is divided into three areas:
How do you make it easy for your customers to opt-in?
Customers have very different needs and expectations that your prospects. We’ll demonstrate how to make it easy it easy for your customers to say “yes” to your up sell or cross sell offers while simultaneously reduce the sales effort required to close the add-on sale.
What steps, once executed, will sustain this ongoing revenue stream for your company? We’ll provide you a visual, step-by-step map that you can follow to execute your customer upsell program and ensure that your customers are receiving the maximum value from your solutions, services and your company.
Finally, we’ll discuss an exciting new book for technology companies, Consumption Economics, that will change the way you organize around and engage your customers.
For software companies used to large implementation contracts, shocks await you in SaaS. Professional services are not as highly valued by your customers and there are critical differences between on-premise enterprise software and SaaS professional services implementations.
This session will analyze:
This course will prepare you to understand how to effectively provide and profit with professional services in SaaS.
Professional Services in SaaS is a very different proposition from the one found in on-premise software. Margins are lower. Revenues for most companies for sales of professional services.
Turn around on projects must be faster. Companies aren’t interested in seeing professional services personnel from your company hanging around in unoccupied cubicles for months at a time.
The good news is that the SaaS model opens up new vistas in services. In this session, Tim Diassi of UnicornHRO will share his firm’s experiences in opening up these vistas and profiting from new opportunities in services.
One of the biggest issues for SaaS vendors is developing the right compensation models to motivate channel partners and salespeople. In an on-premise world this is easy – pay them a margin or a commission when you collect your license fee.
Indirect Channels
Direct sales
This session will help you manage the new issues presented by reseller channels in the cloud, manage channel conflict, and optimize your channel sales compensation operations.
Another fast, enthusiastic and content-rich presentation from Chanimal! Covers the essential phases of creating a SaaS reseller channel including:
Channels can provide the greatest returns ever–find out how. If you want to increase your sales and multiply your chance of channel success with SaaS–then you need to attend this session.
Freemium has worked for some companies to build sales and revenue, but is it right for you?
Join Prezi Growth Hacker Jack Mardack for an action-packed session where he will lay out whether or not Freemium will work for you, and if it will work for you, what works and what doesn’t.
To survive and thrive, SaaS businesses must maximize the efficiency of their pre-sales activity and the impact of their post-sale customer engagement and marketing. One powerful tool for combating high sales costs, low retention rates, and sub-par upsell/cross-sell performance is the behavior-based triggered campaign. These triggered campaigns use the knowledge gained through observed behavior of groups of customers and prospects to target those audiences with more compelling messages. This session will provide a framework for identifying the triggered campaign or campaigns that will have the biggest impact on your top- and bottom-line and will provide real-world examples including:
Case studies from SaaS companies who have successfully executed trigger campaigns will be highlighted during this course.
Selling and delivering SaaS solutions require a different approach from a traditional on-premise or perpetual licensing model. You need to align your compensation strategies with your new business model. Key factors are:
From a Sales perspective, you need to compensate your sales personnel while managing cash flow. You need to take into account different compensation models and approaches based on your company’s growth and development stage. Do you want to pursue multi-year deals and increase cash flow up front? How are you going to motivate your sales force to do so without giving away the store?
Do not forget service delivery. How are you positioning your services offerings based on your product maturity? How do you appropriately transition your services organization from a traditional time and materials methodology to a packaged or subscription model so you can adequately motivate your service team while amply enabling your customers?
Lastly, but definitely not the least important is ensuring renewals and customer loyalty. How do you ensure after you acquire your new customers and enable them in your solutions that they continue to renew? This is probably the most important factor given in a SaaS model you are pricing over a duration of time versus receiving all the cash up front.
Do you have a salesforce? If so, this course is a must “attend.”
At last your company gets the call you have been dreaming about: one of your high-profile customers want to talk about standardizing on your software and may want to install it behind their firewall. Until now most of your big deals have been around 50 seats or so and have been remotely hosted. The head of sales is excited but you want to make sure you’re so you don’t leave money on the table.
When you get “the call” will you be ready? Have you laid the right groundwork? Is your discount schedule suitable? Do you have the right package of product and services? Do you know which terms to stand firm on and which to concede?
This presentation will help you more effectively price, package and negotiate the big B2B SaaS deal so you can do the deal faster and more profitably.
Established by respected technology journalist and writer Jeffrey Tarter in the 1980s, Softletter’s target audience has always been senior management at leading software and SaaS firms.