by Dan Corcoran, Chief Technology Officer, Chief Information Security Officer, VP Sales Enablement
Software as a Service – aka SaaS – has been around for years and is one of the most popular software delivery models out there, allowing businesses to easily access cloud-based apps over the Internet. Getting started with SaaS is straightforward: You just need to buy a license or sign a subscription agreement with a reputable cloud service provider.
But then comes the hard part: configuring and customizing the app to match your unique business needs. The problem is the effort can eat up a lot of your staff time and often require outside experts – and then the final product may not even do the job you want it to do.
We’d like to propose a better alternative to Software as a Service. We call it Services as Software and we think it’s the best way to arm your sales teams with powerful tools to build case studies, ROI calculations, and other “value assessments” that can help you win more deals.
Climbing the learning curve
I’ve often seen B2B companies purchase traditional SaaS-based sales enablement solutions and then regret the decision later. The apps may look good on paper, but then you quickly discover how much upfront research and analysis you really need to get the right data and produce the right content to build a convincing case study.
Even with low- or no-code SaaS solutions, you still need to climb a steep learning curve before you can create a usable sales enablement tool for your sales teams. Even then, you may have limited ability to include complex business logic that’s not supported by the software, reducing the tool’s power and flexibility. Also, once you build a SaaS tool, it takes time and effort to update, administer and support it.
Turning SaaS upside down
In our approach, instead of starting with a software app, you start with services — like a consulting engagement — to zero in on your prospect’s business needs, how your products can help, and what the probable business outcomes for your customer would look like. When that critical and foundational step is completed, now you are ready to build a sales enablement software tool, such as a web-based ROI or value calculator.
Because this method relies on an initial in-depth services engagement, the result is a selling tool that — compared to traditional SaaS apps — better captures the business value your products can deliver, complete with all the industry-specific complexities and competitive nuances your prospects face. It can underpin a uniquely powerful case study or value assessment that can boost win rates and renewals. These early interactions with your customer to gather data and insights can also lead to a deeper business partnership that pays dividends over time.
Productivity boost
To create case studies and ROI estimates for prospects, many sales organizations enlist the help of value engineers (sometimes called business value consultants) and other experts that work with the sales organization. They are highly specialized business analysts and sellers with a well-developed and valuable skill set.
But managing a SaaS platform is typically not among their core competencies. Just because they are good at building spreadsheets doesn’t mean they are good at distributing, maintaining and supporting software programs. And when you think about it, it makes little sense to pull your most strategic sales resource away from selling in order to learn a new platform and also serve as a software help desk.
Ultimately, Mainstay’s services-as-software approach enables you to scale value selling tools to your entire sales organization more quickly, while enabling value engineers to stay focused on their core area of expertise. Ideally, your value engineering team could extend these service-first value-selling tool to the broader sales organization, empowering your sellers to shift their sales pitch from a focus on features and functions to business value — an approach that studies show consistently delivers better sales outcomes.
A leader in business value consulting, Mainstay has created enterprise applications for hundreds of companies worldwide. More than 400 clients have used our tools to build half a million business cases, and by partnering with Mainstay you take advantage of our deep experience. We work with our clients’ subject-matter experts to understand their value proposition, and they leverage our SMEs to understand what works at scale in a value selling tool.
Beyond self-service
Would you consider services-as-a-software a “self-service” tool? Not exactly. But building value enablement tools on most SaaS platforms rarely are. Non-technical salespeople using value-enablement SaaS apps invariably need lots of help from in-house experts and can struggle with inflexible apps that can’t capture the complexities of modern business-case scenarios.
With Mainstay’s services-as-software approach, your value engineers can continue to contribute their specialized expertise in building business value tools and business cases that address unique customer challenges — and they can go about their business free from any arbitrary rules or logic imposed by the SaaS software. They can still build and refine highly complex Excel models — it’s their forte after all — and then tell us how it’s supposed to work.
Our job is to create an easy-to-use web application based upon whatever you’ve built and handle all the aspects of managing software your value engineers shouldn’t be bothered with, such as updating and troubleshooting the app, enabling secure access, and so on.
Following our approach, you’ll no longer struggle to implement your SaaS solution or settle for using its rigid logic and workflows to build critical sales enablement tools. By turning SaaS upside down and starting with (consulting) services, you’ll create better business cases to drive more deals, and avoid bogging down you most important sales resources, boosting everybody’s productivity.
Have you experienced challenges when implementing a SaaS-based Value Management platform? Learn more about Mainstay’s advisor platform or contact us.
