Here is a picture I find myself drawing often. It is closely related my last B2B SaaS post regarding old enterprise habits, but it is actually much more general. Most Web application / Software-as-a-Service companies will find themselves spending up to 50% of revenue on sales and marketing. But, how much should you spend on sales vs. marketing. And, how tightly integrated do these two functions need to be? Of course it is common wisdom that sales and marketing need to work together, but this need is acute for most Software-as-a-Service companies. In enterprise software, where the price point is $100-500K per transaction, the marketing organization is only loosely coupled to revenue through lead generation, messaging /collateral / website, and generating awareness through events and PR. Contrast this with a consumer application, where the tables are turned completely and what sales does exist typically takes the form of partnering and business development—which may be revenue generating, but is not aimed at closing revenue directly, i.e., getting more users.

Most B2B SaaS offerings and B2B2C Web applications (e.g., email marketing, Gadget platforms, online survey research, customer and channel support, etc.) tend to fall right in the middle of this graph. One reason for this is subscription/transaction- based pricing (as opposed to a three year, 1000 user enterprise agreement), as well as the general expectation of a Web or SaaS application to cost significantly less than software. The result is that SaaS companies must continually strive for reduced selling costs, increased marketing efficiency and tighter sales-marketing integration to create a revenue-generating machine—often by leveraging technology to automate as much of the sales cycle as possible from awareness to trial to acquisition and even through to support and add-on selling.

For the last five years or so, the conventional wisdom has held that software as a service holds great promise for enterprise business applications. There has been a spectrum of observers from zealots to skeptics, but no one has been able to deny the successes of salesforce.com and WebEx. In addition, a number of other vendors, such as Taleo, NetSuite, and SuccessFactors appear to be hitting their stride. Nonetheless, most SaaS vendors are still struggling to acquire customers and reach profitability. Why?

Clearly, the requisite larger investment in a vertically integrated hardware/software SaaS infrastructure combined with lower up-front subscription revenue entails an inherently longer ramp up to profitability than traditional enterprise software. But, my belief is that profitability issues run deeper than simple break-even timing, because vendors do not always recognize and rigorously adhere to the fundamental commodity, mass market economics of the space. In plain English, old enterprise habits die hard and it is easy to overspend on customer acquisition and product differentiation by targeting undersized market segments, chasing unprofitable customers, ignoring inefficient sales, marketing and engineering processes, and investing in functionality over quality, reliability, scalability and security.

This post is the first in a series under the heading “B2B SaaS Applications – Flies in the Ointment” that will analyze some of the common day-to-day issues encountered by these vendors, and whenever possible offer potential solutions to their ills. Some of the issues addressed in this series include the following:

• I don’t have enough leads
• My customers want to customize my application
• Getting new customers up and running is too long and hard
• My prospects aren’t Internet savvy
• My sales cycle is too slow and takes too much effort
• My prospects always seems to want that one thing we don’t have
• My prospects don’t have enough time or interest to talk to my sales staff

Also, any suggestions of interest are welcome.