SaaS Product

Software-as-a-Service Success – Build the business into the product

Because B2B SaaS roots are in enterprise or office software which have traditionally been delivered on a CD, i.e., like any offline commodity that is physically seperate from the business itself, the opportunity to change the game by building your business into the product is one of the most overlooked by SaaS vendors.

When you move your software product online into a software-as-a-service delivery model it enables you to connect the product directly to your customers on the outbound side and directly to your internal systems on the inbound side.  I’ll dig deeper into how you can leverage this for your customers to create disruptive economic shifts in the market in another post, but for now I want to focus on how this enables you to reengineer your fundamental business processes by building them out from your product.

Perhaps the best role model for building the business into the product is one of the earliest Internet success stories: Amazon.com.  Although most of what you can buy at Amazon is a physical product, the fact that it gets shipped to you is almost an afterthought–you could achieve the same purpose by ordering through an offline catalog.  What you are really buying when you shop at Amazon is convenience and credibility, and these capabilities are fundamentally features of Amazon’s SaaS application.  It includes affiliate referrals, product search, offers, recommendations, one-click checkout,  order management, support and nurturing. More specifically, it automates the buying process. Amazon’s affiliate programs spread points of entry (links!) all over the Web, and when you reach the Amazon website you are naturally led through every stage of the purchase cycle. These are the automated business processes you want to build out from your SaaS product.

Chances are that your business is different from Amazon’s in some fundamental ways, e.g., target customers, product complexity, community involvement, etc.  and you will need to tailor your approach to your market.  But, I’ll bet if you study this success story and fully understand the implications, you will find analogies that you can apply to your business. For example, crowd-sourcing has become a very popular approach to international translations, but Amazon was crowd-sourcing automation of the decision stage of the book purchase process10 years ago by encouraging customers to create reviews and top 10 lists.

This is post number three in a series of five.

For more on how to build your business into the product, check out…

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