The Pyramid to Business Success in the Cloud

This week I had the opportunity to prepare, present, and participate in sales-training sessions with an excellent, experienced group of enterprise IT sales professionals who are excited about the business goals that customers can achieve with enterprise cloud computing solutions.

Also this week, I found an excellent blog post by Justin Pirie about customer acquisition for software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies. Justin writes in his post about Sean Ellis’s startup pyramid, “the basic premise is that SaaS companies don’t put enough consideration into how they’re going to acquire customers when designing their product.” The foundation of Sean Ellis’s pyramid to business success is product/market fit and customer acquisition.

Enterprise cloud computing is certainly gaining acceptance due to its flexibility, rapid time to market, and cost-effectiveness. This and the low cost of starting a cloud company provide a positive environment for cloud start-ups. However, without product/market fit and an affordable way to scale sales as the foundation of their business strategy, SaaS start-ups and even more mature companies such as LucidEra will not remain in business.

Justin’s post was perfectly timed with our sales sessions. He also links to other excellent posts in his post. Enterprise SaaS sales executives are solving business problems for enterprise customers at a perfect time, when customers are looking for guidance for cloud products with product/market fit such as:

• Enterprise mashup dashboards such as mashmatrix Dashboard provide rapid, personalized development of dashboards from any web-facing data source; get a complete view of a customer or patient on one screen without having to switch between screens and applications.
• SaaS business intelligence (BI) applications from Birst and eiVia provide quick reporting and predictive analytics for decision-making.
• Enterprise relationship management solutions such as BranchIt help your business leverage relationships that colleagues may have with prospective customer or partner contacts.
• Price optimization applications from companies such as Mimiran help you avoid leaving money on the table in pricing your products or services.
• Enterprise brand management solutions from Biz360 aggregate, measure, and analyze news media and consumer opinion from print and social-media sources to yield insights that enable sales, marketing, PR, and executives to better understand their customers, competitors, influencer communities, industry trends and issues, the press, and the investment community.
• Enterprise cloud databases such as TrackVia help you quickly design and deploy cloud-based applications to solve business problems.
• Integration products from Pervasive Software and Sesame Software provide data exchange and interoperability between legacy on-premises and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.
• Cloud-based single sign-on systems from companies such as TriCipher provide a secure, single login for a user to access all authorized cloud-based applications.

What’s in your pyramid of business success with cloud-based solutions this year?