How to sell SaaS through hosters: the experience of the project "My Warehouse"
Hi, Habr. Today I will talk about the experience of the project "MoySklad". We decided to attract customers to our cloud service in an unusual way for the Russian market - through hosting companies and service providers. Below we will discuss the features of preparing an application for sale through hosts, the marketing of the application and how many new customers this sales channel can bring.
The note is not written for PR sake, but for use for. To the benefit was maximum for cloud startups and for hosters (and those, and others here are quite a lot), do not hesitate to ask. Perhaps your questions will be the basis for the following posts on the topic.
')
Story
I will not talk about the Moysklad service. Those who wish, on occasion, can look at the site , and also see here how it all began. Therefore, I will immediately explain for the sake of what, in fact, a cloud startup to work with hosters. Of course, for the sake of increasing the number of customers. After all, the flow of money coming to the SaaS-provider is directly proportional to the number of service users. We tried many ways to attract visitors to the project site (which we already talked about ) and not bad learned how to convert visitors into customers. Work in this direction does not stop for a minute. But no matter how successful it is, you always want more.
Since the price of each sale of our service is large enough, we would not mind getting new customers a bit cheaper than what we received before. The “window of opportunity” opened in early 2010 quite unexpectedly - after the Softline project announced SoftCloud. But Application Packaging Standard (APS), a technological basis for the sale of cloud services and their delivery to the client, supported by Parallels, caused much more enthusiasm.
Reasons for interest:
In general, we decided to pack.
How we packed
An APS package is a set of software components with a special descriptor that describes the metadata about these components. In our case, the package was formed taking into account the delivery method of an external SaaS application: the cloud provider becomes an intermediary for the delivery of the service between the vendor cloud and the end user. Packing can be done with a special APS plug-in , which is put into the Eclipse development environment. It looks like this:
Although APS is positioned as an easy (admittedly open. Maybe this is the problem?) The application packaging standard in circulation, we would not call it elementary. Mainly because of gaps in the documentation, because of which we repacked several times. But the technical support of the standard is cool: they speak Russian, they know the details of APS very well and, importantly, correct documentation errors along the way. In total, packing our application took almost a month and a half, but now we have “filled our hands”.
How to sell it?
We are well aware of the target audience of the Moysklad service. This is a small business, that is, firms of 20-30 people, engaged mainly in trade and partly in production. Quite a large number of such companies have a website for sure and write to their counterparties emails from the corporate domain. Consequently, our Central Asia sits in the client base of hosting companies, which is much larger than ours.
It is clear that hosters will not give access to their client base just like that. They need to make an offer that is hard to refuse. Our proposal was as follows:
It remains to be done so that the hoster organizes active sales of our applications on its client base. Clearly, we cannot stand above the soul and demand reports from providers. This is bad. The good thing is that if the provider has become our partner, then he is at least interested in earning SaaS and he will make at least some effort.
Now it’s obvious that selling cloud services in the same way that hosting is sold will not work. By selling MoySklad, hosters will have to communicate with business owners (mainly trade), among which there are not so many IT engineers. Therefore, successful sales of cloud-based applications should be carried out by humanities and on the same humanitarian principles: customers need to be more advised and persuaded, you cannot make a sale with some numbers.
Based on this, we formulated our vision on how to successfully sell cloud services through a hosting provider:
Intermediate goals and conclusions
The market version of the APS-package with the product “Moysklad” has been tested and is ready for distribution. While we are presented at 3-4 sites that are very much waiting for our product. The next step will be to find partners from among the hosts. We would be happy to wait for the heyday of public clouds, but you can't wait. According to our feelings, on the SaaS market the rule “who first got up, that and sneakers” will work. As for the share of sales of the product “MoySklad” through partners, then by 2015 we are ready to bring it up to 50%.
A few conclusions that we have done for ourselves at the moment:
That's all. Thank you for reading to the end. About all that is not clear, ask in the comments. The most epic questions will be the basis for the next article.
The note is not written for PR sake, but for use for. To the benefit was maximum for cloud startups and for hosters (and those, and others here are quite a lot), do not hesitate to ask. Perhaps your questions will be the basis for the following posts on the topic.
')
Story
I will not talk about the Moysklad service. Those who wish, on occasion, can look at the site , and also see here how it all began. Therefore, I will immediately explain for the sake of what, in fact, a cloud startup to work with hosters. Of course, for the sake of increasing the number of customers. After all, the flow of money coming to the SaaS-provider is directly proportional to the number of service users. We tried many ways to attract visitors to the project site (which we already talked about ) and not bad learned how to convert visitors into customers. Work in this direction does not stop for a minute. But no matter how successful it is, you always want more.
Since the price of each sale of our service is large enough, we would not mind getting new customers a bit cheaper than what we received before. The “window of opportunity” opened in early 2010 quite unexpectedly - after the Softline project announced SoftCloud. But Application Packaging Standard (APS), a technological basis for the sale of cloud services and their delivery to the client, supported by Parallels, caused much more enthusiasm.
Reasons for interest:
- In Russia and the CIS under the APS there is a ready ecosystem. At least one fifth of hosting companies use Parallels Plesk Panel, which supports APS since version 8.2. Plus APS is supported by the SysCP open source control panel. This means that the MoiSklad product potentially gets access to tens of thousands, and maybe hundreds of thousands of small businesses. They are our target audience.
- We started to regularly contact small hosters with a request to sell Moysklad through the hosting control panels. The range of panels from such providers is quite variegated. Therefore, we thought that packing our software each time under a new panel is too handicraft. APS quite pulls the industry standard: Parallels says that more than half a million APS packages have already been installed in the world.
- APS specifications are open and constantly being improved by a consortium of developers. In each version of the standard, new options appear.
- The lion's share of work on the development of APS is carried out in Russia, by the Moscow office of Parallels. Looking ahead to say that it helped us a lot.
- In Parallels we were promised serious support, both in technical terms and in the promotion of our product among service providers.
In general, we decided to pack.
How we packed
An APS package is a set of software components with a special descriptor that describes the metadata about these components. In our case, the package was formed taking into account the delivery method of an external SaaS application: the cloud provider becomes an intermediary for the delivery of the service between the vendor cloud and the end user. Packing can be done with a special APS plug-in , which is put into the Eclipse development environment. It looks like this:
Although APS is positioned as an easy (admittedly open. Maybe this is the problem?) The application packaging standard in circulation, we would not call it elementary. Mainly because of gaps in the documentation, because of which we repacked several times. But the technical support of the standard is cool: they speak Russian, they know the details of APS very well and, importantly, correct documentation errors along the way. In total, packing our application took almost a month and a half, but now we have “filled our hands”.
How to sell it?
We are well aware of the target audience of the Moysklad service. This is a small business, that is, firms of 20-30 people, engaged mainly in trade and partly in production. Quite a large number of such companies have a website for sure and write to their counterparties emails from the corporate domain. Consequently, our Central Asia sits in the client base of hosting companies, which is much larger than ours.
It is clear that hosters will not give access to their client base just like that. They need to make an offer that is hard to refuse. Our proposal was as follows:
- Dealer margin in 40-50%. The larger the hoster, the higher the margin. And ultimately - higher average revenue per user. According to our calculations, those providers who faithfully approached the promotion of SaaS, ARPU can grow by 15-30% only through the sale of software as a service. And this is on the existing client base, without investing in its expansion.
- We explained to hosters that cloud services reduce customer churn. After all, the more services a client receives from one provider, the more difficult it is for the client to leave the provider. Meanwhile, to compensate for the outflow of customers is an expensive pleasure: each client for hosting services now costs $ 20-25.
- We talked about exclusivity. In the Russian market, MoySklad is the only cloud alternative to desktop and server solutions. If from the CRM-systems and accounting applications in the cloud there is something to choose, then the warehouse software is just us. No options yet.
It remains to be done so that the hoster organizes active sales of our applications on its client base. Clearly, we cannot stand above the soul and demand reports from providers. This is bad. The good thing is that if the provider has become our partner, then he is at least interested in earning SaaS and he will make at least some effort.
Now it’s obvious that selling cloud services in the same way that hosting is sold will not work. By selling MoySklad, hosters will have to communicate with business owners (mainly trade), among which there are not so many IT engineers. Therefore, successful sales of cloud-based applications should be carried out by humanities and on the same humanitarian principles: customers need to be more advised and persuaded, you cannot make a sale with some numbers.
Based on this, we formulated our vision on how to successfully sell cloud services through a hosting provider:
- To inform customers that a new service has appeared. Putting news on the provider's site is a solution that is as simple as it is ineffective.
- Therefore, you need to call customers or do mailings. Call, of course, harder. But more effective.
- Reluctantly hiring a humanist who would study the cloud product sold, underwent training from a vendor and could understand clearly how SaaS works, what it is for, and where it is profitable from using it.
Intermediate goals and conclusions
The market version of the APS-package with the product “Moysklad” has been tested and is ready for distribution. While we are presented at 3-4 sites that are very much waiting for our product. The next step will be to find partners from among the hosts. We would be happy to wait for the heyday of public clouds, but you can't wait. According to our feelings, on the SaaS market the rule “who first got up, that and sneakers” will work. As for the share of sales of the product “MoySklad” through partners, then by 2015 we are ready to bring it up to 50%.
A few conclusions that we have done for ourselves at the moment:
- Sales makes the ecosystem. Yes, the work on packing in APS still requires effort, but Parallels, which is one of the main contributors of the standard, was the first to create an ecosystem and show how you can earn money in it.
- A start-up cannot do without its client base - it is very small. If it is possible to enter into alliances, with someone who has a much larger base, this should be done.
- Future partners need to show two things - the possible amount of money and no need to spend. In our case, we are talking about ARPU and about the fact that cloud services even more “hook up” clients on the services of a particular company.
- The sale of cloud services is not technical, but humanitarian. A number of people do not understand this, calling cloud “profanation” and in a hurry to bury him. Until SaaS starts selling humanists, they won't start buying SaaS.
- The sales channel is not always big money. We prepared our solution for sale through hosters and at the same time did not invest a single dollar in the “entrance tickets” and kickbacks.
That's all. Thank you for reading to the end. About all that is not clear, ask in the comments. The most epic questions will be the basis for the next article.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/116379/
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