Ever wondered why some SaaS businesses are achieving record sales, while others flounder?   The difference is not the economy, and rarely their industry.  The difference is strategy & execution that begins with effective demand generation that segues into the sales conversion process where Altus has focused most of its attention. Examples in the webinar come from companies that had record 2009 revenue. In some cases, they were struggling until they hit on the right demand generation process.

Click here to register.

Here is how the Matt described the event:

In this Webinar, you will learn:

- Which marketing channels are working, and which aren’t

- Compelling offers that generate leads AND closed sales

- How companies are generating sales-ready leads from the social Web

- How to get started with nurture marketing today (without new tools or content)

- Specific case studies from some of the SaaS industry’s most successful marketing & sales campaigns

PLUS, each attendee will receive a demand generation audit checklist, specifically prepared to help you evaluate your current demand generation strategy and make immediate changes to improve performance, response and revenue.

Join us Thursday, February 18^th, at 10:00 a.m. Pacific.  Click here to register.

Too often, sales & marketing blame each other for a lack of results. The leads aren’t good. Sales doesn’t follow up. The excuses go on and on.

If this sounds familiar for your organization, there are things you can start doing right away to mend fences and start on a path towards not only better relations, but far better revenue results.

Call a sales & marketing summit, and don’t let anyone leave the room until the following five things are agreed upon:

Common Lead Definitions: What, exactly, is a qualified lead? What are its characteristics? Get as detailed as you need to be, but make sure both sales & marketing agree on that definition. That way, when leads are delivered to sales, they at minimum meet the basic criteria you’ve both agreed on to make them worth the sales team’s time for follow-up.

Initial Response Time: If the leads are good (and meet the minimum qualified definition), you need a “service agreement” for how quickly those leads will get their first response. If the lead is waiting for something (a white paper, for instance) response time should likely be no longer than 24 business hours. In other cases, 48 hours may be acceptable. Decide what’s right for your organization and customer, get sales management’s buy-in, communicate it clearly to the sales team, and put in place reporting tools to make it super-easy to track this on a daily basis (and send both you and the sales rep alerts when leads fall outside of the service agreement).

Lead Follow-up Steps & Channels: How many times should a lead be attempted before the sales rep gives up and moves on? Should all of those attempts be via phone, or should there be a mix of other channels — email, social media channels, in-person, etc.? If you don’t reach agreement on this critical process, every sales rep will have his or her own idea of what’s right. Some will call once, leave a message, and consider the lead dead. Others will call the poor prospect 20 times. Create a standard with sales not only to ensure leads are thoroughly vetted, but also to ensure sales is moving on to fresher opportunities if there’s nobody at home.

Clear Lead Stages: A lead comes in. The rep starts to attempt a call back. They reach the lead and determine it’s a good prospect, or long-term prospect, or just not qualified. How do they report this information to you? What lead stages have you set up in your lead management or CRM system to not only make it easy and clear how you want sales to categorize their working leads, but also to report to management progress & quality of leads (not to mention improve your lead generation ROI performance moving forward)? Don’t go overboard – 15 lead stages gets way too complicated – but 4-6 stages is reasonable and actionable for most sales environments.

Handing Leads Back to Marketing: According to MarketingSherpa and others, the vast majority of leads generated by B2B organizations in particularly will buy – just not right now. Those leads (once they’re identified as such) need to be passed back to marketing for active nurturing. Make sure there’s a clear process for sales to do just that – ideally with the click of a button.

The presentation was given at the Join the Conversation event in May 2009. All businesses are essentially publishers these days. As both a longtime marketing executive and a publisher, Chase shares his experience as a publisher to these new “publishers”. Included in the presentation are topics heretofore thought of as a publisher’s responsibility but have parallels for businesses of all sizes in their marketing. These include the following:
* Editorial planning
* Breaking News
* Syndication
* Content as marketing
* Metrics & Analytics

This shows how a marketer thinking like a publisher can cost effectively communicate with their community.

Last week, Byron Deeter and his colleagues at Bessemer Venture Partners wrote a terrific piece entitled “Bessemer’s Top 10 Laws for Cloud Computing and SaaS. “ The article laid out why it is critical for SaaS-based businesses to abandon many of the long-held tenets of historic software business models and adhere to a new set of laws. Where Deeter did a nice job of laying out “why” managing a Cloud/SaaS software business must be done differently, we have created a set of ten laws to explain “how” to succeed at SaaS Sales and Marketing.

Our SaaS Sales and Marketing Laws are based on success stories that span many sectors – from higher education to online advertising to HR solutions to energy efficiency to vertical markets, such as the dental industry. Our experience implementing these ten laws at dozens of companies has been a consistent 50 percent-or-greater reduction of customer acquisition costs combined with a dramatic increase in revenues.

One great example of the laws in action involved a SaaS company that had an expensive field sales model. Over the course of six months, the field sales force was replaced by an inside sales team and a structured sales process was put in place. The result: A 16-fold increase in Contracted Monthly Recurring Revenues. The combination of lowering costs and increasing revenues led the company to achieving its first profits. It went from a $400,000-per month loss to its current status as one of the high fliers of the Seattle tech scene with a very bright future.

As Mark Leslie of Veritas fame stated in his seminal “Sales Learning Curve” paper in the Harvard Business Review, the risk for technology startups has shifted from technology execution to go-to-market strategy. Sales and Marketing is one of the pivotal aspects of go-to-market strategies. Leslie’s Sales Learning Curve principles permeate the philosophy of the laws outlined below and leads to a much lower sales burn than what is typically experienced.

Click to see the full Ten Laws for SaaS Sales & Marketing Success article.

With SaaS models most of the time the revenue per customer is less than $100,000 per year making it difficult to pencil out a traditional shoe leather sales model. Consequently, we have gained extensive experience with low cost customer acquisition models. Deeter does a great job of laying out the “why”. In a follow-on piece, we’ll address the “how”.

Here’s the opener for Byron’s piece.

At Bessemer Venture Partners we fundamentally believe that the emergence of Cloud Computing – and the three core components of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) – is going to completely change the economics of the multi-billion dollar software industry. We have been fortunate to be investors in many of the early Cloud winners (such as Postini, Netli, Trigo, and Cyota), and continue to invest actively behind one of the largest Cloud portfolios in the venture capital industry. Periods of tremendous transformation create tremendous opportunity, and we consider ourselves privileged to be working with many of the great entrepreneurs who are currently creating the next giants of the “software” industry.

When we first published Bessemer’s Top 10 Laws for Being “SaaS-y “ on Sandhill.com almost two years ago in conjunction with our annual Cloud/SaaS CEO Summit, we were overwhelmed with the positive response and feedback we received. We have heavily modified many of the best elements that we believe are still relevant, and have added several entirely new concepts for this update publication on Cloud Computing and SaaS.

That is what Tim did while for Citrix and what Dave Chase did when he started Microsoft’s healthcare business transforming it from the worst-performing vertical for the company to one of its strongest performers.

While most of the companies we are working with are in the Healthcare I.T. arena, innovations aren’t limited to the I.T. side of healthcare. Second Avenue Partners has backed Qliance which is disrupting the health insurance business. Chase profiled Qliance on the Seattle Startup Buzz blog. Given the track record of Nick Hanauer and Pete Higgins, it is a great endorsement of Qliance’s model.

The following is the press release they put out on the wire today:

Today Sesame Communications, a dental industry pioneer in online patient connection management, has been recognized by the Puget Sound Business Journal (PSBJ) as one of the 100 Fastest-Growing Private Companies in Washington State for 2009. The selection was based on the company’s level of net revenue growth over the past three years. The PSBJ and RSM McGladrey accounting firm conducted research to verify the company’s net revenues and growth rate. Sesame was honored at the PSBJ’s October 15th evening reception as one of Washington’s fastest-growing businesses, and featured in the October 16th issue of the Journal on newsstands today.

“The tougher economy, increased competition among clinicians, and a strong patient preference to interact with service providers online have all accelerated the adoption of the Sesame 24/7 Suite of services,” said Frith Ann Maier, CEO of Sesame Communications. “Dentists now see that being online means being in touch with patients where they spend their time.”

This recognition comes on the heels of Sesame’s endorsement by the Washington State Dental Association as its preferred online service provider. With over 2.7 million patients around North America getting information from their dental professionals through Sesame’s email services and online information access portal, the company expects to continue its growth pattern.

An emerging growth company, Sesame has steadily built its market penetration with substantial year-over-year growth and sustained profitability since its inception in 2000. In 2008, the company posted 47% revenue growth and its pace has accelerated in the first half of 2009. Sesame has anchored its growth in a comprehensive suite of solutions helping dentists effectively connect with patients, ultimately translating to practice profitability. Sesame’s service offerings for dental providers include high scoring patient appeal rated websites and search engine optimization, 24/7 information access, electronic patient feedback mechanisms, appointment reminders, online doctor-to-doctor collaboration, as well as online marketing modules. For more information about Sesame’s services, go to: www.sesamecommunications.com

Altus partner, Dave Chase, delves into this further in an iMediaConnection.com article titled “Social, meaningful marketing through online video“. It’s worth a read.

Article Highlights:

• Online video is providing new ways to “market with meaning”
• Educational video has been embraced by companies whose product explanations require more than 30 seconds
• The increasing overlap between social media and video is driving increased levels of consumer engagement

Federal stimulus funding and technology reforms are causing many companies to directly target the dynamic and growing healthcare technology market.

Tim Fitzpatrick, an industry veteran with 22 years of healthcare sales and business development experience will be leading Altus’s new healthcare division and will be working closely with partner Dave Chase, the founder of Microsoft’s healthcare division and MSHUG-the Microsoft Health Users Group.

“We’re pleased to have Tim as part of the Altus Alliance” says Dave Chase. “His depth of experience, contacts and skills will help Altus expand beyond our technology focus and into the evolving Healthcare market.”

“Healthcare technology and especially healthcare information technology is in gold rush mode” says Mr. Fitzpatrick, “Our focus is to help companies develop and execute a sales strategy that will significantly increase their healthcare revenues. We are not here to provide “whiteboard consulting” but rather to bring our experience and contacts to bear and deliver an immediate impact on healthcare sales revenue and business development traction.”

Mr. Fitzpatrick feels that the current dynamics of the healthcare market is creating opportunities for new companies as well as existing firms and technologies.

“If your company is a new venture with a healthcare focus, we will help you plan, execute and scale your sales. If you are an existing firm that is somewhat horizontal but with applicable healthcare technologies, this is one market you should consider giving a significant vertical focus.”

About Altus Alliance-For ten years, the partners of Altus Alliance have refined methodologies around market assessment, business development traction and sales optimization to accelerate revenues and ensure healthy growth for new ventures. The combination of a proven track record, Fortune 100 experience and deep knowledge of the challenges faced by early stage companies enables Altus to help clients identify and execute against the best growth opportunities and optimize the sales process to maximize revenue traction.