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So you want to onboard enterprise SaaS users without losing your sanity? Do this

By Bhaskar Sarma 1 Comment

If you are a SaaS company already selling to individual customers and SMBs how different would it be if you had to sell to enterprises?

Will you be able to fit into the enterprise IT stack, deliver the same results that you have demonstrated for your smaller users with the same basic featureset?

Or is it a fool’s errand?

Let’s find out.

To understand how different small businesses are from enterprises think about a NASCAR and an F1 race.

According to Top Gear,

F1 cars are made in labs by white coated mad scientists. NASCARs are knocked up in medieval foundries by men with mallets…NASCAR has hammers and spanners, an F1 driver can tune his car on the go…When an F1 driver brakes…his body is tormented by a force of 5g. Brake discs are made by firing carbon atoms at a cobweb of rayon…Over in NASCAR they make do with slabs of cast iron….if NASCAR is the Big Bang F1 is particle physics.

At its most fundamental level selling a SaaS product is the same whether to an individual or to an enterprise. You have to identify your ideal customer, demonstrate that you product has value, remove risk, and make it easy to use.

But when you get down to brass tacks the differences are akin to a NASCAR vs.F1 race.

Here’s what I see the difference is between them (H/t to Steli Efti for his insightful Quora answer) [Read more…] about So you want to onboard enterprise SaaS users without losing your sanity? Do this

How Mandela and a poem can help you gain the trust of your website visitors

By Bhaskar Sarma Leave a Comment

webconversion means trust — Nelson Mandela with Francois Pienaar

It’s frustrating, isn’t it?

You have a website up and running. You see traffic but no one clicks on the buy button or fills up the contact form. They land on a page, have a quick look around and then bounce, never to return.

And it’s doubly frustrating when you know you have a good product that is a proven problem solver.

Do you throw up your hands and become bitter, withdrawn and resentful?

No, you don’t. You get inspired by Nelson Mandela.

How to heal a bitterly divided country

In 1994 Mandela became the first black president of a country bitterly divided along racial lines . He knew that South Africa would be torn apart if reconciliation between the privileged white minority and the oppressed black majority didn’t happen.

As he transformed himself from a rebel to a statesman he decided, in the face of all opposition, to throw his weight behind the Springboks, the national rugby team that most blacks saw as the symbol of apartheid.

He promoted the rugby team as a South African team instead of an Afrikaner or a white team and enlisted the help of the captain Francois Pienaar, a big, blonde son of apartheid.

And against all odds, in the 1995 Rugby World Cup organized in South Africa, the Springboks won. The entire country erupted in celebrations and the slow process of reconciliation began.

White South Africans who had reviled Mandela as a terrorist now accepted him as their president and began to trust that he would give them a fair deal. [Read more…] about How Mandela and a poem can help you gain the trust of your website visitors

Steal the secrets of building high converting websites from codebreakers

By Bhaskar Sarma 1 Comment

Say codes and encryption and you probably think of invisible ink,James Bond and hackers.

But leave governments and militaries aside. Without encryption, even your bank account and inbox won’t be secure.

Throughout history major world events have been shaped by the deviousness of a cryptographer in designing codes or the ingenuity of a codebreaker in deciphering secret messages.

The neutral US entered the WWI not because of German U boat attacks that drowned hundreds of American citizens or strenuous British diplomacy but because of a single decrypted German message.

And the WWII could have gone on till 1948 and millions more would have died had Polish and British codebreakers failed to crack the Enigma code used by the Nazis.

If the code is the case of the Hound of Baskervilles, think of a codebreaker as Sherlock Holmes. [Read more…] about Steal the secrets of building high converting websites from codebreakers

How Tom Clancy can help B2B marketers work with Google Hummingbird

By Bhaskar Sarma Leave a Comment

Tom Clancy died last month ,and like any other fan of techno political military thriller novels I was heartbroken.

The man practically invented the sub-genre.

But that’s not why I am invoking Clancy.

My reasons are a little less literary.

Clancy: the consummate connector of dots

Anyone who has read Clancy will be struck by how detailed his descriptions were especially when it came to weapon systems.

When the “The Hunt for Red October” was published in 1984 authorities were spooked when they found out that Clancy was bang on when he wrote that Soviet submarines spent only 15 percent of their time out at sea. Other classified information that was scarily accurate included the number of SS-N-20 Seahawk missiles a Soviet sub carried.

How to write a whitepaper without getting Force choked by a Sith Lord

By Bhaskar Sarma 2 Comments

On a gloomy day in Coruscant, Darth Vader sat in his office block, breathing more deeply than usual.

The Empire was building a second Death Star and the Emperor wanted him to monitor every phase of the construction.

He was particularly interested in the shield generator for the Death Star which was to be built on the forest moon of Endor.

It was the Death Star’s first line of defence and Darth Vader’s responsibility to make sure that it would do the job.

Knowing the reader

When the news got out about the shield generator trade federations all over the galaxy were excited. The talk went something like this-

Alien #1(manager) – A lot of Imperial credits are riding on this project. Can we bag the contract, team?

Alien #2 (engineering head)- Yes. We have the technology to build this generator and we can whip up the prototype in no time. We are the perfect vendor.

Alien #3 (salesman)- Then get me in touch with the Sith Lord’s office. I am bagging this one. I need to buy that artificial asteroid for my wife.

Alien #1- Brilliant. Prepare a holographic presentation and list out the specs. I will send it to Coruscant.

A Tolkienian formula to writing bewitching case studies that converts like crazy

By Bhaskar Sarma 11 Comments

This post is second in the series of posts dealing with content marketing collaterals and conversion. This first post about landing pages is here . Updated on 20 Jan 2017.

Love a good yarn? Of course you do. You are human.

Stories are the best way to grab people’s attention, whether they are your neighbors or enterprise technology buyers.

And when it comes to stories, JRR Tolkien’s Lord of The Rings ranks up there amongst the best.

When you are using content marketing to reach out to your ideal clients, no collateral can match the effectiveness of a crisply written story, also known as case study, in persuading them to begin the sales conversation with you.

That’s why a good case study (or a customer success story) is worth its weight in gold. The Eccolo Media 2015 B2B Technology Collateral Survey Report found out that 31% of the respondents- the third highest- considered case studies to be extremely influential in providing purchase information.

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