SaaS delivers return before investment

Selling Business Intelligence software is very complicated because you need to communicate the benefits of the application in the context of the customers business processes. And businesses frequently set up their own processes to be unique. So they sales call and data gathering is pretty much a requirement.

But if your selling something like a simple SaaS application then it doesn't require the long process, and a 30-day trial is probably better suited. Or possibly just offer trials for each vertical industry, so its pretailored to the customer.

So the solution to selling confusing software is a sales call. That's a novel idea worth exploring.

I worked for a company like that. They had a whole department dedicated to analyzing customer (or rather, prospective customers) data and feeding it into a system to generate metrics of how much the company's product could save for the prospective customer.

Only trouble was, they did not charge for this, and often times failed to close the deal, and the entire operation just became a drag on profitability.

Were I the CEO of this company, I'd fire whoever came up with this scheme. If the company were based in, say, some heathen place in sub-Saharan Africa, I'd hire a tribe of native barbarians to stone his children for good measure.

(Yeah, I feel strongly about this one!)