The cloud isn’t just a way to free yourself from the pain-in-the-butt of on-premise server care, according to Cira Apps founder and CTO Vern Weitzman. In fact, for both SaaS businesses and their clients, smart cloud management can lead to tremendous gains in efficiency -- and a dramatic lowering of costs. Use the cloud right and you can run with a minimal customer-support team - and you may not need salespeople at all.
Read Vern Weitzman on savings via cloud and content.
“ ...Enterprise customers want to go off and research products to learn about them. They want to talk to someone on the phone, but don’t want to be sold. They also have an ideal process: Talk to someone technical. Then get a demo. Then get a sales quote.
A month or two later, you might get a purchase order. Knowing this will help you set the right expectations. And as you move your product to the cloud, sales can become so much easier: You can combine that weeks-long process of a technical intro, demo and sales quote into a single conversation. The demo is the onboarding -- the onboarding is the demo.”
The other part of Weitzman’s proposition is the creation and maintenance of a robust, easy-to-use content library that allows customers to help themselves. With the cloud allowing you to function without sales reps, and a good granular library to rationalize your CX resources, you can more easily focus on the real key to success: constant product improvement.