One of the biggest misconceptions in the software world is that support is training but that is false. It is important to understand the difference between both in order to improve the retention & adoption rate of your SaaS app. Support typically REACTS to customer needs and is disruptive to customer productivity. Training proactively ANTICIPATES customers’ needs to reduce reactive support and increases customer productivity.

If you implement the right type of training, your customers will understand your product better and they will ultimately want to renew their contract with you.

So in order to correct this misconception and show you how training can help your company I’d like to introduce you to a manifesto that was created by KeyStone OnDemand

So now that you have effectively gotten your customer to buy your solution or app how do you get them to adopt quickly? How do you get them to fully understand your solution and all its features? Well there are number of ways to do that and I will get to them soon but first of all you need to be able to know why your customers might stop using your app and make sure you address all those issues in your onboarding process. If  you put yourselves in your customer’s shoes and try to think like them you will have a better chance of making your app more user friendly. So get your thinking cap on and think of reasons they might leave.

Some of the reasons KeyStone OnDemand has found are:

• Users are unable to get over the initial learning curve to achieve successful outcomes- If there is an ineffective way of communicating how to use your app then your users will be unable to get over the learning curve.
• Low organizational adoption and usage- Make sure that everyone that will use the app in the organization that you sold to is actively involved. You can do this by engaging the heads of the departments that will be using your app so they can in turn effectively communicate the benefits of using your app to their teams and users.
• Not enough customer stakeholders and influencers- You might not have enough of the stakeholders & influencers bought in.
• App is not utilized properly to gain full potential- The app is not being used to its full potential so there is a lack of appreciation for your app thus there will be no perceived value in using your app.
• App reliability- Your app was not able to do what it was supposed to do and it did not meet expectations.
• Competition- They might decide to go with a competitor of yours instead.

Now that you have identified these issues, here are 4 steps that will help your users adopt your app better and quicker.

About a couple of months ago I was part of a webinar called “Increasing Adoption & Retention of your SaaS App” and what rang true then still rings true now. Customer Retention is one of the most powerful indicator of a company’s success.

I find that a lot of salespeople remain quiet between the point of sale and when it is time for renewal. How and why on earth should a customer renew if there has been a lack of communication. It’s like paying for a college education and having the professor barely showing up to teach. Makes no sense right?

So how does a salesperson build relationships?

How would you like to display all your Google Adwords KPIs in a single, beautiful dashboard? Well it’s possible! Monitor measures such as clicks, conversions, impressions and average positions, and mix these with your ad expenditure data to get a fundamental overview of the performance of your Adwords campaigns.

To give you an idea of what you could achieve in a few minutes with Bime, we built a basic dashboard containing (dummy) Adwords campaign metrics data. Imagine the possibilities if you spent a couple of hours on it!

You can access the dashboard by clicking the screenshot below.

OnShift unveiled OnShift on the iPad. With busy schedules and hectic work environments, directors of nursing (DON), administrators, schedulers, and others in long-term care and senior living require access to staffing and scheduling information around the clock, from any device. With OnShift on the iPad, they save time and improve efficiencies with the ability to easily view, create, update and manage schedules from anywhere.

With the iPad in hand, schedulers can easily respond to last minute call-offs and staffing emergencies, with just a few taps. Using OnShift's intelligent communications platform, open shift messages are sent to qualified and available staff via text, email and automated phone call, with replacements typically secured in minutes.

One word: impressive.

I have touched down in San Francisco for the Dreamforce ’11 event.

Here are some numbers, in no particular order:

2 days ago I stumbled across a great article by Derek Singletonat syscon.com.

The article, entitled “Cloud Computing: It’s Not About the Web Browser“, discusses the new class of SaaS
(or cloud) application vendors and why they are racing ahead at great speed while the rest of the enterprise apps market ambles along with limited growth.

The author covers many of the common benefits of a SaaS solution, including multi-tenant architecture and the ability to be able to scale easily, the positive changes in which software is now evaluated and purchased (e.g. transparent pricing, free trials, flexible licensing etc.) and better UIs and UXs (user interfaces and user experiences).

Business Intelligence (BI) is one of the most rapidly evolving and changing industries. Here at Bime HQ we are observing a paradigm shift as users discard more traditional forms of BI for new players, more agile and more cost effective solutions such as Bime. We are seeing changing user habits whereby many users are turning to SaaS solutions for the lightweight infrastructure, flexibility and scalability. More generally, BI has now become a viable economic option for many more SMBs where it may not have been before, allowing small companies to unlock their large amounts of data!

Forrester Research are some of the best in the business for keeping check of this rapidly changing industry and providing market leading BI analysis and insight. They recently conducted a survey of BI vendors (in which we participated) and now they conducting asurvey of BI users in which you can express your expectations and your plans for implementing BI.

Forrester state the objective of the survey is “to help our clients understand business intelligence software vendor pricing and licensing differences, as well as attempt to see if there are some clear patterns in the total cost of ownership between different vendor products.”

From vimeo: While there are good reasons to proceed with caution toward moving your entire infrastructure to the cloud, some applications are no-brainers to migrate today. These mainstream apps are already being broadly adopted as software as a service (SaaS) by companies of all sizes, and their compelling cost, functionality and reliability benefits should be of particular interest to midsize businesses.

Jeff Kaplan delivered a 35-minute webinar through these five application categories. You get an overview of the top vendors in each market and criteria you can use to determine if a move makes sense for you in the short term. Watch it here:

As the popularity of software-as-a-service (SaaS) continues to grow in the enterprise, we keep fielding questions from businesses that are curious about SaaS but aren't sure if it's for them. The questions that we hear from businesses aren't very different from common questions that circulate around the term more generally. 

In an effort to clear up some of these lingering questions and provide a helpful resource for buyers, and people that are just plain curious, I recently put together a guide to the top 10 frequently asked questions about SaaS. I'd like to share with you the top five that we hear on a consistent basis.