Why culture code is important for any company? If you’re asking yourself that question, I’m sure you’re not alone.
You may hear these words thrown around a lot, but what do they really mean? And why does company need them?
Truth to be told, I strongly believe company culture has a significant impact on the success of any business. It creates a bonding with your employees and ensures that they travel along with company until the vision is achieved. And, job seekers should look at their culture code more than anything else before they decide to join the company.
What is company culture?
It is the sum of an organization’s ethics, attitudes, vision, mission and core values. Although it isn’t a tangible asset, it’s one of the most important things about your business. Every business has a unique culture and it helps to shape your company.
Think culture code like a employee handbook that explains your company’s culture. It could be in any form like e-copy, hard handbook or video. But, it should be well documented and clearly pass on the values across the company.
Why is it important?
Your employees should look forward to going to their job. It shouldn’t be a dreaded place. Your culture should help your employees to unburden any work related stress. Basically, it should infuse enthusiasm.
What are its benefits?
Without going into too much detail, here are a few benefits of culture code
It attracts talent. Though the code is important, the employees in your organization will talk about it outside the workplace. And, this itself will attract the applicants to work for you when they feel it is the match for them.
It sets the tone for your employees. By understanding core value, vision and mission the employees will know the direction of the company and what is expected out of them. They become brand ambassadors of your company while interacting with your customer.
Happy employees mean happy environment and more productivity. When company culture facilities happy environment there is improved collaboration, satisfied employee, increase in retention and growth in business.
A culture code ensure that companies stays on course to achieve their vision. It creates a bonding with your employees and that means loyalty to an organization.
Although we understand the importance of strong company culture, many business struggled to implement an effective culture within a workplace even before COVID-19.
So, how is your organization able to implement and maintain company culture when most of us are working from home during this COVID situation? Share your thoughts in the comments section
SaaS growth rates are astonishing; just between 2015 and 2017, the number of SaaS apps averagely used by organizations doubled up from 8 to 16. This upward trend will continue as 73% of businesses have said all of their apps will be SaaS by 2020.
I wrote this SaaS Buyer’s Guide to help you understand what needs to be considered when purchasing a SaaS solution. You are about the read the last part of this series “The ultimate SaaS buyers guide”
Many SaaS organization offers 14-day or 30-day trial. So, you have got enough time to check if the product matches the business requirement. As part of the POC check the following.
Cloud Service Model
Features
Deep dive into the critical features set like this should tick the checklist of must-haves and deal breakers. Don’t compromise on the deal-breakers
Analytics
Business needs the ability to drill down the stats and make an informed decision down for the organization. Ensure that the product meets complexity of your reporting need.
Internationalization
When you have offices across global check the capabilities around internationalization and localization.
Mobile
Your application is not only for desktop or laptop devices but also on various mobile devices. Task reminders as push notification make more sense and add value.
Governance
Data Center
Mostly, data centers belong to a of third party. Verify the data center credentials and particulars. Check the policy terms with respect to who can access the data center? Does the vendor team has access to it?
Security
Apart from the physical and data center security, you need to consider the encryption methodology during rest and transit. Strict password policies need to be enforced. Does it comply with your org, country policy such as GDPR
Data Compatibility
Does the vendor allow customers to import data on to the tool and export data outside? If no, there is a big chance of vendor lock-in and it is a high risk.
Data Seggregation
Most of the time, the data is on the public cloud. So, check with the companies on how data is segregated from other business. Get the architecture plan.
Audit
The application should provide an audit trail of every changes made to the application. Also, SaaS provider has typically to comply with norms and also undergo detailed audits to ensure that sensitive data is completely protected at all stages of storage, processing, and transmission.
Data Protection
Check for the best security practices followed by the SaaS vendor to ensure that your application stays unaffected by attacks. How would they facilitate business continuity in case of attacks such as ransomware attacks and denial of service (DoS) attacks.
Disaster Recovery
When things go awry, it’s important to have a robust, targeted, and well-tested DR plan. Pay details to the RPO and RTO. Also, a few recent SaaS applications provide options for individual businesses to take their own back from the application.
Finally, we conclude
If you’re just starting your search for a SaaS product and wondering which products would fit your need, this guide is for you. Even if you’re midway or towards the end product selection, you may still want to check this guide. I have captured to the best of my knowledge all that I know about buyer experience and customer satisfaction.
Coming soon, DoyenThoughts will release a “The Ultimate SaaS buyers guide” pdf guide compiling all critical points for buyers to make their buying experience enjoyable and smooth.
By now, you all should have had a fair idea of the challenges faced by Buyers in the IT / SaaS market. In case, you missed my previous blogs, here is Part 1 and Part 2 of The ultimate SaaS buyers guide.
Organizations, these days – when the future of the pandemic is still uncertain – ought to be careful in their purchases. In doing so, they expect a long-term business relationship with a reliable and resilient vendor so that they get the maximum ROI.
By 2021, 73% of organizations will be using all or mostly SaaS solutions. Reference here
As a pre-sales, I have fielded questions to customers related to their business, demonstrated various products that fit their needs/requirements, handled many POC’s successfully, and guided customers until they achieve the ROI through the product/solution thus purchased. During this process, I have helped many customers overcome the challenges they faced in choosing the right product.
The choices for a decision maker are aplenty and that by itself, becomes a challenge during the buying process. Match your business needs with the software / solution capabilities is the primary motto during this process. Most vendors in the SaaS business are likely to keep the Customer Acquisition Cost to the minimum – that would mean the Salesperson will try to close the deal with minimal effort. Do your due diligence throughout the process to avoid surprises and frustrations.
Technology, Product, and Governance play a major role in the Buyer ecosystem. Let me share my thoughts on this, based on my experience. In this part, we will have a look at the technology aspect.
Technology
Understand your current eco system
It is better to understand the technology used by the vendor during the decision-making process. You will need a team of domain experts to help you during the process, lest you will have to be at the mercy of the vendor that will in turn add to your hidden costs.
Integration
Understand and review the integration capability of the application. Data should flow seamlessly between the legacy and on-cloud applications.
Most of these vendors could be focused on relatively smaller domains and this could make a customer subscribe to different products. Simultaneously, you may require data integration between certain mission-critical tools. Does the vendor provide APIs to achieve integration?
Service Availability
The Service Availability is perhaps one of the most important things to consider when signing up for a SaaS offering. Most service providers devise the SLA keeping their own best interests in mind, which makes it very important to evaluate the agreement before finalizing it.
Define Downtime
This should be part of the Service Availability. You need to clearly define what is counted as downtime. Does scheduled maintenance count as downtime? From a provider’s perspective it probably won’t, but things are different from the end user’s perspective. You obviously would not want to pay when the system is down, which makes it important to consider how the provider would compensate if something goes wrong.
Scalability
When you talk about availability, definitely you will have to consider scalability. Check the architecture with the vendor so that you ensure that there are no hiccups down the line.
Customer Satisfaction
The journey of a customer post-sales depends on customer support. So, check their support process, mode of contact, and operational hours. Are there ways to reach them during non-operational hours? SaaS organization, proactively, allocates a Customer Success Manager and Technical Account Manager when the deal value is high.
Emerging technologies are impacting business outcomes, especially in today’s unprecedented times. On-premises solutions operate in Silos and they take months of deployment. It lacks the agility, speed, interoperability, and simplicity required to tap into the business benefits of technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, the Internet of Things, etc. This is why many organizations are turning to SaaS consumption models to adopt the pay as you go model.
Subscribe to my blogs to get notified when the final part of “The ulimate saas buyer guide” is released in a couple of weeks.
When you start evaluating SaaS products for Helpdesk or CRM, there is no dearth of available solutions and the task of selection becomes tedious. Instead of evaluating all the solutions that you come across, it is better to be selective. There are a few steps that will help you find the right product/service relevant to your business requirements.
Apply the requirement criteria
You have loads of information from across the internet after the internal discussion. With the list of must-haves and nice-to-haves, start to narrow down your choice of software or solution by striking out those that do not fulfil your overall goal or requirements
Referral
Sometimes referral may work wonders. Before you jump to pick the referred solution thus, you may want to check how the solution helped improve the efficiency or increase the ROI. The problem statement or business need should be aligned before you decide on the referral.
Do the research
By this time, you should have narrowed down on a handful of products / software. Look at those successful use cases that aligns with your business requirements. Take all comments into account before you jump into a conclusion. Also, explore those solutions that businesses similar to yours are using.
DoyenThoughts did a poll on the selection methodology via LinkedIn and blog posts. 53% of the users agreed that the tool needs to meet the required criteria while 36% rely on the research.
Product Hunting
Once you have narrowed down your list of potential software/products, start evaluating each solution thoroughly. When conducting the evaluation, ensure to do the following.
Focus on long-term, not short-term
It is quite common to look at the short-term benefits and choose the most beneficial option, with little or no regard to the long-term potential of the requirement. When evaluating SaaS products, it is important to think big and look at the long-term benefits. For example, paying a little more upfront and getting a great ROI later down the line is better than buying at a lower price and regretting it.
Demo and POC
A product demo will help you to further narrow down the list. Go for a POC. All features such as workflow, automation etc, may look glossy during the technical discussion and demo, however, such features may struggle when put to practical use. Prepare use cases to be tested during POC. It is absolutely not a bad idea to go for a paid POC.
Ask the vendor to connect to similar customers
Do not be afraid to ask the vendors to connect to referral customers who have successfully implemented the product. It would be beneficial if such customers also belong to the same vertical as yours.
Do you agree with our above product evaluation technique? Help me by participating in the poll below. If you have anything else to add please share it in our comments section.
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You know your goals and the service you expect. This will help you choose the right solution. Never settle for good enough products. Go for the best that matches your business requirements.
Take a couple of minutes to answer the questions below before you proceed to read through the blog.
Have you been through a buyer experience?
Have you ever made a ‘not-so-right’ choice of a product or a service?
Are you willing to enhance the buyer experience of your customers?
Is there a scope of improvement in your software/solution procurement process?
If your answer is YES to one or more questions above, then this blog is for you. I have tried to gather all my years of IT Sales experience as a blog to help businesses and entrepreneurs for enhancing their buying/selling experience. [Your thoughts and feedback are welcome to enhance this topic so that I can publish this as a guide.]
My experience
Everyone, in his/her lifetime, is a consumer of goods/services and I am no exception to it. I decided to purchase a new refrigerator, as the existing one has functioned more than its capacity and warranty. I did research on the existing brands and models and headed to purchase one that fits my needs.
When I stepped into the store, I was surrounded by a swarm of salesmen and the manager had to step in to assign a dedicated Salesman to help me out. The Salesman showed all the existing latest models with smart features like mobile app connectivity, auto-connect to inverter during a power outage, dual door and sensor bundled with huge storage capacity, and much more. I was swayed by the smart features in this model and had totally forgotten on the model that I zeroed in on. I had to shell out a handful of my savings, way more than the budget that I had allocated for this.
A year later, to my family’s surprise and mine, we found that we have not used any of the smart features. The storage seems to be more than adequate for our lifestyle and most of the space in the refrigerator had been vacant all these days. Added to this, I have been paying heavily for the operation and maintenance costs.
SaaS buyer’s Guide
I am sure everyone had been through such an experience, on one or more occasions, with any product or service. If you are an Entrepreneur or a business decision-maker, you can draw an analogy to this incident in business opportunities. When you are looking to procure Software for your business, you should not be carried away by those smart and exciting features which do not really fit your needs. It is going to cost you more in terms of money and time, having chosen a Software that provides more than what you need. The scenario is no different when you must choose the right SaaS solution for your business. So, how do you ensure you choose the right one, without succumbing to the temptation of smart features and over promises?
This blog is a 4-part series that describes how to go about buying a product or service for your business or personal needs.
Identify your need
Firstly, try to find out the answer to this question – Is there an immediate need for the product or service? If so, what is the need? What triggered this need?
Secondly, draft the need and the requirement.
Budget
While you draft your need, keep an eye on the budget. Many products or services are left unused and have been unsuccessfully implemented due to budgetary constraints. Financial aspects of your need will help you narrow down on the potential vendors who will fulfill the requirement.
Are you addressing a pain point or improvising the process?
Identify the current fundamental issues that triggered the need for a new product/service. For example, as a start-up, I tracked my leads through notepad, spreadsheet, and email. However, as the business scaled, this was not working anymore. That is when I thought I will need a CRM that will help manage prospects and customers efficiently. Having used one, I found that the CRM software lacked automation capability, without which the work looked tedious and was prone to manual errors. In this case, an improvement in the process is necessitated.
Critical Features
List down the critical features/use-cases that you expect out of the Software or Solution. Differentiate between must-haves, good-to-haves, and so on. Deal breaker features must have to be identified and marked accordingly.
Involve the Stakeholders
This is mandatory. Identify the stakeholders who ought to use the software or service and gather their point of view. For selecting a CRM software, it is necessary to involve the Sales Director, Regional Manager, and the Sales Executives. Involve them in demos, workshops, and commercial meetings. Make them a part of the selection process.
The next part is the selection process and product hunting
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Let us see if we all are on the same page when it comes to Buyer Experience.
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