In short, as per Part 1, you

1. keep admitting to every mistake you are making and do something about it, then
2. continue by looking for cost-effective opportunities for improvement and pursue them and finally
3. never, ever, ever forget the timeless basics.

Today, we’ll continue by describing what you do when you identify, and admit to, one of the next two mistakes (mistakes 3 & 4) we chronicled in our two part introduction to our “dead company walking” (Part 1 and Part 2) series (where we helped your potential customers identify problems that signify you are a SaaS supplier they should be walking away from). (You can find Part 2 here.)

3) Shiny New Tech is More Important than Tried and True Methodology

Tried and true ALWAYS trumps shiny new tech in enterprise software. Especially when the total cost of ownership after factoring in license fees, maintenance, hardware & software updates, services, data feeds, integration fees, etc. usually push a solution into the realm of seven figures (and eight figures for large enterprises). Companies want a return, and shiny doesn’t generate a return. So focus on algorithms, processes, and approaches that are guaranteed to yield solutions. Do this by:

i) As THE REVELATOR would say, take an agent-based approach and focus in on what the solution should do

It’s supposed to be people-process-technology (or, in the doctor‘s words, talent-transformation-technology since you should first look for opportunities to improve your processes before investing in technology), not technology-forced workflow-prisoner! When you focus on the tech first and forget the process it is supposed to support and the people who have to use it, you’re never, ever, ever going to get it right. And believing that an over-hyped unproven technology will eventually show emergent behaviour (that it has zero chance of doing because of the underlying technology) and “evolve” to solve the problem is just stupid.

Real tech encodes real solutions identified by real human intelligence that have been implemented, repeatedly verified, tested in real world operating conditions, and understood to the point that the success can be repeated predictably. Sometimes it’s traditional AI, sometimes it’s RPA, sometimes it’s workflow, and sometimes it’s a simple calculation. It all depends on the problem and the people-process combo that can be applied to solve that problem. Tech is only transformative when it supports the business. You don’t lead with tech, you follow.

ii) Then identify the best tech options for each step

Once you have fully documented the problem(s) the people need to solve, the processes they can support, and the solutions that will work acceptably (maybe not perfectly, but it’s rare that a solution is perfect — plus, as we’ve repeatedly indicated, most enterprise users would cry tears of joys if they found something that just worked), identify all the potential tech options at your disposal, from open source to out-of-the-box from third parties to custom development.

Then, for each option, evaluate:

• it’s cost
• the relative return (for the customer and how that will translate into sales)

And identify the options with the best balance. You’ll be surprised at how often it’s not the new shiny. The best hotness is the old busted hotness.

iii) Select tried-and-true when all things are equal (and save)

Finally, when all things are equal, go for the most stable, tried-and-true, methodology — don’t do experimental new “AI” development if a sold optimization or analytics-based solution already exists.

4) Over Reliance on Third Party Tech is a Sustainable Business, Especially if its Gen-AI!

Reliance on third party tech, especially that which has not been proven to be on stable ground in the market, is not a good business plan. What do you do if the provider goes bankrupt, or, realizes they are on the path to bankruptcy and turns the tech off? If you have nothing else to pivot to, you go bankrupt too. Not a good scenario!

Even if you are building on tried-and-true stable tech (with a large install base), unless your business plan is to be acquired by the tech you’re building on and you actually have a chance of making that happen (you came from the provider, have good connections, etc.), your options are very, very limited if you don’t succeed.

You need to focus on a solution to a real problem that companies will pay to address first. And while it can be based 100% on third party tech to start, that shouldn’t be the game plan. The plan should be to acquire it, build something better in house, or at least find three or four options that will serve the same function until you can acquire or build appropriate tech. (The exception being a product maintained for you by a third party that is based on open source that will always be there for you to take ownership of and then assign to a new team.)

Once you have a solution, and know what tech you need, do the cost benefit analysis of:

• licensing someone else’s tech
• acquiring the third party tech
• building on, and contributing to, open source
• building your own

for each aspect of the solution, as well as the points at which one option becomes better.

In addition, even when you select a solution, always keep your eyes out for an alternative that has been demonstrated to be more reliable, efficient, or cost effective. When a problem has been newly identified, some companies will just throw anything at it to see what appears to work, without doing a proper analysis and designing a proper solution from the ground up. Eventually, some smart minds powered by Human Intelligence (HI!) will come up with a better solution. Once that becomes economical, you’ll want to switch to that if you don’t have an equivalent solution in house, while keeping back-up options open.

And definitely don’t (over) rely on third party Gen-AI — even the biggest companies can only afford to bleed for so long. There’s nothing Gen-AI can do that traditional tech can’t. It’s best uses are as an interface layer for (very) low TQ (Technology Quotient) folk who are being forced to use tech but just don’t get it (as a more natural language chatbot interface) or as a massive document store search and summarization solution (when traditional semantic / neural networks would just be overloaded). That’s it. And in all of these cases, it needs an underlying application that actually does the work and manages the data.

Stay tuned for Part 4!

In short, as per Part 1, you

1. keep admitting to every mistake you are making and do something about it, then
2. continue by looking for cost-effective opportunities for improvement and pursue them and finally
3. never, ever, ever forget the timeless basics.

Today, we’ll continue by describing what you do when you identify, and admit to, the second mistake we chronicled in our two part introduction to our “dead company walking” (Part 1 and Part 2) series (where we helped your potential customers identify problems that signify you are a SaaS supplier they should be walking away from).

2) A Shiny Exterior is More Important Than a Modern Engine

i ) Flip Your Focus from UX first to Solution First

Too many companies right now think the “lack of adoption” problem is a lack of usability problem because all their founders knew was SAP Ariba or monolithic Jaggaer or decade old GEP smart, which aren’t the most usable of applications for certain tasks, and definitely not usable by anyone but core buyers.

Many successful companies have been started, grown, and acquired or merged into bigger companies for the past two decades to be better, easier, and/or more affordable than SAP Ariba, Emptoris (acquired by IBM, sunset in 2017, one of the first big players), Jaggaer (which was SciQuest until the 2017 rebranding), Coupa, etc (including Procuri, acquired by Ariba; Iasta, acquired by Selectica, merged with b-Pack, rebranded Determine, acquired by Corcentric; EC Sourcing, acquired BidMode then was acquired by Simfoni, etc.). And ten times as many have started for the same reasons and no longer exist (without [nearly as] successful exits). Usability is only part of the problem.

For an application to be adopted it has to

• be easy to use to the point where it
• is easier and faster to use it than to circumvent it
  (or to keep doing what the user is doing now) and, most importantly,
• solve the user’s core problem.

This last reason is why a lot of fake-take, sorry, intake, solutions are going to be ultimately abandoned. Simply making it easy for a user to request something and then showing an animated graphic of the request being forwarded to Bob and then, the next day, showing an animated Bob opening the request once he’s read it DOES NOT solve a user’s problem where they need a product or service to do their job. Unless the platform allows Bob to process and fulfill that request more efficiently and effectively than the current methodology, and, most importantly, gives full visibility into what actions Bob has and is currently undertaking, along with an ETD of when the user will have the request fulfilled, the intake application is worse than not having anything at all. This is because the user still has to message or call Bob to find out what’s going on until Bob manually indicates that he has accepted the request, fulfilled the request, and when (and where) the product or service will arrive.

ii) Design Open API first with full data and process control

Everyone focuses on the UX and UI first because that’s what the users (and executives) see, believing that a great demo will get them the sale. And while, sadly, it will get them some sales from executives with no Tech IQ whatsoever, it doesn’t mean it will get them the renewal, especially after the product fails to be adopted because it doesn’t actually let the users work the way they need to work.

It’s not the UI, it’s the ability to capture the data and run the processes in an acceptable manner, and this is not possible if the UI or workflow is wrong. And you’ll never get it (completely) right the first time. But if you build a solid backend that is fully (Open) API driven for data and process control, it will be easy to programmatically alter the workflow, and modify or rebuild the UI (with external help who won’t even have to know more than the API calls) later to be more appropriate.

Too many companies sacrifice a proper software foundation in their rush to MVP and a sale, and this is what cripples them (sometimes to the point of failure). Think of building software like building a real building. If you only build the foundation for a 2 story house, you’ll never be able to build a 20 story apartment building. But if you build the foundation for a 20 story apartment building, you can build out 2 stories of units to start, sell those, and then build out the rest (when you can show off the demo units and drum up a lot of interest).

iii) Then Design a UX on top that customers use – with their help

Work with beta customers, plural, on enhancements and new modules and get their input on what their core processes are and what would make a UI more usable. While you should never design for any specific customer, you should design to meet the 80% common needs, and, where possible, include as many configuration / customization options in the product (workflow and data collection) as possible (but not the codebase, it has to be software switches, you don’t want multiple code branches in production, ever).

Your chances of success improve greatly if multiple customers will say it solves their problems and they use it daily. It’s not about them loving it, it’s about them using it. That’s the key.

iv) If extra $$$ remain, farm out the eye candy development

It doesn’t hurt to have the application look new and shiny, but that’s secondary to having it work in a modern fashion that will leave your new users with tears of joy the first time they use it (because they thought that no solution could tackle their complex procurement, sourcing, logistics, new product design, supplier management, etc. challenges). So if you have a few extra dollars, once you’ve figured everything out about usability and configurability, then you can hire a UX guru to make it sparkle. (But always remember that a solution that actually works shines on its own.)

Stay tuned for Part 3!

Good for you. It takes a lot of guts to admit you’re screwing up badly, burning cash faster than you’re taking it in (or able to raise it), and that you boarded the hype bus heading straight for the edge of the cliff before making sure the brakes and steering wheel worked! (So much so that the doctor wasn’t really expecting you to admit it. That’s why, this time around, his dead company walking series was targetted at buyers to help them avoid companies who won’t do what it takes to survive the coming market crash in our space.)

Fortunately, the fact that you admit it now, before the market situation gets really bad, means that you likely still have time to get treated, recover, and make a comeback before you bleed to death. So what do you do?

In short, you

1. start by admitting to every mistake you are making and do something about it, even if it means ousting part (or all) of the founding team (assuming they don’t still have a majority control, in which case you jump to the next ship while there are still ships sailing to jump to) then
2. continue by looking for cost-effective opportunities for improvement and pursue them and finally
3. never, ever, ever forget the timeless basics.

Today, we’ll start with describing what you do when you identify, and admit to, the first mistake we chronicled in our two part introduction to our “dead company walking” (Part 1 and Part 2) series (where we helped your potential customers identify problems that signify you are a SaaS supplier they should be walking away from).

1) Too Many Assumptions, Too Few Verifications

Double Down on Market Research – Know Your Competition

You’re not selling in a blue ocean. You’re selling in a very crowded ocean, and if you did your market research (or even glanced at the Mega Map, you’d know it! Depending on your core offering, you have at least 50 competitors, and even if you focus in on an industry niche or market size, at least a dozen, if not two. And there’s only so many customers to go around, which means there’s only room for a handful of companies with your specific focus to be smashingly successful.

So learn who they are, what they do, and, most importantly what they don’t do that they should do, and then do that, because, at the end of the day, you need to sell on core and differentiated value.

Double Down on Market Research – Know Your Target Customer’s Pain Points

Your customers don’t want cool. They don’t want custom Aston Martin’s that need to be tuned by a high price mechanic every month to keep running and can’t be driven on anything but the smoothest of roads. They want Ford tough F150s that only need maintenance every six months and can withstand the rugged terrain they work in.

They want a platform that helps them do the job they have to do everyday, the 80%, not the frilly 20% and nothing else. Learn their pain, and, most importantly, after the core pain is solved, focus on their frustrations that your competitors aren’t. That’s the core and differentiated value that will make you super successful, not whatever technology is currently hyped to be in Vogue. After all, like real fashion, tech fashion changes (and in some cases goes out of style) every few years, and doesn’t necessarily solve any problems in the first place (like Gen-AI).

Get Help! You’ll Only Identify So Much On Your Own.

Especially if you’re new to the space and started your company because you were a purchaser forced to use tool X that didn’t do function Y at your last job. You know one tool well, the two competitors who were finalists in the RFX okay, and that’s it … especially since your lack of understanding of Procurement (marketing) terminology led you to believe that the first few results of a Google search and the Gartner/Forrester maps chronicled every vendor you need to know. Which, as one glance at the Mega Map should convey, is not even close.

Plus, you knew your company’s processes, and, if you were involved in an association and actually went to meetings and roundtables, maybe a couple others. But now you have to serve industries and quench the thirst of multiple types of buyers. You need the help of someone who has seen the rise and fall of companies in this space from 1.0 through the current 3.0+ offerings and knows the products, the players, and the pain well if you want to quickly zero in on what the core and the differentiation actually is for your company.

Stay tuned for Part 2!

Good for you! As we noted in part 1, admitting you might be a dumb company is the most important thing to do on the yellow brick road to enlightenment.

So what do you do next? In short you continue to:

1. admit to every mistake you are making and do something about it,
2. look for opportunities to improve that are logical next steps, and
3. never, ever forget the timeless basics.

Today, we’ll continue with describing what you do when you identify, and admit to, one of the last five mistakes we chronicled in our re-introduction to our “dumb company” series and want to do something better.

6) No More Training

Start picking out your corporate coffin and writing your corporate obituary, because the minute you stop learning and stop improving is the first minute on your corporate deathbed. So:

• time your process throughput across corporate processes (and compare to industry averages)
• examine your SaaS utilization (on the SaaS apps you keep after you Get SaaSy)
• train where either can be noticeably improved

7) Tighten The Belt One Notch Per Month

You can trim the fat, but you have to stop trimming when the fat is gone.

If revenue is not increasing, it means that either your marketing or sales is not effective or your product is not appropriate. In both cases, you will have to invest further. In the first, to get some consulting from an expert low-cost guerrilla marketer as well as the educational assets you will need, and then some training on how to improve the effectiveness of your sales cycle. In the latter, expert advice on where to focus the development roadmap to make it more appropriate, and appealing, to your target market.

If there’s not enough cash, then you will have to wrangle more investment (even if the terms aren’t what you hoped) or, if you have revenue, take a loan (and keep your equity).

8) From 60 to 0 in Marketing

As already indicated, just because you wasted the entire $M marketing budget on overpriced events, email marketing, “analyst firms” and their maps, soundbite marketing, and a CMO who only cares about his jet-setting media-centric lifestyle, that doesn’t mean you can cut it to 0. If you do so, crawl in the corporate coffin as it’s almost time to nail the lid.

You need constant visibility as you have to be “the name they know” when your target customer finally gets budget and can invite you to an RFP or a contract negotiation. At any given time, half of your customers are going to be six months away from a potential budget. One fourth, nine months, and only one fourth will be close to a budget season, where they may not get budget, and then it’s fifteen months before they can talk to you.

Constant visibility doesn’t mean a booth at a 100K event every month and the media that comes from it, it means monthly educational content that not only keeps your name visible, but keeps you front and centre as they look for that content to consume, to learn from, and hopefully build their business case to buy your product.

9) Real Innovation is Too Risky

First of all, a lot of customer problems can be solved with evolutionary renovations to existing tech, and “innovation” is thus not as risky as you think.

Secondly, sometimes real innovation is needed to solve a problem, or at least do so affordably. While it’s risky (maybe you won’t solve it / get it right), if solving that problem is key to your corporate growth, and possibly your corporate survival, it’s definitely riskier not to pursue innovation. So do it, but carefully and in a controlled manner — don’t bet the bank on anything without a [very] high probability of success. Innovation should NOT be costly (beyond the innovator’s salary) in software-based tech. It’s just research, trial, and error. More than that, and you’re not doing it right.

X) Raise the DrawBridge!

You don’t know everything. And that’s okay. No one does.

But always remember: what you don’t know can kill you. Bring in an expert ASAP to do an analysis of your critical activities, identify weaknesses, and then, if necessary bring in an expert to address them. SI has been telling you for years consultants are cheap as the value a fair priced expert consultant will bring you is multiples of what that person will charge.

Next up: Avoiding the Graveyard if you are a Dead Company Walking! (Part 1 of 8)