This is an important question you need to ponder over ­ What do you want people to think of when they are presented with your product?

There are 4 positioning options that Indian companies selling to global markets can take:

• Category Creator Strategy: Wingify is a leader in A/B testing which was a virtually non­existing category when the company launched "Visual Website Optimizer" 5 years ago.
• Innovator Strategy: KiSSFLOW came up with a new way of managing business processes / workflows. Similarly, GrexIt entered the crowded customer support and project management market with a lightweight email centric approach.
• Low Cost Strategy: "Low Cost" is not necessary pants down "Drop the Price" approach or being "Cheap". It is really about taking the "India Advantage" and going after global markets and disrupting an existing category. Freshdesk in 2010 started as a low­cost alternative but has transformed itself into one of the top helpdesk management solutions in the world.

Free Trial vs Freemium

Both freemium and free trials have been used extensively. However, the success of the Freemium model is seen around the SOHO/VSB customer segment (less than $1000 annual contract value) and the Free Trial model works best in the SMB/Mid­Market Segment ($1000 to $25000 annual contract value).

Pricing

Nothing is more critical to a SaaS business than its pricing strategy. You don't want to overcharge and also not leave "money on the table". Figuring out the pricing is more of an art than science.

The KiSSFLOW team looked at this problem from the point of view of its potential customers i.e the customers who have already bought Google Apps. Google sells their Google Apps Suite at $5/user/month. At $3/user/month it provided the right price point for a large chunk of customers to get into the trial process without hesitation.

The Grexit team looked at pricing differently. Grexit looked at what its competition's pricing was, and even though GrexIt had a very different approach to solving the user problem, they chose to price it similar to their competition.

The Brightpod team, realized that marketing teams and departments have budgets to spend on online software. Hence, we priced our product a bit higher than some of our general­purpose competitors.

Even before this guide you would have come to know that there is no "one pricing fits all" approach. The key point here is not what is the price of your product, but getting the price of the product right (whatever be it) is important before you push the pedal on sales and marketing.

Sign Up Qualification


As you prepare to put more ammo into your marketing efforts you also need to prepare your team to handle the acquisition model for day to day operations. Three clear team bifurcations will eventually emerge ­ Marketing, Product and Sales and each one should work in tandem with the other.

The prospective customers coming to your website will be an output of the marketing team and input to your product team. As they are trying out your product, "engaged / activated" products act as the output of the product team and input into your sales team. Your sales team will now have to goto work on converting these prospects into customers.