Today I am recommending B4B: How Technology and Big Data Are Reinventing the Customer-Supplier Relationship by J.B. Wood, Todd Hewlin and Thomas Lah. While this book is several years old, the concepts and projections into how businesses will sell and buy are amazingly prescient! I have long felt that the world of B2B selling is changing and most organizations are not prepared for those changes.

Consider this: The basic selling motions that nearly every B2B salesperson and sales manager have been trained in are over 125 years old! They were first developed by John Patterson when he founded NCR. He was the first one to develop and refine the direct salesforce model and selling methodologies. These were later adopted by Thomas Watson when he left NCR to found the company that became IBM.

I’ll apologize now for the length of this blog, but this is something I’ve felt the need to write for some time. If your company sells SaaS – what I commonly refer to as “Something as a Service”, then I believe this blog is for you. The question I want to answer, is selling SaaS different, and if so, then how is it different? What so many technology companies forget is that the operative word here is Service. And it is the right service that will produce the critical outcomes the customer ultimately wants to achieve.

It is this emphasis on outcomes that I argue is essential to selling SaaS and does make it different from selling software, storage, security, etc. It is also the criticality of producing the right outcomes that should inform the focus of other parts of the organization as well as how we should manage the customer after the sale. For instance, delivering or over delivering on the outcomes will have a significant impact on renewal rates. This is key as excessive customer churn can be lethal to any SaaS subscription model.