Chicago, IL
June 30-July 1/2, 2009

SaaS Selling Models: Building Compelling Value Models that Maximize Sales Success

At our San Francisco conference, several people nominated Chuck for the Presidency after his presentation. He didn't run, but he'll be in Illinois discussing how to add more value to your product without benefit of a bailout.

Chuck DeVita, Growth Process Group

SaaS INFRASTRUCTURE TRACK:

SaaS Face Plant Protection: Offering Your Customers Complete Fallover and Escrow Protection

Our 2009 SaaS report reveals increasing numbers of customers are interested in both escrow and fallover protection. Learn what you need to tell your customers.

Frank Bruno, Iron Mountain

SaaS Pricing Models: Developing a SaaS Strategy That Doesn't Leave Money on the Table

Price tags! Pricing strategies. Intelligent discounting! The information is here.

Jim Geisman, Software Pricing

TRANSITION TO SaaS TRACK:

Developing SaaS Terms of Service and Reseller Agreements

Our legal eagle speaks! If you want to make sure you stay out of court, you should probably listen.

Michael Whitener, Vista Law

The Numbers: Key Highlights from Softletter's SaaS, Marketing, and Sales Compensation Surveys

Randy Hujar, Softletter

Panel Session:

Their Cloud, Your Cloud, or Our Cloud?

A lively discussion on the different Cloud approaches being introduced into the market and how to best leverage them to SaaS success.

Moderated by Jeff Kaplan, THINKstrategies

SaaS Multi Tenancy: The Business Case

SaaS multi-tenancy -- shared infrastructure and resources in a single application that serve multiple clients -- has been the subject of great debate that often begins and ends at the technical/architectural level. Like any good technology decision, multi-tenancy should be driven by the underlying business strategies explored in this seminar. This session examines how SaaS vendors should use multi-tenancy to monetize beyond the application, streamline sales & implementation, improve customer service, and gain and maintain a competitive advantage.

Lincoln Murphy, Sixteen Ventures

RANSITION TO SaaS TRACK:

Teaching IT to Love Your SaaS

Sometimes IT is your friend when attempting to introduce SaaS into a customer's infrastructure and sometimes they're not. This session explains what you can do to make sure corporate IT is on your side during the sale.

Andy Greenawalt, Gnostic Ventures

Networking Break

Focusing on the Customer Service Side of SaaS

The service element of SaaS is more complicated than hosting, upgrading and managing the technologies for your customers. Additional complexities exist in the segment responsible for customer interaction. This session enables you to meet these challenges live on two different fronts; helping customers by adding value with every touch point and changing your internal culture to orientate around service methodologies.

Matthew Gonnering,
CEO of Widen Enterprises, Inc.

Smoothing the Bumpy Road: Helping Your Customer's Deal with SaaS Disruption

Ease of deployment and flexibility have made SaaS and cloud-based applications even more attractive in the current economic environment. As a result, SaaS adoption is accelerating faster than anticipated, even in the enterprise. The problem? SaaS applications radically disrupt organization models for managing technology, including applications, users and data. Conformity outlines these challenges and a holistic approach to resolving them.

Scott Bils, Conformity

Working Lunch: SaaS Revenue Recognition Accounting Update

Proposed changes to accounting rules could significantly impact how SaaS companies price and sell service offerings by this summer. Learn about this proposed change and other SaaS specific revenue issues to help optimize your selling practices, stay ahead of the competition and stay out of trouble.

Jay Howell, BDO Seidman, LLP

SaaS Security for the Very, Very Nervous Enterprise Client

The SaaS model is probably more secure than the alternatives, and multi-tenanting makes scaling your business a lot more fun and profitable. But it just so happens there are plenty of clients (like JP Morgan) who simply won't accept technologies that involve co-mingling of data and loss of control over key aspects of their operations. This session will assist you to understand the issues these clients bring to the table and how to manage the operational costs and issues these customer's concerns will create for your business.

Sam Mele, Firm58

SaaS SALES AND MARKETING TRACK:

Marketing SaaS Without the Release Cycle

Our recent SaaS survey revealed that one third of SaaS firms have abandoned the traditional 12 to 18 month release cycle, rasing the question of how you generate buzz and excitement for your product. Today, more than ever, SaaS companies are looking for proven, cost-effective ways to increase revenue predictably and profitably. During this presentation we will present the fundamental building blocks that every company needs in place before it can scale any demand generation program. We will then review five proven demand generation programs for SaaS companies, including inbound, outbound and organic, i.e., social media programs. These programs are tied to a metric dashboard to determine effective ROI. Finally, we will share with you practical examples of how SaaS companies have applied and benefited from these vital programs.

Robert Jurkowski, OnDemand Advisory Services

SaaS Sales Compensation Models: The Most Effective Compensation Models to Incent Your Sales Personnel

SaaS presents companies with unique challenges to effectively compensate and motivate sales forces; this session prepares you to meet those challenges.

Laura Roach, Xactly

SaaS SALES AND MARKETING TRACK:

SaaS ROI Metrics Benchmarks and Methodologies

If you're going to sell SaaS in a recession you need to provide powerful ROI numbers and potential cost savings arguments as part of the sales cycle. This session prepares you to do just that.

Marty Siewert, Kadient

Break