Will Parker

Sales Director

AccountsIQ

Having spent nearly two years out and about in Ireland and UK talking to small companies, accountants and consultants I’ve certainly got a good idea of how hard it can be to get people to switch to a SaaS solution, but also, ironically, how easy it can be as well!

I visited a software company last week who have designed a really neat line of business application in the electrical market.  Their solution did everything around designing, quoting and delivering the product in their chosen niche but it needed a back office solution with which it could seamlessly integrate to produce the numbers for their customers. 

We found ourselves pushing against an open door as our two technologies were easy to connect and I found myself thinking why is SaaS frequently so difficult to sell?

Like a number of SaaS accounting vendors we see accountants in practice as a very important route to market, but as Chris Tanner from Pearl pointed out recently on www.cloudave.com, they are a hard community to sell to.

The main reason for this is that very often they do not see a compelling reason for their clients to adopt an online solution as many clients are happy enough with their existing desktop solution. 

It may seem obvious, but it came to me during this meeting that as SaaS suppliers we should be focusing our efforts specifically on those businesses who will really benefit from switching to our applications and not just try and convert everybody to the online way of thinking!

This is particularly true in the current market where pressures on SMEs mean firstly that they are adopting a bit of an “if it ain’t broke don’t change it” mentality but also considering that they are often working very hard to stay in business at all, they do not want the disruption of implementing a new accounting system (even if it is cheaper than their existing one) getting in the way of them running their companies.

From our perspective the example above clearly showed me that anyone who is selling a line of business IT application, but doesn’t want to have to create and manage the accounting back office behind it, could usefully talk to us with our easy connectivity through web services to their systems.

It is frequently the case that very small businesses simply don’t have any strong reasons to take advantage of the general features of SaaS accounting software – they don’t really need anytime, anywhere access, they don’t need to collaborate with their accountants in real time – sending files backwards and forwards meets their requirements and they don’t have any other systems in their businesses which need to connect into their accounting systems.

Perhaps as SaaS vendors should leave these businesses alone for a while and not try and evangelise to them too much; in the fullness of time there is little doubt they will see the advantage of Saas’s pay as you go model and minimal infrastructure requirements but for now maybe many of them are happy with their desktop solutions. 

However, many slightly larger organisations do have other systems to help run their businesses, from simple tills and EPOS platforms to e-commerce sites and then on to line of business applications upon which their whole operation can depend.

All of these systems produce, at a minimum, the sales data for the business which needs to find its way into their accounting system.  These companies need an industry standard, fast and reliable way of bringing this business data together to produce their financials.

A robust and extensive set of APIs is key here as well as some real experience from the software company with integration to other solutions – I think I’ve got a clear idea about one area that I’m going to concentrate on!