In this fast paced digital era with shrinking business cycles, every business needs to choose technologies that can help them compete and deliver results.

Good news is that technologies are moving to cloud and solutions are available as SAAS( Software As A Service) and can be easily found and deployed.

Then, why are business managers struggling to find the right solutions? Why do lot of SAAS purchase by business managers result in churn?

Reason 1 : There are a lot of solutions to choose from

As the chart above shows, Marketing technology space has grown from few hundred to 10’s of thousands in just 7 years. Overall, there are now more than 50K SAAS solutions growing at an annual rate of 20% plus.

Reason 2: One Size fits all?

Traditionally, businesses bought software technology via the CIO’s offices, which involved CIO dealing with consultants or via Gartner Magic quadrants. This does not scale to individual business managers as their needs can be very different from each others and CIO led solutions are no longer possible for Marketing and Customer facing solutions as shown in Figure 2 based on report by Bain & Company.

Reason 3: Misfit, Churn and Time To Value (TTV)

Software technology vendors have traditionally sold their product using technical specification/features and not based on business processes they improve — business managers struggle to decipher the technical jargons to understand whether a solution meets their business need. Further, push sales from vendors result in misfit as the main incentive of the sales team is to sell.

The problem only gets more confounded once a business manager has shortlisted a solution that solves his business need, as this solution has to not only match the CIO’s and CFO’s specification for security and compliance but also work closely with the existing technologies in the company. Integrations, security and data compliance can take a lot of effort and time and can result in delay to deploy and eventually TTV.

Yet another reason for delay is due to the effort in implementing the technology in the existing workflow and the effort in training the staff. If a solution and its integration is not well thought through, there has be to significant effort and time in re-engineering the processes and workflows to suit the technology. This issue is exaggerated when business manager has a point need but ends up buying popular software technology which does lot more than his need.

In Cuspera, we are on a mission to help business managers find the right-fit technology solution for their business needs.