Tag Archive for 'ipayroll'

There’s plenty of ways to skin a (credibility) cat

Published by Ben Kepes on August 15, 2008 in Business, Design, IT, New Zealand, SaaS and Strategy. 6 Comments

Disruption needs trust. SaaS vendors who are attempting to disrupt a traditional incumbent need to do everything to build the credibility that creates trust from customers.

logo The other day I visited SaaS vendor iPayroll and was pleasantly surprised when I looked up at the entrance to their building. iPayroll decided that their market (payroll services for small/medium businesses) needed to really trust them for their most sensitive of data. iPayroll decided that securing naming rights to a building would give them a level of credibility that would build trust with their customers. It’s a reasonable enough thought and it would seem to work for iPayroll and the market they’re in.

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logo Just up the road in a lovely, but unmarked, building lives the global headquarters of Xero. Xero also deals with SMEs and handles their sensitive financial records. Xero too realised that trust was critical but their approach to gaining this level of trust was to go through an IPO and gain the credibility of being in the public eye. Xero banked on this credibility building trust for their brand. It to is a reasonable enough contention (not to mention other good reasons for IPOing) and it seems to have worked well for Xero thus far.

My point? There’s many ways of doing it, and really it doesn’t matter how you do it, but SaaS businesses have no option but to built a credible story and leverage that credibility to create trust for their customers (and potential customers).

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What it really takes to move customers to SaaS…

Published by Ben Kepes on August 1, 2008 in Business, Efficiency, IT, SaaS and Strategy. 1 Comment

logo I spent some time this morning being set up by iPayroll. I’ve written about iPayroll in the past and been pretty critical about the look of their offering and also whether or not there is a value add to SaaS delivered payroll apps. To their credit, iPayroll decided that, notwithstanding my criticisms, there was value in getting me hooked up with their product so I could better assess what they do (maybe a case of keeping your friends close and your enemies closer ;-)).

I’ll post about my experiences using iPayroll later on, but for now I want to talk more generally about the cost of customer acquisition for SaaS products. I’ve gone on record in the past saying that SaaS vendors who are trying to subvert a traditional installed application need to ease the conversion pain for their users. I for example have been doing SME payroll for over a decade, through multiple businesses - I understand payroll but even I couldn’t face the conversion pain.

iPayroll I can unreservedly say are doing absolutely everything right in this respect. After agreeing to sign up I was personally contacted by iPayroll’s sales manager to run me through the set up process - there were no automatic emails to contend with - rather a patient and helpful real person to talk to.

As we currently utilise a payroll package, we wanted to migrate our data. Again iPayroll shows best practice with this. Rather than asking me to do a migration and deal with the hassles, iPayroll simply asked for either a printout of the reports from my existing package, or a backup file of it. From there they do all the work required to migrate to their own package. (Well they’ve told me they’ll do all the work all ready for our pay run on Monday morning - I’m assuming (and confident) that it’ll happen).

Other SaaS vendors should learn from iPayroll’s model - my contention is that if SaaS accounting vendors in particular provided a similar level of set-up and migration service - their conversion numbers would be much, much higher.

I’d estimate that it costs iPayroll well north of a months revenue to perform this process alone, this is after the sales and marketing costs involved in customer acquisition - it shows a real commitment to giving customers a good experience migrating to their product.

Elaine from iPayroll tells me that they have an exceptionally high conversion rate and that most prospects they pitch end up converting - I can totally see why this is the case, and why their existing customers become the best salespeople they have.

Let me reiterate - anyone trying to create momentum with a SaaS product in a class that competes with installed applications has to ease the conversion pain if they hope to achieve scale.

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Diversity TV - Interview with iPayroll

Published by Ben Kepes on May 30, 2008 in Design, Efficiency, IT, New Zealand, SaaS and Strategy. 3 Comments

I bumped into a couple of the folks from iPayroll last week. iPayroll [Diversity coverage here] is a New Zealand based SaaS payroll service.

There has been a fair amount of chatter around the blogosphere around the role of design vs functionality for software, especially SaaS software - iPayroll has come in for a reasonable amount of criticism for it’s look - in this interview we briefly touch on the design issue but focus primarily on the user-centric/solution-centric discussion.

The video is embedded below, apologies for the sound quality of lack thereof. Feel free to subscribe to Divrsity Blog’s Youtube channel for further updates.

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How important is design for SaaS offerings?

Published by Ben Kepes on May 23, 2008 in Design, IT, New Zealand, SaaS and Web x.0. 14 Comments

Yes