Our reporter Qu Zhongfang reports from Beijing.
In the past, Fanxiang and HUAWEI CLOUD were customer-oriented and even regarded each other as each other's customers, but now, based on the characteristics and environment of China's enterprise service market, everyone needs to work together to innovate with customers and solve customer problems and pain points. This could be a new starting point for the development of SaaS (Software as a Service) in China. Recently, Luo Xu, founder and CEO of the domestic CRM (customer relationship management) SaaS service provider Fanxiang Sales, said in an interview with a reporter from China Business News.
FunShare and HUAWEI CLOUD jointly launched the "CRM + Cloud" joint solution, which organically combines the "base" of Huawei cloud computing and the connected CRM service of Funxiang to provide enterprise customers with digital solutions covering the whole scenario of marketing, sales and service. Tao Zhiqiang, Vice President of HUAWEI CLOUD China and Director of HUAWEI CLOUD Ecosystem Development & Operations Dept, pointed out that HUAWEI CLOUD has been stepping up efforts in ecosystem construction since 2020, and hopes to work with partners to innovate and expand the entire market by better matching customer needs.
Regarding the process and deep-seated reasons for deepening cooperation with HUAWEI CLOUD, Luo Xu gave a positive response to the challenges and ways out of the current development of Chinese SaaS enterprises, and how to deal with the competition of the international CRM giant Salesforce in the domestic market through cooperation with Alibaba Cloud.
crm+The shift in logic behind the cloud model
The reporter learned that in the cloud computing market, the cooperation model of cloud service vendor IaaS (infrastructure as a service + SaaS) is not new. At the same time, Fanxiang has formed a formal partnership with HUAWEI CLOUD since 2020. However, Luo Xu called the launch of the joint solution between Fanxiang and HUAWEI CLOUD a "new starting point", and believes that the "CRM + cloud" model will soon form an industry trend.
Luo Xu explained that the previous cooperation between SaaS vendors and cloud vendors was facing each other - hoping that the other party would bring cloud resources and customer traffic to themselves, but they both neglected to face customers together, so it is very challenging for both cloud vendors and SaaS service providers to do ecological things. Now is a new starting point, HUAWEI CLOUD is vigorously building a cloud ecosystem, and Fanxiang has become an in-depth partner of HUAWEI CLOUD in the CRM track, and the two parties have recalibrated their direction to jointly provide solutions to customers.
It's very difficult to do SaaS in China. Luo Xu lamented that compared with the more mature ecological U.S. market, which has greater openness, business compatibility and value resonance between enterprises, and is easier to achieve good profits, there are very few companies that have achieved real commercial success in the SaaS field in the domestic market. He analyzed and pointed out that the immaturity of the domestic SaaS ecosystem has brought problems from at least two aspects: on the one hand, large and medium-sized enterprise customers, as the largest enterprises with important revenues, often need a complete integrated solution, which requires SaaS vendors to provide services with complete service capabilities. Since 2017, Fanxiang has positioned its key customers as medium and large enterprise customers, providing end-to-end integrated marketing solutions, which involve a lot of industry and technical knowledge, resource investment, and a long period of waiting. On the other hand, the domestic enterprise management is not mature, the management standards are different, which leads to the demand of enterprises in the field of marketing is varied, the demand is cumbersome and complex, many SaaS manufacturers in the field of CRM in the development process, running and running into a project customization company, the final accumulation is not the product capacity, but the ability to invest in manpower and resources, the consequence is that it is difficult to form intensive product production capacity, and the whole market is not big.
In the past few years, Fanxiang has made a lot of explorations, and since 2017, it has been making a PaaS (Platform as a Service) platform, providing integrated CRM solutions through the PaaS platform. On this basis, Fanxiang also needs to connect with upstream and downstream partners to create value for customers. This is also the deep-seated reason for the deepening cooperation between Fanxiang and HUAWEI CLOUD.
Liu Chen, co-founder and vice president of the business center of Fanxiang Sales, said that the value of CRM SaaS is being recognized by more enterprises, the CRM construction of state-owned enterprises is accelerating, and at the same time, independent and controllable has become an increasingly important issue in the digital transformation of enterprises, and the trend of domestic substitution in the CRM field is obvious, and enterprises will be more inclined to choose the "cloud + subscription" model under the premise of ensuring information security.
The business model has crossed the line of qualification
At present, the macro environment at home and abroad is complex and changeable, and the uncertainties and risks and challenges are increasing, and Chinese enterprises have developed into a transition period of great changes in the internal and external environment. Affected by factors such as the retreat of the US dollar, almost all SaaS companies are trying to save costs and survive. In July this year, Fanxiang received an investment of US$30 million from Guizhou Province in innovation empowerment big data**, which is the third consecutive year of capital assistance after being invested by CDH Baifu in 2021 and Chinasoft International in 2022.
Luo Xu pointed out that since its establishment in 2011, Fanxiang has been constantly exploring and adjusting, especially in recent years, it has continued to contrarian financing, and it is very important to sum up the "financial model", that is, the "business model", which is not concerned in the stage of abundant capital, which mainly includes three dimensions of key indicators, one is a sustained and stable growth rate, the second is the industry subscription retention rate, and the third is the profit margin. In Luo Xu's view, a SaaS company can only get investment if it has a qualified financial model. "Fanxiang has crossed the line of qualification, of course, there is still a gap from an excellent financial model. ”
After 12 years of development, Fanxiang has developed perfect product maturity and internationalization capabilities, and has built its own unique connectivity, platform, industry and integration capabilities. In terms of international layout, Fanxiang has also started the internationalization of its products since 2019, and has completed the deployment of data centers in Europe and the construction of related data security certification. The PaaS platform has complete internationalization capabilities, which can effectively support the needs of Chinese enterprises to go overseas and internationalize their business, and help them grow their global business.
The reporter of this newspaper noticed that at the end of October this year, Alibaba Cloud became the exclusive ** of Salesforce in China, and Salesforce was officially launched on the Alibaba Cloud platform on December 18. The emphasis on cash flow, profits, and healthy financial models is also becoming a growing consensus in the corporate services sector.
For the competitive landscape that may emerge in 2024 – First of all, the perception of CRM by medium and large enterprises has gradually matured, CRM is not only a tool, but also a business platform Replacement of the migration of customer demand orders. Secondly, Salesforce was founded in 1999, growing up from the traditional Internet era, through its own construction, investment and mergers and acquisitions and open platform capabilities, to establish a strong ecosystem, which is difficult to match the domestic ecology, but the domestic market has its own uniqueness, especially the demand for mobile and connection, in terms of localization adaptation, domestic manufacturers have formed their own advantages for a long time. Of course, in the end, in terms of the construction and integration of the global ecosystem, and the integration with overseas mainstream applications, domestic manufacturers still have a lot of room for improvement compared with Salesforce. Fanxiang revealed that it will continue to expand partners and introduce more ecosystems in the next one or two years.
In addition, Luo Xu said that after participating in Salesforce's Dreamforce conference in the United States this year, the biggest feeling is "all in AI" (betting on artificial intelligence), and almost every speech is related to AI. AI will reconstruct enterprise software in the next 3 to 5 years, which is not a conceptual layer, but something that can be seen, touched, and implemented, and the software will leap from business-oriented to intelligent. Based on this, China's software industry should catch up and occupy a favorable position in the AI era.
Editor: Wu Qing Proofreader: Yan Jingning).