Article**: tobesaas Author: Dai Ke.
Hundreds of billions of dollars have been burned, a large number of people have been scrapped, and the best digital opportunities have been missed.
China's SaaS, why is it so unlucky?
Many people believe that SaaS has done so far is due to the external environment. For example, the general environment is not good, the economy is sluggish, the business is difficult, the market is not strong, and the user level is not good.
In fact, these are all lame excuses, and the real reason for the decline of domestic SaaS is to catch up with this impetuous era.
It has to be said that the Internet has made SaaS;But at the same time, the Internet has made this era extremely shallow. As traffic becomes hard currency, there are more short-term and fast businesses that can get rich quickly, and how can anyone be willing to work hard to do a long-tail slow business like SaaS?
In fact, it is simply not feasible to move the Internet play method to the SaaS business.
The SaaS business model is not complicated, you just need to follow the business logic and rules step by step, even if it is not successful, it will not fail so much.
The approach of the Internet industry is contrary to this.
Internet entrepreneurship has always been high-minded, either to redefine this, or to subvert that, to penetrate a certain industry at every turn, and to say that brute force is a miracle.
As a result, nothing was defined except for a bunch of specious concepts. The vigorous effort did not produce a miracle, but it came out with a high cost and price.
If the Internet doesn't work, is there a way out for software-based SaaS?In fact, this is another manifestation of impetuousness.
Why?It is precisely because of the maturity of enterprise software routines that you can directly translate to SaaS without using any brains, and you think you can get through.
However, enterprise software and SaaS are fundamentally different businesses. The difference between them is the opposition between long and short, big and small, that is, the long-term business of SaaS vs the one-shot sale of software, and the pursuit of big transactions vs the small business of scale.
So simply panning won't be successful.
Recently, a lot of people have been discussing why SaaS can't do ERP. In fact, it's not that SaaS can't do it, but when the business complexity reaches a certain level, SaaS will go to the road of OP or PaaS customization. Either way, as long as SaaS is projectized, then its productivity and ROI are simply not as good as software companies.
In fact, without replicable scale, the SaaS model has no advantage at all.
In fact, there is no question of which is better or worse between enterprise software and SaaS. If the software is doing well, why do you have to wear a SaaS hat and destroy the Great Wall?
If soft enterprises have to transform to SaaS, it is not impossible, in fact, there are many precedents for successful transformation. However, in this impetuous era, transformation itself is the biggest difficulty.
The impetuous era does create some shallow "business success", but it also causes serious harm to SaaS entrepreneurship: it abandons the learning ability of the entrepreneurial team and the determined entrepreneurial mentality.
Strange appearances can be seen everywhere in this industry, for example, the more serious things are, the less people study them, and the gossip version of SaaS is watched by a large number of onlookers. A friend who works as a tech ** told me that he counted the top SaaS headlines throughout the year, and the vast majority of them were fundraising news.
I've now largely eliminated training in SaaS marketing, sales, and customer success. Because I feel more and more that these contents are incompatible with the current business values of SaaS entrepreneurship. If you spread these contents again, it is tantamount to going against others.
For example, if you talk about SaaS marketing, the goal is to get more MQL and SQL. But the marketer thinks: Is there a clue conversion, what does it have to do with me?No matter how much money you spend, as long as you have enough clicks, the KPI can be met.
For another example, you say that 80% of retention is determined by sales, but sales think: What does customer acquisition quality and retention have to do with me?Considering those things, it will affect my signing of orders, isn't it just counting on commissions to do sales?
For example, which CSM doesn't think so, with this salary, why should I be angry when I see the customer's face?
This is the case in an impetuous industry, where buildings often begin to collapse before they are built.
Chinese SaaS, got up early in the morning and didn't catch up with the late set, but caught up with an impetuous era, which was too unlucky.