Jackrabbit69

Business Development

Valued Contributor

Pitching a subscription model to an industry that's used to perpetual license model

Hey folks,

You lot have been really helpful - thanks for all the advice you've been giving me in some of my previous posts. (Also for the questions you've made me think about - I needed those too!)

But here I am, pitching a cloud-based software to an industry that runs on legacy software that's paid for once and installed on their PCs. It's been really hard convincing them to move away from that model - I mean at the end of the day I'm trying to convince them to shift from thinking of software as a capital expense to an operational expense that's billed quarterly.

Have any of you experienced something like this? Pitching it with the advantages of a cloud native software doesn't seem to be helping (use from anywhere, lesser capital required for hardware, autosave and all the typical cloud benefits).

👑 Sales Strategy

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GDO

Politicker

3

BDM

I saw this in healthcare. A lot of hospitals were Capex intensive and are just now moving to opex.

Jackrabbit69

Valued Contributor

1

Business Development

Any advice for someone driving that change? Our Product definitely has potential, but the resistance is also right up there

GDO

Politicker

3

BDM

having a clear value thats above the monthly cost. Example: cost is 5k/month but they save at least 8k/month on salaries by using your product.

CuriousFox

WR Officer

1

🦊

Dang I've been out of the healthcare game too long.

punishedlad

Tycoon

3

Business Development Team Lead

You've got two options (in my mind) here. You either need to focus your attention on convincing them that there are advantages to doing a subscription based engagement with your company, OR you just need to drive home the value of your product vs the legacy products. If you can't accomplish either of these, you're dead in the water.
Which brings me to a question. Talk to me like I'm a customer. What are the advantages of using a subscription based cloud product vs what I currently have?

Jackrabbit69

Valued Contributor

1

Business Development

You spend far less on hardware and costly set ups first off. Second, you can continue to work on your projects while things like rendering happen on our cloud servers - typically in this industry, once a render is fired up, it makes that system useless for as long as it takes.

I think the most important benefit of a cloud-based system is the frequent updates. Legacy software is slow, you'd end up paying the same initial cost or at least a major chunk of it when that update does come.

TennisandSales

Politicker

3

Head Of Sales

ive had to do this a bit.

when you say pithing the advantages of cloud native / software hasnt worked what do you mean?
what has been the pitch?
depending on who you are talking to, you need to focus less on how its hosted and more on problems that its solving.

do you have an ROI of some sort of Saas vs on prem solutions?

Sunbunny31

Politicker

3

Sr Sales Executive 🐰

One way to get their arms around this change is if there's pain around dealing with upgrades. For example, we would only support 2 dot versions back, so if you were running 3.0 and we'd upgraded to 4.5, it was time for upgrades. That can be very expensive and time consuming for IT to manage, and depending on what you're selling, can be critical to get completed (company platform means preparing a lift-and-shift; desktop deployment means network IT needs to manage every unit in the company). When you move to the cloud, upgrades are seamless and do not involve nearly the same amount of effort, so they save a significant amount of time and money on this alone. If you can find out how upgrades happen today and the amount of time/money/effort is spent on them, you have possibly uncovered a big pain point that the business has.

Justatitle

Big Shot

2

Account Executive

Few things here,
1.) Have they never upgraded that legacy software?
2.) what does the maintenance of that software look like?
3.) Do they have someone/a team internally that manages the legacy systems?
4.) how does your price point compare to that of the legacy system?

FoodForSales

Politicker

2

AE

Sounds like you're selling to Utility companies. Its a hard model to change because the people you're selling to don't make the decision.

Jackrabbit69

Valued Contributor

0

Business Development

More to interior design companies, they're usually not tech-savvy and the legacy software they do use are often referred by others in the same business (prior to them starting the business). That apart, there's a lot of resistance by the end users of the software who usually are trained on legacy software for their jobs and experience in these software is almost always a requirement for a job in this space

antiASKHOLE

Tycoon

1

Bravado's Resident Asshole

I have not, however, what has been your success rate?

Rosie

Catalyst

0

Sales Director

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