SMB SaaS and website builder Mono Solutions has announced the appointment of Kim Mortensen as its chief commercial officer. Among other things, Mortensen will support Mono’s growth as it continues to expand its SMB-focused software including websites and adjacent marketing & commerce functions.
Mortensen will accomplish this by cultivating Mono’s partner channels. He’ll work with partner-facing departments to optimize them for continued growth. The goal is to gain deeper geographic and vertical reach through the channel partners that sell and distribute Mono’s products to SMB markets.
Qualifications include his previous role as CEO of BIM Object, a building information modeling (BIM) content platform. That plus 10 years of executive experience in various SaaS companies primes him for the above expansion goals, which require a firm playbook for scaling up SaaS operations.
“As Mono has continued to grow and expand in the local SaaS space, it’s fantastic to welcome someone like Kim as part of our Executive Management team”, Mono CEO & Co-founder Louise Lachmann told Localogy Insider. “With his prior experience in the SaaS space, I truly believe it’ll help us accelerate our delivery of digital success not only to our partners, but also their SMB clients.”
SMB Life Cycle
Panning back, Mono’s continued SMB SaaS expansion — and Mortensen’s appointment to accelerate that mission — is aligned with a trend we’ve been tracking. As competition heats up among SMB website builders and “presence” products, competitive edge and market share can be gained through expansion.
That can include functions that are adjacent to, and complementary with, websites. For example, SMB website needs can be coupled with the need for transactional, e-commerce or marketing functionality. This allows website providers to deepen SMB relationships or serve them throughout their life cycles.
Examples include Automattic’s new content monetization tools and GoDaddy going deeper on marketing and social tools. Squarespace has recently done similarly by beefing up its social media creation tools. There’s also movement in the other direction with Constant Contact launching websites.
All of this brings advantages in terms of deepening SMB relationships, pursuant to greater lifetime value and recurring revenue. SMBs can also benefit from having a one-stop-shop for the needs they have now, or those that they will grow into. Presence naturally leads to marketing and commerce as SMBs grow.
In Tandem
Back to Mono, Mortensen’s SaaS experience should accelerate growth in several ways. The explicit driver — as reported above — is growing the strength and reach of the channel partner network. Our speculation is that the software bundle itself — already comprehensive — could expand in tandem.
Mono Solutions is owned by Bauer Media Group, and specializes in a Saas-based white-label website builder and suite of SMB digital products. It has oriented these products around a do-it-with-me (DIWM) approach that allows its channel partners to provide a mix of software and support to SMBs.
