Some of the biggest challenges facing those building SaaS products for small businesses will be addressed at the upcoming Tech Adoption Summit, Nov. 6-7, at The Laundry in San Francisco’s Mission District.
How to acquire SMB customers efficiently. How to build a brand that stands out in a crowded field of challengers and incumbents. How to use service and customer experience as differentiators and retention drivers. How to find new reseller channel that can bring your product to market deep into the small business space. How to bring your start up through the journey from launch to exit.
We have just posted our agenda and initial roster of speakers for this year’s event (last year we called it the Cloud Adoption Summit).
Over the past few months we’ve gotten to know several of this year’s featured speakers by interviewing them on our Above the Cloud podcast. Each of these roughly 20 minute interviews offers a snapshot of how each leader views the challenge of moving small businesses to the cloud.
Check out what each has to say.
Tolithia Kornweibel, Head of Marketing, Gusto
In this podcast Tolithia discusses among other things how HR SaaS leader Gusto scales customer experience, which is a huge differentiator for the company, which has thus far raised more than $300 million.
“Customer experience is a key competitive advantage for us and is part and parcel of why we have an NPS score of over 70,” Kornweibel said. “it is not just software, it is also a service that is designed around the a user who is not an HR pro.”
Tolithia is giving a headline talk at the summit.
Josh Melick, Co-founder & CEO of Broadly
Broadly offers a tool for small businesses to collect more customer reviews, and also tools for communicating with their customers across the channels they want to use — messaging apps, live chat and text. One thing we talked about on the podcast was Broadly’s decision to go direct to SMB with inside sales, a risky decision given the cost.
“It’s the hardest decision for a start-up to make. Many choose not to do it because it is so hard. I went direct because I want to hear directly from my customers,” Josh said. “I didn’t want the message to get garbled or lost. I wanted to feel their pain.”
Josh is giving a headline talk at the summit.
Jacqueline Cook, Chief Strategy Officer, Vendasta
Jackie talked about research Vendasta has done to identify best practices that reduce churn. She will cover the same subject matter in her talk at the summit.
“SMBs do not necessarily want a website guy and an SEO gal and so on,” Jackie said. “They want a single trusted provider. They want to hang their hat on the fact that they are the experts in running their businesses and they get to run their businesses. But I get to outsource some of these functions to someone that I trust.”
Josh May, Founder & CEO, POWr.io
May’s company offers plug-ins for self-service websites. On the podcast we talked about how cloud technology has made it possible for small businesses to build a business affordably. “We’ve gone from a very expensive, complicated, limited world for small businesses to what is now the opposite,” Josh said. “Now you can get a site up in a matter of minutes and it is extremely affordable.”
Josh will be a panelist at the Tech Adoption Summit.
Visit the Tech Adoption Summit page to review the agenda, speakers and register to attend. Space is limited and this show is expected to sell out. Early bird rates are in effect through September 28. This is the second annual event presented by the LSA’s Tech Adoption Index.
