Few weeks ago, I wrote about possible ways to integrate with Salesforce.com. The options explored included:
- Traditional web-to-lead forms
- API, especially as edocr.com is based on OAuth and salesforce.com now has OAuth capability
- App Exchange
Since then, after much dialogue with salesforce.com employees, customers and partners, we have come to the conclusion, that App Exchange is the way forward for edocr.com. Having prepared edocr.com for lead capture over the last three months, we are now ready to start the integration work. Whilst the development team is busy with integration, I would like to share my thoughts on how we would price the benefits arising from new functionality.
edocr Essential
edocr Essential, our unmanaged service is priced at £250 per annum, making it viable for both small and large businesses. When we priced this basic offering, it was difficult to guess what the right price would be. As far as I know, there are no magic formulae in terms of pricing a product. Yes, certain factors can influence, but at the end of the day, you go with with your gut feel. I would be keen to hear how you have priced your SaaS application.
edocr Essential’s value proposition is based on Exposure. Sales leads are based on prospects contacting you. It provides a one-stop-shop for all your documents. Documents uploaded by employees with accounts are displayed against your company profile fully categorised with company information and employee information. And the company can be listed against all applicable categories on the business directory. Each document can be distributed through mail lists, tweeted and bookmarked to over 200 social networks by you, your team or anyone coming across your document. Documents are accessible through search engines, social networks (when bookmarked) and edocr.com.
edocr Managed is basically outsourcing above to edocr Ltd or its partners so that your account can be professionally managed.
edocr Enterprise provides tighter integration with your applications in addition to providing a white label proposition.
Sales Leads Capture
The sales leads capture is almost ready. The current development project, LC&SFI (Leads Capture and Salesforce.com Integration), started as one project, but it is increasingly felt as two. And therefore, makes sense to split as follows:
– Sales Leads: The ability to access and download who looked at your documents, giving you pre-qualified sales leads. The assumption here is that if someone viewed your document, s/he will be interested in your products and services. The quality of the lead is not part of this offering, but I can foresee us offering behavioural based sales leads in the future, perhaps in 2011. You will soon be able to download leads in CSV format
– Integration with Salesforce.com: After month’s of research, we decided today that the best way to integrate with Salesforce.com is through AppExchange. I was excited when I heard that Salesforce.com supports our chosen API standard, OAuth, but I believe it would be messy, if we had taken this approach, especially as we would have to develop an advanced version of edocr API that will only be available to paid customers.
Pricing Thoughts
Thoughts on pricing is as follows:
1. edocr Essential at £250 per annum (firmed)
2. Sales lead capture at £250 per annum (discussion stage)
3. Integration with Salesforce.com £250 per annum. (discussion stage)
So total cost to use edocr.com with full integration with salesforce.com would be £750 per annum. Seems still too low to get medium to large companies excited. Please note that there is no real basis for £250, it’s just what we came up with, and seems to be a nice figure to increment. As I said earlier, no scientific thought process has gone into pricing. And all our pricing include fair usage with no real restrictions on number of documents, hard disk space, loading, no. of employee accounts, etc.
We may also introduce a one time fee for setting up, perhaps around £100 mark. Additionally, hourly and daily consultancy/advisory fees will be available soon to get the most out of edocr.com.
Your contribution
We are very much in the dark with pricing. At the end of the day, our success depends on getting this right. Our gut feel is that the pricing is too small to attract larger companies. We believe in offering a fair price for the services rendered with a reasonable margin. We would welcome any thoughts, advice, comments you may have.
