5. Ensure Strong Customer Commitment and Feedback
Knowing your customers' feelings about your products is critical in understanding how to improve your product to meet customer needs and expectations.

For example, people generally don't like to use project management software because it basically plans a project but doesn't help in the execution of it. So we founded Clarizen with a clear vision of bringing the power of team collaboration to project management in order to enhance the plan execution. Having information about customer adoption is crucial to our success. So we put mechanisms in place to get detailed customer feedback about the following issues:

• Whether our customers are impressed with the product's ability to align efforts across the entire value chain in their business
• If they think it's fast enough or too slow
• Do they find it's as simple to use as e-mail
• If they're using the product to obtain up-to-the-minute knowledge that helps them align project data with their business objectives.
• If they have a strong commitment to our product
• Whether they're too busy to use our product
• If they're using the system as we've intended

Clarizen, like many companies these days, is an SaaS and an on-premise vendor. Some vendors believe they can manage their product adoption and improvement strategies by using business analytics to observing what their customers are doing with the product. While the SaaS model provides a good possibility for obtaining that type of customer information, we believe it's not enough to answer the issues I listed above.

We've found that being successful in the SaaS domain requires excited customers. You can't get close to customers' feelings by simply using business analytics to observe how they use the SaaS product. It requires being close to the customer, having face-to-face meetings, and maintaining a presence in the market (through a Webinar, for example). Here, again, our strategy is paying off.

The great thing about excited customers is that they become the best salespersons for a product. Clarizen has now been in the United States for one year, and we're making great progress. Although we sell also in Europe and Asia, 80 percent of our market is with excited customers in the U.S.


Avinoam Nowogrodski is co-founder and CEO of Clarizen, a provider of on-demand, online project management software, allows businesses to easily manage all of their projects and resources in a single environment. Prior to establishing Clarizen, Avinoam co-founded SmarTeam Corp., a provider of collaborative product life cycle management solutions.

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