Are you Selling Trust or SaaS/PaaS?
Well it is a little of both, but let me explain. I learned something about the Salesforce.com agreement that totally changed my thinking about SaaS and PaaS agreements, and service level agreements (SLAs): there is no SLA in the Salesforce.com agreement. Yep, you read it right; there is no SLA in their agreement. What Salesforce.com realized–and you need to remember– is that you are first and foremost selling ‘trust’. So Salesforce.com decided to spend less time negotiating the complexities of an embedded SLA in their SaaS agreement and instead publicized their SLA under a Trust Site.
So, here is what every SaaS or PaaS business needs to know about Trust Sites.
What is a Trust Site?
A Trust Site is a public facing website on which you post your SLA (current and historical uptime performance . . . or whatever metrics your customers need to know to trust you), Security Policy and Privacy Policy. This is a pretty simple concept, but if you think about it you are actually taking it to another level by making this information public.
Why They Did It.
I don’t really know, but what I heard is that Salesforce.com was spending way too much time negotiating their SLA (how to measure it, how to determine and how to apply the credits, yada yada). This was unnecessarily extending the sales process, so they did some deeper thinking about the issue.
They realized what customers really want to know about.
1. Know that …