Selling SaaS in Germany

ISO 27001 and 27017 force you to deal with potential exit scenarios early on.

In DACH you often need both to get public contracts.

I also noticed that costumers are weary of American cloud solutions and SaaS solutions.

Most are aware that they already are one White-House-decision away from being non operational and do not want to make things worse.

I feel this article is saying people from UK/US/etc. want to maximize upside, and people from DACH (Germany etc.) want to minimize downside.

I was a bit shocked when I talked to an Austrian colleague once and they told me they wanted to get into investing, but losing any money at any time was completely unacceptable. They had looked at investing in S&P 500 ETFs etc., but felt they must have misunderstood something, as they didn't understand why anyone would invest in anything that might go down, even temporarily.

So the thesis of the article definitely feels plausible to me.

For those (like the author) who wonder why such a weird mishmash of different conventions was used to come up with the DACH abbreviation, it's because the word "dach" means "roof" in German, so there's a lot of wordplay that's done to talk about all these different regions which are 'under one roof'.

"Dachsprache" (roof-language) is actually a term used by some linguists (sometimes translated to umbrella-language) to refer to a dialect that becomes the standard language of a large region with a varied dialect continuum. E.g. the dialect of Florence became the "dachsprache" of all of Italy.

I very much agree with the fact that IT departments have a massive influence during the sale process. Though, based on my experience, things are slightly softening. We entered the DACH market in 2023 with a cloud based CRM for the care sector. Before that, it was pretty much inconceivable in the care sector to use anything that wasn’t installed on-promises and fully isolated from the internet. Nevertheless, companies are quickly realizing that this is not scalable anymore. There is an urgency for modernizing work tools which is simply not possible with the limitations of the on-promises software era. Additionally, things like C5 seem to give a lot of confidence to IT departments for speeding up the sales process.

In the UK as a startup we found buying Silicon Valley SaaS tools to be a bit different sometimes in similar ways.

Europe, even the UK, prices tech startup significantly lower than the US (a colleague once said that in the US you get funding to turn an idea into execution, in Europe you get funding to turn your execution into money), plus we were tech/retail, so our valuation was just never the same as a pure-tech (or SaaS) business.

Because of this, we had numerous SaaS pricing discussions where the sales rep didn't seem to understand that their pricing was just a non-starter for us. "Why wouldn't you pay $15k a month to save half an engineer's worth of work?"... because our engineers don't cost that much, and we don't have that money.

So much of SaaS pricing is predicated on customers being B2B, pure-tech, VC-funded, plenty of funding, with exceptionally high engineering costs. Essentially: cost is not a concern. Most of the world is not going to pay another $30/m subscription for every employee.

the article is on point. I work in germany for an American company, and the /american/_experts_ always contract the most expensive, feature-less alternative because they get baited by SSO, logging and tracking, that then fail to leverage to anything useful. in some instances, we pay per http request.

How about the payments, what is the easiest way from corporate customer perspective in DACH? Let's say for smaller subscriptions, <1000€/month?

> Yet many SaaS companies still struggle to sell effectively there, even after translating their website or pitching German businesses.

I chuckled on this one. I mean arent these the, like, "the bare minimum" rather then "even extra mile" thing. Using local language and pitched to local business you want to sell to kind of sounds like a basic?

Overall article is fine, really. but that sentence was funny.