The RFP 2.0

Everyone knows the RFP is dead in the SaaS world right?

Our product is a relatively sophisticated on-demand billing system for companies that have non-trivial subscription billing needs. The thing about our business is that any SaaS or Cloud Service company, even the ones just getting started, know they will, in very short order, run into problems rolling out new plans, supporting payments for international customers, and simply handling the subscriber management as the business grows.

So, we deal with prospects and customers ranging from 3 guys in a garage so to speak (not intended to be derogatory, I've done the garage thing twice. It's fun, hard and very rewarding)  to large enterprises who don't want to spend 18 months and $10M ripping up their ERP or Telecom Billing solution to simply roll out a new subscription product.

For example, last month we answered 3 RFP's (aren't they dead?), had online leads from 10 pre-revenue companies and a whole bunch of prospects in between.

The point is, a lot of SaaS companies like us deal with the full spectrum of buying behavior so we are rarely surprised at the different ways people find and evaluate vendors.

Today we saw our first RFP 2.0. We've seen lots of folks using twitter and other social media tools to ask about various vendors and solutions but this approach took it further. @dacourt created a google spreadsheet with some high level subscription billing capability questions, shared with the public and distributed over twitter. A few vendors were initially filled in and over the course of a day or two other vendors added their product evaluations to the mix. Very cool use of today's social media and collaboration tools.

Check out the subscription billing spreadsheet or just search twitter for "subscription billing" and you'll find it being discussed.

It would be great to hear some other stories like this...