BUSINESS SITUATION
One of the leading US-based sales and use tax software vendor with strong market penetration within financial services (both banking, and insurance), manufacturing, and retail planned to extend their reach, and positioning across the software market for their existing SaaS offerings. This paved way for them to conduct a thorough primary, and secondary research backed investigation on the key decision makers, budgets for sales, and use tax software,, and ICT services along with current pain points within existing technologies in this space.
SGA STRATEGIC APPROACH
The eight-week project encompassed thorough secondary investigation of competitors, trends, third party reviews of existing technology stacks, and their core competencies within the US software sales, and use tax segment. This approach enabled us to accelerate the validation of our data points from the survey resulting in the delivery of the project in a week prior to the committed timeframe. Also, the secondary research enabled us to define, and streamline the overall respondent quotas aligned with the changing market dynamics. A good example to be shared is majority of budget holders remained from the financial department within mid-market software vendors. Thus, allocating 35% of the total respondents across these enterprises was decided to improve the reliability of the findings for the client.
ENGAGEMENT
The engagement process included:
- SGA conducted a survey on Finance & Accounting and IT professionals (n=200) responsible for managing sales and use tax compliance in US-based software organizations.
- Sample selection for the survey was done from SG Analytics’ participant panel who were user of key sales accounting tools and were involved in managing sales and use tax compliance in some capacity.
- Designed a structured questionnaire to understand software industry's current landscape (product offerings, Go-To-Market channels, pricing models, and deployment modes), current sales and use tax challenges and foreseeable risks, current tax solutions deployed to mitigate these challenges, and transformation roadmap of sales and use tax software solutions. For example:
- Most significant sales and use tax compliance difficulties organization faces
- In the next 12 months, the most important strategic initiatives organization with respect to tax compliance
BENEFITS & OUTCOME
- Two key deliverables for the client stood as:
- A marketing asset in the form of a whitepaper Sales Tax Compliance Considerations for U.S. Software Providers | Sovos enabling the client to accelerate awareness-based customer acquisition strategy within a newer segment.
- Unified sales messaging through a workshop on key opportunities, pain points, and key drivers of an agile sales and use tax software assisted in faster access to potential leads within the US software space.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- It’s crucial to build a multi-layered thought leadership asset portfolio, i.e. whitepaper, and sales enablement workshop, to meet the overall objective and ROI.
