“Never stop marketing.” That’s the advice of Bonitasoft’s Mac McConnell, a lead and demand generation executive who manages the software company’s global marketing team. Bonitasoft’s subscription revenue grew a whopping 82% in 2013, thanks in no small part to a savvy subscription marketing team. “We actively talk about the subscription economy,” McConnell told Subscription Site Insider recently. “It’s affecting everything from news media to software sales even to hardware sales.”
Bonitasoft’s flagship product, Bonita BPM, began as a free, community project, but it’s now available also by subscription with several levels of added value. “Four years ago, it was a bit of a difficult sell,” McConnell said. At the time, business process management software was typically sold as a complete infrastructure constituting a single, big-ticket purchase; the subscription approach to software was still very new.
Today, Bonitasoft is thriving through a combination of marketing techniques and that original, free edition, which McConnell still considers the company’s best marketing tool.
Company Profile
Founded: 2009
No. of Products: 1
Employees: 140 worldwide
Business Model: Hybrid — subscriptions, OEM partnerships, consulting, training, support
Paying Subscribers: 900
Location: Headquartered in Grenoble, France, with offices in Paris and San Francisco
Website: http://www.bonitasoft.com/
Target Market
As a vendor of BPM software, Bonitasoft’s primary target market is “any company that has internal processes,” McConnell said. The sweet spot, however, is those with between 100 and 5,000 employees.
In general, there are three main audiences for Bonitasoft’s marketing efforts, McConnell says:
- In-house developers — someone tasked with building an app or something to improve internal processes;
- Line-of-business heads or process owners; and
- Traditional IT staff.
“We haven’t yet taken a vertical approach,” McConnell explained. “Instead, we look across industries. Most organizations have finance processes, marketing processes, sales, IT, HR processes. There are certain commonalities across industries, and that’s where we try to carve out a niche starting at the departmental level and focusing on common pain points that cross industries.”
Bonitasoft also provides its software to original equipment manufacturers (OEM) partners, including 170 technology and systems integration companies for incorporation into their computer products. That has “become a bigger part of our business over the years,” McConnell noted. “Process engines and orchestration are hard to build — partnerships are easier.”
Content & Services
Bonita BPM is Bonitasoft’s flagship product, and it’s designed to improve business operations by connecting people, processes and information systems into easily managed applications. Three components make up the software suite, which is available both in a free, open source community edition and in three progressively more feature-rich subscription versions dubbed “Teamwork,” “Efficiency” and “Performance.” Subscription pricing begins at $15,000.
While the free edition of Bonita BPM offers features including collaborative process modeling, decision tables and model validation, the paid subscription versions offer extensive additional functionality such as custom user profiles, business process templates, mobile access, advanced wizards for Salesforce.com and SAP, and an IT monitoring tool for business-critical processes.
Bonitasoft also manages a community section on its website — a choice that’s particularly noteworthy because while many people go to discussion boards to find answers to software problems, few proprietary software creators foster a sense of community among their users.
Bonitasoft also offers a complete set of training and services, available either on-site or remotely.
Revenue Streams
Though Bonitasoft declines to disclose specific revenue numbers, revenue in its three biggest geographical areas — Western Europe, Latin America and North America — grew by an average of 119% in 2013. The company now has roughly 900 commercial customers in 72 countries — more than a third of those came on in 2013 — as well as community edition deployments in 193 countries and more than 2.75 million downloads worldwide.
Subscription revenue grew a whopping 82% in 2013, while Bonitasoft’s embedded OEM business more than doubled its revenue over 2012.
Software now accounts for 65% of Bonitasoft’s revenues, McConnell says, while training amounts to 15% and professional services make up the remaining 20%.
Marketing Tactics
The free, community edition of Bonita BPM is Bonitasoft’s primary marketing tool since it helps spread the world about the paid versions and allows potential subscribers to try the software out for free. But the company uses other tactics as well, including product tours and videos, two corporate blogs — one in English and one in French — along with PR agencies in both Europe and North America.
Advertising
Bonitasoft uses both SEM and display advertising on specifically targeted sites along with PPC through Google, but not through digital affiliate programs. The company uses Google AdWords as well as the Google Display Network.
SEO
Bonitasoft also uses SEO as part of its marketing efforts, and comes up high when in organic search results. “We’re constantly working on the website to improve its structure and keywords to help on ranking,” McConnell explained.
Syndicated content
The company also syndicates content on third-party IT and developer-oriented sites, where visitors are required to register with an email address to get access. The company offers a paper in a resource library on Network World, for instance, and it also offers contributed byline articles and blog posts.
“We never want to be so arrogant as to assume that everyone’s coming to our website to do research,” McConnell explains. “We want to be where people are doing their research so we can more easily spread our message.”
Social media
Bonitasoft has a presence on Twitter (4,091 followers), Facebook (2,664 likes), Tumblr and Google+.
However, the company’s presence on social media sites is not really meant to be promotional. Instead, it’s used more as a member engagement tactic, to update established users and customers.
Events and trade shows
Bonitasoft wisely provides an educational function to prospective subscribers through its participation at trade shows and what McConnell calls “road shows” focusing on Bonita BPM. “We’ll take over a restaurant or hotel and talk about pain points and solutions in the industry, etc.,” he explained.
Bonitasoft hosted 23 free, face-to-face “Process Efficiency World Tour” gatherings on three continents in 2013 and presented 68 webinars across six languages.
Conversion Tactics
Virtually all of Bonitasoft’s conversion efforts begin with a registration form requiring an email address along with name, company and phone number. The company then offers a variety of registration-required content, including eBooks, whitepapers, articles, videos, checklists and short, one- to two-page “teasers.” Those who sign up then get marketing emails from the company.
“One thing that is important to us is to keep it educational,” McConnell says. “We want to be an education resource for them, sending them relevant email about business processes.”
On average, about 5% of people who register globally with Bonitasoft convert to paying subscriber, McConnell says, though “that will be much higher for people who come in through the community edition of Bonita BPM.”
The company uses two types of registration processes. For software and documents, users must create an account on Bonitasoft; that then allows them to come back and access the community and other materials. For lower-value items like video or webinar replays, however, there’s simply a landing page requesting registration.
Bonitasoft spends a lot of time monitoring conversion rates. “There are lurkers and there are doers,” McConnell said. “The lurkers are people who will consume a lot of information and a lot of time, but rarely will purchase a subscription. Doers have a need and are trying to solve a problem quickly. There’s a lot of great technology out there, and the challenge is to separate those two groups to improve efficiency.”
“My team is well-oiled for looking at sources of registrations, how much we pay for each and how they perform further down the marketing and sales path,” he said. “Ultimately, registrations are nice, but they don’t necessarily lead to software subscriptions.”
The company does some A/B testing through its landing pages and registration pages, but “for the most part, when it comes to the transaction, there will be a sales rep involved somehow,” McConnell explained. “We use the salesperson as backstop.”
In general, once the marketing team sees a certain level of activity from a prospect, the salesperson will pick up the phone and contact the person or try them via email. The company is also looking at implementing an online chat feature as well.
For group sales, leads are gathered through the website and content syndication programs. However, very few sales are closed through the website, McConnell says. Instead, deals are closed through a mix of marketing automation and human interaction with sales staff. (The marketing automation reduces the need for travel by sales staff, says McConnell.)
Retention Tactics
Bonitasoft uses social media to engage members, but its main retention tactic is its customer success team that’s separate from the sales team.
“We want our customers to have a real advocate that’s not attached to the sales process,” McConnell explained.
In fact, the company has found that that customer support team is its single best indicator of subscription renewal.
“If a customer is not using our support, we identify them as being at risk,” McConnell said. “If they’re using our support, they’re trying to do interesting things and are engaged.”
The customer success team will reach out to those “at risk” customers to try to keep the renewal cycle going. To that end, the company has recently begun educational efforts through free eBooks to help users succeed with its products, he added.
Bonitasoft tracks account lifetimes, but since the company is just four years old, most customers have renewed so far, giving them a renewal rate in the high 90th percentile.
About Mac McConnell
McConnell joined Bonitasoft at the beginning of 2012 after previously working at Sun Microsystems as well as his own consulting firm.
“What’s fun and interesting and exciting for a marketer like me is that generally the entry point for subscriptions is at a lower cost than big, Oracle-sized software purchases,” he said. “That means it’s a lot less about an account team.”
McConnell’s advice to other subscription marketers? “Never stop marketing,” he says. “A lot of people stop after the first sales occurs, but good organizations know it hasn’t stopped — it’s just changed to a new goal: renewal.
“If you do well, that means you’re not taking the customer for granted,” he added. “That’s really important. We’ve made mistakes in that area and won’t do it again. We can never rest on our laurels. One of the powers of the subscription model is that it makes us constantly market, or the sale or renewal might not happen.”
Vendors & Technology
Bonitasoft keeps its web design and development in-house, along with content management and editing, but uses a number of third-party vendors for other services:
Hosting — Amazon Web Services
http://aws.amazon.com/
Email management — Salesforce.com Pardot
http://www.pardot.com/
Customer management and support — Salesforce.com
http://www.salesforce.com/
Social media monitoring – Sprout Social
http://sproutsocial.com/
CMS — Drupal
https://drupal.org/
Content creation — A mix of internal and external writers and videographers
Media relations/PR — PAN Communicationa
http://www.pancommunications.com/
Insider Analysis
Software vendors can offer a good lesson in sophisticated marketing, which is why we like this Case Study. One, we like that Bonitasoft has set up a freemium model that requires user registration–this is key to engaging free users and turning them into prospects. This is also boosted by the site’s use of community models — a unique feature for a software producer.
Two, we really love the site’s combined use of marketing automation and sales support; too often, software and technology companies choose to only engage customers and subscribers through electronic means, while legacy publications, particularly on the B2B side, rely too heavily on sales teams, often decreasing profit margins. A mixed model of marketing automation and digital marketing tactics backstopped with live, real-person support can lead to impressive subscription revenue. We’re also impressed that the company has adopted a mixed-revenue approach by offering training and professional services to clients.
And finally, we love the company’s use of syndicated content for not only brand awareness, but to generate leads. We feel other B2B companies could adopt this tactic with relative ease.
As for recommendations, we suggest Bonitasoft start exploring verticals. As we’ve discovered here at Subscription Site Insider, even when there are technological and operational similarities across industries, people still identify with their industry and have a hard time believing that a solution for one industry can work for theirs. Creating blogs that speak to each vertical but then all feed into leads for Bonitasoft software might be a savvy way to start. And a quick look at our Paywall Optimization Toolkit may help the company optimize some of their landing pages a bit more.
