Selling your SaaS products globally

US based producers of Software as a Service have a few problems when targeting the European markets with their products. There are two main reasons for this. The first is the language problem. Europeans in general understands English, but feel more confident speaking their own language. It's also true language localized products is more popular compared to English only. And unfortunately Italian, Spanish, French and German people don’t even want to speak English.

The second problem is the time zones.  When you are awake, we are sleeping. So to effectively market and sell in Europe you either need to run a 24/7 office with sales staff who speaks 4-5 European languages,  or you need to open up local branch offices in Europe. Both alternatives are expensive and highly risky.

You could also choose to work with Value Added Resellers, but experiences from many producers who have tried it, shows that most V.A.Rs  are not solely dedicated to your product, or they have another core business, where your product will always come in second place. 

There are many resellers of software-in-a-box on the market, but nearly no resellers of SaaS products. (That is why developers depends on their own ability to manage sales and professional services. But really, they should stick to their core business and develop software instead.) The reason why traditional software-in-a-box resellers does not understand the SaaS business model is that their skills is in catalogue services, phone order service and physical distribution. Whereas a SaaS resellers focus must be in branding, marketing, online presentations, sales engineering and professional services. Hello SaaS resellers! Where are you?