How to thrive the long term relations with customers?

The really big difference about Software as a Service, compared to regular software-in-a-box sales, is that you enter a long term relation with your customers. You send a bill each month, or quarterly, and you constantly upgrade the product. You service, train and support them, month after month, year after year.

There is a need to form a strategy of how to maintain your customer relations. How to build it up. Another way of looking at long term customer relations is that you can start small and build big. Get in with one small, cheap product. Prove yourself as a supplier, build up confidence, and then slowly throw the customers old software out, and change it to your solutions.

SaaS developers can obviously also harvest on involving their customers into their development plans. One of the really great project management systems, Daptiv Inc. has a great concept. They work with something they call the greenhouse, a smart way of collecting views from users and rank them by need.