I was writing a post for one of my other blogs about Software As A Service (SaaS), when something hit me. Let me back up a little bit so I can explain.
When people write about the advantages of software as a service vs. on-premise, installed software, they generally talk about:
- Time to value
- No up-front costs
- No additional hardware
- No patching, upgrading done by the customer (the vendor handles that)
- Accessibility- Just log in, it doesn’t matter what computer you’re on
- Scalability
The list goes on, but those are the big ones you hear from proponents of SaaS. But one of the most interesting things I see is the availability of massive amounts of live data. Since SaaS companies maintain and track data from their members, they could easily provide aggregate, anonymous data to their users. Let’s say you’re using a SaaS CRM package and you’re curious about how you’re doing compared to others in your industry. You could see things like:
- How is my average lead-to-customer conversion time?
- How is my average lead-to-customer conversion time compared to others in my industry?
- How is my average lead-to-customer conversion time compared to others in my industry that are the same in company size?
With this data available, it would be easy to compare your company to others with any number of additional filters. So that begs the question: how important is comparison?
Well? How important is is?
That’s one of those questions that causes an immediate reaction in me. I want to quickly answer "well, yes, it’s very important," but I’m not sure why. I think that comparing ourselves to others is kind of a built-in, inescapable human trait. We compare how much money we make, how tall we are, our looks, our house….essentially everything with everyone else around us. The entire notion of competition is just a big chance to compare our skills with others.
But why?
If we take emotions out of the equation – which is easy to say, I realize – the simplest answer would be to guide positive action. For instance, if I’m only healthier than 10% of the population, knowledge of that could make me decide to do something about that. On the other side, if I’m smarter than 97% of the population (again, just as an illustration), that could make me want to maintain that standing and aspire to get closer to 100%.
But something about that is unsatisfactory. If the only benefit to comparison is guidance for positive action, it seems like there is a negative ROI. I mean, we spend so much time comparing and really don’t do much with that comparison data.
So I must be missing something. Is there value strictly in knowing how we compare regardless of what we decide to do with that knowledge?
