Just back from a great session with the S+S Incubation Center partners that join us this week in Bellevue, WA for the MS Hosting Summit.

Main themes of the discussion were around lead generation and promoting offerings. An interesting topic for discussion with all partners was launched after Richard Dym from OpSource showed some of his metrics on how they find and win new ISVs.

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Inbound marketing using the web, seo an d events are proving to be the most effective tools to drive pipeline. So far no surprise. The time from lead to order has doubled from 2007 to 2008 with now being an average 222 days.

A key indicator that the ISV market moving to S+S and SaaS is clearly slowing in the economic climate, despite upbeat reports from IDC and Forrester.

This raised the question on what it would take to get ISVs to move faster? Is it by focusing on the Hosting Partners’ key competencies of infrastructure, 24/7 monitoring and availability? Or is it by helping the ISVs to generate new business from reselling other services, to bring money into the operation?

What do you think? Are you seeing the slowdown in turning leads to orders?