Data Controller - Sales & Positioning Playbook

Reference for writing marketing, blog, feed, and sales copy. Covers pain points, target audience, value proposition, packaging, sales motion, and objection handling. Synthesised from the marketing site (datacontroller.io), product docs (docs.datacontroller.io), and product glossary (dc/CONTEXT.md).

The product in one paragraph

Data Controller for SAS® is a SAS-Powered web application that lets business users safely add, modify and delete data in SAS datasets and databases. Every change goes through an edit-stage-approve workflow: edits are staged, validated at the point of entry, reviewed as a diff (new / changed / deleted rows), approved by a data owner, then loaded - with a full audit trail of who changed what, when, and why. It runs on SAS Viya, SAS 9 EBI and SASjs Server, entirely on-prem / offline (no external network calls). It can write to any database reachable via a SAS libname engine.

The problem (pain points)

SAS users routinely need to load or fix data manually - steering tables, parameters, mappings, corrections, regulatory adjustments. The status-quo approaches all hurt:

Network drive + batch job - drop a CSV/Excel on a share, wait for a nightly job. Every new input means a new job to build, test, document and deploy. File-format drift breaks batches at the worst times (month end).
Direct SAS code / Enterprise Guide edits - requires granting end users MODIFY access to sensitive data locations. High risk of locking datasets, no audit trail, no approval.
Asking a DBA / IT to run a script - change requests, queues, delays, blame games between business and IT.
Bespoke in-house capture apps - years of development and testing, and a "black box" nobody wants to maintain.
EUC sprawl - uncontrolled Excel/VBA applications on network shares: opaque access, no version control, no lineage, audit failure. Regulators care (SOX, BCBS, national DQ circulars). Fines are real: Morgan Stanley $5m (2020), Citibank $400m (2020), DTCC £350k (2021).

The five measurable cost areas (see blog post "ROI and Payback"):

Development time - reduced to zero (zero-code, config-driven; the grid is generated dynamically from table metadata).
Deployment time - reduced to zero (config change in the UI, not a code release).
Batch incidents - invalid data cannot be submitted (validated on arrival).
Data quality issues - schema-based automatic rules plus configurable frontend validations and backend hook scripts.
Compliance costs - single source of truth, full audit trail, Excel originals retained with each submission; no reperformed audits of unsecured EUC code.

Target audience

Verticals: regulated industries with large SAS estates - Banking, Insurance, Pharma / Life Sciences. Typical use cases: regulatory reporting adjustments, actuarial / bitemporal reporting (Allianz), DWH steering-table management (AFA försäkring), data catalogs and lineage (Siemens Healthineers), BICC / BI competency centres (DER Touristik).

Personas:

Economic buyer: Head of BI / Data Platform owner, CDO, Head of Regulatory Reporting. Cares about OpEx, risk reduction, audit outcomes, compliance.
Champion: SAS platform owner / technical manager drowning in ad-hoc data-load requests.
End users: business users (Editors) submitting data; data owners (Approvers) signing off; Auditors reviewing history. Roles: Viewer, Editor, Approver, Auditor, Administrator.
Gatekeepers: IT security (satisfied by: on-prem, no external calls, uses existing SASLogon auth, row & column level security, end users never get direct write access to target tables).

Audience tone (from the LinkedIn guide): assume competence - don't explain ETL or data warehouses. Speak to their pains: reporting deadlines, audit trails, hand-cranked ETL, EUC risk, OpEx. Professional and direct; no hype.

Value proposition / key messages

Zero code - adding a new editable table is configuration, done in the tool itself. Column types, lengths, dropdowns are derived from the target table at runtime.
Review / approve workflow - nothing is applied without 1+ approvals; approvers see only the diff.
Full audit history - who, when, why, what; original uploaded files retained.
Secure - existing SAS authentication; RLS and CLS enforced server-side; no end-user write access to targets.
Real-time - intra-day concurrent updates via lock table and queuing; loads abort if the table changed since the diff.
Any database - via SAS libname engines; supports retained keys, composite keys, SCD2 (TXTEMPORAL) and full BITEMPORAL history.
Validation at point of entry - HARDREGEX/SOFTREGEX, dropdowns, min/max, NOT NULL, plus hook scripts to run arbitrary SAS programs before/after edit or approve.
Saves vs alternatives - years of dev/test vs bespoke build; no black box.

Packaging & pricing

Four packages, all with unlimited users (since v6), all flavours of SAS (Viya / EBI / SASjs Server):

Package	Price	Shape
Community	FREE	35 tables/library, 15 view rows, 5 upload rows, 1 viewbox, best-endeavours support
Bronze	12k EUR pa	1 production env, 100 tables/library, 100 rows, 8hr SLA, SASjs support
Silver	21k EUR pa	2 production envs, unlimited tables/rows, 6 viewboxes, in-house SAS app support
Gold	Contact us	Unlimited envs, 4hr SLA, developer + consulting days, perpetual licence option

Add-on: Developer Days (new product features) at 600 EUR/day for all plans; consulting rates at sasapps.io/pricing.
Pricing goals: Transparent, Simple, Fair. Full public price list on the site - a differentiator; use it.
Support: tickets via support.4gl.io or support@datacontroller.io, severity levels 1-4, SLAs per package, escalation by video call between managers.

Sales motion / execution strategy

Land with the free tier. The Community package and the evaluation SPK (single-file import, ~minutes to install on SAS 9) make trying the product nearly frictionless. Since v6.1 the source is also available for anyone to build and evaluate. Push evaluation hard - it is the top of funnel. The eval version is deliberately not production-grade (BASE-engine config tables, table-lock risk, unlicensed interface) - the natural upgrade path is built in.
Discovery call as the primary CTA. Marketing (LinkedIn, blog, feed) always ends with "book a Discovery Call". Content strategy: hook with the pain (EUC risk, ETL sprawl, audit pain), not the product.
Expand from one use case. Typical wedge: steering tables / mapping tables / parameter tables in a reporting team. Expansion levers: more tables, more environments, more business units, API-driven submissions (API Explorer since v6).
Sell the business case, not features. Use the ROI/Payback blog post (five cost areas + calculator) so the champion can build an internal business case. Quantify dev hours, batch incidents, audit effort.
Partner channel. Resellers exist (e.g. SaasNow in the Netherlands); partner-purchased deals may have partner first-line support.
Roadmap as a sales tool. The public roadmap is customer-driven - "features requested by customers get built" - and Gold includes Developer Days. Position the product as one that listens.
Proof points. Named customer stories (AFA, Allianz, Siemens Healthineers, DER Touristik), SAS 2021 Excellence in Innovation Award finalist.

Getting it installed (technical ease-of-adoption)

Deploys entirely inside the customer's existing SAS platform - no new infrastructure, no external assets or network calls at runtime (passes strict security reviews).
SAS 9 EBI: SPK import via SAS Management Console / DI Studio; run the configurator stored process; done. Requirements documented at docs.datacontroller.io (dci-requirements, dci-deploysas9, dci-stpinstance).
Viya and SASjs Server deployments also documented (deploy-viya).
Instillation/deployment support is in-scope for all paid support plans.

Licensing

Annual subscription per package (Bronze/Silver/Gold); perpetual licence available at Gold.
Community tier is free; the evaluation build is governed by an evaluation agreement (Bowe IO Ltd) - evaluation/non-production use only, no redistribution, no reverse engineering, "as is".
Embedded Handsontable requires a licence key for commercial use - handled as part of paid deployments.

Objection handling (from the FAQ)

"Can it change our data model?" - No; it updates data, not structure. Positioned as a safety feature.
"Our preferred database?" - Yes, any engine SAS can reach (incl. Snowflake, Redshift support announcements).
"Retained / surrogate keys?" - Supported, along with composite primary keys, SCD2 and bitemporal loads.
"Security review will block it." - On-prem, offline, existing SASLogon, RLS/CLS, no direct target access, no metadata modification after install.
"We could build this." - Yes, at the cost of years of dev/test plus an unmaintainable black box; DC is proven, supported, documented, and source-available for evaluation.

Copy rules when writing sales-adjacent content

Regular dashes, not em-dashes. No hard-wrapped Markdown.
Use product glossary terms exactly (submission, staging, target table, load type, etc. - see dc/CONTEXT.md).
® on first mention of SAS®.
CTA conventions per channel: site content may link directly; LinkedIn puts links in the first comment (see .agents/docs/linkedin.md).

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