Smart SaaS

By Kevin Dobbs

Montclare, LLC

When thinking about your transition to SaaS, there are many questions to consider including target customers, value propositions, packaging, pricing and how best to build customer relationships.

After conducting more than 50 Smart SaaS business profiles of all different types including pure SaaS, Hybrids and Cross-Overs, all of these companies would probably answer many of these types of questions differently depending on their type of customer, functionality, geography, vertical markets and the only way they can get useful answers is to continually test everything.   Best in class SaaS firms are always trying different pricing, packages, messages in order to optimize their businesses, like a recent firm we profiled – Clarizen.

Some resources when thinking about these types of considerations include:

Software Pricing Partners - Jim Geisman

Chaotic Flow - Joel York

SaaS Blogs

Sixteen Ventures - Lincoln Murphy

4 Pillars of SaaS – Phil Wainewright, ZDNet

In addition to testing, it is a good idea to measure everything including website traffic, marketing campaigns, product usage, customer satisfaction and a myriad of other SaaS and business metrics.  Again, the best firms track and monitor all the key business metrics in order to improve their ability to generate revenues, build market share and reduce unnecessary customer churn.  SaaS requires a very tight operational model and has moved business an art to a science and now there are an entire new class to tools to improve revenue performance and reduce costs.  Some of these next generation of tools include:

Sales Automation

EchoSign - Provides electronic signature and contract management.

InsideView - Sales business intelligence and social media platform.

JigSaw - Business information and data services.

NetSuite – CRM and ERP suite.

RightNow - CRM, call center and social platform.

Salesforce.com - Salesforce is not only a solid Customer Relationship Management system but also a great system of record for all types of sales, marketing and service information and applications. Also offers a application marketplace that provides value added extensions.  Salesforce also offers Chatter a collaboration platform to improve internal communications.

SugarCRM – Open source based CRM that provides a robust no cost solution.

Marketing Automation

Eloqua - Marketing automation platform.

Genius.com - Sales and lead automation.

MarketBright - Marketing and lead generation management.

Marketo - Marketing and revenue management.

Pardot - Business to Business lead automation.

SaaS Analytics

Birst – On demand business intelligence product.

Cloud9 Analytics - SaaS performance management.

GoodData – SaaS business intelligence product.

PivotLink – On demand business intelligence product.

Using many of these tools companies can help a SaaS firm track their business, sales and marketing performance.  The question that I often get is ‘what should I be tracking?’  There are an emerging set of SaaS-based business metrics that include Monthly Recurring Revenues (MRR), Churn, Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC), The Magic Number (MN) and others that provide very precise views into how a SaaS business is performing.  Here is a chart that details some of the more common SaaS business metrics by functional area:

Other resources to learn about SaaS metrics;

5 C’s of SaaS Finance – Bessemer Ventures

Chaotic Flow - Joel York

For Entrepreneaurs – David Skok, Matrix Partners

Haut Tech – Michael Dunham at Scio Development

My opinion about the SaaS business model is that there are a lot of new considerations about building a profitable subscription business today.  The buyers are different, there are many robust low-cost tools available, Cloud technology that can radically change your cost model and time to market as well as many other business factors, so the only real way to really tune your business for SaaS is to continually test everything!

I would be interested in your comments and hearing about what you are testing.

Stay tuned for Tip #4 Sales & Marketing on a Budget