Building a Better SaaS Business: How to Make the Market Love Your Product

The shift to a serverless world is changing the face of software development, ready or not. Though change can often be painful, the serverless shift is creating opportunities for technology businesses that can be beneficial for consumers and corporations alike. With the cloud comes reduced costs and headaches, and often, greater opportunity and flexibility.

However, with any process that involves reinvention, growing pains are almost certain to result. With the new set of cloud tools that enterprises will have at their disposal, comes the inherent struggle to decide exactly what that cloud-based business will look like.

Do I have the right tools and expertise in-house? What markets will be most welcoming to our SaaS product offering? How do I position, market, and differentiate our product?

As you undertake this transformation at your enterprise, here are some factors to keep in mind that can help you make the right choices in your evolution:

 

Infrastructure First: Though the cloud, by design, offers some lightweight benefits in terms of physical footprint, cloud services represent a partnership through which enterprises must participate fully. Whether through a third-party vendor or by hiring or retraining internal resources, you’ll want to ensure you have people who can oversee things like:

• UI-UX development, including mobility across multiple devices
• Security for your enterprise and the SaaS product’s users
• Uptime and availability of your product
• Billing systems geared for metered usage
• Application performance monitoring
• Sales talent
• Scalability and architecture

 

Product Marketing: Being the “new kid on the block” means you’ll have to do a fair amount of convincing the marketplace that your SaaS offering is worth some wallet share. With other SaaS brands in circulation, how do you gain notice? How do you support the price that you wish to charge? How do you integrate your current customers into your new offering? How do you push new features to customers? How do you alter your approach to now offering something that will be considered more of a service than a product? Taking the time now to answer some of these questions will benefit you greatly in the long run.

 

Stacking the Odds: One way to wade through the ocean of competitors is to make sure you’re talking to the right people. By analyzing target demographics, you can drill down to find niche users who would be most interested in your product, and market directly to them. Other ways to offer a modicum of distinction include:

• Thought leadership – position your company as an expert in your field
• Value – clarify what it is that your offering does to enhance the user’s life
• Brand voice – What do you stand for
• Customer service – Make it outstanding
• Content marketing – Tell the story of your SaaS product in long form

 

Retain: Here’s an interesting reality check: Most of a SaaS company’s revenue comes from existing customers – according to Gartner, about 80 percent of all future revenue will come from just a fraction (20 percent) of current customers. If you increase your customer retention by only 5 percent, you can increase your business’s profitability by 75 percent, say researchers at Bain & Co. The best way to do this, according to the website WalkMe, is to truly understand your customer – ensuring your tools are relevant for each user; interacting with each customer on a regular basis; educating them on new and lesser-known features, and offering a digital adoption platform.

Ultimately, it is possible to gain entry into the SaaS marketplace and to stake your claim, if you keep a few absolutes in mind. The consumer is always open to beginning a commercial relationship with a company that offers a product or service that will enhance their well being or make their lives easier.

Remember, you can always call upon a partner like Pegasus One to jumpstart your SaaS aspirations – we’re happy to initiate a conversation.