Tag: saas growth

Most Important Customer Success Metrics For SaaS Companies

Posted on by Sweta Kamble

The SaaS (Software as a Service) industry has gained a competitive edge over the last few years, thanks to its customer retention and growth that has transformed the face of businesses today.

Needless to say, the inclusion of Customer Success is a crucial contributor to the success of any SaaS platform.
Customer success metrics

What Is Customer Success?

The most cited definition by a Customer Success Consultant, Lincoln Murphy states – “Customer Success is when your customers achieve their Desired Outcome through their interactions with your company.”

To ensure the success of their product, the subscription-based model in SaaS has radically changed the game for a lot of businesses, more so due to its frequent touch points with customers that require an on-going effort.

Deemed as a game-changer, Customer Success in SaaS majorly contributes to boosting conversions, raising the bar for customer satisfaction, and reducing churn rates.

Additionally, proactively anticipating potential issues rather than waiting for actual issues eliminates future escalations.

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There Are 3 Key Takeaways From This Article That Focus On:

  • How Customer Success Teams contribute towards the SaaS growth
  • Customer Success Statistics in SaaS platforms
  • Customer Success Metrics that are responsible for SaaS growth

Customer Success Teams Contribute Towards The SaaS Growth In:

  • Guiding customers in the new sign-up process.
  • Converting trial customers to paying customers.
  • Upfront demonstration of the product value.
  • Prompting for concrete feedback in real-time.
  • Updating paying customers and ensuring customer satisfaction with the product or service.
  • Influencing customers to love your product or service to make them loyal brand ambassadors.
  • Fostering relationships with customers’ businesses.
  • Increasing revenue and reducing churn throughout the Customer Success cycle.

How Important Is Customer Success In SaaS?

In the words of Jason Lemkin, the founder of EchoSign, “Customer success is where 90% of the revenue is.”

This translates to Customer Success serving as a solid growth driver for SaaS companies.

Research conducted by Databox found a myriad of answers for gauging the success of customer success efforts.

This ranged from collecting customer feedback to renewing accounts to upgrading and upselling to customers.

Let’s check the figures –

Customer success team

Smart Karrot’s statistical report on Customer Success statistics mentions that improving customer retention by just 5% can accelerate a company’s profits by as much as 95%.

Moreover, 70 to 90% of the profit generated by SaaS companies often comes from renewals, upsells, and after-sales services.

According to Bain & Co.’s study, exceptional customer success programs blended with key account management increase profit up to 95%.

With all that said, the investment needed to land new customers falls between and 25 times more expensive compared to new customer retention processes.

After considerable evaluation, the following 7 Metrics prove why Customer Success should not be taken lightly by SaaS companies.

In other words, how Customer Success is a major contributor to SaaS success can be determined by some vital parameters that can make or break your SaaS efforts.

7 Solid Customer Success Metrics For SaaS Success

1. First Contact Resolution:

Resolving the customer’s issue in a single interaction through a phone call, email, or a live chat session reduces the spillover effects of escalations. Needless to say, escalations are way threatening to ignore.

As Jeremy Watkin of 8×8 mentioned, “First contact resolution highly correlates with customer satisfaction. The higher your FCR, the more positive your customer experience and the higher your customers’ lifetime value (LTV).”

This means the absence of a First point of contact.

Contact Resolution equates to poor customer service. The inclusion of FCR on the other hand offers an easy passage to eliminate future complaints of your SaaS.

2. Educating Your Customers Upfront:

The SaaS’s growth strategy primarily focuses on easing the customers’ initial hiccups.

A user-friendly approach and your product offering are vital for SaaS success.

To eliminate the horror or escalations that might crowd the customer support phone lines, it’s always advisable to brainstorm the possible issues or questions that users might come up with.

3. CSAT (Customer Satisfaction):

Happy Customers + Product Recommendation = Increased Revenue. It’s self-explanatory that Customer Satisfaction is the primary reason why Customer Success exists in the first place.

Much of Customer satisfaction involves ‘quick’ resolution to unexpected issues brought up by customers and prospects for inquiries.

You don’t want to be judged by your prospects for poor or slow customer service, which is why satisfaction holds prime importance.

4. Upsells And Cross-Sells:

The customer’s churn rate is a blessing in disguise while up-selling your premium products and tools.

Why?

Upselling helps SaaS companies if there’s a requirement for new development or improvement in the existing offering.

Additionally, a happy customer won’t wander online to find your competitors’ tools.

A SaaS company’s profitability hinges on low churn rates and recurring revenue.

Upselling and cross-selling provide an impetus of innovation which makes it easier to sell to the existing customers than the new prospects.

A single sale turns to multiple purchases when your Customer Success team is well acquainted with your customers’ needs.

5. Brand Recommendation:

Customer loyalty leads to brand recommendation. Customer Lifetime Value translates to Customer Loyalty that in turn increases your product value.

Acquiring new customers costs almost 5 times more than retaining existing ones. CLV is one of the key metrics
that focus on the value of the customer over the monitory gain you achieve with their purchase.

The ultimate reason for including CLV in the SaaS growth strategy is retaining existing customers and attracting new ones, moreover, the profit margins are also maintained.

It also helps companies measure ROI for every new customer that in turn helps sales and marketing budget estimation.

6. Net Promoter Score (NPS):

How likely is your SaaS entitled to referrals? NPS is essentially one of the most important customer-oriented metrics as it helps companies gauge customer loyalty stats.

Net Promoter Score is a loyalty program in which surveys are filled out by the customers who in turn advocate for you and share their success stories with their colleagues.

However, the unsatisfied ones won’t bat an eye.

After the NPS survey results are out, they’re grouped into 3 distinct categories, namely:

  • Promoters (Those customers that are likely to buy and promote)
  • Passives (Those who have no strong opinions)
  • and Detractors (Those that could be at risk for churn)

7. Churn Rate:

From a retention point of view, Churn essentially measures how many customers the company loses over a given time frame.

Churn rate is measured in terms of a dollar value lost or a number of customers lost.

I’ve worked with the team at AndolaSoft on multiple websites. They are professional, responsive, & easy to work with. I’ve had great experiences & would recommend their services to anyone.

Ruthie Miller, Sr. Mktg. Specialist

Salesforce, Houston, Texas

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Parting Words

SaaS Success begins with Customer Success.

Your SaaS company is unique and so should your customers feel about themselves and your services.

The exceptional support you provide to your customers would go a long way to retain them and help them spread the word.

Armed with this mindset, every SaaS platform today is on its way to greater success.

All in all, the final verdict is that Customer Success translates to SaaS Success.

What are your thoughts about the contribution of Customer Success in the SaaS space?

Are you looking to develop a SaaS application! Lets Discuss

How To Put Together A High-Performing SaaS Marketing Strategy

Posted on by Jay

As per Cisco’s Global Cloud Index, SaaS marketing will deliver 75 % of cloud workflows.​ Isn’t it amazing?

The above data depicts the growing pace of the SaaS business model and the competition created by it in the industry. SaaS companies are finding it very difficult to stand out in the industry by providing products and services distinct from their competitors.

Well, for this reason, we have come up with dependable SaaS marketing strategies to help companies lead the competition.

It is more complicated than product marketing since you don’t have a tangible product to offer.

Yes, it is more difficult to tell someone that your software can help them in their daily process than selling a pair of shoes.

First, What Is SaaS Marketing?

We can say, It refers to the strategies implemented to promote software-as-a-service companies.

This marketing is exclusively unusual from promoting physical products since it has a varied customer base, distinct pricing strategies, complexity in their offerings, etc.

Since SaaS development is distinctive, marketers should use distinct strategies for promotion.

Our Products

orangescrum

Wakeupsales

We transform your ideas into engaging Web and Mobile Apps

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Conclusion

These worthwhile SaaS marketing strategies, if leveraged, will enhance customer acquisition and lead generation for SaaS businesses.

Diverse offers avenues that marketers can explore to serve as beneficial SaaS strategies, and there are endless possible combinations that work for numerous businesses.

All you have to do is to try different approaches, and with the help of consumer metrics, figure out what works. SaaS marketing is a paradise for marketers.

Want to discuss more? Let’s talk!

How To Achieve SaaS Growth Through Customer Acquisition Techniques

Posted on by Jay

An established SaaS company can achieve growth in many ways. They could retain more customers, increase prices, or reduce churn rate either. 

But as a startup, you just only have one option: “to acquire more customers“.

However, the problem is that you might not have a clear path of how to do it, right?

That is exactly what I have explained with some proven strategies.

Through this post, we will show you the top 5 customer acquisition strategies that will boost your SaaS growth.

Intrigued? Then let’s do it.

Defining Acquisition:

Before making a deep dive into the techniques, let’s make something clear;

“Customer acquisition has nothing to do with generating new users.“

But the acquisition is a process of bringing new visitors to your application and helping them to sign up. 

Without new signups, you’d have no one to try to convert into a user, and retaining them as a paying customer.

However, customer acquisition is the most important part of the SaaS growth process.

“To ensure that customers go through the funnel stages (to Revenue), you have to make sure that there are enough customers at the top of the funnel. Without those customers, there will be no customers at the end.”

Defining Acquisition

(Source – incisive-edge.com)

The above graph described this point quite well. TO generate the average conversion rates at each stage, you need to acquire a large number of incoming visitors to paying users.

Now, let’s take a look at some customer acquisition strategies or techniques to grow your SaaS business.

Verify Your Product & Its Market Fit:

Like other vendors, you also like to start acquiring the targeted users as early as possible, even if you don’t have a product ready.

And it is always crucial to acquire the first user for your application.

Acquiring the first users helps you validate your idea, and learn if you’re targeting the right customer pain point.

When you have a validated idea and achieved your product & its market fit, then you can switch you focus it to grow your SaaS application.

It refers to a situation of being “in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.”

Verify Your Product & Its Market Fit

(Source – incisive-edge.com)

Pivoting a value proposition is relatively straightforward, and speaking in technical terms as well. 

So, before you launch any strategy to attract new customers, ensure that you have validated your idea.

Develop Customer Personas:

It helps you design your products & campaigns that your target audience connects with. Preparing a customer persona also gives you detailed insights into your target audience, their behavior, their needs, etc.

But without buyer personas, it’s hard to know who your potential users are, and how you could reach them online.

Or figure out the best ways to attract them, at that.

For example, how can you create lead magnets that will attract new users to your list, without knowing their pain points relating to your product first?

Or discover channels that drive the most targeted traffic?

You see, buyer personas make it easy to attract the right type of web visitors. And that, in turn, makes customer acquisition a much simpler task.

Develop Customer Personas

(Source – incisive-edge.com)

Identify The Most-Targeted Traffic Sources:

We admit this strategy requires experimentation to get it right. But the benefits of going through the process are immense.

Because you see:

Not every traffic channel will deliver visitors who can convert.

In fact, often, channels you might consider a certainty flop.

A couple of years ago, Dan Norris did an experiment to assess his traffic sources. And as it turns out, sources he banked on, like Adwords or email brought hardly any results.

However, strategies like guest posting, being active on forums, social media, and Twitter auto follower strategy, delivered actual conversions.

Identify The Most-Targeted Traffic Sources
(Source – incisive-edge.com)

Now, your best visitors might come from different channels. Perhaps SEO would work for you or maybe advertising your SaaS product on Facebook would drive the most signups.

It’s hard to tell without testing.

And so, to ensure that first, you get new customers, and secondly, acquire them at a relatively low cost, you have to identify your best channels.

Create Different Customer Acquisition Funnels:

Most of the time the website visitors do make the sign up on the homepage.

But many others will not even see it.

And yet, they could become users too. 

For the most part, however, SaaS founders focus on a simple acquisition funnel that looks more or less like this (via Google Analytics):

They calculate that visitors on the website will notice the Sign-Up call to action, act through it, signing up for the free or version. 

And then, through the onboarding and retention strategy, convert into paying customers.

And many do. However, a large group of your visitors may not yet be ready to create an account and start using your product.

As Elizabeth Yin points out in this article: (http://www.launchbit.com/blog/what-customer-acquisition-funnel-should-you-use-as-a-saas-company/)

“these days, the Saas market is becoming inundated with new Saas products. Nearly every Saas company has either a free trial or a free package, so free software no longer a unique factor that distinguishes your product from the competition. Professionals are no longer jumping at the opportunity to try every new free Saas tool that is on the market.”

And so, to acquire them, you’ll need to find another way to convince them to sign up.

For example, you could first target them with your lead generation strategies, then nurture them, and finally, entice to sign up at the time when they’re ready to do so.

Invest In Building Audience:

Nothing beats having an audience.

Just take a look at SaaS companies like Orangescrum, Wakeupsales CRM. They enjoy engaged audiences.

And although many of these people aren’t their customers (and maybe will never even sign up for a trial), they actively help them promote the app.

How? By sharing their content, for example, telling others about it, commenting on their blog posts, attending and promoting their webinars, and other events… The list goes on.

So, building a targeted audience for your SaaS application as early as possible. 

But when building your audience, go beyond from just posting blogs on your blogging portal:

  • Repost your content on other channels, like Medium or Linkedin. Many successful SaaS companies utilize this strategy to simultaneously initiate conversations with many audiences without having to produce original content for all of them.
  • Repurpose your content into lead magnets and content upgrades and build a lead generation engine to fuel your secondary funnel (the one we talked about in the previous point).
  • Target social media channels that you’d discount in B2B, like Pinterest, for example. You can hear Dustin Stout from Warfare Plugins sharing his experiences with less common social networks for B2B (and how they’ve become his top traffic sources) here.

Warping Words:

Last, not the least, be sure to always put your customer’s requirements first before applying the customer acquisition techniques. By focusing on the customer’s benefits and presenting the solutions to their queries would lead to more retention.

Keeping this in mind, and finding the best way to guide the visitors through the acquisition process with helpful involvement that comes at the right time and adds value to their experience. This will lead to much more success in the long term.

Have an awesome SaaS idea, but not sure about the techniques and developing the strategies? Let’s Discuss!

Top Reasons Why The Future Is SaaS Subscription

Posted on by Netrananda M

The software industry has gone through many changes in the last few years. Software as a Service (SaaS) is booming in this internet age.

SaaS has become an important aspect of  running a business in the internet era. However, SaaS technology refers to an application that is hosted by a provider on the server’s side and accessed by clients through a secure internet connection.

With SaaS technology , there is always a growth in the  Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) and Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) which helps to lower the Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC).

“In the future of SaaS will largely depend on buyer and consumer choice.  Businesses are taking note of buyer behavior and switching to subscription-based business models.

From a company perspective, the goal is to provide many different applications to satisfy consumer needs and buying behaviours.

The future will also depend on creating an ecosystem that will allow businesses to integrate into a partnership-driven community.

The integrator will be the winner.”

                                                                             – Grant Goodwin, President, AllRoads

Know more insights from Industry Experts and the future of SaaS.

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The model of the SaaS industry largely depends on retention and you can keep your customers paying month over month for a longer period of service.

Retention depends on customer engagement and both are the lifelines of every SaaS business.

Along with faster and more reliable internet, including lower barriers to entry in the multiple markets, this has paved the way to a new generation SaaS tools. The audience that needs these new solutions reaches out to these SaaS companies.  

According to SaaS benchmarking survey, let’s have a look at the difference between new customer acquisition cost (CAC) and the cost of upselling to existing customers (per $1 of New Annual Contract Value),

SaaS Benchmarking Survey

In SaaS upsells, it’s all about the value. If the customer can see the value of the upsell compared to his or her current subscription or purchase level, then they will understand why they need to buy.

Neil Patel, Co-Founder of Crazy Egg

Market Estimations

According to Forbes by 2018, 27.8% of the worldwide enterprise applications market will be SaaS-based, generating $50.8B in revenue up from $22.6B or 16.6% of the market in 2013. From IDC study data, you will find

You can refer to the below image of the SaaS success achieved by these largest SaaS companies  of 2021 and 2022 by delivering SaaS tools..

SaaS companies

 (Source: BMC.com)

  • Salesforce, Intuit and Oracle controlled 35% of the worldwide SaaS market in 2013; this could continue to decline as other companies have now established a strong foothold in the market.
  • The worldwide SaaS operations and manufacturing applications market will reach $5.8B by 2018 – In 2013 7.3% of all applications were SaaS based and this is set to increase to 10.30%
  • Cloud applications will account for 90% of all worldwide traffic data by 2019 an almost 10% hike seen from usage stats at the end of 2014.

(Source: drip.com)

“Organizations are advancing their timelines on digital business initiatives and moving rapidly to the cloud in an effort to modernize environments, improve system reliability, support hybrid work models and address other new realities compelled by the pandemic,” said Brandon Medford, senior principal analyst at Gartner

It’s the right time, to go for SaaS application for a rocking business as the future being bright.

Coming to betterbuys SaaS Report 64% of small and medium businesses today rely on cloud-based technology to drive growth and boost workflow efficiency and 78% percent of businesses indicate that they plan to expand the number of SaaS platforms.

SaaS Expenditures

Research analysts forecast a growth to $12 billion in 2016, a jump to $16 billion in 2017, and a continued growth year over year to a whopping $55 billion by 2026.

The subscription models now account for more than 50% of new software implementations over traditional on-premise licenses.

It’s estimated that by 2020, about a quarter of organizations in emerging regions will be running their core CRM systems via SaaS, a 10 percent increase over 2012.

Top Companies in SaaS

More than 1,400 SaaS companies were founded in the last five years.

Among every industry, marketing comprised nearly 4 in 10 of these relatively recent SaaS startups.

Market Segments of SaaS

Application pricing is always a hot debate and customers or users are looking more and more convenience regarding this.

Usually subscription and transactional models are used by the SaaS vendors.

In subscription model a periodic (monthly, yearly, or seasonal) payment to gain access to products or services where in transactional model you pay as you use the products and services.

The subscription-based pricing model works for services that deliver true value to users, now and in the future.

Why SaaS Subscription Is The Future

1. Provides Regular And Sustainable Income

SaaS subscription model gives regular and predictable revenues to the SaaS vendor though for a specific period of time.

As a vendor, you can track your monthly revenue to get your estimated income rather projection.

The subscription price can be easily paid by users and customer as it is cost effective and broken into smaller payments.

Wakeupsales CRM Tool Pricing Model

Wakeupsales CRM Tool Pricing Model

2. Scalable And flexible Pricing Model

SaaS subscription pricing model is scalable and flexible in nature with a long-term plan. Traditional pricing model may create problems in the competitive and fluctuating market.

SaaS provides a balanced and adjustable pricing which can be easier for buyers and users to afford. The regular billing cycle also helps users a lot.

Orangescrum Project Management tool Pricing Model

Orangescrum Project Management tool Pricing Model

3. SaaS More Focuses On Towards Retention Of Existing Customers

A business owner always relied on new customers but in SaaS relief the burden of focusing more towards new leads and prospects.

Serving better to existing customers with high-quality support and update them to the paid membership is the basic rule of SaaS.

Quality service to existing users is the key reason for its popularity. It is secure, solve wide ranges of business problems and improve your profit margin.

SaaS

4.SaaS Provides Data And System Security: 

As any subscription billing service handles a large amount of information of their customers, information such as credit card details, address and sometimes even bank account and their social security numbers. And the cybercriminals always look for chances to exploit any weakness. 

Hence, to resolve this issue the providers are always equipped with all the latest in network and data security that includes up-to-date encryption protocols and strong defense against the known hacking techniques.

I’ve worked with the team at Andolasoft on multiple websites. They are professional, responsive, & easy to work with. I’ve had great experiences & would recommend their services to anyone.

Ruthie Miller, Sr. Mktg. Specialist

Salesforce, Houston, Texas

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 It is not only applicable for the actual billing servers, but it is also for the security of the connection from the customers.

5. Subscription Billing Integration:

The major factor that implements growth of Saas companies for the future is when the clients can smoothly integrate the subscription billing service in their operations. With a quality subscriptions billing provider, makes it easy for it’s clients to customise the appearance and feel of the billing application that fits perfectly in what they are going through. It provides customizable billing portals which can be easily embedded in the existing website’s of the client

Conclusion:

No doubt software as a service has bright future and it is grabbing the attention of both consumers and vendors.

The subscription-based pricing model is more effective than the traditional. It is delivering true results to the end users with cost-effective price.

Are you planning to switch your old app to SaaS! Let’s Discuss

We have the experience and expertise for SaaS application development and deliver with high quality & support services too.

You can also depend on our service for your SaaS application development, our experts will hear out your preferences and develop your desired application accordingly

Our two products Orangescrum and Wakeupsales are the best examples of our work. Check our product pricing models and try these now.