Software vendors Switch from the license software model to software as a service model (SaaS) has a chance for a more sustainable and predictable business model but faces the potential for a significant customer life cycle step in the transition.
The SaaS Provider today knows that improvements in the customer’s life cycle can have a substantial impact on their profitability. Selling to the right people and maintaining a long-term relationship with this decision-maker is a sustainable challenge and is one of the keys to success. Sustainable efforts to achieve this effectively, recurrently, and efficiently will produce happy customers and a more profitable SaaS business.
Are you the current SaaS provider or just converting here are some traps in the customer’s life cycle:
1. Successfully sell to the wrong person
The main attributes of successful SaaS offerings are how easily sold and produce low customer acquisition costs. This is often done using trials and online demonstrations that are directed.
The Try-demo approach, while easy and cost-effective, can cause customer acquisition that is not too interested in the full value of your service. These types of customers will provide fewer sales opportunities and cross-selling, resulting in a lower level of adoption of the full ability of your services, much higher potential for unhappy customers, and higher customer churn rates.
Limited involvement of your sales with customers during the experimental and demo process can result in real business needs never being revealed. As a result, customers are left alone to find out how your services discuss their needs. In this case, you may have the right customers, but your salespeople will not be able to take advantage of the opportunities in the future without knowing the customer’s true needs.
Although the demonstration and experimental environment that are easily arranged are good things, avoid traps missed the main conversation about potential customer business goals and needs before starting a demo or experiment.
2. Find the right buyer
With a high number of people using your free trial, it can cause false hope for a high conversion rate. Just because someone participates in a free trial does not mean they have the purchasing power or understand how to connect their strategic business initiatives with your service value. Salespeople You still need to make sure they deal with the right business decision-makers who can buy saas business and appreciate their strategic values.
One way to negotiate access to the right person is to use a trial as evidence of the basic ability expressed by the lower-level buyers they need. You can then use this fact to get access to a real decision-maker.
Remember, even though the trial is free for your potential customers, it’s not free for your company so it uses a demo and trial wisely as a tool, but it doesn’t mean until the end.
3. There is always a purchase process
Although the SaaS model is equipped with a decrease in ownership and risk implementation costs, salespeople still have to understand the purchase process. The buyer always evaluates solutions based on their needs with the purchasing process specified or implied. Without knowledge of this process, your salespeople will not be able to effectively introduce capabilities that may not be realized by buyers, distinguishing positions of the key, or uncovering what key steps/no-go can increase the possibility of victory.
In addition, without knowledge of the purchase process, it is difficult or impossible to fulfill the opportunity requirements to make the forecasting process more difficult. After the buyer shares their purchase process and has done resources to evaluate your services, then the experiment, for example, is only a step in the purchase process.
It’s easy to let potential customers pass through the evaluation and process of their purchases but don’t fall into the trap. With SaaS services as well as the company’s sales there are many to learn about the process of buying customers who can help you more successfully show the value of your service that produces better forecasting and a higher level of nearby, more predictable.
4. Difficult implementation tasks still exist
The easy and easy implementation process is a great added value in bringing value to customers quickly and it is important for the SaaS business model. However, an easy implementation does not mean that customers can ignore the time needed to make changes to the required business processes that are typical in most project implementation projects.
For example, the implementation of the SaaS-based sales compensation system is quite easy and easy to implement. However, there is still a need to consolidate different sales compensation plans and review the total structure of the compensation system. If this hope is not set at first and the right time is planned for these steps, there is a high chance that the implementation of the system can be seen failure through no error service provider.
This risk is not new. Implementation risks are always very dependent on the ability of an organization to make changes and improve its processes as part of the system implementation. Adequate efforts, time frame, and exportation expectations properly need to be planned into your overall implementation methodology and in the final proposal and price. Failure to do this can result in higher customer churn because the service value has never been fully realized.
5. Don’t get out of sight into not attention
With the SaaS service, you have the opportunity to please your customers every day, but the question is whether you take the maximum advantage of this opportunity. The sales and account management team plays an important leadership role in this regard but almost everyone in the company involves one way or another.
Plans for routine conversations with customers at some levels are very important critically. It must be depth and focus on understanding whether customers have achieved their original business goals and to explore any new business goals and changes that customers imagine. Your account management team will be able to take the required corrective action and the possibility of exploring opportunities for sales and sales now or in the future.
These conversations must continue for a long period so you need to have continuity in a conversation even though a salesperson, account manager, or customer support person may have turned to other responsibilities. Likewise, all touchpoints in the organization must have full knowledge about what conversations and results.
A good combination of the account management process, automation, listening skills, and internal communication can provide structures for strong customer relationships. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that “no news is good news” or focusing all your resources to get new customers, you must invest substantial time in a sustainable relationship to maximize reciprocal value.
6. Make sure selling and selling cross is easy
The successful SaaS business model has a strong strategy to sell and sell the SaaS service on the customer’s life cycle. This might use additional functionality, using expanded functionality, or additional users.
Some SaaS solutions have integrated subscription management in the application, with automatic connections to billing and payment systems, and provision of automatic increase. When this is the problem, minimal administrative efforts. In other cases, administrative efforts, provisions, and billing/payments are not automatic and can make substantial efforts on the part of your salespeople to increase or improve users, or implement other value-added services.
It makes sense to see exactly how your account management time is spent and look for opportunities to simplify, streamline, and automate the process. Remember that all of these costs are ongoing and are potential barriers to customer satisfaction. Account management resources must focus on identifying and maintaining opportunities that do not carry out administrative tasks.
7. Keep your customers involved with new features
The function of SaaS offers is usually enhanced two to four times a year and these features are added to attract new customers and retain existing customers. Existing customers need to be aware of their new features and potential values. You can use online course platforms for this.
Because of the frequency of SaaS increases, it is important to have clear processes and responsibilities to communicate about new features and take advantage of up-selling opportunities. The marketing department usually communicates new features to customers through email campaigns, bulletins, or communication in the application itself. This will notify your customers that this product continues to be improved and that service value continues to increase too.
Account managers who call customers and say that they know that certain types of situations always create difficulties and propose a new increase available to resolve problems seen as troubling problems and partners with customers, exactly what you want to be. To be positioned for this, sales personnel or account managers must have listened to customers and understood their worries.
Without this proactive activity around new features, valuable opportunities to strengthen customer relations and increase the value of the account will be wasted.
Conclusion
Avoiding these seven traps will reduce the cost of your new customer acquisition, reduce customer churn, increase account value, and produce a more sustainable and profitable business model. Don’t let the simplicity implied from SaaS offerings make you not have a clear sales, implementation and responsibility, and support process. You will need more than before.
