All businesses start out as great ideas. You come up with a piece of software that fills a gap in the market. You have confidence that your ingenious offering is going to wow customers. So you spend your budget on advertising, promotion, and lead generation tactics to create awareness. As soon as everyone knows who you are and what you do, they'll be lining up to buy – right? The enthusiasm is high, and the expectations even more so. According to Gartner, SaaS revenue is set to reach $278 billion by 2021– hugely encouraging figures for anyone trying to stake a claim to a slice of that pie. But what happens when your profit margins don't line up?

When you launched your SaaS business, be honest, how long did you spend putting together your pricing model? According to Price Intelligently, most SaaS businesses will only spend a total of 6 hours on their pricing model. However, if you have ambitions to grow your business (which, let’s be honest, is why you’re reading this blog, right?) you need to be continuously re-evaluating your pricing process; for best results, this should be done every three months. Due to the pace that the SaaS industry moves at, with new competitors and more advanced technology creating new opportunities and challenges, it’s clear to see why you’ll always want to review your pricing strategy regularly.

The software industry is projected to be worth in excess of $130 billion by the end of 2020; new tools and platforms are being developed to address demand. There seems to be a software product to help with most problems, usually with the benefit to save time, save money, increase productivity and profitability.

I’ve got bad news for you: you’re going to lose customers. Every year, forever. It doesn’t matter how good your software is, how much value for money it represents or how much effort you put into retention. For one reason or another, some of your customers will end their subscription to your SaaS product. And that’s okay. After all, you’re awesome, right? You’re going to be bringing in new users all the time, so as long as your churn rate is manageable, you’re still going to grow. But what’s too high when talking about churn rate for SaaS?

For SaaS companies, and indeed traditional software companies, part of the sales process is giving prospects access to the software for free. This offers them a chance to get hands on with the solution, really see if it fits the way they work and can deliver the end results they are looking for. In this article we are going to look at the best tactics you can deploy to ensure a healthy conversion rate of free to paid users.

For SaaS marketing teams, getting prospects to the pricing page is a major step in the right direction towards generating more leads for the sales team to follow up. The marketing team has been working like crazy to understand your buyers' personalities and journey. With the help of your analytical tools, they have put together a content plan to ensure your value offer is attracting and engaging your “best fit” clients for your software. It would be a shame for the prospect to get to your pricing page and not convert into a lead or service subscriber. You need to have a compelling pricing model for your SaaS solution; otherwise, all that hard work that has come before is going to become undone.

Sales enablement was defined back in 2008 by research firm Forrester as:   “Sales enablement is a strategic, ongoing process that equips all client-facing employees with the ability to consistently and systematically have a valuable conversation with the right set of customer stakeholders at each stage of the customer's problem-solving life cycle to optimise the return on investment of the selling system.”   Poetry is not Forrester’s strong point; however, the approach of enabling sales teams via a process that provides them with the right tools, at the right time, for the right audience is very much at the heart of sales enablement for a SaaS sales organisation.  

On 6th January, at 9:30 am, I sat in my beloved MK4 Golf, contemplating what would begin in 30 minutes time. I could tell you how I was a picture of confident calm, or I could tell you that I was sweating from the palms. The truth is that I was floating somewhere in between the two and feeling very excited. In just 30 minutes time, I would be walking through the doors of Klood—the SaaS Growth Agency—for the first time as an employee.  

We are delighted to announce the date for the upcoming HubSpot User Group meet up for Milton Keynes. The HUG will return on 23rd March and feature a keynote talk from HubSpot’s own Dan Tyre. Who is Dan Tyre? Dan Tyre joined the original HubSpot team in May of 2007 as employee number 6. An authority on inbound marketing and sales, Dan is a regular speaker, writer, and coach to those who yearn for inbound success.