sales

Acquiring new customers is never easy or cheap; keeping them is even harder. Customer Retention Cost (CRC) is the key metric to watch for 55% of SaaS companies – and with good reason. It's five times more costly to acquire new customers than it is to retain them.  For SaaS startups, in particular, losing customers due to a lack of engagement is a sure-fire way to sink a business. 

To keep evolving your SaaS product, you need a steady cash flow. It's imperative to set up a pricing strategy that appeals to the needs of your buyer personas and keeps them loyal to your brand. The wrong pricing model could quickly damage your reputation and discourage customers from growing with your software.

The recent global crisis has left us in uncharted – certainly turbulent – waters in our personal and business lives. This difficult time is driving us all to review how we operate as businesses and communities. Here in the UK, at the time of writing, we’re at the early stages of dramatic changes that we’ve had to make and it’s unclear what is to come and for how long it’s going to be before we return to some form of normality. Therefore, it would be easy to have a knee-jerk reaction, batten down the hatches and cut all your spend, but that would be entirely the wrong thing to do.

Misalignment between sales and marketing only happens in traditional, dinosaur-esque type business, right? Software and tech companies are far to evolved and well equipped to have friction between these two departments, no? The truth is, outdated business practices and poor communication between these two critical teams can creep into even the most forward-thinking companies. SaaS enterprises can fall victim to this precisely because the nature of the industry is to upgrade and improve continuously. Digital media and advertising will also frequently present business with new promotional opportunities and strategies to pursue. This makes the propensity for each department to veer off in its own – sometimes misguided – direction very high.

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?

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.

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.