Key Success to SaaS - 30000ft view

My experience of SaaS comes from my startup. I learnt a lot about building SaaS Products. 

Then, when I worked at my last company, a 400M SaaS business, it all made sense.  For me, It came down to following 3 things to succeed and grow SaaS business.

1) Acquiring Customers

2) Retaining Customers

3) Monetizing Customers

Infact, whole business was structured keeping above 3 things in mind. This leads to things like,

How Sales teams are structured?. - Sales Teams are structured in certain way, because most of the customers started the trail through websites.

How Marketing Teams are structured. - Marketing teams always cared about acquiring that new visitor to the site or converting that prospect to start the trial or converting the trailer to paid customer. 

How Operations Teams are structured - SaaS businesses are heavily analytics oriented. So, data from every touch point mattered. When you are looking for that next customer or scratching your head on why churn rate was high in a given month, data gave lot of insights...

How Product Teams are structured - Product teams don't have luxury of building product in vacuum.  It was always customer first mind set. We learnt from every click on our product...We learnt why certain feature we introduced didn't get much traction...Making that quick small adjustments in product mattered a lot. It helped leapfrog the competition.

How Support teams are structured - The existence of support teams meant, an opportunity to talk to real customer and help them understand product better and convert them to loyal customer. Having a in bound call center mattered.

End of the day, all of this  revolved around, those 3 things...Acquisition, Retention and Monetization...

Following blog is very useful, with some context, it can be very helpful.

http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/saas-metrics-2/

If you need help with your SaaS product strategy and optimization, let us know, we are happy to help...