SaaS Business Model Success
Overview: 80% of the results that you’ll get in growing your SAAS user base comes from understanding your customer needs and wants and creating habits associated with using your application. The way we gather this information is through asking them and measuring the data that we collect based on their behaviours.
For every SAAS Business there are 4 main stages of growth.
Stage 1: Product Market Fit
The aim during this stage is to acquire at least 50 paying customers and gather what we call market intelligence from them to aid future sales and marketing promotions.
Stage 2: Customer Acquisition
During this stage we look at methods to acquire new customers. Some common forms of customer acquisition include; manual outreach, ppc advertising (facebook ads, google ads, bing ads etc) & content marketing from here we have prospective customers visit a landing page and complete an automated sign up for either a free trial (7-14 days is recommended for most apps) or a relevant download then an invitation to demo your product.
Stage 3: Customer On-boarding
At this point in the customer lifecycle we are wanting to have them activate and use the app, create habits around using it and answer any questions in their mind about it’s benefits and whether it’s right for them. We do this through a series of emails, phone calls and if appropriate demonstrations.
Stage 4: Increasing LTV
At this point customers will have transitioned from a trial to being paid users. Your job now is to increase their Life Time Value. There are 2 main ways in which you can do this, offer additional features/support in extended licenses or decreasing your attrition rate (the rate at which you’re losing customers e.g you might currently be losing 60 customers a month your goal would be to decrease that number through methods such as communicating with current and past customers and understanding why they might be leaving your service.)
Sales Process
below you will see a Birdseye look at a typical sales process for SAAS Businesses (If you’d like access to the email sequences, call scripts and headline swipes that you can modify and use in your own business send an email to jos (at) iamjosaguiar.com )
Born as a serial ‘thinker’ I’ve always had a fascination for understanding how and why people do the things they do. As I’ve grown up this fascination turned into a career in film & tv, then sales and marketing. You name it I’ve probably sold it! (and have a lesson or two to share about the journey)
I’d love for you to connect with me here or on Facebook/LinkedIn.