Strategies to help your SaaS enterprise grow

The SaaS (Software as a Service) industry has changed in the last decade as most large enterprises transition to the cloud. Efforts to survive new-age disruptions require a holistic approach, including business changes, commitments to processes and methods, and everything in between.

If you’d like to prepare your SaaS business to achieve hyper-growth, your business and application must be ready to scale without warning and at a moment’s notice. Furthermore, it is essential to remember that as your business scales up, you must be agile and ready to act on any business opportunities. 

Hence, since there is no foolproof method to ensure high growth for SaaS businesses, we analyzed some companies that have achieved hyper-growth in a short period. After examining them, we have elaborated on some of their strategies to help you achieve sustained SaaS hyper-growth. 

Now, let’s delve into the strategies below:

Experiment with Pricing

Enterprises grow when the revenue increases. One of the factors that can tremendously impact how much revenue your enterprise generates is determined by the pricing of your products. 

Remember that selecting the right price for SaaS products is complex. Often, SaaS enterprises that are just beginning to scale have customer bases from varying industries as well as stages of growth. You must experiment with your pricing strategy to determine if you’ve opted for the right price.

While experimenting with the prices, you can also create price tiers and incorporate new payment models. It is essential to compare the performance of the various products before and after altering the prices to gauge how the price change impacted your growth trajectory in a short time. 

But, businesses will also need to understand that different enterprises price their SaaS products differently and that changing the price of products can take time. Additionally, sudden price changes can result in the loss of customers. 

Explore Global Markets

If you own a proliferating SaaS enterprise, you’ll need to identify new markets that you can explore. Eventually, you can decide whether you want to expand your operations and provide services to the new market. 

Furthermore, since Saas businesses are built on the cloud, they can be accessed from any part of the world. Hence, this provides entrepreneurs who are running a SaaS enterprise with an abundance of growth opportunities. Therefore, if you’re looking to expand your operations and go global, you should be ready for the following:

• To accept payments via international payment gateways
• To accept payments in multiple currencies
• To equip your service with language localization 

Expanding your business without changing your current workflow will be beneficial and give you an edge over your competition.

Expand Revenue and Curb Churn

New revenue is not always generated from new customers. Usually, existing customers are often an untapped source of SaaS revenue growth. Additionally, it is less expensive to generate revenue from existing users and upsells than having to acquire new customers. 

Drive Operational Rigour

One needs to be aware of the subscription metrics for an enterprise to drive data-backed decisions and keep its SaaS aligned with growth. These subscription analytics can help you power your enterprise’s growth in the following ways:

• Enterprises can keep track of their business help by managing subscription analytics.
• Subscription analytics helps identify and track opportunities to boost revenue.
• Forecasting and prevention of churn are made more accessible with subscription analytics.
• Customer behavior patterns can impact revenue if made simple with subscription analytics.
• Subscription analytics helps in the identification of trial performance and optimization of conversions. 
• Strategizing and optimization of the pricing are simple with subscription analytics.

With a robust subscription analytics platform, you can see your revenue from different perspectives, including product, sales, marketing, and finance.

Pivot Business Models

As an enterprise grows, it may face unexpected market turbulence, switch to more profitable business models, and discover new markets through pivoting its business models. Different enterprises take on varying approaches to shifting business models. These include:

• Improving the business model in use to meet the market requirements.
• Changing the approach when the existing business model cannot respond to a crisis. Venturing and exploring other business models will likely help open up new markets or market segments.
• Explore other business models to help you prepare your enterprise for the future. 

As your SaaS scales, you must ensure your enterprise is agile enough to pivot between business models swiftly, especially for a competitive edge. Additionally, it would be best if you kept in mind that to successfully pivot changes like the ones mentioned above, you would also need to invest your financial resources in sophisticated technology that you can leverage. You can expand the customer base and move upmarket or downmarket with a robust tech stack. 

Conclusion

The hyper-growth phase of a SaaS business requires continuous innovation, implementation of new features, and cost optimization. Starting a business seeking hyper-growth requires each of the five characteristics discussed here. Make sure you prioritize those that affect your revenues the most. A balance must be struck between scalability and financial viability.