How to grow your SaaS business is a legitimate question, but first, you have to solve another: What is growing? Seems like a silly question.
Some will say that growth is getting new customers. But growing is much more than that.
Selling a SaaS product is relatively cheap, but it also has a cost: to get customers you have had to create the entire infrastructure of your company, you have had to do a marketing campaign and you have had to offer a free trial that costs you a processing time of your server. Since the moment a customer gets to know your company until he makes the first payment, a lot of time goes by. If we think about a SaaS already created, about the time since the time the company is born until the first payment is received, there is an even longer period.
We said that some respond to “how to grow your SaaS business?” with “Get more customers”, but this is not enough. It is only part of the growth and not the most important. After all, every market is limited and every market has competitors who are going to take customers away from you, so there will be a time when getting new customers is no longer possible.
Client types
If you’re looking to grow your SaaS business you’re going to need to know your customers well:
There will be dissatisfied customers, who will let you know that they are, there will be satisfied customers, which is assumed to be the vast majority (and it is said that for every dissatisfied customer who complains you need 11 satisfied customers to make the same noise as the first) and there will be Whale customers. They are customers who pay exorbitant amounts for your product and they are the ones who have to be taken care the most, the ones who need to have new content that is worth paying for. If you keep the job well done they will continue to be whales of your business. Many businesses rely only on their whales, which may even ignore the rest of their customers because 5% of customers make 95% of the expenditure, according to Spanish web Resources for SMEs.
So, in addition to focusing on getting new customers you have three other tasks to continue growing:
Tasks to continue growing
Keep your whales
Identify them, put baits in the form of products for them to buy, try to get them. And once you have them, don’t let them go: give them gifts, give them special promotions, get them to perceive that they receive more value than they pay. Making your SaaS company grow can depend, exclusively, on these customers.
Keep the same contracts
It’s not enough to keep customers, you need that customers spend the same quantity: increase your offers, look at what the competition is doing, check prices and keep the customers you have profitable.
For that, they must keep perceiving value in your product and they have to find it better than the competition. Don’t rest on your laurels, ask them, study what they use and what they don’t and try to change things so that your situation doesn’t change.
Nurture your customers with more potential
We’ve already seen three things you have to do to grow:
The first is to get more customers
The second is to keep your customers.
The third is to get your customers to keep investing the same amount in your company.
The last one is to feed your customers, make them spend more on your product and, if possible, try to turn them into whales. Surely you have a few customers who spend little but are part of a company that could make more use of your services. Surely you also have some customers who are always reaching the limits of what they have contracted. These customers may spend more than they spend. Offer them a few months free of a higher plan, let them know about your products and what they could gain if they increased their contracted plans, let them know you care and help them hire more products or improve their plans. Maybe you can offer them another way to access your product.
If you want to grow your SaaS business, it’s important to keep your customers as long as possible. Growing companies cannot afford to treat customers as if they were replaceable. It is also important that you take care of everyone, but especially that you take care of the most important ones. And, of course, it’s not bad to get more customers.
