When times change and major events leave us wondering what the future will hold, it can feel that uncertainty can bring business to a standstill. But previous experience tells us that resiliency is determined by our ability to be adaptable.
So while your SaaS business may be pivoting your sales pitch, and looking for new types of revenue streams, it can also be a perfect time to re-establish your business goals, and think about how you will adapt for your customers, for your employees, and for the longevity of your business.
How do you think about long-term versus short term goals?
Long term goals may be harder to plan for now, so you can start by re-evaluating the ones you you set previously.
Now is a good time to re-prioritise activities - but not just temporarily. Set goals to adapt for customer satisfaction, but think about the long-term implications for this. For example, what are your goals for how can you improve your churn rate right now in the short term? And how will you keep the initiatives going even as economic and working conditions begin to normalize?
It's no secret that companies now are finding out in real-time just how important digitization is, so another thing to think about is how your short term goals can be more closely tied to emphasizing how you help your customers continue operations even when teams are distributed, and efficiency and automation in business processes are even more crucial.
What do you want to accomplish with your offerings?
When defining the business, SaaS companies need to think about the business model, and what they hope to achieve with their actual product and service offerings.
Now may be a good time to see if your execution is aligned with your plans, and if your offerings are covering all the basis, or some of your customers are left wanting more. Proper subscription management can help you identify previous blind spots when it comes to your customers' usage and lifecycle stage, and if your solution is working to their advantage.
Re-establish if the contracts you offer customers help them achieve their goals, as well as your own business goals. You may need to reconsider your product roadmap, pricing tiers, contract types, or how you upsell features or add-on services. The balance here between these objectives is what can solidify the scalability and longevity for SaaS companies.
How will you define success?
Business success looks very different right now, and that may be true for a long time. In re-establishing your goals adapted to the current climate, it's important to re-establish what achieving those goals may look like, and how you measure success.
While some SaaS KPIs will consistently stay as indicators of success, such as customer churn, you may set different thresholds now for what you deem acceptable. Your sales process overall may be longer now, but rather than focusing on a lower monthly new sale average, see these times as a way to establish better customer relationships and support which can lead to longer contract terms and improved average customer lifetime values.
It's true that the way we do business may never be the same, but SaaS companies now have an opportunity to return to the basics, re-establish and realign their business goals, and ensure that success is measured to a new standard.
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