Four Levers of SaaS, Startup Worth, & SaaS Marketing Done Right
This week’s roundup includes the four metric “levers” of SaaS when focusing on new ARR, determining your SaaS’s worth, how SaaS marketing is key in turning free trial customers into paying customers, and the best tools for keeping startup costs low.
Four Levers of SaaS
Enterprise Irregulars
Your love of SaaS likely goes hand-in-hand with a love of math and metrics. Knowing your metrics is a good thing; however, loving metrics can taking you down a rabbit hole in the SaaS world. You do not want to end up spending more time than necessary crunching numbers when they do not lead to any progressive action in your business development. In this post the author discusses the four levers that are necessary to knowing a SaaS business’s new ARR at any given time.
“Hopefully this framework will make it easier for you to diagnose and act upon the problems that can impede achieving your company’s new ARR goals. By focusing on these four levers, you should be able to optimize the productivity of your SaaS sales model.”
How much is your SaaS Startup worth?
Tomasz Tunguz
The truth? Estimating your SaaS company’s worth is nearly impossible for even the wisest investors, but in his blog post, Tomasz Tunguz estimates approximate worths by comparing it to the other publicly traded SaaS companies and benchmarking the business by its growth rate.
“These trends illustrate why 2016 is such a big year for enterprise M&A with about 30 $1B acquisitions and take privates to date. In short, every company is trading at a discount relative to two or three years ago. To use a hyperbolic Warren Buffet aphorism, ‘Buy when there’s blood in the streets’.”
SaaS Marketing Done Right: How Buffer Turned Me Into a Paying Customer
CrazyEgg
Potential clients pretty much expect that any SaaS tool will offer a free trial of their products, if not a ‘freemium’ version. That free version requires a great deal of consideration by the business itself, as it is a real hook for bringing in paying customers. How do you give enough to close the sale without giving away so much it devalues the product?
This article discusses how the marketing and communication during a free trial period went a long way in winning over a lead after many months. Sure, the tool itself needs to be solid and of value, but seeing that the real faces behind the tool communicate well and are in fact humans who want to continually improve the product in order to help other humans do a job better goes a long way. Read the author’s 5 takeaways here.
Money Is No Object: The Best Tools for Low Startup Costs
Business 2 Community
Once upon a time, starting a tech related business involved the purchase of a lot of hardware–costly hardware. But, as we know, SaaS products and companies have been a major game changer for this requirement.
“Almost everything we use is pay-as-you-go — from phone numbers and email to software and even payroll systems. Being an entrepreneur is not a low-cost venture by any means, but with an abundance of products and services being offered as subscription services instead of an upfront fee, it’s more affordable than ever to get the tools needed to manage your company.”
This article outlines five areas where SaaS technology and options can help keep your costs lower when pursuing a fresh business idea: software, web hosting, business planning and admin, documentation, and split-testing. [Read more here.]
Video of the Week:
Explainer video for Secure Code saas product from webvillee on Vimeo.
Tweet of the Week:
80% of #SaaS sales happen between the 5th call to 12th call. Keep following up. – @yashparallel #tsparks pic.twitter.com/0TQRpYbFfP
— YourStory (@YourStoryCo) September 8, 2016
Instagram Post of the Week:
A photo posted by Jason DiNunno (@jasondinunno) on
