9 Mistakes In #Saas Business That Make You Look Dumb

The pressures, expectations and responsibility of running your business can make you lose focus on important goals and end up making some simple mistakes that make you look dumb, unfocused and confused. Here are nine mistakes SaaS businesses make that make them look dumb:

1. Thin Content Website

SaaS users are expected to be internet savvy. However, how ‘savvy’ a person should be is subjective. To some people, being “savvy” means knowing how to use read and send email. To others, it means knowing how to configure databases and extrapolate information from an application.

Regardless of the market you are serving, your website should be rich with helpful content on your product. Having a walk-around tour of your solution and a comprehensive “knowledge base” can help to activate more paying customers.

2. Hiding your Prices

It’s still shocking to see some companies still hiding their prices. The first thing that comes to customer’s minds when they cannot find prices on your website is that you are too expensive.

On the flip side, you may encourage customers to contact you to get pricing information. However, this is not a marketing strategy you want to use. First, most customers will just not take the trouble to email or call to ask for pricing information. Secondly, you can get lots of unqualified inquiries, which do not help your business and makes you waste your time answering questions that would have best been answered on the website.

3. Concentrating on Front Sales

This mistake will make you look dumb among your investors. The SaaS business model is built on recurring revenue. Therefore, your sales process should be optimized for both immediate and recurring sales.

To reach your revenue goals, take advantage of upsells and cross-selling opportunities. These opportunities enable users to derive more value from your product while at the same time generating higher revenue for your business.

4. Measuring Unworthy Metrics

Still on revenues, you should know which SaaS metrics to measure. Not all metrics are helpful in determining the health of your business. In particular, you should measure the recurring revenue, churn rate and cost of acquiring customers.

Other metrics such as brand awareness and website traffic are good for devising your marketing strategy. However, at the end of the day, your efforts will not make sense if they do not improve your bottom-line.

5. Poor Customer Support

Poor customer support is one of the biggest contributors to churn. Support has to be at the center of your operations since you rely on recurring revenue. Do not make it difficult for users to contact you. If you provide fanatical support, you will build a loyal customer base that will assure you recurring revenue through the user’s lifetime value.

6. Copying the Pricing of Others

Your competitors can guide you on pricing but you should not necessarily copy their pricing plans. There are many things to consider when coming up with your price. These include your overheads, debts, future growth plans, support and so on. Essentially, you should price your product based on the value that you provide. Do not underprice or overprice as a marketing strategy.

7. Ignoring the UI

Functionality is at the core of a successful SaaS app. However, user experience should also not be ignored. A poor UI can kill a great app. Remember, people want solutions that are easy to get started with and use. Save the technical part for your dev. team on the backend and make the UI intuitive for front end users.

8. Not Enabling Integration

The business world is increasingly being connected and so are apps. Regardless of the market you are serving, there are other apps that can increase the functionality of your product. Make it possible for users to integrate these apps with your product. For example, if you are providing a help desk system, users should be able to integrate it with popular CRM options like Salesforce.com.

9. Locking Customers in a Package

Users love SaaS because it is cost-effective and flexible. The notion that you can pay for only what you need is one that makes most people consider SaaS instead of legacy software. When you lock up customers in a package, you are essentially killing the value they are looking for. You should provide customers with the option to automatically upgrade or downgrade their consumption.

The above are some of the dumb mistakes SaaS businesses make. Are you making any of them?