Introduction
Scaling is essential for success in the SaaS industry. If you can’t scale, you can’t reach new customers. Once your customer pool stays stagnant, your competitors will overtake you.
With so much competition and such a small time frame to get it right, scaling your SaaS business can seem scary. Luckily it doesn’t need to be so difficult!
19 Top Tactics for Scaling Your SaaS
We’ve compiled this list of top tactics on how to scale your SaaS business for success. Let’s dive in!
1. Revamp or Rethink Sales Strategies
Tactic one on our list for how to scale your SaaS business is all about your sales strategy; Rethinking, revamping, and reinventing the way you go about selling your SaaS.
Here are some top tips for taking your sales strategy to the next level:
→ Investigate Your Sales Funnel
Having the perfect sales team means nothing if your sales model isn’t the right fit for your business. Step one in perfecting your sales funnel is to look into different SaaS sales models. Choose a repeatable, scalable model that best suits your product.
→ Get to Know Your Staff
Assembling an effective sales team means hiring the right amount of staff with the right amount of skill. If you hire too many salespeople, you could harm your cash flow. If you hire too few, sales opportunities will slip through your fingers.
→ Optimize Your Sales Tactics
Once you’ve got your model and your staff, it’s time to focus on your strategy. What procedures are you going to put in place to sell your SaaS?
Make sure you:
- Automate where possible to improve time management and resource allocation.
- Invest time and money into training for your sales teams.
- Hire qualified and effective management.
- Check sales quotas and gross margin percentages and adjust accordingly.
→ Zoom in on Micro-Segments
Create account executive sales teams for specific segments of your audience. An account executive sales team could focus on a particular region where part of your audience is situated. They can tailor sales strategies to that region’s market or solve common problems in the micro-segment.
2. Refine Your Marketing Efforts
Tactic two for how to scale your SaaS business is refining your marketing efforts. Effective marketing strategies are contingent on careful planning and market analysis. You need to strike the right balance between trying new techniques and using standard channels.
3. Focus on Customer Satisfaction
Across all industries, there’s one undeniable fact that happy customers are the backbone of any successful business across all industries. Keep your customers happy, and they’re guaranteed to stick with your brand. Upset your customers, and you’re handing them to your competitors.
This brings us to tactic three on how to scale your SaaS business – customer satisfaction. To keep customer satisfaction levels high, make sure you:
- Adopt customer-focused strategies at all levels of your business.
- Consistently ask for feedback from your customers.
- Demonstrate your interest in customer satisfaction through product innovation.
- Pay attention to negative reviews—train customer support staff to help unhappy customers solve their problems.
4. Referral Program
If you want to scale your SaaS fast, converting customers to advocates is an effective way to do so. But how do you create brand advocates? Try number four on our list for how to scale your SaaS business – referral programs.
Tapping into the power of referral programs allows you to inspire brand loyalty within existing customers. You’ll simultaneously spread brand awareness to potential customers.
Start by reaching out to your customers to ask for feedback about your product. Once you’ve started a conversation, lure them in with details about your referral program and the possible rewards.
You can incentivize advocates to share your brand with their network in return for a reward for any successful referrals. Remember – make sure your staff is well-prepared to woo your customers into advocacy.
5. Finetune Your Pricing
Your product can be perfect, but if it’s priced too high, it won’t sell, and if it’s priced too low, you won’t make a profit. So tactic five for how to scale your SaaS business is all about pricing.
The ideal price point for your SaaS will fluctuate with the market. You’ll need to prepare your pricing structure for continuous optimization.
Try experimenting with different pricing packages to see which combination hits the sweet spot for your SaaS. Employing A/B testing market testing can help with this.
6. Zoom-in on Important Sales Metrics
Any list for how to scale your SaaS business would be incomplete without metrics. Tracking, analyzing, and utilizing metrics is an essential factor for scaling SaaS. Without understanding your metrics, you can’t plan for scaling or justify valuations.
You need to know what’s working for your SaaS growth and what’s working against it. And prospective metrics give you a feel for your scaling trajectory, like your sales cycle, sales costs, and payback period.
Some key metrics to look into are:
- Customer retention.
- Conversion rates.
- Growth rates and margins.
- Cost per acquisition (CPA).
- Revenue run rate.
- Customer lifetime value.
- Net promoter score (NPS).
- Churn rates.
- Monthly recurring revenue.
7. Tap-in to Micro Use Channels
Tapping into the benefits of micro use channels takes the spot of tactic seven on how to scale your SaaS business. Your product design teams can consider micro-use channels during product innovation. If your SaaS can address functionality issues with or connect easily to other apps, you’ll have more success in the market.
8. Optimize Your Teams
Coming in at number eight on how to scale your SaaS business is optimizing your team. You need to make sure all teams within your business are not only working together but working together in the most optimal way possible.
To achieve this optimization, you need to create cohesive teams which offer the right blend of skill and personality.
Well-rounded, effective teams often have the following combination of people:
- Stars = high-performers and role models for the rest of their team to emulate.
- Sherpas = operation-perfectionists whose consistency keeps the team moving.
- Strategists = visionaries who act as long-term optimizers for your team.
- Specialists = people who bring expertise and knowledge to your team.
- Supporters = team members who take on extra workloads and help out.
9. Make Product Adoption Easy
For tactic nine on how to scale your SaaS business, we’ve got easy product adoption strategies. Difficult product adoption creates barriers to renewals and referrals, so they should be avoided at all costs.
Making product adoption a seamless experience requires unfailing, effective, and targeted customer support. Your staff needs to hold your customer’s hands through every step.
Top tip. Offer customers as many options as possible to make product adoption easier, from walk-throughs to offering free trials, from easy data migration to one-click installs.
10. Use the Multichannel Acquisition Method
While it’s tempting to stick to one solid customer acquisition strategy, it’s not the most effective approach. Successfully scaling in SaaS is more likely if you don’t put your eggs in one strategy basket. Step in the multichannel acquisition method.
Using various digital channels in addition to your core business strategies is an effective way to scale. Invest in paid and organic acquisition strategies like paid advertising on Google, Facebook, or PR campaigns.
11. Use Analytics to Secure Your Sales Funnel
Analytics reveal where your user traffic is coming from and the direction it takes on your sites. They show which pages users are most interested in, which pages they ignore, and which pages they explore but abandon.
Analytics can pinpoint areas in your sales funnel that are slowing down lead generation and harming conversion rates—analytics highlight new opportunities for increasing customer acquisition strategies and scaling your SaaS.
You can zoom in on pages with high bounce rates and revamp them to be more appealing to visitors. For example, making them more clickable or optimizing the design.
12. Enter International Markets
International markets give you access to new markets and bring opportunities to create a global service. International expansion allows you to provide customer support coverage 24/7 and does wonders for boosting your brand’s reputation in the industry.
When looking to expand internationally, make sure you:
→ Set up new regional headquarters in the desired region.
→ Partner with a trusted local reseller to bring your SaaS into the new market.
→ Keep your core teams in your home region and expand sales and marketing strategies to reach new regions.
13. Automate Where Possible
Automating your business helps speed up your scaling efforts as it uses fewer resources to reach a wider audience. Its ability to make you money while saving you money is what makes it tactic thirteen on how to scale your SaaS business.
By automating sales, marketing, and customer service departments, you free up your staff’s time. They will be able to focus on more complicated tasks and provide better customer support. This ultimately gives your customers a better brand experience.
Steps for automating your SaaS business:
→ Outline Your Customer LifeCycle
Understanding your customer’s life cycle means fleshing out the journey that users take from visitor to lead to customer. You’ll gain insight into how users become aware of, engage with and stay loyal to your brand. You can then use this insight to target accordingly with automated strategies and techniques.
→ Outline Your Metrics Each Funnel Stage
Metrics give you a better understanding of where to allocate resources. They also show what weak points in your funnel are affecting your conversions.
Tracking metrics is the only way to know if your strategies are working. It also shows you which areas of your funnel receive the most traffic so you can automate as many processes as possible to drive conversions.
→ Outline Your SaaS Automation Workflow
Once you’ve got your lifecycle and metrics sorted, it’s time to build an automation workflow for your SaaS. You need to customize your marketing automation plan to fit your SaaS and the unique needs of your customers. For example, automating your social media posts to be released at the time of day most likely to reach your audience.
14. Utilize Live Chat and Drive Leads
Using live chat features is another excellent tip for scaling your SaaS business. Live chat tools are a perfect way to reach your customers directly and quickly.
Located at the corner on the screen, live chat tools are always available to users to answer questions and provide support. You can also program live chat tools to offer personalized offerings like demos in return for user information.
It’s possible to integrate live chat tools with popular platforms like Facebook. You’ll have more access to your users and make it easier for them to contact you.
15. Prioritize Content Creation
Content helps give your brand a voice – it’s a way you connect with your audience and forge deep connections with customers. With that in mind, tactic fifteen concerns how to scale your SaaS business is creating compelling content strategies.
To create compelling content that resonates with your audience, do this in your content strategies:
- Write regular blogs tailored toward adding value to your customer’s lives.
- Include content that is link-worthy and appealing to your audience.
- Repurpose old content by updating, improving, and adding to it.
- Create persona-based content that answers questions and addresses the pain points of potential customers.
- Focus on crafting thought leadership content to position your brand as an authority.
16. Reach Out to Influencers
Moving to tactic sixteen on how to scale your SaaS business, we have influencer marketing. Reaching out to popular influencers in your niche is a sure-fire way to drive traffic to your sites helping to scale your business.
Influencers have a direct link to your customer base. They can communicate your product’s value faster than Google can through their ranking system.
Find influencers in your niche who would be interested in promoting your content. Then find ways to engage with them and connect. If your product is something the influencer believes in, you can offer them tangible partnership benefits for promoting your brand.
17. Gather Customer Insights
Tactic seventeen on how to scale your SaaS business is gathering customer insights. To know whether your scaling strategies are working, you need to know what’s going on with your customers. Find out who they are, what problems they have, and why they need your help.
Great avenues for gathering customer insights are websites like Quora. You’ll see what questions customers are asking and get a feel for what pain points are not being solved by current products on the market. You can then use this information during product innovation.
These platforms also give you an excellent opportunity to communicate directly with your audience. Assembling teams to answer customer queries on these sites helps create a readership and generate leads.
18. Tap into the Freemium Structure
Tactic eighteen is about the freemium model. By offering a watered-down version of your product, you give free users a taste for how it can revolutionize their businesses. The model can help generate more leads and spread awareness of the benefits of using your product.
→ Product Innovation
The freemium model brings opportunities for product improvement. You can gather feedback from free users who choose not to convert on what was missing from your product or why they didn’t like it. Then you can use this feedback to fix product issues, making it more successful in the future.
→ Showcases Popular Features
The freemium model shows you what features of your product are most popular. You can then focus on promoting them in your marketing and sales strategies.
→ Free Tools Function as Lead Magnets
Free tools are effective lead magnets for your product. Try offering one of the key features of your product as a tool and limit the number of times it can be used for free. Free users will start relying on the tool and will be motivated to convert so they can keep using it to solve their problems.
19. Retarget Visitors
Retargeting visitors is the last tactic on our list on how to scale your SaaS business successfully. There could be loads of different reasons a visitor chooses not to convert the first time they visit a page. Maybe they’re busy. Perhaps they need more convincing. Whatever the reason, it’s vital to keep sparking their interest.
By retargeting visitors, you keep your brand and the solution your product offers at the forefront of their minds. So when they’re researching other options, they remember your product.
To create an effective retargeting campaign, make sure that your site and product pages have a strong value proposition. Use this to repeatedly highlight to visitors why your product is the best solution for addressing their pain points.
Originally published here.
