Once a fringe segment of the software industry, the market for software-as-a-service has exploded in recent years. Monthly or annual pricing plans are now a regularity in many corners of the B2B and B2C software world, and that trend will only become hotter in 2014 as more businesses explore unique ways to deliver products to consumers via subscription models.
Of course, as much as those formats make sense for software buyers, SaaS pricing and economic models also present some unique challenges, too – namely, high customer acquisition costs, more frequent customer churn, and the difficulty of deciding which metrics are most important to measure and track.
To help your growing SaaS business address those issues as we head into a New Year, we’ve curated the 10 most popular SaaS-related posts that were published on our site in 2013.
If your SaaS business is seeing customers attrite at an abnormally high or unhealthy rate, SaaS sales and marketing expert Lincoln Murphy suggests in this post that it might be time to pump up your customer engagement and focus more on acquiring higher quality users. Read more.
How do you price a subscription product? That’s not an easy question to answer and it often depends on your product, the market you’re targeting, and the buyers’ expectations in that market. That said, there are some common factors that often influence SaaS pricing, and SurveyMonkey’s Brent Chudoba shares some tips in this post that will help you create the best SaaS pricing structure for you. Read more.
For most SaaS companies, offering free trials and freemium plans is a no-brainer. But as SaaS entrepreneur Josh Pigford, the founder and CEO of PopSurvey, explains in this post, going in the opposite direction might actually do more for your SaaS company’s bottom line. Read more.
Your product is ready for prime time — but is your sales model scalable and sound? In this post, Matrix Partners‘ David Skok shares four SaaS customer acquisition best practices that will ensure your approach isn’t actually a disservice to your bottom line. Read more.
Maybe you already offer a free trial, but is it really drawing in the quantity (and quality) of customers that you need? In this post, SaaS marketing strategist Peter Cohen encourages entrepreneurs to consider the full picture of the free trial experience and follow these four steps to improve their free trial yield. Read more.
The path to scalability is littered with failed startups. Want to avoid that fate? GinzaMetrics CEO Ray Grieselhuber offers advice on making your company a success story, instead of a cautionary tale of early-stage promise unfulfilled. Read more.
If you’re offering freemium plans in hopes of increasing customer acquisition, you might want to reconsider your pricing strategy. This guide explores how raising prices (and eliminating low value customers) can actually result in more profitable customers and higher retention rates. Read more.
When scaling a SaaS company, keeping tabs — and acting on — key performance indicators is an absolute must. In this post, Intronis CEO Rick Faulk explains why that is especially true when it comes to sales and marketing, and highlights the most critical metrics to track your spending and success. Read more.
In this quick guide you’ll discover the six key performance indicators (KPIs) every SaaS entrepreneur needs to monitor if they hope to analyze their SaaS company’s performance and track its growth — without drowning the business in useless data. Read more.
While every SaaS founder would love to have five-second sales conversations that center on cut-and-dry product pricing options, that’s not how most SaaS deals work — particularly as companies begin to scale. In fact, as SaaS expert Jason Lemkin explains in this post, SaaS discounting at the enterprise level is expected, not optional. And if you don’t price your product right, it could severely impact your bottom line. Read more.
<strong>Jonathan Crowe</strong> is Senior Content Manager at <a href="https://www.barkly.com/">Barkly</a>. He was previously the Managing Editor of OpenView Labs.
Enzo Avigo, former product manager at Intercom and CEO of product analytics startup June, unpacks how to accelerate your path to product market fit. Get the guide here.
Achieving true product-led growth takes a winning combination of free parts of your product, virality, paying users, and more. Startups spend years (and thousands of dollars) trying to figure out the right model for viral growth – and many never do. So how do you succeed at PLG. Find out here.
Eraser founder, Shin Kim, shares why his company, Eraser, a whiteboard for engineering teams, built an AI sidecar that ultimately drove 30% of all product sign ups. Learn more here.