How to Win in the SaaS Tidal Wave

The last decade saw a surge in the number of software-as-a-service (SaaS) startups in India. Quite like how there was an overload of apps for any particular consumer need on the Apple Appstore, there is now a software for almost any business need—sources list about 8500 products and counting.

SaaS products that focus on enterprise customers take significant effort to build, long sales cycles, proof of concept, and post-sales support. Then there are also the requirements of customization, data governance, and security concerns. Finally, there is always the looming issue of the startup going out of business, code access, and future availability.?

Products that have grown in scale and features typically share traits that many others normally ignore in their rush to write code.?

The Lincoln Code: As the US president famously said, preparation is key—in the case of product companies, research is a breeding ground to iterate ideas and find proof that buyers will be interested in the product. Successful product marketing heads are continuously researching, running product recommendation campaigns, and in-application analytics to understand user experiences. India has many design schools of repute, and designers are trained to look at the big picture, execute user research, and help hone product ideas.

Problem or mouse trap: Most enterprise users or leaders typically will not be able to articulate that they have a problem or what their problems are. Picking up a feature gap in an existing product and trying to build a business around that gap is probably the surest path to failure. Many CEOs claim their products have more features and capabilities than existing incumbents are setting themselves up for disbelief. Better mouse traps don’t sell that much more. Products that solve true problems don’t even sell their product features—the marketing and sales teams evangelize the customer problem, and guide them to try their products out.

Start with outcomes: Most SaaS companies—small and even large, approach problem solving from a feature mindset rather than an outcome mindset. This engenders long time to value cycles and pushes the onus of customization to product teams. It will really help to have an outcome focused mindset, building that into the product culture, and providing out-of-the-box solutions to common use cases. At the end of the day, all efforts should help reduce time to value, help educate the customer to move up the maturity curve in using the product, and improve the experience of their users.

Design it, then build it: Tools like Figma allow product companies to design near-real clickable product experiences that help in early product testing and feedback—without writing a single line of code. This also helps product companies to leverage content writers to develop UX content that is engaging, informative, and helps the user experience the product. In numerous cases, the technology team uses the design talent as an afterthought and are reluctant to make any changes—leading to “pretty” products instead of well-thought products.

Customers are Users are Customers: Any SaaS product use begins with normal people, who want to experiment, push the edges, and see how products stand up. The engagement model with the customer starts before they purchase the product and continues into the purchase, usage and expansion, and the support experience offered to customers. Making these seamless for the customer allows one to cross-sell, up-sell, and drive up the stickiness with the customer.

Own the customer journey: Most startups consider customer support as a non-event or an expense. Enterprise customers deal with numerous business challenges every day and learning how to use a new SaaS product is the last thing—if at all—on their agenda. Startups that leave customer support to some community-based content or a non-human chat support are setting themselves up for churn. SaaS products are rented, and customers will quickly move on to their old ways of working or to a competition if the product support does not live up to promise. The sales contract is only the first step in the relationship but most CEOs consider it the last step. In SaaS, every hour the customer is not using a product is an hour’s worth of loyalty lost forever.

Diffuse the experience: In the real world, business users are battling log-in fatigue—from constantly having to log in to different screens, remembering or resetting passwords, and multi-factor authentication. If a new product can simply diffuse into an existing product and transform the experience, user adoption becomes a non-issue, and the value of the product is delivered in a highly consumable manner, leading to higher user retention, frictionless feature introduction, and higher revenues. In-application payments, analytics, insights are all examples of how new-age products are consumed without being seen.

Finally, deliver fun: In the end, business users are people—and they remember how the product made them feel, not features or benefits. In today’s rapidly changing technology landscape, elegance, intuitive experience, and frictionless engagement are table stakes. For example, Zoom’s gesture recognition or Figma’s playful highfives are great fun ways of engaging with each other and with the product. Humor, empathy, and lenience all drive to better product recall.

As always, I welcome more inputs that I would love to include here and give credits.