The 4 Legs of Your SaaS Bench

Transcript: Hi, I’m Anna Talerico with Married2Growth. This is just a quick thought on how to view the departments of your SaaS organization. 

Lately, I have been thinking more and more about the organization and teams in a SaaS company as four legs of a bench. All are equal, all need to be strong and sturdy.

Those four legs are product, marketing, sales and customer success. You literally can’t function without one of those legs.

The product of course is the first leg—you have to have something that has product/market fit. But then you have to market and sell it and support the customers in adopting and using it. So it does start with product, but very quickly after that, the other three legs become just as important.

In the simplest form—you aren’t growing without marketing and sales, and you aren’t retaining customers (which will kill your growth) without product and customer success.

And just for fun, you can think of operations as the bench seat on top—it covers the legs and it isn’t a bench without it. Operations keep your people happy, brings order to the chaos of a growing company, ensures customers get billed and the money flows in. Operations crosses the T’s and dots the I’s. Operations is the glue. Again, you can’t have a bench without it.

So, make sure your SaaS foundation is strong. If something isn’t clicking the way you think it should be—you aren’t growing fast enough, your customer churn is high, your employee turnover is crazy, your margins are out of whack, or your CAC is escalating—look at the four legs of your bench to see what’s wrong.

These legs are part of a single unit—your SaaS company—and when you look at one, you need to take them all into consideration.

So, that’s probably enough of an analogy for today. I think you probably get the point. Just a simple way to think about what’s working and what isn’t inside of your SaaS so you can start diagnosing and solving for it. Thanks so much for watching!