It’s Monday, and that means it’s time for another weekly SaaS article roundup! This week we bring you a sales metric for geeks, pricing tips, a look at revenue growth in SaaS companies, SaaS marketing basics and more.
Each Monday, we collect some of our favorite SaaS articles from around the internet and put them together for our readers to enjoy. So grab your lasso and saddle up, it’s roundup time again!
A SaaS Sales Metric For Efficiency Geeks
As a group of proud efficiency geeks ourselves, the title of this article caught our eye early last week. In this quick 3-minute read, Justin Welsh talks about a lesser-known sales metric (Dollars Per Demo by Source) and provides the perfect introduction to what it is, how it can benefit your SaaS company, and best of all, how to implement it.
I love this metric because it gives you a quick “measuring stick” by which to judge your reps. This simple SaaS sales metric takes into consideration the source, the win rate and the average contract value, all wrapped up together, giving you a single metric to compare reps side-by-side.
– Justin Welsh
Don’t Leave Money on the Table — Price Your SaaS Products RIGHT!
Having trouble pricing your SaaS product? Whether you’re currently stuck in the product pricing phase or moving out of one with a few regrets, you’re probably familiar with the typical SaaS pricing methods. But what if there was a better way? Software writer Chetan Kapoor talks about the less common methods like Value Based Pricing, analyzing Willingness to Pay (WTP) and how to triangulate WTP against various aspects of your product using a Value Matrix or Relative Preference Analysis.
Kapoor offers a simple and effective solution to an often overwhelming problem.
It is important to deeply understand your products true value proposition and equate those to people’s willingness to pay for them. The tool that comes in handy to do this analysis is Value Matrix or Relative Preference Analysis. The idea is to compare the relative preference of various features or different aspects of the product or services and then cross referencing that(layer that) with willingness to pay(WTP). Essentially Willingness to Pay is Triangulated against various aspects of Your Product.
– Chetan Kapoor
The Expectation of Winning
Automation Anywhere‘s Ben Cotton reflects on his time working at revered companies like Edelman and HubSpot, and explains what it feels like to be on a “winning team”. In this article, Ben talks about the characteristics of winning teams, how they’re lead and how a culture built around the expectation of winning can empower a team to succeed where others may fail.
Are you on a winning team?
Winning teams possess what I consider to be a healthy paranoia and appreciate that what they have today, could be gone tomorrow – that sense of fear is what (partly) feeds their discipline.
– Ben Cotton
How Fast is Fast Enough: Revenue Growth in SaaS Companies
ITProPortal‘s Dr Alistair Forbes penned a great piece on SaaS revenue growth last week, sharing statistical data from studies done by respected sources like The SaaS Capital to determine how fast is fast enough when it comes to revenue growth. If you’re looking for insight into properly paced revenue growth, look no further.
The authors found that for best-in-class SaaS companies, the growth rate for any given year is between 80% and 85% of the growth rate of that same company in the prior year, the so-called growth persistence, which they found to hold true for companies studied that were above $10million in ARR.
– Dr. Alistair Forbes
Marketing Basics for Your SaaS Business
Shubhi Jain from SlickAccount shares 4 fantastic tips on how to market a SaaS company, directed at the many business owners who start a SaaS company with the intention of selling it. As mentioned in the article, any well-made and useful SaaS product is wasted if not marketed well. So what are the marketing basics for a new SaaS company? Jain has the answers.
The best part about a SaaS business is that the combination of efficient product and service will practically sell itself.
– Shubhi Jain
Xero’s Growth Strategy — How they acquired 350k SaaS users in the last 12 months
Last but not least comes my personal favorite from this week’s roundup. Sydney-based growth marketing specialist Duncan Jones wrote a mind-numbingly detailed deep-dive into SaaS accounting giant Xero‘s growth strategy. Though probably best suited for some after-hours weekend reading (due to its estimated 65-minute read time) the information contained in this article is worth its somewhat surprising length.
Every business is different, and every marketing strategy should be unique, so we’re not recommending that all companies should focus on being simple and customer centric.
– Duncan Jones
What we’re highlighting is that Xero has understood exactly what it is that their audience loves about them, and what makes them stand out from the competition who have been in business for a long time. They’ve then taken this understanding and applied it throughout their digital presence to ensure the message connects with their audience.
And that’s it!
That does it for this week’s SaaS roundup! Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you back here next Monday!
Leave a Reply