A.R.E. Planning for SaaS Companies

The A.R.E plan is the simple approach to outline the initiatives and tactics to reach your goals for SaaS customer acquisition, retention, and expansion. For those leaders and teams who don’t love to plan, but know they need to.

Hi, I’m Anna Talerico and I want to share a quick idea for planning for SaaS teams in sales, marketing, and customer success.

I have a love/hate relationship with planning. I think it’s important to set goals and then to determine specifically HOW you will achieve those goals, but I also don’t like cumbersome or intensive planning formats. And I think sometimes in planning you can forget to see the forest through the trees, and then you lose focus on what is most important.

That’s why I always favor simple approaches. So, one of the ways that help me and my teams quickly plan without getting too bogged down is the ARE plan. A-R-E. That stands for Acquisition, Retention, Expansion.

The most important things for a SaaS company—acquiring new customers, retaining them and expanding them.

So, I work on plans that simply state the goals for acquisition, retention, and expansion, and then list the initiatives we are going to do in the period—usually a quarter—to ensure we will hit those goals. You can do A.R.E. plans for the year and on a monthly basis. I like to close the loop on plans too, so I always recommend coming back to the plan at the end of the period to update how the initiatives worked, if the goal was achieved, what didn’t get done, etc. That’s how you learn over time.

So anyway, consider A.R.E. planning for your teams—defining what your goals are for acquisition, retention, and expansion, and then your initiatives to meet those goals—The how. That’s it for now. I hope this was helpful. You can find a link to an article about how I do A.R.E. planning at the end of the video if you want to learn more. Let me know what you think. And thanks for watching!