The economic instability is hitting the SaaS industry pretty hard.
In fact, according to Crunchbase, more than 73,000 workers in the U.S. tech sector alone have been laid off so far in 2022.
Now, when things get hectic - and they are pretty wild right now -, looking at facts and data might be the best thing to do.
Paddle recently published an insightful report: The State of SaaS Growth: Uncovering the growth levers that see SaaS businesses achieve long-term success.
So, we invited Andrew Davies, CMO at Paddle, to share some of the key learnings of the said report.
The episode covers:
- The main growth barriers for SaaS businesses
- The main growth levers for SaaS businesses
- How marketing can support growth in the wake of an economic recession
- How to find your product-market fit
- How to experiment with pricing
- The impact of self-serve on growth
Watch the episode on YouTube.
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcast and/or Spotify
“Pricing is one of the easiest levers for growth”
If most SaaS organizations deal with pricing in their own way, they seem to share a common trait: they fear to experiment with pricing.
According to Andrew, this is a mistake.
“Pricing is one of the easiest levers for growth. Just imagine how hard it is to go and win another 10% new customers. So that means all of the demand gen, the Op creation, the sales work, the enablement (...) to go and win that extra 10% of customers …. or just putting up your prices by 10%. One of those feels a lot easier than the other one to me.”
— Andrew Davies
One price to rule them all
Andrew adds that testing different prices actually supports growth.
“Our data shows that the more frequently you change your prices, the more your output grows.”
Each market and currencies are unique.
So should your offers.
To make a long story short, experimenting with pricing gives you a chance to test the perceived value of your SaaS products or services for different audiences in different locations.
“Each of territory has a different willingness to pay based on their GDP, economic, climate, disposable income, the importance of this software versus local market competitors, etc. So, you have to dig into those things as well. And that's part of testing your pricing and learning.”
— Andrew Davies
“Self-serve doesn’t mean ‘no sales’ ”
There are a lot of misconceptions about the self-serve model. One of the most common is the so-called incompatibility between sales reps and self-serve.
But we do see in our data that it correlates with lower customer acquisition cost overall and high net promoter score.
“Self-serve doesn't mean no sales reps. Once they get past about 300 staff, product-led businesses are probably hiring sales reps at a faster rate than sales-led businesses.”
Why is that?
Well, when going for a self-serve model, you are likely to significantly up your acquisition performance.
“You get lots of companies and people coming in and testing your products and services”.
Of course, this also means “lower conversion rates than you would get from a normal opportunity being created by a sales team.”
Andrew’s solution? Hire sales representatives to talk to Sales Qualified Leads Product Qualified Leads and significantly impact revenue.
To learn more, listen to or watch the episode!
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Links
- Visit Advance B2B >> www.advanceb2b.com
- Visit Paddle >> https://www.paddle.com/
- Find the report >> https://www.paddle.com/offers/outliers-state-of-saas-growth
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Recommendations
- Book: Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?: Inside IBM's Historic Turnaround, by Louis V. Gerstner Jr.
- SaaS Company: Gong.io
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