8 Ways to Scale Your SaaS Business

SaaS businesses are growing rapidly, but scaling them can be a challenge. According to a report by Venture Beat, just 4% of SaaS businesses successfully scale beyond $1 million in annual revenue. However, scaling a business doesn’t have to be difficult. We listed a few tips on how to scale a SaaS business successfully.

Yet, before we get to the list, it’s important to understand first the key elements that are necessary for SaaS growth.

What Does It Take For a SaaS Business to Take Off?

1. Set clear goals and KPIs

You need to be clear on how you define success, and what metrics you will use to measure it. Without a clear understanding of your goals, it’s impossible to know if your SaaS startup is meeting them or not, and therefore difficult to make decisions about the direction of your business.

2. Build an effective marketing strategy

Your SaaS business can have the best product or service in the world, but if no one knows about it, it won’t be successful. That’s why you need to develop a solid marketing strategy that includes techniques such as SEO, PPC ads, content marketing and more.

3. Provide excellent customer support

Whether you offer your customers live chat support or email support, it’s crucial to provide timely and helpful customer service. This can make or break a new business, so don’t underestimate its importance.

4. Implement effective tracking tools

In order to scale your business successfully, you need to have an accurate understanding of how your marketing campaigns are performing, who your customers are, and how they are engaging with your product or service. This can be done using a variety of tracking tools, such as Google Analytics, user surveys and more.

While there is no guaranteed formula for success when it comes to scaling a SaaS business, following these tips will put you in good stead to achieve your goals.

8 Tactics to Scale Your SaaS Business

1. Focus on your target market

One of the biggest mistakes new SaaS businesses make is trying to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. This can often dilute your message and limit your growth potential, so instead you need to focus on a specific segment of the market that is most likely to be interested in your product or service.

It’s important to know who your target customers are and their needs to successfully scale your business. Consider conducting regular surveys or focus groups that can provide valuable insights into your target market.

Creating a buyer persona is another effective strategy for understanding your customers and fine-tuning your marketing efforts. You can start by identifying the demographic and psychographic traits of your ideal customer, and then finding out where they hang out online.

2. Invest in quality marketing and sales tools

Another key factor in scaling a SaaS business is having the right marketing and sales tools to support your efforts. This might include a CRM system that can help you track leads, or analytics software to measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. In addition, consider investing in a good quality sales enablement tool, such as a proposal generator or an e-signature service, to help you close deals more quickly.

3. Invest in diverse marketing strategies

In order to grow your customer base and reach more potential customers, it is important to invest in marketing. This can include:

• Paid advertising can be a highly efficient way to scale a SaaS business, especially when considering how much time and effort it takes to build organic search traffic and engage potential customers through other channels.
• Content marketing: Creating helpful and informative content can attract new visitors to your website and help build trust with potential customers. Check out our list of 10 B2B SaaS Content Marketing Strategies That Truly Works
• Social media marketing: Utilizing social media platforms, such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, can help you reach a wider audience and create brand awareness.
• Search engine optimization (SEO): Optimizing your website and content for specific keywords can help you rank higher in search engine results and attract more potential customers.

It’s important to test out various marketing strategies to find what works best for your business.

Check out our list of 10 SaaS Marketing Tactics Every SaaS Business Should Know for more tips.

4. Focus on improving customer retention.

While it’s important to focus on customer acquisition, it’s also essential to invest time and resources into retaining your existing customer base. There are a number of ways you can improve customer retention, such as:

• Offering a free trial: When potential customers are considering your SaaS product, they may be hesitant to commit to a paid subscription. To ease their concerns and increase conversions, offer your product a free trial. This will give potential customers a chance to experience your product and see its value before they make a decision.
• Providing excellent customer support: Nothing is more important than responsiveness when it comes to providing great customer support. Whether customers are contacting you with questions or concerns, they expect a timely and professional response that shows you care about their experience. By quickly and effectively addressing customers’ needs, you will build trust and loyalty that can keep them coming back for more. 
• Offering discounts or coupons: Offering discounts or coupons is a common marketing strategy that can be highly effective in incentivizing customers to continue using your product or service. This is because discounts and coupons serve as attractive offers for consumers, often providing significant savings on the original purchase price. Additionally, by offering these promotions, businesses communicate to their customers that they value their business and want to ensure that they stay loyal.

Read our blog on SaaS Customer Retention: Best Practices and Pitfalls to Avoid for more tips on improving customer retention.

5. Reduce Churn

The best way to scale your SaaS business is to be a customer-focused company. In other words, you want to set up your business to maximize customer success and retention. To that end, you need to:

Reduce customer stress

If your product is making your customers’ lives more difficult rather than easier, it won’t be long before they leave for an alternative solution. Continuously provide them with tools and resources that help them achieve their desired outcomes. And make sure you have a robust support process in place because if you don’t have an answer for their burning questions, they will happily turn elsewhere.

Delight your customers

Make sure every interaction between them and your team leaves them positively surprised and delighted. Make them feel like VIPs by going above and beyond in every area of the customer lifecycle-from onboarding all the way through support, training, advocacy, and renewal. You can even go as far as sending them handwritten thank-you letters after they sign up.Another way is to offer workout tips when they mention on social media that they’re trying to lose weight (the possibilities are endless!).

Build relationships with customers

The relationship between sales teams and their prospects often ends once the buyer says “yes”-but scaling a SaaS business requires building deeper connections with them after onboarding is complete. This will help keep customers engaged during the entire length of their contract period (and also encourage repeat purchases or upgrades).

6. Charge More

The first and most obvious way to scale your business is to simply charge more. As a general rule, if you provide more value, you can charge more. There are a variety of ways that this can look for SaaS businesses:

• Charge more for features that people want: If your product has a popular feature among users, try increasing the price and see if customers will still buy it. If you’ve built up lots of goodwill with your customers by providing outstanding service in the past, they’ll be willing to pay a little extra for the features they want.
• Charge more for features that people need: You might have some features that are crucial to your product but don’t get very much use from customers because not everyone uses them or thinks they’re important enough to pay extra money for. In this case, consider bundling these features with other ones, so users have no choice but to pay extra money if they want access to them (and if they don’t, don’t worry-they’re probably not core parts of your product anyway). Just make sure there’s enough interest from other users out there who do need those features before making this move!
• Charge more for features that are easy to use: Some aspects of software can be hard on both users and developers alike-things like complex workflows or complicated data structures require time and effort from everyone involved in order to ensure things run smoothly. To combat this problem without having any impact on functionality, try building simple interfaces over top of complex functionality so they’re easy as pie while still providing all those benefits under the hood!

7. Increase Number of Customers

To scale your SaaS business, you need to reach beyond the customers you already have and target new customers. New clients will not only increase your income but also improve your brand recognition and may require you to add additional services.

• Create a marketing plan: A marketing plan can help you define where new customers are located, what their needs are and how your business can fill them. Your plan should include an analysis of your current customer base and those who do not currently use your services that could benefit from them. Include metrics in your plan so that you can track the effectiveness of different strategies.
• Track results: Keep notes on what is working in terms of finding new clients by tracking the outcomes of different marketing methods so that you can continue with those that work best for scaling your SaaS company. You may find referral programs work well or that a certain type of advertising generates more leads than others.
• Research new markets: There might be a market for what you offer within another industry or region where competitors are lacking or nonexistent. Look at industries where other companies provide similar products or services to see how they create their value proposition, as well as areas where there are no competitors offering similar products or services at all. You may be able to find an untapped pool of potential clients by looking outside the norm for your industry, including targeting B2C instead of B2B sales or looking for international markets instead of focusing solely on domestic ones.

8. Automate Your Business Processes

You can also reduce the time spent on mundane, repetitive tasks by setting up email marketing automation. You can set this up to trigger emails when customers reach certain milestones, like when they have been a customer for a certain period of time or they have reached a new subscriber level. This kind of automation cuts out the need to do these things yourself and saves you time.

However, you don’t want to rush into automating everything because that might cause more problems than it solves. Instead, think about what parts of your business could benefit from being automated and only automate those processes that are likely to save you both time and money. For example, if you’re using an email marketing platform with built-in features for sending automatic emails then make sure you look into those features before deciding whether or not they’re worth paying extra money for them.

9. Implement Remote Working To Improve Hiring Opportunities

Nowadays, employees expect the opportunity to work flexibly. Hybrid working environments give your workers a greater work-life balance and can provide a boost to their productivity and wellbeing. Fail to offer the ability to work from home and you may find your next recruitment drive is a painful experience. However, choose to implement a remote working framework and it’s likely you’ll attract a high number of applicants. Better yet, your hiring opportunities will increase tenfold — an employer of record service like Remote can allow managers to legally employ talent from anywhere in the world. An EOR takes care of all the legal aspects of the process, from tax to payroll and HR, leaving senior leadership to focus on onboarding their new acquisition. If you’re looking for your next employee, why limit yourself? Cast a wider net and scour the globe — an EOR eliminates the need for compromise.

Final Thoughts

If you follow the above-mentioned steps, your business will grow and be able to scale to new heights. These steps are easy to implement and they can make your business more efficient and profitable. 

Additionally, focusing on improving your customer experience and automating business processes can help you appeal to a wider audience and keep existing customers happy. With the right strategy in place, you’ll be able to increase your number of customers quickly and effectively.​

As you work to scale your SaaS business, there are several key strategies that can help you reach new customers, improve your customer experience, and automate your business processes. By following these steps, you can ensure that your business is primed for growth and ready to take things to the next level. 

Read our blog for more information on scaling your SaaS business. We go over the different stages of growth and offer advice on how to achieve each stage successfully.​