In recent times, the SaaS business model has gained a lot of spotlights. Entrepreneurs are foraying in the SaaS market with their ideas to grab a large chunk of market share.
Many other existing successful organizations are also trying to become a part of the SaaS business.
SaaS business models are exciting to hear but equally tough due to many challenges present at various stages.
Every SaaS business model has to deal with these challenges and hoist the flag of success. But first, you need to recognize those challenges.
Here we have prepared a list of challenges that a B2B SaaS solution provider faces. Here it goes.
1. Discovering the Right Market
If you peek into the SaaS industry, there is a huge crowd of companies already making space for them. To churn out the competition, you need to define your market first.
Identify your market, figure out the problem that consumers of that market face, and then provide a solution to them. You are not the only one operating in your niche. So you need to be innovative while creating a solution.
One of the mistakes that most companies make is solving a problem that no one is interested in. You can dodge this problem by implementing a lean startup methodology.
First, try building a small-scale solution and read the reaction to it. If you find a good reaction to it, you can go on modifying and scaling it on the grounds of the feedback.
2. Defining Buyer’s Persona
The best way to tell everyone about your brand is storytelling. And to create a story and get people to listen to it, creating a buyer persona is important.
You are going to put a lot of effort into building the solution, so it is important to find out the people needing your solution, for which you need a buyer persona.
To define your buyer persona, develop detailed consumer profiles and buyer persona. When you are done warehousing your buyer persona and profile, you are good to go toward your final decision. Use this buyer persona to find out prospects and customer retention.
3. Onboarding Customers
Onboarding new customers is undeniably one of the greatest challenges faced by SaaS companies. Better the onboarding process, the less the chances of product relinquishment in the trial period.
While onboarding new customers, don’t just pour down the entire process over them. They may feel overwhelmed and leave.
What you can do to avoid this is break down the process into pieces and then introduce every piece to them at the right time. Help your customers in empathizing with your product. This may put invaluable feedback in your review bank.
You also need to firmly and correctly decide that at what stage you should start laying out capital in the onboarding process so that you don’t just drain out your money.
4. Delivering Exceptional Customer Experience
Selling the SaaS solution is not a one-way street, instead, the bridge starts from here. The path to providing an outstanding customer experience entails a plethora of challenges because customers are going to come with problems.
But a good thing here is you can solve every problem and get to evolve after every mistake made.
Your customers are the lifeline of your SaaS business, so you have no choice to compromise on customer experience. SaaS companies should start realizing at the earliest that customer retention is as important as customer acquisition.
If you fail at providing a good experience to your customers, the entire market is packed with the companies that want to snatch your share and fill their silos.
5. Creating a Practicable Business Model
This shouldn’t be the scenario, but many SaaS startup owners are convinced that after exhibiting their service once, clients will start gushing to avail their SaaS product again and again.
This is not true. Maybe at the outset, a few enthusiastic people can come to get services from you, but you will have to spend capital on acquiring a pool of new customers.
Keep in mind that your lifetime value of the customer (LTV) should be higher or equal to the customer acquisition cost (CAC). If your CAC is more than LTV, then it’s time to work out because your business is spending more than it is earning.
If this goes on, your growth graph will eventually fall. You can put inbound marketing strategies in use to increase LTV and reduce CAC.
6. Not Attaining Rapid Growth
If you are launching something new and innovative in the SaaS market, you can get some free publicity for the first few weeks.
You may remain in the spotlight for some time but with time, this free promotion will dry out. Soon another SaaS fresher will come to the market and start getting free attention. This is the reality and most SaaS businesses have to deal with it.
There are still many ways that can be used to get promotions and market share. Referrals are one of the most productive ways of advertising your brand.
You can ask your existing customers to refer your solution to someone and in turn, give them a gift. That gift can be anything, be it a coupon, gift voucher, or discount on your next service.
7. Not Focusing on Supporting Features
A multitude of SaaS startup teams are too focused on their product’s core features. They mostly introduce their SaaS product by highlighting the fundamental features only. This is good but ignoring other supporting features is not good.
If you are planning for a long race, you need to keep your customers satisfied, which cannot be done just with core features. The supporting systems, such as billing, onboarding, customer support, etc., are equally important.
8. Saving Resources
Along with making money, you also need to be a master in keeping that money. Most of the SaaS companies do not start with a plan and then burn their resources by spending in an organized manner.
In the real picture, time and money both are finite. So you should keep a track of your expenses from the starting of your business.
9. Not Emphasizing On Customer Churn
For a successful business, you should keep a track of customer churn rate and customer acquisition rate. Your customer acquisition rate must be higher than the customer churn rate.
If it is not, you are rolling down from the mountain. Keeping churn in control has the utmost importance for reaching the success peak.
In this regard, we understand that some factors, such as changing priorities of customers, are uncontrollable. But some other factors, such as quality of the product, customer support, etc., can be worked upon.
10. Establishing Poor Management Team
A strong management team is the cornerstone of every SaaS business model. If your management team is often failing on strategy, then this is the time to roll up your sleeves and work on weak points.
Your development team must be putting their entire work and effort but for marketing & selling, strategies planned by your management team are going to be of use.
For the good health of your business, a good management team is crucial. It is well and good if your entire team is skilled and dedicated. After all, a good management team has the authority to hire good employees for the company.
Conclusion
Here you have finished the list of challenges that almost every SaaS business faces. Hurdles along the process may differ a bit for you.
Every business has its own set of challenges and not everyone is prepared for that every time. All you can do is find a solution for every emerging problem and become better with time, just like wine.
In case you run a B2B SaaS solution that helps online store owners to automate different business processes, then you know how challenging it is to develop a robust integration. Each eCommerce platform has its own logic and uniqueness, so you have to spend a lot of time and resources on the development. Luckily, there is a unified API provided by API2Cart that allows to integrate with more than 40 shopping platforms and marketplaces in one go.
You will be able to work with store data such as orders, products, customers, shipment, inventory levels, etc. Moreover, you have a 30 days trial period to test the service and see how it works.
If you have some questions about API2Cart and how it can help you to solve your business cases, feel free to contact us or schedule a call with our representative.
Author Name: Harikrishna Kundariya
Biography: Harikrishna Kundariya, a marketer, developer, IoT, ChatBot & Blockchain savvy, designer, co-founder, Director of eSparkBiz Technologies, A Mobile App Development Company. His 8+ experience enables him to provide digital solutions to new start-ups based on IoT and ChatBot.
