One of the Greatest Advantages of SaaS is Flexibility
As a SaaS company, there is an incredibly valuable aspect to your platform that you absolutely need to be utilizing in your growth strategy: flexibility. This includes your marketing campaigns and tactics, your sales strategy and all that entails, and your customer support/success processes. The flexibility of SaaS should be one of your leading angles for winning new customers and for growing your business with existing customers.
Why? Because for decades, companies had virtually no options when it came to technology. You had Microsoft Office or Apple iWork. Now you have Box, Dropbox, G Guite, and many, many others. The same goes for virtually any other business function. CRMs, ERPs, data sharing tools, and others. There are dozens if not hundreds of options for businesses’ specific needs. That competition is increasing, too. In 2012, SaaS companies in one market segment had fewer than three competitors. By the end of 2017, it was nine. By now, it’s likely well into the teens — or even higher.
Now is the time to invest in communicating and leveraging the flexibility of SaaS as it pertains to your product. The demand for what you have to offer is higher, but so is the competition. To remain competitive, retain your customers, and continue your growth trajectory, it’s critical that you maximize the flexibility of your SaaS platform, how people hear about that flexibility, and how they experience it.
Flexibility Isn’t Just a Benefit — It’s a Competitive Necessity
Companies today face ever-growing shifts. Take manufacturing, for example. The pressure on manufacturers to adopt better technologies for both internal efficiency and productivity as well as field service is tremendous. Thus, they are undergoing rapid change. And while you may be able to provide a solution to a specific problem through your platform, there’s no guarantee that a competitor won’t take your place one year from now.
Your company and your product must remain flexible enough to adapt to your target audience’s specific needs. A SaaS platform that evaluates production lines for analytics is great, but what happens when a competitor that can do the same thing comes along with the ability to analyze that data against worker performance as well? The results manufacturers could achieve by comparing both the productivity of their machines as well as their workers would be significant. And that means your platform will no longer be needed.
The Flexibility of SaaS Also Supports Changing Workforces
The Millennial generation is now the largest actively working generation. How does this tie into SaaS? Well, in addition to having the greatest familiarity with technology (apart from perhaps Generation Z, the oldest of which are just now entering the post-college workforce), Millennials also have a greater interest in roles that offer flexibility in both schedule and location. This, combined with more industries utilizing remote and distributed workforces, means that your platform will be used in more locations, on more devices, and for different reasons.
Clearly, flexibility should be chief among the benefits of your SaaS platform. Building a solution that not only solves the operational and technological challenges that companies are facing but also supports the ways in which they work will be a strategic advantage. Most SaaS platforms are Cloud-based, allowing access from virtually any device. But how can your platform take that a step further? How can you support distributed workforces who might not always be on a desktop? Is a mobile solution needed? How does data pass between users and systems located in different areas and in different timezones?
Just as important: how are you sharing this capability of your platform? Are you leveraging your onboarding communications to remind users of your platform’s flexibility? Are you emphasizing it through your new customer acquisition marketing? Are you marketing the flexibility of your SaaS platform at all — or just its features?
Get Working Capital to Leverage the Flexibility of SaaS
At River SaaS Capital, our equity line of funding was designed specifically to help SaaS companies take their platforms to the next level. From building out your platform for the next phase of its capability to strengthening your operations, our equity funding provides the working capital you need to achieve your goals.
This is often a follow-on or supplement to our debt financing, an incredibly flexible solution intended for the acceleration of marketing and sales efforts. So while you’re enhancing your platform to better compete in the market, you can build up your customer base through targeted marketing efforts and increased sales capacity.
If you’re ready to learn more about our financing solutions, how they can help you leverage the flexibility of SaaS, and how we can help you grow like never before, fill out the form below. If you’re ready to put our funding solutions to work, apply online quickly and easily here.
