672888521-COMPLETE-SAAS-PRESENTATION.pptx

it is more about SaaS

1. SAAS PRESENTATION UNDERSTANDING THE SAAS BUSINESS MODEL

2. TABLE OF CONTENTS DEFINITION OPERATIONS/SET-UP SOLUTIONS PROVIDED BY SAAS DRIVERS OF SUCCESS MATURITY STAGES OF SAAS CHALLENGES

3. 1. DEFINITION Software as a service (SAAS) is business model, used to describe businesses that leverage cloud technology to provide application software, that clients can link their devices to for a subscription fee. In SAAS business model, the product isn’t necessarily the application on offer, but rather the service/assistance/experience that will be derived from the use of the application by the client.

4. 2. HOW IT OPERATES In an era that is fast paced and more intense than ever before, the cloud enables agility and responsiveness driving new business models. Cloud computing enables businesses of all sizes to get projects started quickly and deliver products and services to the market faster than many competitors, as is the case with WILDGRASS. This business model operates by securing a number of users to interact with the application, in the digital workplace. Interactions are simply the actions your users take in those SaaS apps; they’re the processes users perform, the people they interact with, as well as the data they interact with. User interactions lead to an ever-growing data sprawl, which in turn increases risks of human error and negligence . This is where SAASOps comes in.

5. Software as a Service Operations (SAASOps) This is an IT practice referring to how SAAS applications are managed and secured through centralized and automated operations, resulting in reduced friction, improved collaboration, and better employee experience. SAASOps has three essential pillars and these are; People and processes SAAS Management SAAS Security

6. People and processes Involves the following; Team structure Team skills End user training End user support Change management

7. SAAS Management It consists of the following; User Lifecycle Management Visibility and Audibility Application configuration Least privilege access Spend Management

8. SAAS Security It is made up of the following; Identity and Access (IDAAS) Insider Threat File Security Incident Response Regulatory Compliance

9. 3. SOLUTIONS PROVIDED BY SAAS As mentioned earlier, the value of SAAS business isn’t in the product/service they provide, which in this case is the application, but rather it is found in the service it provides to the clients. In other words, it is found in the solutions they provide to their clients challenges in their business. Therefore SAAS provides solutions to businesses in the following areas; Selling more effectively Marketing with Intelligence Delivering exceptional customer experience Improved financial decisions

10. Selling more effectively Give members of your sales team access to every morsel of information they need to succeed in the field, and make sure they can access SFA tools on any device. Also keep tabs on what they’re doing in the field. Closing the gap by starting with a reality based forecast that draws upon the most solid information. Then track the trends in real time, making changes if needed quickly. Gain credibility with accurate forecasting and planning. Move past gut decisions and use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to guide selling actions. Build a sales plan that your team can take out and pursue for a big win. Set the right goals and incentives, and use cloud-based intelligence for territory management . Predicting your customers’ behavior, by Performing white-space analysis and determine the most likely opportunities for cross-selling and upselling. Spend the most time on the most high-probability deals. Use predictive analytics to provide insights that help you identify the next likely purchase a customer will make, based on what similar customers have purchased in previous encounters.

11. Marketing with Intelligence Create data-driven customer experiences that are tailored to every visitor and viewer yet are unified across the various channels. Capture and display the online behavior and social interactions of customers and prospects. Ensure that your content strategy speaks directly to the target, across the sales process . Track how each campaign and program contributes to revenue, and do so with enough speed and nimbleness that you can adjust course as needed. Measure the impact of specific content at each point in the sales funnel, and analyze the “digital body language” of each customer and prospect . Take smart action to optimize top-line growth by identifying revenue drivers and monitoring performance . Connecting marketing and sales by ensuring that the sales and marketing teams are on the same page and a single platform, so that everyone’s on board with the same goals, strategies, and metrics. Do a more effective job of identifying, engaging, and qualifying potential buyers before passing them along to sales as leads. Provide your sales professionals with visibility into customer interactions with marketing campaigns and extend marketing-approved content directly to your sales professionals.

12. Delivering exceptional customer experience Free up your call center representatives for the tougher calls with self-service sites that offer guided answers. Supplement that with online chat, click-to-call, co-browsing, and virtual assistance. Make it all happen regardless of the device the customer is using . Keep an ear to the ground by monitoring social media channels for service-related comments and potential issues, so that you can respond and engage customers proactively . Underpin all service channels with a single knowledge base, so it’s easy for customers and agents to find the right information that’s consistent and accurate. Make it easy for agents to author and publish to the knowledge base so it becomes a living, growing repository that is constantly updated . View service as the nursery for establishing and building customer advocacy. An exceptional and personalized service experience, delivered through preferred channels, can have more impact than anything else on getting customers to recommend your company and refer others in your direction.

13. Improved financial decisions When compared to on-premises systems, cloud solutions consistently deliver a lower TCO with a greater ROI . Older on-premises systems are usually tied to major Capital expenditure outlays. With cloud applications, these costs can be shifted to Operating expenditure, which preserves more costly capital for critical business needs. Don’t fear disruptive change; embrace it and turn it into an asset. Replace traditional finance tools — especially problematic spreadsheets and costly third-party reporting tools — with cloud solutions that enable more nimble responses to change . Stop spending endless hours preparing financial reports. Use self-service embedded reporting capabilities driven by real-time enterprise data tied to a common schema. The benefit: more opportunity to analyze your numbers using analytics, metrics, and key performance indicators (KPIs) prebuilt across cloud applications . Use cloud applications to partner across the business and drive data-based decisions with real-time information.

14. 4. DRIVERS OF SAAS SUCCESS It goes without saying, that the first and foremost driver of success for any SAAS business, is whether their exist and/or there is potential market for the service on offer. In short is the service on offer useful, this will determine whether the business is viable or not. Next up, is the quality of the product/ application. How effective is it, as that will help differentiate it from other software that may offer similar services, this is an added advantage especially in a time such as this, where customers have an abundance of options to choose from. And finally the most important driver, and one we will specifically focus on in detail, is customer success. It is an after sales service, that ensures that customer have the best experience using our applications, in-order to keep them using the software.

15. Customer Success Customer success is a system, run by people whose only goal is to help customers get the best out of your product. It happens straight after a sale is processed. To define customer success, you have to know what success looks like for your customers. The definition will be different for each customer , and the method of achieving it will be different for every company . The first thing about customer success you have to know is that it’s not customer support: it’s a way of proactively working with your customer. If your customers aren’t constantly getting value from what they’re paying you, you can understand from a business perspective that they will stop paying . An effective customer success strategy touches every aspect of the customer experience and affects the operations and culture of each function in your company. Customer success is not the result of a single mandate; it is the culmination of hundreds of small changes, all moving you toward a common goal.

16. Continuation The goal should be to create A predictable customer experience where each customer is setup and supplied with the necessary assistance to achieve his or her goals around adopting/using your product or service . The “formula” for customer success varies depending on your company’s maturity, resources, product , and customer life cycle, but the framework for developing your strategy is always the same: Assess your situation Build your plan Implement your plan Customer success is a mindset before it’s a department. It takes an analytical approach towards retaining existing users and draws on great communicative skills to forge long-lasting relationships with customers. It’s part client onboarding.

17. Benefits of customer success If carried out properly, customer success has the potential to lead to the following benefits; Customer Retention Expansion Operational improvement Customer Acquisition Revenue Growth

18. 5. MATURITY STAGES OF SAAS For the purposes of this guide, we will refer to the customer experience maturity framework developed by Jackie Golden, Senior Vice President of Customer Success at Socrata and Open View Senior Advisor on Customer Success, which includes the following; Maturity level 1: ADHOC Maturity level 2: AWARE Maturity level 3: REPEATABLE Maturity level 4: PREDICTABLE Maturity level 5: ACTIVATING ADVOCATES

19. Maturity level 1: ADHOC The customer experience is unpredictable with very little structure to guide the customer. As a result, each customer experience is unique and cannot be replicated . Reactivity is the name of the game . There is no formal prioritization process , so issues are handled as they come-up and everything is treated as a priority . Omer Gotlieb , Co-founder and Chief Customer Officer at Totango , describes this stage as the “CPR” stage during which you don’t really know why anything happens and you’re just trying to stay alive .

20. Maturity level 2: AWARE Y ou’re beginning to identify what’s working and what’s not. Some basic processes have been put in place, and priorities have been established . This stage is about getting to the “why” – delving into statistical methods and models to better understand root causes of churn, trial conversion , purchase, etc., and uncovering the customer success KPIs and benchmarks that will help identify operational opportunities to improve the customer experience. You may have an initial customer success team in place, but it is focused almost entirely on triage efforts.

21. Maturity level 3: REPEATABLE This is the point at which you really begin to get a handle on defining and managing your customer experience . You have defined your customer’s lifecycle and established repeatable processes and metrics that align with that journey so that you can deliver a standardized customer experience . This stage marks the transition to a more proactive approach, or the application of “preventive medicine.” You are now able to develop engagement and action plans based on customer segments and their respective journeys and preemptively identify at-risk customers.

22. Maturity level 4: PREDICTABLE At this level of maturity, all the elements of your business are working together to deliver a predictable customer experience. Your people, processes, and technology are all focused on supporting and enabling customer success in an integrated and collaborative way. This is the point at which you transition from defense to offense . You are continually fine tuning your processes using data from churned and renewed customers to deliver the value and account expertise that help you proactively encourage full use of the product . At this level of maturity, York describes the organization as a “recurring revenue machine .” There are no more “what if ?” scenarios . Financial and operational goals are linked using customer success metrics and predictive analytics.

23. Maturity level 5: ACTIVATING ADVOCATES The last level brings the power of the customer full circle and leverages them in your business’ go-to-market processes in a structured and repeatable manner . In a study on the efficacy of different channels in relation to the share of closed-won vs. closed-lost opportunities, Organ and his team compared the conversion rates of different types of leads and found that referrals are roughly four times more effective than other kinds of leads. Delivering a customer experience that inspires loyalty and advocacy will drive profitability via improved LTV, number of closed deals, and lower CAC, cost-to-serve , and churn rates . Organ cautions SaaS companies to understand the distinction between what it takes to maintain vs. what it takes to grow . “Minimizing weaknesses doesn’t delight , it appeases,” he explains, “If you want to earn advocacy, you need to be remarkable .”

24. 6. CHALLENGES Despite its promise SAAS business is anything but straight forward. In such a competitive market, it is inevitable that organizations both large and small will face challenges presented to their growth, overcoming them will determine the survival of the business. Here are a few of the common challenges that are faced by SAAS businesses. Not achieving fast enough growth Competition Establishing a market Recruiting the right people and equipping them adequately Prospects failing struggling to find value in your products Users seek features that your product does not have

25. Continuation 7. Resistance to change 8. Establishing feasible Models 9. Coasting 10. Lack of communication and support 11. High customer churn rate

26. Not achieving fast enough growth Once a product is launched it receives the free publicity that in needs to be in the spotlight for a while and take off, however this does not last long, and many businesses fail to take advantage of this opportunity. This is because an SAAS product needs to be dynamic enough to keep up with the rapid changes in consumer preferences, thus many SAAS start-ups struggle in the beginning as they simply cannot grow fast enough to keep that interest, beyond the stage when their product is no longer the flavor of the month. The solution to this problem, is to find creative ways of promoting your product in-order to achieve explosive growth.

27. Competition In such a lucrative market, that most SAAS businesses operate it, it is inevitable that competition will exist. Especially given how relatively easy it is for a SAAS business to be set-up. This means that some entrepreneurs are going to have similar ideas to you and move at warp speed-faster, sometimes, than you, therefore it goes without saying that an SAAS business must not be stagnant but constantly evolving, as other similar brands are always available, and switching costs for customers are relatively low. The solution to this problem, is to use competition as a driving force for your team, in-order to keep on making innovating improvements to your product.

28. Establishing a new market SAAS companies usually do not have a pre-existing market. You often try coming up with solutions for problems that no one knew existed, or creating customized solutions for newly developed problems your clients may be facing. In such a scenario it is vital that you make your solutions attractive enough for your potential customers to adopt. However challenges arise, as a lot of times the problem you are addressing end up not belonging to the current market or are ones that no one is interested in tackling. The simple solution is to pick up the right market sentiment, by conducting intensive marketing surveys, get feedback on your basic solutions and build on it only after garnering a positive response.

29. Recruiting the right people and equipping them adequately In SAAS companies the core managerial team plays a very important role in devising strategies, reaching out to the target market and carrying out operations. The problem arises from a failure to put together a well-trained strong team. These faults within management will affect the overall working and efficiency of your company. And this will have a direct affect on sales. Hence, the recruitment of highly trained team is extremely important and it is vital that you equip them with a comprehensive training session before they begin communicating with prospects.

30. Prospects struggling to find value in your product The fierce competition between SAAS products vying for customer’s attention makes the assessment process difficult for prospective buyers. This is evidenced by a majority of business leaders, who have concerns about SAAS integration, as they feel it is too expensive, and the implementation issues are simply not worth the advantages it may provide. The point of any SAAS software is to help customers be more productive and make their work easier. If the operational gap between their on premise system and your SAAS software is too much, its easy to understand why they would struggle to find the unique value that you provide. To provide value to the customer, you will have to reinvent how you market your product and its salient features, this is after understanding the customer’s paint points, focus on them to see which ones your SAAS product can overcome differently, or have a better solution than what they are presently using.

31. Users seek features that your product does not have Due to the incredible amount of options of SAAS applications available at the fingertips of consumers, they are spoilt for choice, this may lead to them requesting features that your product does not have nor plans to include in the near future. This can present challenges in the process of trying to tailor your services to the demands of customers, as it may deviate from the initial projects that your firm has already in the pipelines.

32. Resistance to change Organizations may choose to oppose SAAS because they have legacy systems in place that they have used for a long time. In most cases, asking them to switch is requesting a lot. You may also face roadblocks of business continuity, as client organizations may fear damaging their relationships with existing vendors, and the need to adapt to new systems. However, the biggest cause to this resistance is that organizations that have invested effort and time in building their current systems won’t just let it go to waste. The solution to this challenge, is to offer a trial of your products to clients to see how your product can make their lives easier. With targeted marketing initiatives, it is likely that even the most conventional users of legacy systems will find the benefits in using a system that makes their work simpler, enhances security and lowers costs.

33. Establishing feasible methods When setting up a new SAAS business product, you could expect an instant clientele of early adopters but it is the further group that is difficult to convince and attract. You will notice that you have to invest a lot of time and money in setting up the further client base. Not all expenses may be justified and you realize that you can spend only up to a limit on acquiring customers. Only when the life time value of customers is higher than the customers is higher than the customer acquisition cost can you flourish. And for this to happen, you must have a feasible model in place.

34. Coasting Sometimes when an SAAS business has a booming start, the founders may think that they’ll be able to carry along by coasting, and thus they pull back on effort, take a bit of revenue out of the company etc. This is dangerous, as the lack of effort from the business will reflect in the quality of the service they provide, and this will in turn lead to a high level of churn from the customers, and may also demotivate the top talent at the firm, which may lead to employee turnover. As we have earlier established, a lack of proper allocated expenditure will lead to the inevitable decline of the business, thus if money was to be constantly taken out of the business, accompanied by a drop in performance levels, then the only direction of the firm is downwards.

35. Lack of communication and support The grim reality of many businesses, irrespective of whether they realize it or not, is that they fare relatively poor when it comes to customer support. Failure to deliver support to customers can lead to lower levels of customer satisfaction, and consequently poor retention rates. Providing superior customer support is easier said than done for a sales team that has to juggle between converting hot leads, engaging paying customers, and meeting their respective quotas. Not to mention that prospects searching for a suitable SAAS solution are possibly evaluating your product against others as well. In these situations, equipping your sales team with a tool that lets them provide live support to prospects can help you avoid this altogether. This is because providing live support through the site’s landing page helps customers get instant solutions and answers to their issues during the evaluation phase. It also allows customers to evaluate your product quicker while you cement the impression of providing lightning-quick customer support in their minds.

36. High customer churn rate The cost of customer acquisition is high for SAAS company. You need to ensure that the customer turnover rate is lower than the customer acquisition rate, if not you are bound to fail. Along with constant growth, you also need to focus on keeping your existing customers. You can make use of your existing customers to get referrals and increase your client base. SAAS sales can be complicated and you may face many failures before you succeed. But having the right mix of good strategy for your business development, using digital tools and advertisements, reaching out to the right audiences and persistently following up with efficient communication will yield good traction and long term results.