Tech is The Spice: The Code to Reshape SaaS Go-to-market Strategies

Summary: SaaS businesses are experiencing a rapid decline in the ‘magic number’. While a lot of businesses are randomly cutting down costs to balance their ROI for SaaS marketing, our VP Marketing has a different take on the situation. Read on as Sarrah Pitaliya explains how a holistic tech approach to SaaS GTM can pave the way for wider success.

If you’re in the Software as a Service business, the term ‘magic number’ isn’t new to you! Also, you are aware of how this magic number benchmarks your sales efficiency against the marketing spends. The median magic number isn’t just a metric for measuring your revenue but the overall growth of your business.

In the wider global market, private SaaS businesses are witnessing a grand decline in go-to-market efficiency since 2018. This is reflected in the way the net magic number has dropped from 0.7x to 0.3x. Imagine how negatively your annual recurring revenue is impacted because now you would be generating a value of $1 against a $3 of marketing and sales spend.

The crux is to understand a very complex but valid equation here! You might be making hundreds of dollars more in terms of revenue, and your growth even may show a solid 30-40%. However, when you quantify these numbers with your sales spend, you’ll realize you aren’t making it to the break even.

This brings us to the inevitable question of reinspecting the GTM strategy and design – understanding how we can leverage the power of technology to reshape the SaaS Go-To-Market and eventually become a durable-growth business.

As a SaaS business owner, you must realize that your GTM is intrinsically linked to customer-centricity. Therefore, to build a successful GTM strategy, you must never look at it as a conceptual exercise. Coupled with tech expertise and prowess, you can find the crux to push for sustainable growth.

Understanding How GTM for SaaS Businesses Is a Niche

Before you reconsider your go-to-market strategy, I want you to reiterate some learnings with me. As a B2B SaaS business, redefining your GTM can have astounding effects on your revenue and growth at large.

Target Businesses and Not Consumers:

Customer behavior study is a crucial aspect of any business. However, as a SaaS business, your target customer is another business and not the end consumer. Since the decision makers are different, so will the purchase behavior. Your sales teams must pinpoint the right stakeholders to enable positive purchase decisions.

Company Size Makes an Impact:

Your GTM should be majorly focused on the size and market value of your target companies – from startups to SMBs, mid-sized ventures to megacorps. To meet their unique requirement, you’ll need to study the challenges of each segment carefully.

SaaS Products Are Intangible:

The software as a service industry thrives on building business values for clients. The iterative nature of technology is to evolve with time, so SaaS products too need to consistently iterate and evolve to meet the demands of the market. More than anything, a SaaS business needs to harp on product messaging to its clients with SaaS dashboards and reporting. Only a streamlined SaaS reporting and analytics feature will effectively comprehend to your target businesses the right insights to transform their operations.

Affiliate Marketing for Foundational Product Strategy:

Affiliate partnerships are crucial to SaaS success. Your product strategy should align well with your GTM in explaining how your evolving SaaS solution is consistent in meeting market demands. Through SaaS affiliate marketing, you must explore and explain how your iterative solution is adding value to existing and probable customers. You need to consider collaborative opportunities to widen the reach and impact of your SaaS solution.

Now, let’s come to the part where emerging technology can help you reimagine your go-to-market strategy and lead you toward durable growth.

How Technology Can Reshape Your Go-To-Market and Lead You Beyond Break Even

Technology is constantly evolving to meet the changing demands of the market. As the owner of a SaaS business, you can leverage the true power of emerging technology to dramatically improve your capabilities, multiply your offerings, bring in more business value for your clients, help improve their decision-making through actionable insights, and streamline their operations with SaaS automation.

Build Personalized Experiences with Data:

It is a no-brainer that every modern business thrives on customer behavior study. You cannot build efficiency by randomly cutting costs, the drill is to make balanced spending. As a SaaS business owner, leveraging predictive analysis, big data, and machine learning can prove to be crucial in understanding customer preferences and pain points.

Extensive data analysis will enable you to launch targeted product messaging, customize product recommendations, and drive customer interactions in the direction that drives favorable purchase decisions.

Adopt Product-led Growth:

As a new-age business, you do realize the importance of driving personalized brand journeys for your clients. Focus your entire product and marketing strategy on delivering the best experiences to your clients.

This model thrives on prioritizing value over features and operating on a constant feedback loop. To drive wider user adoption and expansion of your market, streamline your in-app experiences with advanced technologies, freemium models, and self-service sign-ups.

Iterative and Agile Approach:

For an advanced SaaS business, an agile model is indispensable for growth as it enables you to iterate quickly, respond to the constantly evolving market better and design effective GTM strategies.

With continuous deployment, A/B testing, and rapid feature releases, an agile approach helps you stay at the top of your game with relevant upgrades.

SaaS AI Automation:

If you have been shying away from automation, this is time you deep-dive into it. The constantly evolving SaaS demands call for dehumanizing routine tasks like lead scoring, sales process, and even generic client interactions through chatbots. With SaaS automation, your sales and marketing teams can now focus more on strategizing while your regular operations are managed and monitored by artificial intelligence.

Leverage Niche Targeting:

As a SaaS business, you must capitalize on your niche to deliver better customer-fit solutions. Verticalization is crucial to your success as it enables you to study customer behaviors better and deliver tailored experiences to your clients.

Adopt Partner Ecosystems and Community-driven Growth:

You must remember, your innovation won’t be limited to your business. To create a bigger impact with your SaaS solution, you must find ways to extend its benefits to the community at large.

On one hand, you must build collaborative relationships with complimentary SaaS businesses, pile in relevant integrations, and capitalize on marketplace partnerships to widen your reach and promote cross-selling.

While on the other hand, you must attempt to build a community around your service, leverage inbound marketing communities and knowledge exchange forums, and promote user group communication to leverage the age-old method, of word-of-mouth marketing.

Your TakeawayEmbracing emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and predictive analytics can provide a competitive edge in identifying market trends and optimizing strategies.A well-crafted go-to-market strategy is a compass that guides a SaaS product toward success. Through understanding the market, defining value propositions, and implementing effective tactics, companies can introduce their products and foster enduring customer relationships.The landscape for the SaaS industry is evolving as you read this piece. Your go-to-market strategy is the bitter-sweet pill that can either break your business or make you future-ready with the capability to adopt new challenges and opportunities. With a holistic view of revenue and growth powered by personalization and data-driven decision-making, your approach toward customer success becomes both attainable and sustainable.Every SaaS business owner must consider benchmarking as the starting point and iterate as per market demands. Investing in technologies like predictive analysis and artificial intelligence can transform your business into a scalable one and take you closer to the competitive edge.Since 2021, the SaaS market has been experiencing a free-money environment due to a huge proliferation of capital. Where more and more businesses have been focused on investment before growth, their approach and accountability towards GTM have considerably dwindled. This is why I insist you focus on RevOps and parallelly adopt a broader and holistic approach towards SaaS marketing – needless to say, technology is an unavoidable fabric of this game plan.