As most experienced entrepreneurs and business magnates would appreciate SaaS benchmarks offer one of the best ways of appraising viable startup strategies. While also giving you the opportunity to make comparisons with similar companies (both in size and operations) in your given niche. This can go a long way in offering you the prerequisite data and statistics to determine whether your startup strategy is practical. And also enable you to take effective steps to adjust or optimize it for enhanced realization of your given business goals. Before delving deep into the features and distinct working of SaaS benchmarking. It can be a good idea to lay an appropriate foundation on just what SaaS is and what benefits it can offer to your startup.
For those who might perhaps not be in the know, SaaS stands for Software As A Service and happens to be one of the best application performance management (APM) tool currently in the market. Despite experiencing a somewhat sluggish reception in its earlier days, this tool has over the recent 5 years rapidly become the APM of choice for quite a lot of firms. Most especially those that have embraced cloud computing.
SaaS Benchmarks
As would be expected SaaS and in extension its benchmarking services offers a horde of benefits to companies that integrate them into their day to day operations.
It could take a lot of time to effectively elaborate on all of them, but some of the most prominent include:
Remarkably quick deployment
Unlike most other similar applications and solutions, SaaS is widely acclaimed for its lightning quick deployment attributes. All it takes is for you to sign up for these services. If you are not sure about its effectiveness or suitability for your firm you can take a free trial to appraise whether it is practical for your business. This can be accomplished in just a matter of minutes, with no strings attached.
Highly decreased costs of licensing and maintenance
SaaS usage licensing is based on subscription, and you can at any time withdraw your subscription if you feel it is not ideal for your firm. This offers a high level of flexibility unlike most other similar solutions that require hefty licenses for you to fully utilize them. Besides this, the cost of managing and supporting your SaaS APM infrastructure (which enables you to monitor its applications) is included in the annual subscription fee. Additionally, unlike other traditional solutions you will never be necessitated to spend any money on acquiring hardware to run your APM servers.
Unmatched ease of use
SaaS is also noted for its unmatched simplicity and ease of use. You don’t have to take any special training, apart from general orientation to effectively utilize it. Its user interfaces offer a heightened level of interaction that even an all out novice can efficiently use them.
Ease of migration
Naturally, SaaS applications are subject to updates, and unlike most other alternatives, you will not be necessitated to enlist the services of a skilled technician to make any migrations to a newer version. The vendor that handles your servers is ultimately responsible for any migrations to the latest software and additional features. All you will have to do is login and your APM will be automatically moved to whatever updated version you wish to move to.
Scalability
As most of SaaS applications are cloud based, many of its providers (especially those that deal with enterprise systems) effectively handle thousands of applications on many servers.
Coming back to SaaS benchmarks, if you might be thinking of launching a startup, you may already have several metrics that intend to use to gauge the progress of your new firm. If you haven’t there is no need to fret. SaaS benchmarking offers accurate data representation of the key metrics firms on SaaS in your given niche utilize. From this information you can effectively evaluate your own metrics as compared to both established companies and those that might be new to the game.
This can be invaluable in enabling you to make adjustments to your strategy to optimize your sales, marketing, production and any other aspect of your startup. The following are some of the most important SaaS benchmarking metrics that you can access within these services.
Revenue growth rates
These services proffer in-depth and accurate statistics of the growth rates of the major players in your given industry, SMBs and even new firms and also offers median estimates. From such data you can effortlessly pinpoint the metrics you need to tweak to take your startup to next level.
Effective sales strategies
As a new business entity you might not have figured out the ideal sales strategies to heighten your revenue generation. SaaS benchmarking services can elaborate on all sales tactics your competition utilizes and just how effective they might be. For instance, the recent survey by Pacific Crest for new and growing businesses, revealed that firms that are inside sales driven grow 40% quicker than those that utilize field sales and online sales. This represents around 37% annual growth.
Product pricing
Pricing products in most cases than not is often a major challenge for new firms. However, by appraising how your competition on the SaaS platform do it, you can be on the high road to offer to your clients unbeatable rates. Which can significantly increase the sizes of your customer contracts.
Other key metrics you could access through these services are the cost of customer acquisition, cost of upsells and renewals among plenty of others.
Conclusion
With such pertinent data you can effortlessly model your startup using tried and tested strategies while also setting realistic goals for your firm’s operations. This information can also be handy in making informed decisions on the various aspects of your company. Above all you will be in an excellent position to outline your startup’s goals to a third party, be it an investor, customer or even an employment recruit. It is thus self evident how SaaS benchmarks can be highly invaluable in setting you on the right course into realizing your startup’s aspirations.
