Leveraging business automation to boost SaaS growth is a dreamland for most business owners. Building custom software for small businesses paves the way for better operations.
Business automation is the blooming space that can transform your SaaS product and make your business vibrant.
Automation in SaaS or any cloud-based company is a match made in heaven that triumphs over all the power combinations out there.
However, the real question here is how should you leverage its benefits strategically to get your SaaS business to a hyper-growth matrix.
Despite the fact that automation and SaaS are the most powerful combinations, many businesses fail to leverage them as effectively as they could.
This is one of the secret gravel that hinders them from reaching their peak efficiency. When your business is not automated, there is a lot of time and effort that is being spent on operations and the growth is less rapid.
What’s even worse is when you miss out on clients and the flipside to an already rocky start is that you also lose opportunities to sell!
Before diving deeper into this, you need to ask these important questions such as whether your business is ready to manage the growth. Imagine if your product got an unexpected celebrity endorsement, is your app ready to respond to unexpected traffic spikes?
Remember what happened to Zoom at the beginning of the pandemic?
Before we get into the tactics, you must mentally prepare yourself by acknowledging the fact that to grow your SaaS business, you have got to expand your customer base.
And to answer your follow-up question, yes, it involves automation change in all of the processes and it is definitely more than making coding changes.
If you are a few of the smart ones who are aware of the disadvantages of the misalignment between automation and SaaS business, then you are in the right place.
To ensure that your organization is in the position to take a flight, here are a few ways through which you could bring exceptional value to your business.
Business Automation Boosts SaaS Growth
The global SaaS market is growing. A Cision PR Newswire report estimates that this market will grow from $158.2 billion in 2020 to $307.3 billion by 2026.
Gartner reports that the amount spent on cloud services will reach $396 billion in 2021—and also grow to about 21.7% by reaching $482 billion in 2022.
In today’s world, there is no successful business that prospers without automation! Thus, by leveraging the right tools, you can hone your business processes to a great extent!
This helps in streamlining operations, reducing costs, improving customer acquisition, and customer satisfaction.
Processes and principles have made extensive progress encompassing an entire lifecycle of product development and operation that improves your software!
However, it is important to note that this is a highly competitive industry! Once you launch your SaaS product, you will have to look out for customer churn. In this industry, the SaaS churn rate is more than what one could expect!
Customers will bounce off if they cannot provide you with great value or user experience. Improving customer lifetime value will help in retaining your users and promote healthier growth for your SaaS company.
An industry as fierce and progressive as SaaS has a versatile range of buyers who may as well be experts in the same industry who might want to avail your services to expand their own footprint.
You will always encounter buyers and investors who are interested in either breaking into a new field or turning into profits.
Attracting these expert prospects are mostly these buyers and therefore, the key to successful conversion of these buyers is simplicity in your operations.
Core services provided by SaaS vendors essentially focus on business automation since they provide their services to empower and equip their clients with core competencies that they might otherwise lack!
What all processes should you automate?
As a runner-up in the industry, your buyer should be able to get ahead and tail of your business. The more you are able to automate your work processes, the easier you will be able to onboard a new owner.
Here is a list of things you must automate:
Billing and invoicing: Your software must be automatically notifying all of your customers about failed transactions and server issues while also regularly verifying payment information for any invalid or expired entries. This is a must-do! You cannot expect your customers to come back and enquire about this.
Account retrieval: Resetting a lost password should be enabled at a moment’s peace. If your customers have to go through the misfortune of contacting tech support to regain access to their account, then you are bound to make some very angsty customers! This should be entirely handled by automation.
Logging Activities: Running a SaaS business means that you will be often required to keep logs of certain activities or actions. Automating this process helps in having your reports filed error-free rather than relying on manual fill-ups.
General maintenance: Automating server-side tasks makes it easier for you to secure your backups and ensure the best database management. The more your business runs without any interventions and interruptions, the better your customer’s experience.
Human Resources (HR) Automation
HR professionals in the modern world use BPA to automate various other HR essentials and management processes such as:
- Scheduling interviews
- Sending employment offers to selected candidates
- Employee onboarding
- Approvals of employee leave requests
- Administration of employee benefits
Delivering better customer support: Retaining customers by turning them into loyal advocates, your customer support chatbots must work 24 x 7. They help in answering the queries or doubts that your customers might have regarding any issues they are facing in a very conducive and straightforward manner. Be a great representative of your brand by focusing more on complex questions and issues of your customers.
Using Robotic Process Automation for Order Processing: Businesses should start using robotic order processing to improve operational efficiency by ensuring better scalability.
Offer a personalized touch based on your customers’ behavior: Artificial Intelligence (AI) can help you monitor various online behaviors of your customers that visit your website. AI and advanced analytics will help in providing you with real-time insights that are based on web analytics. This AI system can help in offering a personalized touch and various offers for your customers.
Automate your personalized email marketing: BPA can help you respond better to customers immediately so that your customers can fill up a contact form on your website. This helps in generating quicker responses and also enables automated follow-ups to make your email marketing efforts much more effective.
Gather data for future marketing campaigns: Social media is the reservoir of content and information that people put about themselves! Additionally, most of this information can be found on online polls, feedback forms, and surveys. BPA can help SaaS businesses to collect their data on a massive scale. Several businesses can use the best of analytics to gather real-time insights for future marketing campaigns.
Improved Awareness And Growth
The growth rate is the core metric that signifies the value of a SaaS business. As you well know, the growth rate is one of the core metrics involved in valuing a SaaS business. Consistent growth will likely be valued higher than the stagnating ones wherein business trends are regular!
To grow progressively, you will need awareness. For awareness, you will need effective marketing. The most effective marketing strategies can be achieved through automation.
Marketing automation reduces the overall marketing overhead which signifies a lower cost per customer acquisition.
The Steve job of marketing quotes that to effectively automate your marketing, you will first need to do some extensive groundwork! You will have to know your goals to understand how people engage with your software.
Finally, the most rewarding and crucial stage of marketing is to track your customers and kick-start a customer journey! Provide them value by nurturing them at each of the touchpoints of the sales funnel to get them converted.
Map out your metrics so that you can measure each stage of the customer’s journey accurately!
SaaS applications must pursue marketing automation tools with an eye for integration with your customer relationship management systems. This can further help to clearly delineate and help in segmenting your audience and understanding your audience.
Robotic process automation (RPA) is a subset of BPA that automates repetitive tasks and increases organizational efficiency.
This automation software and cloud computing can help you in automating email marketing that helps organizations save time by automating their batch processing, report generation file transfers, approval notifications, report distribution, etc.
Over to you!
The goal of automation is to reach maximum efficiency through easier and streamlined business processes so that the burden does not rely on you! A major appeal of any SaaS business is that it is both passive and predictable. No buyer would want to shoulder the cost of any gaps that are created by your exit!
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