General
- Secure executive sponsorship
- Assess company culture moving to a services orientation
- Assess required companies skills that need to be acquired
- Determine willingness to impact current company products
Product Definition
- Define market requirements
- Define your SAM — “Served Available Market”
- Determine Product/Market Fit
- Perform competitive analysis
- User Interface consistent with Consumerization trends
- Create “Customer Self Service” capabilities for customization and administration without need for external services
- Define APIs for user extension of the product
- Position product relative to other competitive offerings
- Iterate on product definition using customer feedback and statistics on actual product use
- Build products that fit into the larger open environment
- Avoid vendor lock-in
Product Development
- Assess SaaS skills
- HTML5/JavaScript development
- Ability to build multi-tenant, high performance, robust backends
- Development SaaS skills training
- Recruit key SaaS talent
- Assess re-use from existing code
- Integrate key SaaS enablers
- SaaS Provisioning, SaaS Billing, SaaS Monitoring, SaaS auditing
- Ensure applicable compliance standards are met (SOX, HIPAA, FINRA, data locality)
- Ensure security and privacy requirements are met
- Build upgrade strategy (online or minimal downtime)
- Build in fault tolerance and recovery
- Build customization capabilities (with a single shared code base with multiple tenants, customization must be dynamic)
- Enable shared schemas for multiple tenants with no lengthy schema modifications possible at upgrades
- Build site use monitoring tools to determine:
- Which system features are most/least used
- Activity level by functions by customer
- Build APIs for customer use
- Provide integration APIs for 3rd party integration
Sales & Marketing
- Build your SaaS benefits pitch
- Shift your marketing focus from “push” to “pull”
- Build your discoverable online presence
- Blogs
- White papers
- User forums
- Comprehensive web site
- User and community reviews
- Social Media
- Remove barriers to SaaS purchases
- Easily usable and accessible product
- Offer free versions and free trials — make trying your product easy
- Structure offering to remove sales complexity
- Minimize IT approval requirements
- Minimize corporate approvals possible
- Offer a low entry price offering
- Perfect your “land and expand” strategy
- Do not expand sales expenses until your strategy is proven by actual sales
- Creatre a set of key sales and customer success metrics:
- Customer Acquisition Costs as a percent of Lifetime Customer Value
- Customer Acquisition Costs as a percent of Year One Contribution Margin (customer gross profit)
- Value of current contracts
- MRR (Monthly Reoccurring Revenue) from new customers
- MRR from installed base (expansion)
- TRuC (True Revenue under Contract)
- Weighted Attrition (lost MRR as a percent of total MRR)
- Gross Attrition (lost customers as a percent of total customers)
- Pipeline
- Sales cycle time
- Create customer SLAs (Service Level Agreements)
- Build sales comp plan
- Plan for existing channel transition to SaaS
- Build reseller recruitment plan
- Plan for new channel partners to sell and support your product
- Create channel revenue share model
SaaS Services
- Create Services plans for:
- Onboarding
- Configuration
- Customization
- Build third part integration capabilities
- Build standard integrations with most popular third party software
- Acquire capabilities to use third party integration tools such as Dell’s Boomi, and IBM’s Cast Iron
- Build an “app store” for off the shelf integrations
- Create training material and courses
- Create services offerings for VARs and System Implementation partners
- Train services personnel on SaaS offerings
- Create additional services that add business value
Finance
- Build your SaaS business model
- Driven by crucial KPIs
- Forecast revenue growth
- Cost of Customer Acquisition
- Attrition
- Determine your cost of SaaS operations/Gross Profit — drive to 10% of MRR
- Project the cash flow and the sensitive to KPIs and growth
- Determine Working Capital requirements
- Develop your fund raising plan
- Develop your exit plan
