Phase 4: Launch / Go-To-Market
The final step in your journey involves the launch of your SaaS offering. This is an area where a well-defined go-to-market (GTM) strategy is necessary. Every plan to bring a new software to market requires an understanding of customer personas (buyers and users), a sales strategy, and a marketing plan to land new customers. However, a SaaS GTM strategy does not end with new customer acquisition; it must span the entire customer lifecycle, including stages of retention and growth.
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Factoring in your Company Profiles
The nature of your market, domain, and product will influence your GTM approach. For some companies, this is about reaching out to an already-established market and bringing visibility/access to their new offering. For others, this is about reaching entirely new markets. No matter where you are at on this spectrum, you still need to devote time to thinking about how you will roll out your SaaS solution. This section outlines some examples of company dynamics, using hypothetical SaaS business archetypes:
ToeDipper Software: This company type is dabbling in SaaS, and dependent on the revenue and profit generated by its legacy software. They have the benefit of a captive audience, and understand from direct experience how to market and sell to them. To bring SaaS to-market, they must align internally, and make a firm decision about how and when they will communicate the initiative to customers. Is SaaS the future of the business, or is it just another option in the product portfolio? They need to ingest voice-of-customer feedback to prioritize an appropriate sense of urgency; a dynamic customer advisory board (CAB) with diverse, rotating members can deliver useful perspective. In this scenario, it is especially important to align the GTM plan with the priorities of investors. It is common for investors in such businesses to prioritize milking the cow, taking profits from the legacy operation, as opposed to investing in real transformation. If investors are hesitant to fund true SaaS transformation, ToeDipper can create a GTM plan to attach new, vertically-relevant SaaS solutions to their legacy product portfolio. SaaS can be leveraged to reach new buyer profiles (e.g. early adopters) within the existing customer base, as well as net new customers. ToeDipper should assign Sales representatives who are passionate about innovation to the SaaS offer, shine light on their success internally, and compensate them for landing customers who reach product adoption milestones.
SurvivorTech: For this company type, the use case is clear: customers want a more-compelling value proposition, and niche, verticalized competitors are rapidly-eroding market share. SurvivorTech profile has some advantages relative to their nascent competition. They know their customer base, with direct experience selling to them over a long period of time. They know how to market to these customers, and can leverage these legacy relationships and contracts to buy time, while moving quickly to deploy SaaS solutions. Before announcing the new SaaS launch to existing customers, SurvivorTech must align internally to establish new sales motions and compensation incentives. In addition to the customer-facing company changes, transformation to SaaS will also require change to back-office processes (e.g. billing, revenue recognition, entitlement management). Internal alignment requires an executive mandate and a top-down goal associated with SaaS transformation. Awareness of the economic investments and time horizons required for transformation is also important. Going-to-market with a land and expand sell motion in tandem with an agile product/service design and frequent release model can help these companies succeed.
UnicornExpress.com: For greenfield SaaS companies, an effective GTM plan is dependent on successful product adoption by new customers. Customer acquisition is the top priority, followed by retention and expansion-selling initiatives to fuel progressive growth and prolong the customer lifetime. Cloud-native companies typically spend far more than traditional technology firms on sales and marketing (including acquisition, retention and renewal motions). These companies often use one-to-many marketing initiatives to populate their funnel, in tandem with product-led growth strategies. In-product communication and knowledge management tools are important levers for UnicornExpress.com, and will reduce the need for high-touch human support. Efficient demand generation and lead management models are key, to ensure that Sales representatives are focused on closing highly-qualified opportunities. These companies are often content to operate at a loss for several years, in order to acquire new customers.
New Horizons Software: This company type is better positioned than ToeDipper Software to bring SaaS to market in a timely manner, as it is less-encumbered by investor reticence. This company is willing to invest in launching SaaS for new market segments, to create incremental, recurring revenue streams. They must work backwards from the prospective customer to understand their new audience, over-indexing in market segmentation analysis and persona development, to build a successful GTM plan. New Horizons must learn a great deal about the buyer and user experience during the MVS phase, and incorporate these lessons into the GTM strategy for GA launch. Using mechanisms such as customer journey mapping will help New Horizons find company skill gaps and new support requirements for the SaaS offering. They should closely evaluate opportunities to leverage channel partners in the sales cycle, to benefit from their incremental reach and niche subject matter expertise.
