Building a SaaS Business From An In-house Application

Embarking on the In-House App Commercialization Journey

Congratulations! You’ve built an amazing in-house application that your team LOVES. Everybody uses it and everybody is so happy that you’ve championed the build of this tool for your company. But you’re thinking bigger. Why stop at just your company when everyone in your entire industry could be using this system? 

All you need to do is be able to sell the thing, right? Just throw up a website and the world is your oyster! If you’ve gotten this far though, you’re smart enough to know that’s not the case. But you might not know exactly what needs to get done to make this happen. 

Taking a product to market is something that very few single people know how to do. There are many teams that have all the information and know all the steps, but it turns out that not many people have led those teams and really know every piece of the puzzle. Most of the time, you would need to have experience as an entrepreneur or intrapreneur running the process to know the pitfalls you’re about to face. 

Fortunately, I’ve been through this dozens of times, stepped in those holes for you, and am here to tell you how to avoid them.

How to Commercialize the App – Setting The Scene – A Real-World Example

I recently met with a client in manufacturing who wants to take their in-house enterprise B2B Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP) system to the world. We’ve been working with the COO for years now building the system along with their in-house team. 

Now, the product is at a point where it runs a 50 million dollar per year (and growing) factory. It’s saved the company millions of dollars per year and the team is excited to keep building more features.

After a week together discussing what additional features will be required for the application to be truly a standalone commercially viable system, we started the discussion about the process of taking it to market. The process of building an in-house system versus building a SaaS business are two very different things for many reasons.

I want to make sure to say that the client gave me permission to discuss their project in-depth, as long as no one can tell who they are from this article.

Is it worth it? Let me work it.

The first question to ask yourself is “Can I make any money doing this?” 

The formula is simple: how many companies like yours are out there that would buy this product and how many can you sell to in a timeframe which will equal profitability? This also helps dictate how much money you need to raise because you’re going to have some upfront and ongoing costs that need to be accounted for as you implement your product into those businesses. 

Profit Potential

To answer this question, you need to do some market research, probably by reaching out to your trade organization. You need to know your Total Addressable Market (TAM), your Serviceable Available Market (SAM), and your Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM). The TAM is a nice piece for investors to see and gives a good representation of the total market size and the movement of the market. If the market is growing and is of a reasonable size, you have a much better chance of getting investment in this. The SAM is the portion of the market you can potentially sell to, and the SOM is the market size that you can address and sell to. 

The SOM number is particularly important. 

In our example case, the factory could only distribute to 30 or 40 customers in the first year, and that would be pushing it hard. So even if everyone in the industry wanted the product, the company couldn’t obtain the customers without a substantial scale-up time for implementation or risk having failed implementations, their reputation could suffer, and they could face a major hurdle in getting the business going. Distribution can only go as fast as it can go and to go faster requires a lot of money.

Releasing Your Secret Weapon: To Share or Not to Share?

The second question to ask yourself is, is it worth it to distribute a tool that gives you a competitive advantage? This is often the first roadblock with senior stakeholders within the business. I’ve heard this a number of times “This system has made or saved us millions of dollars. Do we really want it in the hands of our competitors?”

From the perspective of the intrapreneur, it may not always seem like a relevant question because of course your competitors are eventually going to figure this stuff out, and maybe they have already. If you’re going to justify the distribution of the product you need to answer the question:

“What would change in my business if everyone had this tool?”

The other side is that you’ve likely been using this tool for a long time. The rest of the industry may have moved on and there may be great competitors out there that surpassed your in-house system a long time ago, but you don’t know because you’ve been using this system for years. 

And that brings me to the next point…

SaaS Validation: Ensuring Market Fit

You and the senior leaders of the company have all agreed that it’s ok if the rest of the market has this tool.

Now what?

Now it’s time to make sure that:

1. What you’ve built is useful to the rest of the market
2. Competitors don’t exist that are very difficult or impossible to dethrone
3. The market is large enough and will pay enough to make it worth launching a business around this tool.

Then you need to decide if you will need to raise capital or if the organization you’re a part of has enough money on the balance sheet to fund the business. 

Learning from Missed Opportunities

With the first SaaS I launched, I built a great tool that replicated a process that we used in-house at my agency. I was so proud of the system and I worked a very, very long time on it and spent a ton of money building it, only to find that no one else in the market did things the way we did things so selling this product without major changes was impossible. 

It was dead before it ever started, but I didn’t know because I didn’t do my homework. If only I had had this article then…

What should I have done?

Trade shows. The easiest way to become knowledgeable about the top players in the industry and to ask around about what you’re thinking about doing is to go to one of the big trade shows for your industry and see what everyone is using, how they are doing things, and ask tons of questions. It’s always at least a bit costly to go, but it’s way less expensive than spending hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars building something that never gets sold, losing face at the business and with your investors, and potentially even losing your job over it if you’re an intrapreneur. 

Here’s how to do it: Go to the big yearly tradeshow as an attendee, not as an exhibitor. Get the attendee list ahead of time if you can and find all the people that match the role that would be the buyer of the software you want to provide and invite each one independently to a quick meeting. In the meeting, you’ll just show them the most important or most impactful functionality of the software and ask what they think. You’ll also ask what their top problems are around the issues you’re solving and how they are managing those issues now. 

Next, you’ll walk around to all the vendors providing software solutions that are anywhere close to yours and see if they have similar functionality as you’re providing. Then, ask them if they have any plans to provide this kind of functionality. This is important because it will tell you if someone who already has a foothold in the market is occupying or moving into your space. As an attendee from a business that could be a customer of theirs, they will pretty much tell you whatever you want. 

You Have Friends In Low Places, Right?

Well, maybe or maybe not. But more than likely, you have at least some contacts in your industry that share some of your job duties. Give them a call, take them out to lunch, tell them you want to ‘catch up’; whatever you need to do to get them on a video call to ask for their recommendations about what you’re considering spending tons of time and money on. 

Competitors and Google

Now that you’ve got some of the competitors lined up, use Google to search for ‘alternatives to [name of competitor] and you can find other similar companies. Hopefully, you already got your taste of software demos at the tradeshow you attended, but if not, now it’s time to ask for demos of competitors’ software.

When you do this, make sure you do a feature comparison document that describes the features of the major competitors against your solution. 

Distribution Strategy

It may seem odd to think about distribution so early in the game, but this is potentially one of the most important things you can do. You need to know, not think but KNOW, that when you finish developing the product you have a rock-solid distribution system that WILL WORK.

As you’re building your system, you need to be building your distribution systems at the same time. So, before you start building anything you must validate that the distribution systems will work.

If you’re building something from scratch, that may mean building some designs out to show people your ideas, but because you already have an in-house app that is amazing, you can just show people what you have and get their feedback.

From that feedback, you should be able to start developing interest in distributing your system. If you can’t validate the distribution of the system through potential partners, directly to your consumers, or through other systems, how do you expect to do it later?

Red Flags

Here’s your quick RED FLAGS list of things you may have found:

• The industry is shrinking
• The market isn’t very big or there are a very limited number of buyers
• There are monster-sized competitors
• The MVP you need to reach to be viable is very large
• There are government compliance requirements that could take years to accomplish
• No one at all is doing anything close to what you’re doing
• It’s not possible to validate a distribution system or partner for your SaaS.

The industry is shrinking

If the industry is shrinking substantially or dying, then no one in their right mind is going to give you money to work on this and it is going to be very hard to get the system off the ground. Also, you have fewer and fewer potential customers who are likely more and more broke. Just don’t… it’s just going to hurt and you’ll thank me later if you don’t do it.

The market isn’t very big or there are a very limited number of buyers

This one is a bit iffy. It could be a good investment, but there is also a good chance it could be a total flop. In industries where there aren’t many buyers, if you get a bad reputation with one buyer, that failure is going to get around fast. Also, there is the ‘keeping up the Joneses’ idiom, and it applies here. If the leading company does something or uses a particular system, in a small industry the rest often fall in line, even if that system isn’t particularly good. 

Monster-sized competitors

When there are monsters on your street, you don’t go poking your head outside, it’s likely to get bit off. The same thing applies to enormous companies. Big boys play big-boy games and they play hard. This means that a big player that doesn’t want you on the scene might just find some reasons to sue you into the ground before you ever get out the door. Don’t think this kind of thing happens, you’re wrong, it happens more than you might imagine. Keeping you from getting started is often a lot cheaper than buying you once you’ve become a problem.

The MVP you need to be viable is very large

There are certain industries where there are just a few major players. No other players are entering the market because the cost of entry is enormous. Going into the platform level, mission-critical B2B SaaS is often at that level. Those competitors often grew into that space over the course of decades and were propped up with private equity money and other major investments.

Oftentimes, when there are huge systems in play there are also huge costs to change systems. Getting a company to go from their old system (even if it is terrible) costs so much money that sometimes they still won’t do it. If you want to learn more about this, take a look at the system used by the VA (Veteran’s Affairs) and how it’s taken them something like 40 years to change systems and how many failed attempts they’ve had. While I was writing this, I saw that Cerner just signed a 10-billion-dollar contract with them to upgrade their system. Best of luck Cerner!

There are government compliance requirements that could take years to accomplish

When I was managing Experience Care, an EHR system for long-term care, there were several certifications that we had to get in a certain order in order to sell our product. These requirements came up over the course of years and if someone were going to enter the market now, it would take the better part of a decade to get all these certifications, and you wouldn’t be able to sell much of your system during that time. The cost would be in the tens of millions of dollars just to keep the business running long enough to get the certifications, and that’s before you could take on a single customer.

No one at all is doing anything close to what you’re doing

As much as we both want to believe it, you’re not the only person who has thought of this. It’s possible that you may be the only person who is willing to do it, but other people have definitely thought of it. So if there is nothing even remotely close to what you’re proposing, there is probably a good reason for it. I can’t tell you why because there could be dozens of reasons, but there is almost certainly some reason.

Assuming that you don’t have any of these red flags, it’s time to move on to the next step.

Building the Financial Blueprint

Congratulations! With a few days to a few months of effort, you’ve determined that:

• You can make money from this endeavor
• There is space in the industry for your product
• People want what you’re selling
• There are no major red flags, or if they are you have a plan to work around them

But how much is it going to cost you and how are you going to raise or deploy capital? 

This is a very important question because so often people working as intrapreneurs within bigger organizations don’t necessarily see how money moves in the organization and have insight into what it takes financially to get the business moving. 

So the next step is to build a financial model that shows expected costs, projected revenues, a headcount planner for different departments, and a proforma to bring it all together. With this tool, you will have so much more data that will allow you to see the impact of changes to your business on the long-term success and plan for the future. 

DON’T SKIP THIS STEP!!

There is a ton to be said about building forecasts so if you need help with this, let me know here. I am running a webinar on how to build complex forecast models quickly. 

Architecting the Architecture

With the in-house tool in our example, just like most in-house tools, you’re just supporting your team. Managing a system of 100 concurrent users is a lot different than managing a tool for 10,000 concurrent users. Architecture considerations change at scale. The way you build a tool for a few people very often has completely different considerations than building a tool for many people.

Multi-Tenant vs Single Tenant

You built a system for one group of users, but now you need to plan on a system that will support many groups and have users with the same email address that needs to access multiple systems with different levels of permissions and in some cases move data across systems. 

Now you need account management systems that were previously not necessary or maybe just handled by a developer. Since we’re building out an enterprise B2B platform that has many modules with different levels of connectivity to other modules, you’re going to need a robust permissions management system.

Transactional Emails

With the in-house system, you just had a few notifications and everyone knew they needed to log into the system to get most of the data. But how many notifications is an enterprise B2B manufacturing system going to need? Probably a lot. 

When there are issues with machines, people, materials, profit margins, new sales, new issues or conflicts, and so, so much more. For each of these issues, there could be multiple variations of email notifications that need to be sent out. So we need to budget time and money-wise for the build of this system as well and expect to iterate on this. 

System Architecture

As I mentioned earlier, the current system only manages a few people. But building the same underlying architecture could scale monetarily at an unbearable cost. I’m not saying it will, but there are almost certainly areas of the system that need to be refactored for larger scale and systems that can be combined. 

A regular example of this is reporting. Running a report with one on-site machine from a dataset of a few million records, no problem. But running a report from an offsite cloud machine from billions of records, Houston, we have a problem. 

I managed an enterprise B2B SaaS for healthcare and prior to refactoring their reporting systems, it could take 10 minutes (that’s correct, TEN MINUTES) to run a single report even on a server that was costing us $97,000.00 PER MONTH. We did eventually bring our monthly cost down to under $25k and our reporting load times under 10 seconds, but it took a ton of work to get there. 

There are many more problems you may face in system architecture, especially with regulations and compliance that were never an issue for an in-house system, but suddenly are for a system you’re selling. But you get the picture. 

If you’re building a system like this and want help understanding what you’re facing, just message us here.

Skipped Systems & Processes

When you’re building in-house, you’re not thinking about distributing the system, and often times it’s ‘good enough.’ Also, cost is a big factor and things that would be critical in a system you were distributing can be overlooked. 

Not every system below is skipped in every in-house build, but when they are skipped, they must be built before the system can be deployed en masse. That said, you don’t necessarily need to deploy to hundreds or thousands of customers right away and you can skirt by with just a few fixes to begin with and build as time goes by. But without some systems, you’re going to struggle to get anything more than basic traction, or if you do get traction, you’ll struggle to keep customers happy or the business costs under control.

Testing… Regression Testing

On in-house systems I’ve seen this so many times; the team did all their testing in-house and they didn’t build automated regression tests because they didn’t want to spend the money on it. Being an in-house system, they could live with some issues as long as the important new features were being released. Also, the senior leadership isn’t made up of SaaS executives, they are, in this case, manufacturing executives. So they don’t understand why this is important and as long as the thing worked it was fine. 

But now you’re going to the big leagues and guess what, if you don’t have automated tests you are going to miss bugs, big important bugs that people are going to be really upset about. So now you’re going to need to go back through the system and rebuild all those tests you never built. That’s going to take some serious time, but it’s a lot less expensive than wasting all your sales and marketing dollars and starting over because people are pissed off when your system breaks on every new release. 

Documentation – For Developers and Customers

The same management that didn’t want to pay for regression tests also didn’t want to pay more to make sure everything was documented. This means that now you’re going to have to pay a developer to go through and document everything in the system thoroughly. Probably, a lot of the in-app documentation was done well enough or you wouldn’t have gotten this far, but there are definitely some areas missing. 

Questionably the bigger issue though is the one of technical writing for users. Now you’re going to need a full-time person spending months documenting how to use every system in the entire application. This process could easily take half a year for a mid-sized application, and as you build more tools you need this person to do the documentation for those tools and future releases. When you add it all up, it is a ton of work that has to be done. 

System Setup Options

At the enterprise level, EVERYONE does it differently. Everyone has different ways of setting up their factories, different machinery, and different processes. So, you’re going to need a robust way of setting all this stuff up. 

Pretty often, with in-house systems, all of this is just stored in a database because “why would we need to edit that stuff?” Sound familiar?

In systems you’re selling you can slide by in the very beginning by telling people you’ll set it up for them, but you better have a plan for enabling them to do it themselves pretty quickly. Otherwise, the cost of managing these settings for your customers is going to rack up and become unsustainable. On top of that, it’s going to hurt your reputation because people don’t want to wait for you to do it for them. Just the fact that they can’t do it themselves may keep them from buying, even if they never make a change to the setup systems.

How are you going to manage all those new accounts?

You’re going to have to be able to know who is using the system, add users, ban people, refund money, get access to users’ systems to support them, help them set up the systems, manage their usage, and so much more, and you’re going to need to do it centrally. 

You’re going to need an admin panel to do this. This is where your support team, customer success team, and other teams go in to find accounts and users, know what they have access to, see some or all of their billing, perhaps give refunds, make changes, etc. 

You’re going to need at least a few months for the MVP for this feature set, and you’re going to be hard-pressed to implement or manage anything until it’s done.

If you want to learn more about what goes into an admin panel, take a look at the video I did on it a few years ago here.

Where’s my money?

In many enterprise B2B platform SaaS systems, you set up customers on one to five-year contracts. But you still collect money every month, and by far the easiest way to collect that money is to have it come out of their credit cards. That means you’re going to need a way to bill customers and have them know how much they paid for what amount of usage and what modules or systems they are paying for. 

If you don’t set this up early, you can create a massive headache for yourself where you don’t know who is paying you for what. If you’re thinking this can’t happen, think again. I stepped into a turnaround project where the company couldn’t tell who was paying how much for what for YEARS because of this issue. It took me a year and a half and almost $300k to get this all straightened out. 

So take my word for it, getting proper payment systems set up upfront can save you a ton of money.

Activation

You may have just created an amazing implementation program that allows you to bring on new customers quickly and get installed in their facilities fast and well. But when that manager who’s been your on-site champion leaves and takes a few people with them, now what, and how do you know the manager even left?

First off, you’ll need to implement segmentation analytics systems like Baremetrics or Kissmetrics. 

You need a way to make sure that the next person coming in understands the system without extensive training and can just get into the system and start using it. Or else as soon as your contract is up they’re moving to what they’ve used before and all that hard work getting the sale and maintaining it with past managers will go to waste. 

This entails user-segmented onboarding tools – in-app product tours that are different based on your role within the system. My recent favorite tool for this is Useitful, it does a great job of building product tours, banners, checklists, and more, and has great segmentation tools. These systems need to be built and updated as you change the product. It’s usually a customer success rep or product owner’s job at first, but you will eventually need a full-time person working on this. 

So you know, the link above is an affiliate link. I use them for my company HeyRamp.com and I 100% recommend them to anyone wanting this kind of thing.

Don’t underestimate the importance of a good user activation system! It can just take one bad experience for a new senior manager to decide they don’t like you or your product. 

Anything else? You betcha!

There are tons of integrations, tracking tools, reporting systems, and other tools that you should probably consider. These tools allow you to understand how people use your tools, where they are getting lost, and where to make changes. 

If you have a product-led approach (freemium model where people sign up for free and then pay based on the value you provide), then you need to understand which customers need to be contacted and at what times to maximize sales. There is a bevy of tools to accomplish this and move users to leads in your CRM for your sales team. 

People Are The Foundation of Success

You’ve been building an application using either an agency or an in-house team, but more often than not, your in-house team members have full-time jobs doing things for the business and can’t come over to your new SaaS business without filling their positions. 

Case in point, the COO of the example business has been the Head of Product for the application being built. If he takes over the application, who is going to run the business? A COO role is both difficult and expensive to fill. Also, once the SaaS launches, it’s going to be a full-time job, and having him split time is just going to sink both businesses. So we need to figure out how to fill either his product role or the COO role at the main business. 

It’s not as easy as just a few developers and a product owner, although technically you could start this way and grow from there. But you’ll need to grow your team fast if you start selling. On top of that, the fact that selling to enterprise businesses for mission-critical systems requires a lot of trust, and having a small team does not inspire that trust. That means hiring is a sales problem as well as a staffing issue.

What does your SaaS org chart look like?

You’ll want at least a CEO and people to fill roles in the following departments. This does not mean you need to fill your company up with people before they have work to do, only that you need people to do the work. 

• CEO/GM
• Director of Operations
• Customer Success
• Customer Support
• Product / Product Ownership
• Development / Engineering
• UX / Design
• Finance / Accounts Receivable
• Human Resources
• Sales
• Demand Generation / Marketing

Again, you don’t need one person in each role to start, you can have one person do multiple jobs and you can bring in consultants and agencies to fill certain positions or roles. But as your business and revenues grow, you’re going to need to start filling these positions. 

Once you start growing

If you start taking off, it may very likely be worth bringing on a recruiter to help find the right people fast. Don’t ever assume that your network is big enough to find the best talent.

Building out a company is different than managing an in-house app. Your current team already has jobs, so you’ll need to hire a number of people in different departments including

• Sales and Marketing
• Customer Support
• Customer Success
• Accounts Receivable
  • Enterprise B2B software systems are often sold on longer contract terms and have billing issues
• More product & development team members
  • COO is currently the director of product, but that won’t work anymore
  • Your in-house devs have full-time jobs
• Management – your current managers have jobs already, so you will need new managers

Agency Concerns

If you’ve been using an agency to do the work so far, you might be thinking it doesn’t make sense to fully rely on them forever. In that case, you should consider options such as:

• Acquiring the agency
• Acquiring the agency’s build and product team that worked on your system
• Having the agency work with your team to train up your developers
• The cost of keeping the agency on as a training and project management team for your developers until you fully replace them.

Charting Your Market Debut

Now that you’ve got an understanding of what you’re system is likely missing you can begin the conversations about how much time these things will take and how much they’ll cost. Finally, it’s time to start talking about going to market!

The fun part right? I think so.

Distributing Your Product

Before we talk about a sales team, let’s talk about the sales strategy as that determines how many sales team members you may need. The easiest way to succeed in selling is to have an unfair advantage. My preference is that as soon as your product is ready to go, you make a phone call or push a button and suddenly have ten thousand sales (or whatever the equivalent is for your industry). 

So how would you do this?

My favorite is having a good friend who runs a business that already has substantial distribution and who is willing to do you a solid, in exchange for a good kickback of course. 

Don’t have a friend or partner like this? No problem! You’ve got plenty of time to work on that while the team is putting together all the development items listed above. 

Be warned, just going to tradeshows and selling via outbound calls and emails is hard and time-consuming.

You should strongly consider distribution partnerships in the beginning.

Find people who are selling similar products where your product would be an auxiliary system or enable their sales, that’s a good first target.

You may also find success in communities of people in your industry, but you’re going to need to be a contributing member of that community BEFORE you start selling to them. An example of this is when I was running Experience Care, we did an amazing job of building up our podcast which was a purely community-focused endeavor. The endeavor unlocked tons of savings and sales, but it took more than a year to get it going. 

Take a look at how we put together the Experience Care Podcast here. 

Building an Enterprise B2B SaaS Sales Team

For the first few sales, you can probably handle it yourself. But if you’ve done a good job procuring distribution partners, then you’re going to need people to handle the incoming leads. Very often that means you’re going to need to set up an enterprise B2B SaaS sales team with at least one salesperson, and more than likely a sales manager and a couple of sales team members.

On top of that, you’ll want a CRM system such as HubSpot or Pipedrive. I don’t usually recommend Salesforce right out the gate unless you already have Salesforce support at your current company. If you have someone to set it all up for you and do all the integrations you’ll want and need, then fantastic, but most of the time that’s not the case. So you’ll want to have a smaller and much less expensive system. While Hubspot is my favorite, I also use Pipedrive and Close at other companies. 

There is a ton to be said about setting up an enterprise B2B SaaS sales team, but I’m writing a blog article, not a book here (despite what it may look like). 

If you want help getting your SaaS sales team set up you can always reach out and I can help you further. 

Demand Generation

Those sales team members can make outbound sales calls, send emails, and go to trade shows, but they are going to be so much more effective if you line up the leads and they knock them down. That means you’re going to want to create a system of demand generation. Even if you’ve got great distribution partners, you still are going to want to start building up your own lead generation systems because the world changes and those channels decrease or disappear sometimes. It’s great to get you off the ground, but you have to learn to fly on your own.

Please note, I said ‘Demand Generation’, not marketing. The reason is that when you’re starting out you want leads, not brand recognition. Brand recognition will be important soon enough, but if you can’t survive long enough and generate some initial sales, it won’t matter. You need revenue now and so you need leads.

If your SaaS business is doing less than a million in revenue, you have a sales problem, not a marketing problem.

Jason Long

In the beginning, EVERYTHING IS FOCUSED ON SALES. 

Here are some of the top areas of demand generation that are used in SaaS and enterprise SaaS businesses:

• Content marketing / SEO
• Public relations
• Pay-per-click advertising
• Trade shows
• Podcast
• Community building
• Outbound Email
• CRO
• Newsletter
• So many more things…

Content Marketing / SEO

Almost every successful SaaS CEO I know has SEO as a top lead generation system. 

The trick here is that it takes a long time to establish. Plan on SEO taking AT LEAST A YEAR from the time you start. A lot of time, people are hesitant to start because it’s going to take so long, but if you don’t start now, you’re always a year away. Besides, the content you generate for this should be sales-focused in the beginning. It should be content that your sales team can use to generate interest. 

Pro Tip: Most SEO agencies aren’t going to be able to build your SEO from the ground up because they don’t know your space and aren’t industry experts. Your team needs to produce your own content and then send it to an agency to optimize it in the beginning. Also, this content MUST directly support your sales team. 

Public Relations (PR)

PR can be a quick way to generate leads. The easiest way to do this is to put up a series of posts on Cision or PR Newswire. It will be sent out to journalists across the country, and if it’s something of interest to them, you’ll get published in some newspapers. At the very least, a few major publications pick up every article and publish it and now you can list out that you’ve been published in Yahoo, Benzinga, etc. and likely a few newspapers. 

“Real” PR is a lot more complicated and requires you to establish relationships with actual journalists and pitch them on articles. It can be super helpful, but most of the time it means you need to find a PR agency and use their connections.  

Either way, once again, this is to support sales. You would use this method initially to give your sales team credibility and show that you and your products are being talked about in the news. Your sales team can use this to convince people to at least let you present.

Advertising

Paying a trade organization, Google, Facebook, or other pay-per-click (PPC) systems to let you advertise on their website, emails, at their trade shows, etc. can be a powerful tool to gain exposure. The trick is that you need to make sure that if you’re doing this in the beginning, it is ALWAYS TO GENERATE LEADS. Brand recognition is great and all, but you need money now. 

Tradeshows

We’ve talked about tradeshows a few times now. The reason is that much of the time, enterprise B2B SaaS sales are started at tradeshows where people can meet in person. Don’t underestimate the power of exhibiting at shows. The trick here is that you need to be prepped and ready and have meetings set up ahead of time. Just going and exhibiting is a waste of time and money in most cases, especially if there are competent competitors. 

So how do you get people to show up at your booth? Give them something they can’t resist, let them know months ahead of time, and then keep reminding them. By the time they get to the show, they need to have you at the top of their list of who they want to talk to. 

Here’s a great example.

At Experience Care, we gave a talk on how to bring in and keep staff. There was a massive staffing shortage so everybody wanted to hear what we were talking about. We would make sure that we could get the attendee list if we signed up as an exhibitor, and we wouldn’t go if we couldn’t get it. Then we would email every attendee months ahead of time with a link to a web page that talked about what we were going to talk about at the show and how to reach us. We would email them five or six times ahead of the show to make sure they remembered. This had a huge impact on lead generation.

Newsletter

If you’re reading this, it’s probably because you’re on my email list, and if you’ve read this far then you’ve probably seen a number of calls to action. (We can help you with your newsletter as well). You see, that’s one more! 

But seriously, sending a regular email can bring in leads fast. When I first started sending out a weekly newsletter I was shocked at how many people started reaching out to me for help. Of course, the issue is always how to build up your list. For that, I refer you back to all the other methods above.

While we’re talking about newsletters, consider subscribing to our kickass newsletter here for more in-depth knowledge bombs:

Bevvy of marketing systems

There are SO MANY other things that you can do. If you’re looking for more ideas and more systems, please feel free to reach out and we can chat about the multitude of other things that can be done. Once again, this is a blog, not a book. 

Retention and Churn Reduction

After you’ve had a few sales on an in-house system, you’re going to start getting a lot of requests for new features, people upset about things, and notes on how you can improve. You’re going to need people and systems to manage all of this. 

Support and Tickets

Each time someone emails you, asks for something, gives you a recommendation, etc. it needs to be logged and someone needs to get back to them in a reasonable amount of time and then send over a satisfaction survey to make sure your team responded appropriately and they were happy with the result. 

Here are some of the systems to consider for this, although there are tons of other systems out there:

• Zendesk
• Hubspot
• JIRA Service Desk

A friend of mine who runs a mid-sized SaaS business did all the support himself for the first 2 years in business. He said it made a huge difference in knowing how to improve the product and was one of the reasons that he was able to grow the company to where it is today. So it is definitely possible to fill this role without tons of people at first, but as your team grows you will need to bring on Support people. The same person was also very, very happy to finally let go of support when he did. It got out of control after the first year and he was taking more than 3 days to respond to people in year two. 

Customer Interviews

Getting on the phone with customers or to their facilities and understanding their issues with the system and within their businesses is one of the best ways to improve the customer experience while creating lasting relationships. At the very least, you should consider setting up regular group calls with customers to present new features and gather feedback on what is and isn’t working. 

There is a lot to be said about how to go about doing this, but it is a key aspect of some of the best SaaS businesses’ product development strategies and greatly improves ongoing user experience. 

Customer Success & Implementation Teams

In our example, we’re building a system that must be implemented on-site by experienced professionals. Very often, the Customer Success and Implementation teams are one and the same to begin with, and even after some time, they work interchangeably because they have to have on-site experience and extensive knowledge about how the business works so that they can implement effectively. 

When you have failed implementations you have a business in trouble. But great customer success representatives are both hard to come by and very often expensive because they have so much experience in both the operations of the business and the technical side. Despite their cost, they are invaluable. 

In the beginning, you can probably just have one person who does this, but at the enterprise level, you can’t afford to just have one person for very long. If something happens with that person, you have critical issues fast, so redundancy here is important. 

Scaling

You’ve done it! You got the thing off the ground! Congratulations!!!

Sales are starting to come in, your departments are starting to fill up, revenue is looking better and you’re not eating into your investment capital as much. A path to breakeven is visible. Now you need to start optimizing and running more efficiently. It’s time to start looking at things like:

• Pricing strategy will change over time
• Product-led growth 
• Culture management
• Company management systems
• Performance management systems
• Board management
• Raising Capital
• Regulatory Compliance and Data Security
• Infrastructure scalability and reliability

Fortunately, these are some of my favorite things to talk about! The goal of this article though was to get you this far. Getting to the next step will be covered in upcoming articles. 

Lighting The Fire

As you can see, moving from an in-house application to a SaaS business is an endeavor. It’s not as simple as launching an application, it’s the launch of an entire business. The challenge that so many in-house teams run into on this kind of project is that they don’t know what’s coming at them because they are not operating at the top levels of their own business or have not started a business before, and especially have not started a SaaS business before, so they don’t know all the pieces that need to come together to make it all happen.

Also, an important disclaimer, this is a blog article, not a book, and I could have written SO MUCH MORE on all of this. The article is a good overview, but certainly not a deep dive into any of this. Each section in this article is essentially an overview of an entire industry and/or profession. Understanding the ins and outs of each area is something that requires experience, which is one reason the #1 indicator of success in a SaaS business is experience. 

If you want to get your journey started as an intrapreneur or entrepreneur, we’re here to help. And if you want to keep learning about this kind of thing, jump onto our newsletter to get regular long-form articles and content on SaaS building, investment, turnarounds, and more!