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Scaling a SaaS Business: 8 Top Tips

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The GoCardless content team comprises a group of subject-matter experts in multiple fields from across GoCardless. The authors and reviewers work in the sales, marketing, legal, and finance departments. All have in-depth knowledge and experience in various aspects of payment scheme technology and the operating rules applicable to each. The team holds expertise in the well-established payment schemes such as UK Direct Debit, the European SEPA scheme, and the US ACH scheme, as well as in schemes operating in Scandinavia, Australia, and New Zealand. See full bio

Last editedAug 20223 min read

Top tips for Scaling a SaaS business - once you’ve successfully managed to get your SaaS business up and running, the next most important question to ask yourself is, how do you go about scaling your business?

Growing a company is the ultimate goal of any business owner, and the more rapid the expansion, the better. While there’s no magic formula for success, there are some proven ways of scaling a SaaS business. In this post, we’ll provide you with some useful strategies to consider.

Signs you’re ready to SaaS scale

Here are some signs you may be ready to scale:

You’ve found your main selling point and market fit
You have more leads than your sales team can handle
You’re not able to reach markets where demand is high
You have a positive cash flow
You have a loyal customer base

How to scale a SaaS business

Re-examine your sales strategy

Look into different SaaS models to identify the right, scalable model for your product or service. Make sure you have enough skilled staff at your disposal, then outline your sales strategy. Automate relevant tasks and invest in sufficient training for your team. Then, allocate resources to the segments of your target audience likely to be the most profitable.

Continually track, analyse and utilise your sales metrics so you know what’s working and what’s not.

Get your prices right

Your ideal price-point will change according to market conditions, so you’ll need to keep a close eye on this to keep prices optimised. Try experimenting with different pricing packages and employ A/B testing.

1. Focus on product adoption

Product adoption should be easy for users, otherwise you’ve created a barrier to renewals and referrals. This means you need to offer high-quality customer support to take customers through the adoption procedures. Offer walkthroughs, demos, and free trials. If you can, create one-click installs too.

2. Use a multichannel approach

Successfully scaling a SaaS business is best done by using a variety of channels, for example, paid and organic search, as well as advertising on Facebook and Google.

3. Make the most of analytics

Find out where your traffic is coming from and what users do on your website to determine which pages they’re interested in and which ones they abandon. This can help you identify what’s slowing down your lead generation and hurting your conversion rates.

4. Keep customers happy

By automating repetitive sales, marketing and customer service tasks, you can allow employees to take on more complicated aspects of their job and provide your customers with better support. Provide a variety of payment options too. To make things easier for customers, consider collecting their subscriptions via Direct Debit. This way, customers only need to set up their payment details once, and their payments are collected automatically on every due date.

GoCardless is a payment provider that makes it easy for SaaS companies to collect recurring payments from customers, reducing the risk of late or missing payments (and those awkward conversations with customers).

1. Focus on content

Write regular blogs to add value to customers’ lives and reach out to influencers, to drive traffic to your site and help you scale.

2. Offer a freemium product

This can help give users a taste for how your product can revolutionise their lives. Showcase your most popular features, then focus on promoting them in your marketing strategies.

How to reduce costs in business when scaling your SaaS company

Scaling a SaaS business is not easy, and attracting new customers is one of the most challenging and expensive aspects. Cut costs by replacing your team’s workloads with automation. Software, for example CRMs (customer relationship management systems), can help you analyse your sales funnel so you can optimise your sales processes to achieve the highest conversion rates.

By automating customer support functions, you can provide customers with a great experience, while freeing up staff time to more critical tasks. Chatbots, for example, give you a cost-effective way to respond to customers’ questions faster and more efficiently.

Scaling a SaaS business is crucial to survival. Without being able to scale, there’s no way to reach new customers, and with no new customers, your competitors will outrun you. In order to stay ahead of the pack, you need to identify and use the right tactics, and make use of software to streamline and improve processes.

We can help

GoCardless is a global payments solution that helps you automate payment collection, cutting down on the amount of financial admin your team needs to deal with. Find out how GoCardless can help you with one-off or recurring payments.