Schaal uw go-to-market als een SaaS-ondernemer - inzichten van oprichters

We hebben onlangs nog een scale-up-diner gehouden en operationele onderwerpen besproken met een groep oprichters. Deze keer was het in Parijs en concentreerden we ons op de uitdagingen van het opschalen van de marktintroductie in een SaaS-bedrijf. De avond werd georganiseerd door onze Venture Partner, Kevin Kimber , EMEA-oprichter van succesverhaal Service Now ($ 30 miljard marktkapitalisatie) naast Michael Treskow en Lucile Cornet van het Eight Roads beleggingsteam. De discussie varieerde van het creëren van de beste prijsstructuur voor het definiëren van de rol van de succesmanagers van de klant. Hier is een samenvatting:

Prijzen zijn een tijdstip ...

• •De prijs is moeilijk om goed te krijgen, en het is gemakkelijk om fouten te maken die de hele klantenbasis verstoren, zoals Zendesk in 2010 deed
• •It’s unlikely that you’ll get the right price straight away. It takes time to understand the value you present or feel able to justify it. Kevin explained that for ServiceNow, getting their first multi-million-dollar deal was a huge achievement, in terms of the team feeling confident about the size of contract they could negotiate. Also, if a customer agrees to feature in a case study or press release, it can provide significantly more value to you than getting an extra 100k ACV
• •Early on, the biggest pricing mistake is not properly understanding the value you’ve delivered to previous clients as the reference pool is small, plus deciding which volume metric you price against. If you can, stay away from revealing how much the product costs you to deliver as this will potentially drag your prices down
• •You should test pricing elasticity with your customers. There is no better way to find out where the limit is. Most entrepreneurs in the room felt like it wasn’t an issue if different customers ended up paying different prices for the same product, especially in the early days of the business
• •Every little helps: Do you have inflation indexing in your contracts? Do you charge for implementation? These are ways you can easily increase ACV or build a natural upsell mechanism. You may also want to incentivise customers to pay upfront, especially when cash is scarce. It is worth having a large discount for multi-year deals paid upfront, as this will bring in cash but also visibility in revenue
• •Moving from a self-serve SaaS offering to selling to large enterprises is a big switch, which can have big implications as Algolia and others can testify to. The entire sales organisation and customer acquisition cost will change, so you should think about reflecting the longer sales cycles and lumpiness of the pipeline in your new prices

What is the role of a Customer Success Manager?

• •Customer Success Managers (CSM) can have very different roles in each company, from being tech/customer support focused to being more sales oriented if they are in charge of renewals and upselling. The primary responsibility of a CSM is to nurture customer lifetime value and preserve customer retention. CSMs should anticipate client demands and keep in touch depending on where a customer is on the journey
• •In any case, it is crucial to ensure great communication flow between pre-sales, sales, implementation and then the CSM (and then potentially sales again if they get involved at renewal). Encourage them to share information and have overlapping conversations with customers to help all teams stay aligned. The key is to get good accountability. For each customer, who is the person in charge of their happiness? And of their renewal? What are the KPIs to measure success?
• •Compensation is a key aspect. Kevin noted that ServiceNow iterated on its model during the early days and in one year had a model where the sales people didn’t get paid any commission on renewals but would get a negative in their new year quota if an existing customer churned
• •What is the right profile for a CSM? In general, it is a person with both technical and commercial sensibilities; the relationship building skills can be as important as having deep product knowledge. To ensure all CSMs are up to date with the latest features and product roadmap, many companies like Qonto choose to invest heavily in training their employees — knowledge is power! Another idea could be to select some of your early customers as CSMs, as they will share the passion and knowledge of the use-case with other customers
• •Deep tech companies such as Dataiku spend a lot of time helping their customers, securing adoption and discussing the use-case, so their CSMs will need to be much more technical than the typical candidate
• •Good relationships with the actual users of the product are crucial, but it’s equally important to keep “political" stakeholder management in mind, so keep in touch with the budget owners, decision makers and c-suite at the customer
• •Find good tools to track engagement, especially as there are now so many which monitor product adoption and usage. Generally, the SaaS CEOs in our portfolio do a good job of monitoring which features are used most by customers, how frequently, for how long etc. — all useful insights for the CSM team

What to consider when scaling internationally?

• •How do you decide which territories to expand into and whether to move headquarters? These are questions that nearly all European SaaS founders ask at some point. While there was consensus that there is no need to legally flip to become a US/Delaware entity anymore, many found that moving HQs and relocating the CEO to the US can help significantly with exit prospects, especially if an IPO is on the table. Having the CEO in the US also helps a lot with hiring, as typically great hires don’t want to join a satellite office, they want to work in the same location as the CEO. However, even those that move HQs decide to keep their tech teams in Europe because the quality and the retention of good engineers is much higher
• •With regards to other countries to expand into, again, a data driven approach can help. Those with an open source product can identify which countries are demonstrating traction before deciding to formally open an office or sell there
• •Obviously, market size is a big part of this decision. In Europe, the German market is renowned for being tough and complex to navigate and local speakers are definitely needed. That said, this is a very large market and opportunities difficult to neglect. One way to look at it is to prepare a matrix of market size and likelihood of success in a given country
• •There was further consensus that the UK should not be seen as a launch pad for the US. If the plan is to open in the US, you should go directly there. It is expensive to set up an office in London, recruitment can be difficult and there is a shared view that it’s easy to fail. The UK is worth considering as an interesting market in itself
• •Go where nobody goes! A few CEOs are pursuing a strategy to go where their competitors don’t go. Poland and Turkey are often overlooked, as well as places like the Mid-West of the US
• •If you do open an office in a new geography, decide early on what you’re looking to achieve. Are you focussed on establishing your brand there or do you want to make money from day one?
• •Hire carefully — the first local employee is paramount to the success of the business in a new market, and the image you will have there. They will be the “custodians of your ethos"

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We’ll be continuing our themed scale-up dinner series in several cities across Europe in the next few months, sign up to our newsletter or follow us @8roadsventures for updates.

In the meantime you can connect with Kevin Kimber, Michael Treskow or Lucile Cornet for more in-depth SaaS scaling tips!