When VC firms and other investors evaluate private SaaS companies, they often complain that cloud-based software providers too frequently add staff to manage growth rather than simply improving their client onboarding processes. The right SaaS tools help the best in SaaS improve customer onboarding and boost revenue.
As investors, they know that many SaaS providers are leaving a ton of additional money and margin on the table by passing their customers off to success or partner teams who end up emailing static spreadsheets, Smartsheets or some other general project management tool that detract from an otherwise impressive sales pitch.
In this post, we’ll explore three ways in which a sophisticated project management tool designed specifically for SaaS implementations can help significantly boost your revenue, revenue growth rate, customer upgrades and gross margins—while also reducing churn.
So, let’s get to it.
The right tool will make it easy to meet your deadlines
Stalled implementations delay bookings-to-billings because many SaaS clients delay payment until the software is fully up and running. Most CFOs won’t even recognize revenue until the project is signed-off on by the client as complete.
The right project management tool helps you accelerate revenue by helping your implementation team get the customer live faster—oftentimes two times faster. That makes for happy customers and you get to recognize that revenue this quarter instead of the next quarter.
How do you keep everyone— implementation teams and the client — accountable for meeting deadlines and up to date on status? Real-time visibility. The right project management tool gives everyone a clear view into upcoming deadlines, project delays, and task dependencies, 24/7. That keeps your project on-track and on-schedule.
You’ll be able to add efficiency, not staff
An established process allows members of your implementation team to repeat what they’ve already done without having to rethink and reinvent. It’s the path to scale.
Locking down the process before you start means that the path is clear, and perhaps more importantly, the next implementation (and the one after that) will move even more efficiently. Continual efficiency improvements lead to increased scale, which leads to increased revenue growth.
The key is to lower the marginal cost of replicating your product implementations. How? Add sophisticated project management tools instead of more people. The right tools allow you to create repeatable, efficient processes that don’t require more bodies.
An audit trail can help you identify and address critical patterns
A sophisticated project management tool will also provide an audit trail for everything that happens during the implementation. That’s huge because it allows your team to identify and address patterns that require corrections, build project templates, and show clients a unique and ongoing view of a project’s status.
A platform that uses real data to show you the history of past project timeframes and schedules will help you create deadlines based on facts. That gives you a more reliable structure on which to build a timeline and instills confidence in your client that you really are the expert.
Understanding past task time frames and completion schedules also helps you avoid unrealistic deadlines in the first place. You can be realistic about how long tasks will take to complete, who is available to actually complete those tasks, and how long client approvals will truly take.
While an accurate trail can help you build a better onboarding process, it also helps the client understand your value (and where they may have caused delays and other issues themselves).
Your implementation should be just as impressive as your product
Don’t give your clients buyer’s remorse — or worse, watch them abandon the whole project — because your implementation is messy, delayed, or disorganized.
The right project management tool designed for SaaS Implementations will dramatically boost your bottom line by helping you complete complex implementations faster and more efficiently. Your customers will love you, and so will the investors. It’s win-win.
Want to learn more about the most common SaaS implementation hurdles and how to address them?
Download our guide “The Quick Guide to Solving Biggest SaaS Implementation Problems” now.
