To gain from the experience of failure, though, requires that you recognize it when you see it.
To help software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution providers recognize their failures, I'll point out a few telltale signs that will let them know that something's gone wrong.
Customer acquisition costs are too high
When your customer acquisition costs can't be covered by the projected lifetime subscription revenues derived from customers, you have a problem. A faulty sales and marketing machine gobbles up one dollar in expenses and pays out less than one dollar in revenues.
To borrow from another business axiom, if a dollar in yields less than a dollar out, you won't make it up in volume.There could be several solutions to the problem: establishing a more efficient sales and marketing process, securing more renewals, raising the subscription fee, or articulating a more compelling value proposition, among others. But if you find that you are spending more than you're earning, first acknowledge that you have a problem.
Note that the calculation for customer acquisition costs measures annual sales and marketing expenses relative to subscription revenues earned over the lifetime of customer. SaaS companies should, in fact, expect to pay a high percentage of annual revenues on sales and marketing - often in excess of 40%. But the goal is to earn that back, and more, over the entire length of the customer's subscription. A high-functioning customer acquisition machine can gobble up one dollar of expense to win a customer, but should pay out three, four, five dollars or more over time.
Implementation costs are too high
If the cost to implement your solution is chewing up a large chunk of the subscription revenue, you may have product problem. High implementation costs and long deployment times are often a symptom of a SaaS solution that requires extensive customization.
Not only is customization an immediate problem, but it usually grows worse over time. Every upgrade to the solution may require additional implementation expenses. Even if the customer has paid for the initial implementation work separately, the vendor incurs new expenses with every new product release. There's a cost to violating the SaaS multi-tenant model.
The solution is configuration instead of customization. Better yet, configuration managed by the customer. Allow them to tailor the solution to suit their particular needs, but without altering the core of the solution.
The sales cycle is too long
If you find that sales cycles are extending too long, there's a problem. The SaaS model usually functions best at faster speed. You spend money now to make money later. Anything that delays the "make money later" part of the equation is a bad thing.
The sales cycle might be stalled by IT professionals with legitimate questions about security, performance and integration. Or perhaps, legal and procurement professionals are struggling to understand the unique SaaS terms and conditions. Multiple drafts of red-lined contract drafts pinging between vendor and customer are a sure sign that something's gone wrong.
IT, procurement and others involved in the purchase decision should be educated and won over, and earlier in the process is better than later.
The marketing and sales support material is out-of-date
If your marketing group is struggling to keep marketing and sales support material up to speed, you may have a broken product introduction process. You'll know it, for example, if your web site and product literature are out-of-date, or press announcements lag product enhancements by weeks or months.
The cause may be a product introduction process that's built for on-premise applications and 18-month enhancement cycles. It's out of sync with a SaaS development schedule that rolls out enhancements every quarter. Your marketing team is caught on the "wheel of death" and can't run fast enough.
This isn't a comprehensive list, but you should be on the lookout for each of them. They're all symptoms of your SaaS model gone wrong.
