One of the aspects of a truly agile SaaS company is the ability to adapt subscription offerings and pricing tiers to the wants, needs, and demands of consumers and existing customers. Unfortunately for some subscription model businesses, the ability to understand the implications of updating subscription offerings is lost because systems are not set up properly, or there is a lack of control over master data. But when you know when to update your subscriptions, you can maximize profitability while delivering options that are optimized for your customers.
Have the right systems
It's impossible to truly keep track of subscription performance if you don't have the right systems in place. Having tools that manage your portfolio, track usage, and handle invoicing are great, but if they aren't integrated with one another it can be difficult to see the bigger picture of how customers are using your products and services, and what the indicators are for satisfaction and performance.
Take a look at your subscription offerings. Do you know about feature usage? Are you aware of the reasons why certain offerings are more popular than others? Have you evaluated cost versus value and what that means to your customers?
If you don't really have a handle on these concepts, it can prevent you from making decisions regarding your subscriptions that will be beneficial in the long term. By establishing automated, integrated systems that allow you to drill down into performance from all angles, then you can have better information to make the smart business decisions regarding your portfolio.
Control over data equals agility
It's not enough to just have systems in place for monitoring usage, performance, and customer satisfaction. You need to ensure that you are getting real time metrics that are giving you the right picture that allow for optimization. Without a thorough understanding of the metrics that indicate performance, and established KPIs to measure that performance, you may have a portfolio of subscription offerings that aren't useful to your customers.
When you can look at data about your subscriptions, you can monitor how changes to your offerings affect upsells and renewals. You can see if customers are using specific features less and perhaps adapt your offering to eliminate certain aspects from their subscription. In some cases, this would then reduce their cost, but could secure better customer satisfaction which translates to customer loyalty and recurring purchases.
Being a truly agile SaaS business means being able to make these tweaks and changes to find a formula for your products and services that satisfies your most qualified potential customers and secures existing ones.
Without securing the right systems and ensuring those systems allow you control over your data, it can be very difficult to establish that your subscription offerings are optimized. If there are many question marks when it comes to subscription management, you may be suffering from losses that you aren't even aware of.
Want to learn more about what indicators there may be for optimizing subscription offerings? Grab our E-Book now on the Five Steps of SaaS Success.
