Value of Services in a SaaS Market – Part 1

Your service provider partners may find themselves constantly reinventing wheels and missing opportunities. Whenever they develop a project for a customer and execute it, the very next thing they should be doing is find other customers who need the same project. Anything they invent and only use once is a very expensive proposition. When they can re-use those project designs and sell them over and over again those designs become extremely profitable.

Here’s how you can help.

Rethinking Services

Where they may have asked you for increased margins in days long gone, they now look to you to identify services they can deliver based on your product. Product-attached services have always been among the easiest to sell. That hasn’t changed.

What has changed is that partners now seek to provide layer upon layer of additional services beyond the initial product-attached ones.

How Partner Services Fit Into Your Saas Model

      1. Services are key to the Lifetime Value equation
        In the Saas model, the initial sale is just the beginning of the path to value. Where business growth is measured not just in ARR or MRR, but more importantly also in customer lifetime value (LTV). The economics of Saas solutions define best practice financials to cover the customer acquisition cost (CAC) in 12 months or less. In doing so, each customer becomes a recurring, profitable revenue generator.
      2. Services create Customer Stickiness
        Simply planning for recurring profitable revenue growth won’t make it a reality. By delivering high-touch, high-value customer services, your partners can create stickiness that promotes product adoption and real-time value.
      3. Partners create the Human-to-Human Magic
        If you do not engage with your customers in a real, personal way, then you are just another vendor — and vendors are easily replaceable with better, cheaper options. However, clients are much less likely to replace people with whom they have real relationships. Your partners can act as an extension of the customer’s team, offering:

      We’d love to hear your insights on enabling partners to promote healthy customer relationships through services. Join the conversation! Share how you’ve enabled partners. And we’d love to interview some of you for a future blog post!