SaaS Company Opens to New Markets

Summary

A $70 million SaaS company faced a growth challenge. Because of slowing sales, the team was redefining its two to three year strategy for what to build next, and wanted to consider additional growth options.

About the client

The client is a multi-award winning software company that provides small businesses with online financial services.

The challenge

The company had limited resources, but needed to find new sources of revenue as growth from its existing products had slowed sharply. Under consideration were incremental additions to the existing product to make it attractive to a larger base, new add-on products to better monetize the existing customer relationships, and building completely new products. The question was what products should they consider and which offered the best long-term growth opportunities.

The company needed to understand the current customer pain and competitive pressures so they could map it against the product options.

Rubicon uncovers new opportunities

Rubicon provided data on the different market possibilities and likely opportunities for the company. Rubicon quickly gathered and sorted through mountains of data to produce a list of requirements from: customers, potential customers, sales reps, services reps and engineers.

Insights, credibility and data validate new services

In situations when considering what to build, the issue often comes down to what to do next and which requirements to attend to from the various options. The options are summarized below.

We could have created several frameworks for the given situation, but this one was the best organizing principle for the ideas and options for this client. In this case, being able to highlight the relationship of the options to each other—letting one see which ideas leverage the customer base and which leverage the product base—was what the client really needed help with. By putting ideas in relationship to one another, the larger picture became clear, so the client was able to have a deeper—and highly productive—discussion about what each idea meant.

Next, we helped the client organize all their ideas for product innovation and growth initiatives so they could determine what strategy they wanted to pursue. The grid above really helped the client to transform their thinking from micro detail (everyone’s pet idea) to a shared top line view.

Because of the ability to see the options in clear terms, the net result was that the client company was able to move forward with shared plans for growth.