The Growth and Importance of SaaS Sales

Since the early 2000’s, the use of software technology has grown rapidly and even become a part of everyday life for most people. From your favorite web browser to all your apps that help you stay focus, organized or even entertained; software is just something we know to be a massive part of life. What many don’t know is the vital importance that software plays for businesses around the world. Software allows these businesses to automate or speed up almost any aspect of their operations to help solve a problem or increase a target metric like revenue or productivity. A recent trend that has blown up over the last few years is the purchase of SaaS by businesses; but why?

WHAT IS SAAS?

SaaS, or Software as a Service is the process of selling web-based software that customers access through an online portal (Barron 2022). SaaS is often sold as a subscription-based service so that users can either try the software before the decide to buy it long term or different versions of the software, so they don’t have to dive right in to it. Often times, SaaS comes with a cohesive customer support team to help you navigate the software, and sometimes a specified team to help program the software to your specific needs. Generally, SaaS is sold to two different groups: B2B (business-to-business) and B2C (business-to-consumer), but sometimes SaaS can be sold to both. Examples for each include Netflix for B2C, Microsoft Office Suite for B2C and B2B and Sales Force for B2C.

SELF-SERVING VS SERVICE SOFTWARE

As mentioned previously, SaaS is a newer trend in the software sales space which has evolved from the need self-serve software. The question is, why has SaaS grown so much off the decline of self-serving software? Well, I think the biggest reason for that is because SaaS companies understand that the companies they serve are unique and a one size fits all approach won’t cut it. This leads the top SaaS companies to trying to understand their customer better and providing service better than anyone else (Efti 2022). While Self-serving software may often be cheaper and sometimes less complex to use, often companies may run into problems in the software without a team to help them navigate it.

WHY SAAS IS SO IMPORTANT?        

With Saas, businesses can take advantage of a support team provided that is willing to customize and perfect software to fit their exact needs. This can lead to dramatic increase in not just revenue and productivity, but even employee and customer satisfaction by making day-to-day operations smoother for all parties involved. To best highlight the importance of SaaS, in 2022 companies with 50 to 99 employees utilize an average of 24 SaaS application, companies with 100 to 499 employees are double that and companies with over 1000 employees use an average of 177 Saas-based products (Ramakrishna 2022).

A MASSIVE MARKET

Because of this massive need in the business world, SaaS applications have become a 171.9-billion-dollar market worldwide with expected growth to be well beyond that over the coming years to 716.52 billion by 2028. This has led to many try to get in while they can and deliver their own SaaS solutions. In 2020, 41.12% of Brazilian startups were part of the SaaS sector (Howarth 2022) so as more and more SaaS applications become available, we must understand how these software solutions work, and how they apply to the businesses that we work in, and which ones can truly add value in helping solve solutions.