IDC #EUR145482319 Sage Infobrief

IDC #EUR145482319 Copyright IDC 2020 10 How to Become a Great SaaS Partner Customer success: Successful SaaS companies deploy new business strategies and functions to improve customer experience Selling SaaS requires a shift in how partners sustain relationships with their customers, necessitating a customer success strategy that: Exists to improve the customer experience holistically across the organisation Aims to ensure that customers achieve their desired outcomes Creates upsell, cross- sell and renewal opportunities for the partner What to think about as you transform your organisation for SaaS success: In a SaaS business, mitigating customer churn is vital and renewals are just as important as the initial sale. There must be an emphasis on value recognition, ensuring that customers extract the most value from the SaaS product throughout the lifetime of their contract to secure renewal. Because both pre-sales (e.g., marketing) and post- sales (e.g., services) have a critical influence on the customer experience, they also need to be incented on lead identification, retention and renewal. Existing compensation models need to adjust to incentivise the move to recurring revenue, upsell and renewals. 1 3 2 Successful SaaS partners expand their focus beyond the initial sale. Compensation models are geared towards maximising the revenue opportunity from each customer.