Why SaaS Channels Are Vital To SaaS Growth

“The biggest problem is that most SaaS investors and CEOs still want to control the customer from beginning to end and they see partners as a threat.” Sunir Shah, Founder of AppBind.

The subscription model of SaaS has led many SaaS founders and investors to think that they can scale through a 100 percent direct sales model. The fact is that partners are the key to many SaaS companies’ success.

I spoke with Sunir Shah about why SaaS channels are vital to SaaS growth in a recent Channel Journey’s Podcast. Sunir is a strong advocate for the SaaS Channel as founder of the Cloud Software Association, host of the SaaS Connect annual conference, and his own SaaS company AppBind.

Key Take-Aways:

• While the majority of SaaS is still sold direct, you can’t expect to own the entire customer experience or reach every customer in the world.
• SaaS growth is being limited by a lack of SaaS channels. While Gartner predicts SaaS revenue to reach $85 billion in 2019, Microsoft’s revenue alone is over $100B. The big difference is that Microsoft generates more than 95 percent of their business through partners.
• SaaS adoption is key to reducing churn, yet most SaaS companies attempt to handle the customer experience on their own or compete with their partners in providing on-boarding and adoption services. Partners have unique skills, reach, and relationships that you can leverage to drive higher adoption and retention.
• The SaaS Growth Ceiling is a trap you can reach where the number of customers your acquiring every month equals the number of customers who are turning away. One way out of the Growth Ceiling is to grow customer acquisition exponentially through SaaS channels.

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Read my 4 SaaS Channel Takeaways from SaaS Connect and Listen to the complete podcast to learn more Sunir and his mission to it easier for SaaS Channel partners to buy and manage multiple SaaS subscriptions they sell as part of their bundled service to their clients.

About The Author

Rob Spee is founder and CEO of Channel Journeys Consulting and host of the Channel Journeys podcast. Rob applies his channel expertise to help clients create and execute channel strategies to accelerate revenue growth. His global channel experience spans from building channels at startups to vendors and distributors like Arrow, BMC, Carbonite, and SAS. Follow Rob on Twitter and LinkedIn.