If your SaaS product is readily pivotable into different scenarios, it can make the initial growth journey easier. The more flexible your product is for lots of different use cases, the more you’re able to pivot into various new opportunities with new customers, in pursuit of greater MRR, and therefore ARR.
In theory your ARR journey is accelerated if your product supports a high number of use cases, because:
The more potential leads you can go after - of which, a usual proportion should convert.
The larger your total addressable market - which means you can achieve a higher valuation and more funding, empowering you to go faster.
The more flexibility you have to allow a customer to adapt the use case during the sales cycle to whatever is most relevant to them - keeping that customer optimally engaged along that journey.
But once you’ve got greater traction, and you’re starting to scale, having such a breadth of applicability across so many markets can start to become obstructive.
With so many potential use cases for so many different types of customers, how do you focus your go to market resources? How do you prioritise finite product development capacity to always evolve the product in the most profitable direction? Which industries or customers become your most strategic or biggest bets?
In practice, as your SaaS company grows with accelerating speed, being so widely applicable to a diverse range of use cases runs the risk of actually inhibiting ARR growth.
Taking so many use cases to market will likely drive spiraling costs with diminishing returns in the following ways:
Spreading sales and marketing resources too thinly across too many use cases can result in a weakening of effectiveness, as focus is too stretched to really target and personalise go to market messaging in a way that draws in new customers (especially customers of enterprise size)
Without effective prioritisation, the time and energy of product management and engineering resources can be spent on developing less valuable features at the expense of high value features that would earn more or larger customers
Core subscribing customers may start to churn if their initial use case for your product is not continuing to be supported in such a way that maintains or increases the value they seek or expect over time
So the most valuable approach must balance the benefits of having a flexible product with the even greater benefits of having an aligned and targeted growth strategy.
And that balance can only be achieved with prioritisation. By strategically prioritising the use cases you’re taking to market, your go to market and product resources are given 1) clarity on where they should spend 80% of their time - as well as 2) freedom to spend the remaining 20% of time exploring expansion opportunities that could also grow ARR.
But whilst strategic prioritisation of use cases will facilitate optimal ARR, actually delivering on optimal ARR requires more than that. It requires very well oiled execution of your core business. Your core use cases must be well understood, well articulated and well rehearsed. Your teams must evolve your core product and take it to market in an aligned, informed and targeted way.
In other words, your 80% core revenue engine must be highly industrialised to achieve robust ARR growth results. The more industrialised your core revenue engine, the more powerful and profitable your whole operation becomes, and the greater the level of ARR achievable.
That’s where Expedeck can help. Expedeck industrialises your core use cases by crafting business-led, insight-rich go to market messaging and representing it in pitch decks, blogs and whitepapers. Expedeck content enables your teams to align around a winning strategy that delivers on ARR growth potential.
Contact Us to find out how we can help.
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