As a Technology and SaaS company, you’re managing leads, sales, deals, and likely managing subscriptions. Perhaps you are even using Zoho apps to do it. With Zoho CRM, Zoho Desk, Zoho Subscriptions, and Zoho Books implementations, capturing your data across the business is covered.  It’s a great start to business problem solving.

But are you using that data to the fullest? 

Are you keeping an eye on the correct metrics for your Key Performance Indicators? In this article we share the top three problems that we see a lot of Technology, Saas, CaaS, TaaS, and Subscription-based businesses contend with and how to solve them. Keep reading to ensure that you’re resolving these possible lapses in reporting. Avoid these pitfalls that could be leaving a hole in your potential revenue.

Problem 1: You’re Losing Track of Subscriptions or Recurring Revenue

Some businesses use deals to keep track of annual subscriptions or contracts, but depending on your contract structure, this can lead to a case of counting your chickens before they’ve hatched. Keeping an eye on your KPI’s slightly shorter-term will give you a more accurate pulse on the health of the business. Business problem solving can start by tracking Monthly Recurring Revenue. 

What is Monthly Recurring Revenue?

“Regardless of your subscription model, monthly recurring revenue as a KPI is foundational to your business. Take the total number of paying clients by the average revenue per customer to achieve this figure. Straightforward really, but if you have a lot of pricing variants, it can get sticky. (Bonus points if you can segment your recurring revenue by new vs existing clients.) Taking into account your known churn rate when looking at MRR could give you insight into whether or not it’s time to acquire more accounts.”

Keep your Monthly Recurring Revenue data at hand when you add this metric to your executive dashboard. In Zoho CRM, or Zoho Analytics depending on your business need, you’ll be able to bring this KPI front and center, with the ability to drill down for specifics when you need them. You won’t lose track of subscriptions or recurring revenue as easily when you make it part of your organization’s KPI’s.

Problem 2: Your Quoting, Job Costing, and/or Sales Process is Complex

As the market space for SaaS and Tech businesses continues expanding, so must the service and product offering of many organizations. If your business model includes software services, plus physical equipment – and maybe even installation – then your quoting complexity certainly goes up a notch. 

Here’s a quick bonus tip: With a solution such as a custom Zoho CPQ tool, built on Zoho Creator your org can use your own factors, triggers, and calculations. Then you’re able to assemble quotes that include software, hardware, and  services. (P.S. The app includes a quote configurator, as well as kitting or bundling!) 

With complex businesses, and complex quoting, so exists a complex and often longer-term sales process. They can be difficult to keep tabs on. This is where having the right tools and a handle on the right KPI’s can really help. Start by asking yourself some questions geared toward business problem solving. For example, do you know with certainty:

• • How many new deals are in your pipeline right now? 
  • Which deals are closing this week?
  • Do you have a deal that started out promising that is now going stale? 
  • Do you know why? 

There’s a KPI for that! Here we provided a little bonus tool suggestion with the customer Zoho CPQ tool. However, we recommend a very common tool with far-reaching KPI’s to keep tabs on quotes, your open deals, deals with subscriptions renewing soon, and more. It’s a sales pipeline.

Use a Sales Pipeline in Zoho CRM, in tandem with your custom Zoho CPQ tool, to have quick insight and a connection between the data in your deals and your sales process. Tracking pipeline data can help you:

• • Know when it’s time to dive into issues with sales staff, saving time and maybe even saving a few deals your org might have lost due to inattentiveness.
  • Identify patterns in pipeline data to help you identify your ideal customer to target as you search for new leads.
  • And if you are dealing with complex quotes and long sales cycles, you can also see when customers are dropping off at certain stages of the cycle. You’ll know the seat of the problem and won’t have to guess where to start adjusting your sales process.

This insight from an integrated Zoho solution can solve for complex sales processes and mean a big leg up against your competitors.

Problem 3: You Don’t Know if Your Current Clients are Happy.

Anecdotally, you can poll your sales staff on behalf of clients. Or you can talk to a few customers to find out what they do or don’t like about your offering. However, without an active effort to utilize data from Zoho CRM, Zoho Survey, and potentially custom Zoho Creator functions in this process, you may never know the full story. If this sounds familiar, actively start business problem solving for customer satisfaction.

Are there things you could be doing differently to ensure happy customers and what are they?

We suggest three KPI’s to track, both lead and lag measures. They can help you understand objectively if your clients are happy. This mix of KPI metrics provides a rounded set of information to indicate the overall health of your existing customer base. 

First, Churn Rate. 

The SaaS industry average is said to be between 5-7% annually. Do you know yours?

The outlay of cost (CAC) to acquire a new client is usually significantly greater than the cost of maintaining an existing customer. Right off the bat, this is a bonus because the lower your churn rate, the less you may have to invest in acquisition. Satisfied clients aren’t generally searching for new business solutions. So for this reason, we recommend keeping tabs on Churn Rate as a lag indicator of customer satisfaction. To do this, use Zoho tools to calculate the percentage of your cumulative cancellations over your cumulative sign-ups every month. 

Secondly, On-Time Delivery. 

On-Time Delivery is a process metric that can tell you if your operations are working as intended. However, on-time delivery can double as a lead measure for customer satisfaction. In most cases, if your staff have promised a delivery date, and it has lapsed (calculated as a rate of deliverables made on time) there’s a very good chance that customer perception will be impacted. Knowing your baseline for on-time delivery, and acknowledging anomalies alongside other satisfaction metrics could be a simple way to stay aware of potential negative trends.

And if you need assistance with this or any KPI’s, Zoho’s many tools are indispensable. Zoho’s almost endlessly customizable with the Creator app. It allows you to create the features you need to capture the data your org needs including on-time delivery and churn rate. Zoho Creator  puts the tools to innovate and improve squarely into your hands.

Finally, Net Promoter Score. 

Net Promoter Score is used widely to measure customer satisfaction. Zoho Survey is a perfect tool for measuring this, and straightforward to do. With a single question, customers are identified as Promoters, Passive, or Detractors. We suggest adding in a comment field in order to collect statements if your customers wish to leave one. Using the quantitative data of the 1-10 rating, alongside the qualitative comment data, you open the door to actionable insights.

Ready to start solving business problems and empowering your organization through better use of the data you’re collecting? Instead of leaving it to chance, contact us for an assessment that’s geared specifically to your business. Whether you’re in SaaS, other technology, or you use subscriptions in any form, the ZBrains team of Zoho Certified Consultants are eager to help.