Three Fundamentals of a Winning B2B SaaS Offering

For a new SaaS product, it is important to have a robust MVP (minimum viable product). To create the MVP, you need to make sure that there is good coverage of a few areas, and reasonable coverage of fundamental user or buyer needs. The product team has to make several critical decisions to prioritize features in the MVP.

However, all great SaaS products cover the following three areas very well.

The business features to be monetized

A client will buy your product for their employees or users. To buy the product, a minimum set of business features are a must. These are the features that either offer parity with existing products or differentiate your offering from other products. Occasionally, certain CX or integrations capabilities are also described as differentiating business features. Salesforce Lightning Platform is one such example.
 Clients use this as the first basis of comparison (in different packages or payment models) with other products when buying a subscription.

 A robust cloud platform 

The platform is the key to supporting business, regulatory and user needs. A good cloud platform is infrastructure agnostic, and can support security and compliance needs, data movements and user life cycle at scale. It offers easy integration with existing IT infrastructure and simplifies the life of the application administrator. Architects and product owners must work with business product managers to ensure that the cloud platform can be built quickly and in increments.

Vertical or department specific features or rules

These are the domain specific business features that impact the usage of the SaaS offering in a vertical. Offering such features out of the box, is a distinct advantage compared to products that require significant configuration.
For example, a business may require configuration to prevent store employees from logging in outside working hours. If your application has a configuration screen to enable this, and easily set working hours, then that is a big plus for your user experience.

If your SaaS offering covers these 3 areas, then you can be confident that your clients are getting value from the MVP as it is enhanced.

Strategic Business Unit - On-premise or Traditional vs. Cloud Based

Here are two organizational charts that indicate how product business units have evolved in line with business strategy. [These organizational charts are based on conversations with clients and people in the industry, but do not represent any actual business unit]

The cloud business unit is mainly about the product

The traditional business unit was about the complete Marketing Mix, including the 4 Ps or sometimes the 7Ps.

This change has also impacted the way other departments now engage with the new SBU structure. Some points to note:

1. Finance, HR, Ops are usually centralized functions in a cloud SBU
2. Service delivery, configuration, customization, support, integration and other monetization possibilities have changed dramatically in the cloud. It is no longer possible to have year long delays in installation and configuration contracts, which did occur in on-premise installations. These teams now get fixed contracts and upgrades occur automatically.

3. Subscription pricing is very different from pricing for on-premise or app type products. Unless you are very careful in your pricing models, it is easy to occur losses. In fact, pricing is also getting centralized and moved under finance or corporate strategy teams.
4. Marketing is another function impacted significantly, with SEO/SEM gaining a big share of marketing spend.

In my next post, we will see how these, and other changes, have impacted the role of Product Manager and the Director, PM.