Is your SaaS app destined for success? Do you know how you are going to get customers to buy and get their colleagues hooked on your SaaS app?
Is your SaaS app destined for success?
Do you know how you are going to get customers to buy and get their colleagues hooked on your SaaS app?
Looking at some of the biggest and most expensive startup failures of all time may make building a successful SaaS app seem even more difficult than you imagined it would be. However, what most of them had in common was that they failed to create products that resonated with customers. Others ran out of money while trying to figure it out.
As a founder, it’s easily to become overwhelmed with the sheer amount of advice, information, and ‘hacks’ out there for building a successful SaaS company. However, none of these details actually matter if you don’t have what you need most: paying users!
Buyer personas are an essential component of SaaS application development and are the key to the profitability and long term success of your SaaS application. Without them, you have no idea who your customers are.
While every SaaS application is different, you can still identify trends. Using buyer personas takes characteristics that apply across all SaaS users to find the behaviors and demographics that applies to your ideal SaaS customers.
Here is why you need to develop buyer personas for your SaaS app.
What Are Buyer Personas?
Buyer personas are profiles that are designed to imitate the real customers of a product or service. A buyer persona is developed by taking user behaviors, sediments, pain points, and their needs and wants from data collected in order to personify a profile with these traits.
Instead of designing apps with a generic audience in mind, buyer personas help companies to tailor their products to specific groups of users with the goal of achieving mass adoption of the product by those users.
Companies often use demographics, such as age, sex, location, household income, education, and past purchase history in order to identify patterns in behaviors that can be used to create a buyer persona.
How Buyer Personas Facilitate the App Development Process
Buyer personas aren’t only important for your sales and marketing efforts. They actually facilitate the app development process. Buyer personas:
1. Promote Development Outcomes That are Focused on the Needs of Users
In order to create a SaaS app that will be successfully adopted by users, companies must ensure that the development process is focused on the needs of end users. Without this focus, the app may not resonate with users because it lacks the features that users want.
2. Keep Differences in Opinion From Derailing Development
Using buyer personas as the blueprint for the development of your SaaS app ensures that differences in opinion between the members of your team don’t derail the development process. When you use buyer personas, there will be no debates about what features the app should offer or who you are building it for.
As a result, this is an excellent way to eliminate disagreements during the conceptualization process. Buyer personas also help to effectively communicate development ideas to the development team members, project stakeholders and even end users.
3. Ensure That the Development Budget Is Used Effectively
Buyer personas also have the added benefit of helping to ensure that the SaaS app development budget is spent in the most efficient way possible. With buyer personas, the entire app strategy, from development to marketing, remains focused on satisfying the needs and desires of the members of the specific group.
Quantify Your Buyer Personas
However, it is not enough to simply create buyer personas that sound like actual customers. The buyer personas most also identify where there are opportunities for monetization and should lead to profitable outcomes for your SaaS app.
To quantify your buyer personas, consider these questions as you develop them:
- Are the buyers of your product actually the users of the product?
- What is the price that each user is willing to pay to use your SaaS app?
- What is the Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) of that user?
- What is the Lifetime Value (LTV) of that user?
- What features should be considered as standard features to that user?
- Which features are they least likely to care about?
Once you have comprehensive answers to these questions, then you need to figure out what the likelihood is that you could sell your product to 9 out of 10 of these individuals.
If the answer to that question is ‘yes,’ and your buyer personas are backed by data, then your company is positioned to dominate the market.
Creating Engaged Users Is the End Goal of Developing Buyer Personas
The most important thing to know about buyer personas is that they aren’t simply about finding people who are interested in purchasing your app. At the core of this strategy is finding a loyal user base that will remain engaged with your product.
As a result, this also means that your buyer personas should continue to evolve as your SaaS app grows. In fact, a recent study done by Cintell, found that 64.7% of companies who exceed lead and revenue goals have updated their buyer personas within the last 6 months.
Most SaaS companies create buyer personas as a part of the initial development process but then forget about updating them even as their service changes and they find out more about their users. However, you should always be reviewing them based on the data from surveys, user metrics, and general outreach so that you buyer personas are as accurate as possible.
Understanding who your audience is and why you are developing a SaaS app for them will undoubtedly improve the quality of your app and your marketing and sales efforts.
Let’s Talk About Your SaaS App
At Achievion, we have helped clients ranging from startups, to small businesses, to enterprises design, develop, and deploy SaaS applications. We’ve been there, we’ve done it, and we know how to help you succeed. Take 30 minutes with us to see if we are a good fit for your SaaS app project.
