User Review
( votes)If you are a SaaS startup, chances are in the first few years you will spend anything from 80% to 120% of your revenue in sales & marketing. That’s before you pay for the office rent and talent, of course.
You will be paying $1.18 to acquire $1 in revenue from a new customer.
If you don’t manage to push your company’s growth to exceed the annual increase of 20%, you will cease to exist within a few years, just like 92% of SaaS startups do.
You will learn that you will generate twice as many paying customers from your free trial if you don’t request a credit card.
You will most likely get your call center to give a buzz to existing free trial users to increase the chances of conversion by a massive 70%.
But most importantly, you will quickly learn that sleep is overrated and you may consider calling your future daughter Arabica.
How do you get your SaaS startup to push the company’s growth above 20% a year, so that to squeeze into the minority of just 8% of surviving businesses?
This is exactly what we are going to deep-dive into in this piece: how to hack the system and find a better productive self with the help of CRM. Why CRM for SaaS startups is the air and fuel combined.
Ready for the worldly wisdom from the SaaS CRM, that made it to the Capterra’s top five CRM solutions?
Let’s get around to the Nimble crash course on how to harness the Gods of CRM to help your SaaS startup survive and thrive.
16 Reasons Why Startups Fail
What’s the best source to find out about the failure?
We took the data statistics of the 100 startups that failed and can give you some fun insights based on that data [it’s kinda convenient to have 100 companies analyzed, as every company is 1%]:
As you can see from both tables below, the top causes of startup failure are:
- Competition – 15%
- Bad Business Model – 14%
- Mix of Reasons – 11%
- Legal challenges – 7%
- Lack of funds – 7%
- Acquisition flu – 7%
- Mismanagement of funds – 6%
When it comes to the number of funding rounds that startups manage to go through before disappearing for this or that reason, over a third of 100 companies on this list gave up after the 1st round of investment. Slightly less than a quarter after the second round of funding and another 14% after the 3rd round.
Which boils down to 3/4th of all failed startups never make it to the 4th round of funding,
From this table, it’s obvious that most of the startups – 69% – are failing in between the 2nd and 5th year of existence. 12% don’t even make it to the second year.
Feel free to check out the sheet itself [it has more pivot tables for your analysis], downloadable here.
What’s Wrong With Your Startup Productivity, Time & Task Management?
If you look at the reasons why companies fail, you will see competition as the number 1 cause of failure. But if you think of it, if your competition wins, it means you were not fast enough, smart enough, heavy enough to pull enough market share.
In each of those reasons, efficiencies could become a make it or break it factor.
Lack of funds?
Could you have a better overview of the process with a dashboard screen so that to notice your churn rate is too high and ensure funding on time?
Lack of experience?
Could that be the case, that with the right outreach to mentors and consistent attendance of industry forums and meetups, founders could have lifted their level of subject knowledge enough to keep the business afloat?
Mismanagement of funds?
Is that possible, that with the proper planning in the CRM and integration with accounting software solutions with Zapier, your CRM SaaS solution could have helped to spot the overspend or inappropriate budget distribution?
SubPar Marketing?
SaaS CRM software is great in helping to plan & implement marketing strategy. Nimble is social media-based, so it has marketing embedded in its DNA.
Teams are only fresh in startups, founders are often new to the business, processes are rather chaotic and irregular.
What you need in the world of chaos and permanent state of urgency and missed deadlines is a proper CRM.
Get yourself a reliable Customer Relations Management System and start seeing discipline reside in your office.
How Does CRM Software for SaaS Work?
CRM tools for startups usually function as per the following principle:
- You feed or upload contact data into CRM either via a spreadsheet, from your current CRM, from email and social media accounts, or any apps having integrations with Zapier [2000 apps now and growing].
- Users can then integrate their calendars & reminders with a system to conveniently manage their schedule and appoint/cancel meetings from one place.
- Connecting with GDrive, Dropbox and other currently used file management applications is also an option. This step allows for easy access to templates & shared docs from anywhere within CRM.
- Team members can get different levels of access to contacts, deals, pipelines so that to ensure proper time management, task assignment, delegation & control process over the entire spectrum of team workload.
- Tagging & segmentation features can be used for contacts, deals, pipelines to convert any data point into the subject of analytics & reporting. Now, users can measure everything. Thus they can improve everything.
What To Look For In CRM Solutions For SaaS Startups
Usability: No Manuals Needed
Ease of use is important for several reasons. In a startup environment, you don’t have the time to master a plethora of applications. Best SaaS CRM tools are supposed to make your life easier, not harder. The new team member onboarding process is so much easier when your CRM software provider took care of the high usability and educational webinars.
Integrations
Data needs to flow seamlessly from one app to another. Nimble is fully compatible with the Zapier menu of over 2000 top software solutions.
Pricing: Value For Money Index
Software tools pricing is a huge factor for small and medium businesses. Pay attention to monthly vs annual billing fees, if they are per user, per team, or have other limitations. Some CRMs for enterprise-level deployment will require a hefty set-up fee.
Free Trial – Good Sign
OK, free trial signals one thing: software developers are confident, the product is as good, as to convert from free to a paid version. Good sign.
Set up a Process
Most of the best CRMs for SaaS startups will be based on SaaS technology themselves. So the setup process should be fairly easy and intuitive. If you are keen to order a CRM with on-premise deployment for some reason, a team of IT experts might be needed to ensure a smooth installation.
Functionality: Extensive Menu Of Features
There is an app for every action nowadays. But needless to say, it’s convenient to have a tight tech stack, that doesn’t confuse the team. The more features your CRM has, the better.
Nimble CRM combines social media, calendar, scheduling & reminders, email marketing, contact management, task management, and many more useful functions, for example.
Scalability: Fitting Your Ambitions
If you are hoping for a marathon, not a sprint, ensuring that your CRM can scale with your startup is a great idea too. You become addicted to your tools, so even with seamless integrations, changing tools is a painstaking process.
How To Use Nimble CRM For SaaS Startups
Focus On: SaaS Client Onboarding
A new SaaS startup client costs more than is capable of bringing initially. So you need to make sure the onboarding funnel is as tight as possible with any potential leakage minimized along the way.
Get a seamless integration of your customer into the CRM database, enrich sales data on the way and start handling any further marketing funnel steps, like drip email campaigns, monitoring your churn rate, understanding patterns, and more.
SaaS CRM software: Automate Your Tasks
SaaS startup growth hugely depends on several pillars, like planning, time management, efficiencies. All of those are side effects of CRM usage.
When you automate your task management, pipeline & customer management, chances grow that your startup may get into the 8% of the startups that make it.
Sales Activities On You Radar
Sales & customer dashboard is your mission control center. Plan, track, assign, distribute, postpone, cancel, measure, report your sales team workflow like Elon Musk controlled the launch of SpaceX.
Analytics: Measure, So You Can Improve
Figures don’t lie. In business, as in art, you need to step back to see the picture. This is why reports are so great – they allow startup entrepreneurs to see the full picture of their business. To pick the trends, to diagnose the dips, to timely pinpoint the disasters.
Turn Email From A Kitchen Knife Into Your Bazooka
Emails are amazing in marketing and sales, we know.
SaaS CRM vendors try and integrate as many features in their email module as possible. Nimble CRM has packed the email functionality packed-full of useful features, so you really feel like your kitchen knife has become a massive bazooka.
Send and schedule group-email, track click & open rate, store, and share templates from the comfort of your CRM inbox.
Nurture Relationships With Partners & Stakeholders
Nimble’s extensive social profile matching and enrichment feature is a fuel turning your relationships from the dry business like grilled bun into a delish burger with a juicy perfectly grilled patty, Dijon mustard, and smoky paprika sauce.
You are never lost for a conversational topic or an icebreaker. Your vendors, clients, partners are an open book that you love reading.
Sales Pipeline Management On Steroids: The Deal Closing Machine
The pipeline management module is of utter importance in any business, but when it comes to startups, this is where you cannot afford to go wrong with your pipeline.
Nimble CRM knows the importance of well-controlled, smooth pipeline management, this is why we created a clean, no-nonsense deal pipeline. Get a firm grip on the deals, so you can timely address the weaker areas of the funnel.
How to Select The Right CRM
Best CRMs for SaaS companies will help to make a good idea great, inexperienced founders grow their entrepreneurial skills faster, relationships with stakeholders stronger, and schedules more streamlined.
When selecting a Customer Relations Management software for your startup, ensure to:
- Check rankings & reviews [Capterra, G2]
- Take advantage of the free trial [Nimble offers 2 weeks free trial with no credit card requirements]
- Ensure seamless integration is possible via Zapier
Why Choose Nimble CRM For A SaaS Startup?
Nimble is a good match for a CRM for SaaS business for a plethora of reasons:
- We are a successful SaaS, and we literally built the service taking into account our company’s needs.
- We cost $19 per annum per user – we know things may get tough with cash flow at the beginning of an entrepreneurial path, so we take care to be affordable.
- Our 140K+ clients are from a diverse range of businesses, so all features are universal and customizable to fit your needs.
- Usability is in our pixel-stream. You can click your way through the system even if you never watched one minute of our webinars.
- We are confident you will love it, our free trial conversion rates prove this month in month out.
Make your own judgment by trying Nimble for free for 2 weeks. Sign up now!
