When faced with tough economic times, many B2B SaaS businesses struggle to keep their businesses afloat. With clients cutting down their B2B SaaS spending to survive the economic downturn, many B2B SaaS vendors find themselves unable to meet their financial obligations.
Keeping your business afloat during such times requires you to lower your costs. However, not all cost-cutting measures out there apply to B2B SaaS businesses. In this post, we’ll show you the right strategies that will not only help you weather the storm but also position you for long-term success in the face of economic uncertainties.
1. Offer Flexible Payment Plans
When times get tough, your B2B SaaS clients will look to cut costs and streamline their budgets. If they’ve been paying a hefty fee to access your B2B SaaS software, they may start to question the value of your product, especially if there are cheaper alternatives.
According to the Younium expert guide, offering flexible pricing plans to accommodate your B2B SaaS client’s varying financial constraints. Rather than prioritizing annual contracts, consider flexible options like monthly subscriptions and tiered pricing plans.
This will help you retain most of your clients as it allows them to scale down to an affordable plan when times are tough. A flexible payment plan also eases your client’s financial burdens since it doesn’t tie them to long-term contracts or high upfront costs.
A great example of a B2B SaaS with flexible pricing is Omnisend. The brand has tiered pricing with flexible monthly subscriptions to accommodate the varying financial needs of its customers.
Image via Omnisend
2. Cut Non-essential Costs
As the economic downturn persists, it’s crucial to trim non-essential expenses from your budget and only pay for what’s necessary. Evaluate your expenses keen to identify areas where you can reduce your costs or eliminate them completely without compromising the quality of your product.
This evaluation could push you to take the following measures to keep your B2B SaaS business afloat:
- Renegotiate contracts with vendors
- Consolidating software tools and services
- Optimizing your operations to minimize wastage
For instance, if you have separate software for email and SMS marketing, you can consolidate these services and get an all-in-one tool that can handle both functions.
Additionally, for ongoing company legal filing and compliance, you can use a low-cost business formation service provider like ZenBusiness which offers extra features like market research tools, branding packages, and tax planning. This Small Business HQ comparison post provides a detailed review of the plans and features offered by ZenBusiness and its alternatives.
However, there are instances when you may be required to take drastic cost-reduction measures to keep the business afloat. For example, if office rent is one of your major expenses, you may have to cancel your lease and have everyone work remotely.
Many B2B SaaS companies have found success with fully remote or hybrid work arrangements. Taking this measure can significantly reduce your business costs and free up funds for other essential activities.
3. Refine Your Sales Strategy
When times get tough, most B2B SaaS companies are quick to withdraw their sales budget. But rather than cutting your sales efforts entirely, Attrock recommends refining your sales strategy and focusing on cost-effective measures with the best returns.
For example, if your sales strategy entailed using influencers to promote your product, you can switch to a cheaper alternative like content marketing. In addition to it being cheaper to create and distribute content, content marketing offers the following benefits to B2B SaaS companies:
- It helps you establish thought leadership and authority in your niche
- Evergreen content has long-term value and will help generate leads consistently over time
- It gives you greater control over your messaging and brand image
- You can repurpose your content for different platforms to increase its reach and effectiveness
By shifting your sales focus to cost-effective measures like content marketing, you reduce your operating costs while continuing to generate leads for your business.
4. Automate Where Possible
Automation can also be an effective strategy to reduce your business costs during an economic downturn. Automating repetitive tasks and workflows can significantly reduce your operating expenses.
It also frees up your workforce to handle more strategic initiatives like developing cost-effective marketing strategies to improve your online presence. Some of the tasks you can automate to lower operating expenses and improve business efficiency include:
- Customer support
- Data entry
- Billing
- Social media posting
- Customer onboarding
By embracing automation, you reduce your reliance on manual labor and lower your payroll expenses.
5. Focus on Client Retention
Acquiring new customers for your B2B SaaS takes a lot of time and effort. With your business facing financial challenges because of the economic downturn, marketing your product effectively and acquiring new customers will only get tough.
But do you know what doesn’t require much effort and finances – retaining your customers. Your existing customers have already tried your product and found it effective in solving their problems.
This means that they don’t need much convincing to keep using your product. So, rather than spending your limited resources going after expensive new customers, focus on retaining your existing customers who are responsible for more than 70% of your revenues.
Image via Collective 54
Some of the strategies you can implement to retain your existing customers include:
- Offer discounts for renewals: Incentivize your current clients to renew their subscriptions by offering them discounts. Your clients are also going through a hard time and the discount could be the motivation they need to renew their contract.
- Provide exceptional customer support: Customers want to know that you care about them and are willing to help them when they run into challenges. Don’t neglect any issue they raise since this could see them cancel their subscription.
- Provide ongoing educational support: As the developer of your product, it’s your responsibility to help customers gain maximum value from it. You can help clients do this by regularly sending them helpful materials to teach them advanced techniques. This can be video tutorials, quickstart guides, and invites to educational webinars.
- Roll out regular product updates: Nothing will make your customers happier than regular updates that improve the value they get from the product. Introducing new features and improvements will make your customers eager to stick around to enjoy the enhanced product.
6. Rethink Hiring for the Moment
Tough times call for tough measures and one of those is to pause hiring until things return to normal. Hiring comes with many financial commitments that you don’t want to make during an economic downturn.
As such, you should pause any hiring for the moment and focus on maximizing the efficiency of your existing team.
What if the team lacks particular skills that are needed to perform certain crucial tasks? Well, you can hire a freelancer as a short-term measure. Freelancing platforms like Upwork, Fiverr, and TopTal exist to help businesses find high-quality talent in different sectors.
Simply publish the job requirements on the platform, review the proposals, and hire the freelancer with the skills and expertise you need.
FAQs
How do I keep my B2B SaaS costs low during a recession?
Suitable strategies for reducing your business costs during a recession include?
-Cutting non-essential costs
-Turning to cost-effective marketing strategies
-Automating your operations
-Focusing on client retention
-Pausing hiring for the moment
Which cost effective marketing strategy can I use to keep my B2B SaaS business costs low?
Content marketing is an affordable marketing strategy with great returns. It will help you establish thought leadership, generate and nurture leads, and increase your online visibility.
Which tasks can I automate to keep my operational costs low?
Some of the tasks you can automate to lower operating expenses and improve business efficiency include:
-Customer support
-Data entry
-Billing
-Social media posting
-Customer onboarding
What makes customer retention an effective strategy to reduce my business costs during a downturn?
Businesses should focus on customer retention because it’s cheaper to retain your existing customers than to acquire new ones. This is because your customers are aware of your product’s value. As such, it doesn’t take much to convince them to renew their subscription.
How can I deal with the issue of hiring during an economic downturn?
Rather than hiring full-time workers during this period, recruit freelancers with the skills and expertise you need to execute specific tasks in your organization.
Conclusion
In the face of an economic downturn, it’s crucial to reduce your expenses to keep your business afloat. The strategies discussed in this post will help you weather the storm without sacrificing the quality of your product or service.
