Small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) have to do more with less. Often, the software solutions that utilize expensive hosted servers and require a team to manage are out of reach due to time to implement and cost.
SMBs are better served by SaaS products that are designed to be cost effective, quick to get started, and can scale with your company. SaaS products are the right amount of value for the size and stage of your SMB.
But there are many SaaS products out there. Which ones are worth your time and provide cost savings and time efficiencies? Let’s find out.
What is a SaaS Product?
SaaS companies offer software to customers that is accessed at any time, anywhere in exchange for a monthly or annual subscription. Companies like Salesforce, Twilio, and Dropbox are examples of SaaS companies that use a SaaS Framework to run their business.
Typically, a SaaS company offers their product to customers via a web interface that can be accessed on desktop and mobile devices. SaaS companies sell to businesses, consumers, and sometimes both at the same time.
SaaS products take care of the backend headaches of servers and security, while also providing integrations with many of the current products customers use and keep the product updated and evolving with customer needs.
Advantages of SaaS Products
- Access: SaaS solutions allow for access to the software service nearly everywhere with an internet connection. Your phone, tablet, laptop, desktop, and any other internet connected device can utilize SaaS products.
- Redundancy: SaaS solutions typically incorporate multiple servers in multiple geographic regions, which means your uptime is greater than what is offered by a hosted solution.
- Maintenance: SaaS solutions provide the benefits of the cloud, but without the maintenance expense. Under a hosted solution, maintaining a server and dedicating resources to a full-time position to keep your software available and updated is a large expense that most companies would gain little value out of.
- Cost: Cost of renting, maintaining, and hiring qualified personnel to maintain a hosted solution is high. SaaS solutions are cheaper because they build economies of scale by offering the service to many people and specialize in providing that solution utilizing cloud computing services. Their cost is lower and your cost is lower.
- Scalability: Hosted solutions often rack up significant restructuring costs as technical demands grow, under the SaaS model, additional licenses and increased functionality can be added easily, often with a click of a button.
Communication & Commerce Tools
#1 Slack
Slack became the dominant alternative to email and spawned a revolution in how SaaS companies communicate internally. In addition to a great communication tool, Slack integrates with many SaaS tools you already use like Google Docs and Office 365, and 2,200+ others.
Slack is critical to fully and partially distributed teams to keep work running efficiently and communication channels open.
#2 Confluence
Confluence is a place SaaS companies can store their policies, internal working documents, and even designs in a searchable wiki. It also integrates with other Atlassian products like Jira and Bitbucket.
Confluence also provides the ability to mention teammates, easy version control, and the ability to use pre-made or your own custom built templates.
#3 Notion
Notion calls itself the missing half of Slack and is a wiki style collaboration tool that utilizes databases and views to organize your SaaS company. There are templates and tools for the product, engineering, HR, design, sale, and marketing, and customer success teams. Notion also offers the ability to embed your other SaaS tools.
#4 Asana
Asana is a communications and project management tool.
“From the small stuff to the big picture, Asana organizes work so teams know what to do, why it matters, and how to get it done.”
Asana offers Gantt, Kanban, and spreadsheet views of your company’s tasks and goals providing a single source of truth across your SaaS company.
#5 Grasshopper
In the era of bringing your own devices to work, companies need to provide a way for employees to use their personal phone for your SaaS business. Grasshopper sets up a virtual phone system with separate messaging and phone services for business.
A handy feature is the ability for Grasshopper to auto-text reply to a missed call to keep them from trying to call multiple numbers to get a live person. This provides a better experience for your customers.
#6 Mailchimp
Mailchimp was initially an email marketing platform, but has expanded into offering landing pages, websites, appointments scheduling, and social media management. They make creating marketing email campaigns easy with drag and drop elements and intuitive automations so you can set up a sequence of emails based on customer personas or landing pages accessed.
Automated emails sequences save time and you can even set up A/B testing by running multiple sequences sent to smaller batches of customers to see which sequence is optimal. Mailchimp provides everything you need to get your SaaS small business marketing through multiple channels in no time.
#7 Campaigner
Campaigner is a marketing channel automation suite of tools that include SMS text message marketing. Marketing emails are created in a drag and drop builder that will save time in formatting and layout. In addition to landing page creation tools, Campaigner provides your SaaS small business conversion tracking tools that are simple to set up and easy to understand.
Gaining clarity in your conversions is essential and SaaS small businesses do not have the time our resources to set up a complex system for tracking conversions. Campaigner takes the hassle out of conversion tracking and automates your marketing message delivery.
#8 Shopify
Shopify is the dominant ecommerce platform that is easy to setup and suitable for early-stage SaaS startups, mature SaaS small businesses, and everyone in-between. With hundreds of templates and even more plugins, the Shopify ecosystem allows for flexibility at an affordable price.
Ecommerce is the lifeblood of a SaaS small business. Shopify is a helpful partner in ensuring customers can find you, understand what you have to offer, complete a transaction, and doing all of this without requiring a developer to engineer the whole experience.
#9 Hootsuite
Hootsuite is known for its Twitter social media management, but it also offers other social media channel automation and management like YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Hootsuite offers SaaS small businesses the ability to set up multiple posts for multiple social media channels ahead of time, so you can set it and forget it each week.
Hootsuite also provides social media analytics tools to measure your campaigns and assess whether your marketing strategy needs adjustment. This software saves you time thinking about setting posts up each day for each channel, and then assessing metrics for each one separately. Save days of work with Hootsuite.
#10 Zoom
Zoom is now synonymous with online meetings and conferences. With hybrid and fully remote work becoming the norm for SaaS small businesses, Zoom is both the go to brand and a change in culture.
Zoom allows you to set up web video and telephonic conferencing in one session. You can also share your screen, host events, and create “breakout rooms” to provide different experiences for your viewers and collaborators. Zoom also provides chat and phone service making it the easy choice for your SaaS small business needs.
Project Management & Automation
#1 Trello
Many SaaS small businesses utilize a form of project management process like Agile or Scrum, that use a Kanban board. The method, developed by the Japanese corporation Toyota Motors, involves placing cards in a section like “backlog,” “In Progress,” or “Done,” to name a few. This allows you to see the flow of work and where there might be blockers or opportunities.
Trello digitizes the Kanban system to create an efficient project management and workflow tool that has numerous integrations with software you already use like Google or Outlook Calendar, as well as Confluence and Bitbucket. Collaborate with your team and watch as work is completed and new work is added.
#2 Jira
Jira is a software team focused digital Kanban board similar to Trello. Owned by the same parent company, Atlassian, the main difference is that Jira tightly integrates with Bitbucket, the code collaboration tool from Atlassian. For SaaS small businesses, you cannot waste developer time trying to create an organization system and Jira allows for quick understanding of work in progress, blockers, and the ability to track developer team velocity, or generally how fast they can ship features and squash bugs.
#3 Zapier
Zapier provides easy automation of over 3,000 applications like Slack, Google Drive, and Dropbox to send data where you need it without complicated coding or data engineering. This no-code solution is ideal for optimizing SaaS small business operations at little expense.
Financial & Accounting Tools
#1 Gusto
Gusto is your HR and payroll best friend. This SaaS tool is indispensable when your SaaS small business begins to hire employees. They assist you with easy to use tools for payroll setup and interface with employees to reduce your overhead. Additionally, they make it simple to create health and life insurance programs for your employees and offer support to get your employee’s questions answered.
#2 Freshbooks
Freshbooks targets SaaS small businesses by providing easy to use accounting software. Features include invoicing, mileage tracking, and time tracking. There are multiple integrations including Gusto, Shopify, Hubspot and Outlook. Freshbooks provides reporting on how your business is doing so you can understand your cash flow, burn rate, and where you might need to improve your business financially.
#3 Intuit Quickbooks Online Plus
Quickbooks is a leader in accounting software. Quickbooks Online Plus allows SaaS small businesses to manage labor costs, payroll, and expenses through a dashboard and reports. There is even a feature that lets you see projections of profit and loss.
If your SaaS small business is a blend of employees and contractors, Quickbooks offers a way to manage it all in one place.
Sales / Marketing / Customer Success
#1 Hubspot
Hubspot offers a marketing, sales, and customer service suite of tools that will power your SaaS small business growth engine. With a free CRM to start, Hubspot walks through all the steps necessary to grow your business with their Hubspot Academy. Whether you are planning out your content marketing strategy or need to track the numerous emails you have sent each prospective customer, Hubspot offers professional tools to accelerate you growth.
#2 Pipedrive
Pipedrive is a focused tool for the Savvy sales team. SaaS small businesses need to log prospects and keep the sales pipeline full. Pipedrive does just that with easy to understand dealflows and easy reporting. Pipedrive claims that using their software helps you sell 28 percent more and they have a free trial. What do you have to lose?
#3 Happy Fox
SaaS small businesses live and die based on their reputation and positive customer referrals. A solid customer support software setup and team are critical. Happy Fox provides a ticketing system to track support tickets, automation to increase efficiency, a knowledge base for self-service customer support and reports to track your successes and learn from your failures.