SaaS and Working From Home

November 2020

Welcome to the November Cirrostratus Group newsletter.

SaaS and other technology businesses have typically always had remote workers so they have had a head start on how to enable and empower employees working at home during the pandemic. SaaS applications have also enabled enterprise and SMB employees to work at home by enabling easy access to shared applications and data and by providing much needed functionality like video meetings. But will this trend continue after the pandemic is over? Based on some of the information below the answer is likely yes, but to a lesser extent. Hybrid models and flexibility will likely continue at a much higher level than before.

Is your SaaS business at the stage to expand? Take a look at some of the benchmarks and guidance below on how grow your SaaS business.

I'm always interested in hearing about your cloud applications.

Paul Ressler

The Cirrostratus Group

SaaS and Working From Home

Many of us have been exclusively working at home over the past months but we can always use ideas to make it work better and here is an excellent list of practical work at home tips from Openview Partners.

Recent reports indicate that working from home will continue to be done even after the pandemic is over. This article from the BBC has a lot of different perspectives from a variety of international experts on what the world of work will look like post pandemic. This article from Global Workplace Analytics talks specifically about how much remote work is likely post pandemic. This information is useful to understand how much of your product functionality to support remote work is likely to be important in the longer term. Looks like in general a hybrid type of work model is likely to be in place for a good portion of the knowledge worker population and making sure your application creatively supports this model is important.

One of the most important areas of SaaS tools which enable working at home is applications that enable video and other types of communication. Gartner just released their Magic Quadrant for Meeting Solutions and the Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications as a Service.

SaaS Benchmarks for Growing Your Business in the Expansion Stage

Openview Partners recently published the results from their 2020 Expansion SaaS Benchmarks. These benchmarks are of interest because they are one of the first comprehensive SaaS surveys available which gives some perspective after COVID had been around for a couple months.

Although the results state strongly that enterprise SaaS is recession proof I think that is stated a little too strongly. Q2 was a recession and enterprise SaaS did well during the quarter. A surprising number of SaaS businesses, over one third, indicated that COVID had little to no impact on their business. However, over 20% of SaaS businesses were impacted substantially. Of course some vertical applications, such as hospitality, have been significantly impacted.

Sales and marketing expense fell significantly year over year, because of discretionary expense cuts to deal with COVID. However SaaS businesses were generally able to retain their customers and indications are that customers are willing to buy. However, due to lower sales and marketing expenses revenue growth is lower. This indicates that there is an opportunity for revenue growth for many SaaS businesses if they spend more on sales and marketing.

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