Tech Experts Explain How To Maximize SaaS Investments
Leveraging software as a service can provide significant advantages for businesses in need of tested digital solutions—particularly smaller companies that don’t have large (or any) in-house tech teams. However, maximizing the positive impact of this essential investment requires strategic implementation and ongoing management.
Simply purchasing a license for new software isn’t enough; organizations need a set of best practices to truly harness the potential of these tools and keep related costs in check. Below, members of Forbes Technology Council share actionable tips for optimizing your SaaS investments and aligning them with your organizational goals.
1. Align Software Selection With Strategic Goals
I recommend regularly aligning your software selection with your strategic goals. Keep evaluating its performance, and stay engaged with your provider. By integrating the software deeply into your processes and adapting as needed, you can ensure you’re leveraging its full potential for your business. – David Marley, Comply Exchange
2. Focus On Simplification To Support Innovation
There are two key principles in SaaS selection: Less is more, and make room for innovation. Make the trade-off of giving in to a little vendor lock-in for consolidating your stack, simplifying operations, maximizing your investment and reducing complexity. This strategic consolidation frees up resources, allowing your business to reserve alternative cutting-edge products for your most innovative departments. – Nick Herbert, Fujitsu
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3. Calculate Both Purchasing And Training Costs
Buying SaaS these days is easy; however, what really matters is usage. Therefore, it is important when buying SaaS services to not only include the purchasing costs in the budget, but also the time and costs for onboarding and ongoing training of internal employees, as people and services change. Lastly, measure the actual usage against available features, take action if usage is not sufficient, and make a plan to maximize usage and features. – Luboslava Uram, Solvd Group
4. Make Full Use Of The Available Features
Businesses need to ensure they’re leveraging all the features available within their SaaS deployments. SaaS technologies evolve rapidly, yet organizations often aren’t aware of the full breadth of capabilities and how those capabilities can help achieve business objectives. IT leaders must prioritize employing these solutions in ways that support their business goals, both for today and tomorrow. – Eric Helmer, Rimini Street
5. Track Usage And Outcomes
Enterprises and SMBs looking to maximize their return on SaaS investments should leverage data-led insights and analytics to track usage and outcomes, thereby ensuring that their solutions stack is delivering against strategic business goals. Embedding a data-driven approach can enhance productivity and efficiency while enabling an agile approach to solutions management. – David Grant, Westcon-Comstor
6. Try Before You Buy
Businesses can maximize their SaaS investments by taking a low-friction approach—such as “try before you buy” options and freemium models—to ensure software is easy to use, adopt, deploy and integrate into existing workflows. This allows teams to avoid the usual barriers to adoption and quickly determine a product’s value (or lack thereof) before making a long-term monetary commitment. – Andy Boyd, Appfire
7. Provide Ongoing Training For Users
To maximize the benefit of SaaS investments, businesses should focus on continuous training and onboarding. Regularly upskilling employees on the latest features ensures full utilization of the software. Additionally, leveraging data analytics to monitor usage and ROI helps identify gaps and optimize the tools to align with business goals, ensuring the software delivers maximum value. – Andrew Kucheriavy, Intechnic
8. Fully Integrate Tools Into Daily Workflows
One way businesses can ensure they’re getting the most benefit from their SaaS investments is by fully integrating these tools into their daily workflows and ensuring their teams are well-trained on how to use them. Too often, businesses invest in powerful SaaS solutions but fail to leverage their full potential because the tools are underutilized or not fully integrated into existing processes. – Itzik Levy, vcita
9. Set Goals For Success Up Front
To maximize SaaS investments, businesses should align on project objectives and measurements up front. Too often, we see misalignment in terms of both expectations and how improvements will be measured—especially during different phases of implementation. Plan to readdress project success measurements as you move from adoption to benefits realization, and don’t miss capturing your starting positions. – Jeff Moses, WorkForce Software
10. Work Closely With Your Vendor
Actively collaborate with your SaaS vendor to optimize the scalability, cybersecurity and future-proofing of the solution. This involves regular reviews and updates to the SaaS environment to ensure it aligns with evolving business needs, remains secure against emerging threats, and adapts to future technological advancements. – Andreas Pettersson, Arcules
11. Be Wary Of SaaS Sprawl
SaaS investments can lead to SaaS sprawl. Businesses can ensure they’re getting the most benefit from their investments by analyzing who is actually using software licenses and for what functions. Maybe someone tested a product and then found something better. Are the old licenses still active? Or perhaps only a handful of people actually need a license. Do an inventory! – Ann Westerheim, Ekaru
12. Have Your IT Department Manage SaaS Purchases
SaaS purchasing needs to be centralized in an organization’s IT department. Middle managers should not be allowed to buy tools with corporate credit cards and expand the company’s shadow IT. Otherwise, the zoo of applications will grow to an unmanageable cost factor with unfathomable risk. – Kevin Korte, Univention
13. Ensure The Solution ‘Plays Well’ With Other Applications
One of the best ways businesses can get value from a SaaS solution is by making sure that it can operate across environments and “play well” with other applications. Don’t let your vendor’s limitations restrict what your business can do—prioritize solutions that can work across on-premises and cloud environments and support extensible, standards-based integrations. – Jim Taylor, RSA Security
14. Analyze Integrations To Ensure Efficiency And Value
Companies buy SaaS to support business processes. They should carefully analyze the integrations connecting them to ensure workflows are boosting efficiency and removing data silos. With proper integration, companies can streamline operations and extract more value from existing SaaS investments, avoiding unnecessary purchases and creating an ecosystem that fully capitalizes on SaaS expenditures. – Rich Waldron, Tray.ai
15. Attend Vendor-Provided Webinars And Training
Businesses can maximize their SaaS investments by fully utilizing all the features. To ensure you’re doing so, participate in vendor webinars and training sessions and leverage professional services. These practices ensure companies extract the most value and efficiency from their SaaS tools. – Rajat Sharma, CWS
16. Ensure Your SaaS Solution Adapts Smoothly To Changing Needs
When it comes to SaaS, people, processes, technology and data are the key pillars of success. Outcome-based metrics are critical; working backward from these metrics, and keeping those pillars in mind, ensure your SaaS solution can constantly adapt to growing business needs and changes. It’s essential that added features are well-tested to ensure stability and consistency so that they cause minimal or no disruption for customers. – Vishal Patel, Webster Bank
17. Regularly Reevaluate ‘Build Or Buy’ Decisions
Revisiting “build or buy” decisions on a regular basis can help inform companies if the decisions they made while onboarding their current SaaS technologies are still relevant. Evolving business needs, a changing technology landscape and the arrival of new, more cost-effective competitors in the space can change the optimal choice for supporting strategic initiatives. – Agastya Kumar Komarraju, Amazon
18. Ask For The Vendor’s Input On Strategy
Leverage the service provider’s industry expertise by asking for feedback on your target operating models and three-year vision. This collaboration allows the provider to understand your business objectives and tailor their services to meet your specific needs. Since they often interact with other companies in your sector, the service provider can share insights and suggestions to optimize your strategy. – Alex Ford, Encompass Corporation