In an ever-evolving digital landscape, running a software-as-a-service (SaaS) business presents unique challenges and opportunities. Over the years, we at Zoey have navigated this space, learning invaluable lessons and evolving our strategies to better serve our customers. While our journey has been unique, many of these insights are universal and could be beneficial to businesses of all stripes. With that in mind, we’ve decided to share four key lessons we’ve gleaned from our journey of building Zoey into a successful SaaS business.
1. You Don’t Need to Do Everything In-House
One of the biggest lessons we’ve learned is that we don’t need to do everything ourselves. Sometimes it pays to outsource work to specialized partners. You may have learned this same lesson in the process of building your business.
For instance, when Zoey got started, we attempted to handle various billing scenarios in-house. Eventually, we shifted to using a solution, Chargify, to handle all sorts of scenarios like expired cards and payment failures. We not only got engineering and customer service support time back, but we get features we probably wouldn’t have had if we had to maintain it ourselves.
Over time, we’ve expanded our use of third parties when it simply doesn’t make sense to have a resource working certain aspects on a part-time basis, or when more specialized knowledge can be valuable.
As our organization grows, we can always evaluate when the time is right to bring these resources in-house, but for now, it gives us access to valuable expertise that we simply couldn’t justify on a smaller staff level.
2. Customer Service is Paramount
The number of stories we hear from various sales conversations about how difficult it can be to get a company to respond is surprising. This isn’t just trying to ask a support question, but can even bleed into reaching a salesperson. Why should it be so difficult to get support for a solution? Even worse, we often see the problem is more pronounced on SaaS solutions, where you’re more reliant on the solution for support.
That’s why we’ve made customer support a consistent priority as we grow, whether during the sales process, site buildout or post-launch period. When our sellers are getting set up, we have a unique process that’s designed to make getting up and running on Zoey easier. When our customers have a support question, our response time can be measured in business hours, not days, so they can get the answers they need and move on to other tasks.
Our focus on support has borne out in not only customer feedback, but recognition by companies like SoftwareReviews and Featured Customers, who use customer feedback of those who use the platforms as a guide for who deserves recognition.
3. Zig When Others Zag
It’s important to stand out in a sea of others who claim to be working in the same space you are, as that can make it easiest to stand out.
For instance, Zoey offers a more complete suite of B2B Ecommerce offerings in part because we put B2B Ecommerce at the forefront of what we do. Many of our competitors see B2B Ecommerce as an additional area they can cover while offering something else as their primary offering.
The difference is Zoey can think about, and solve, common B2B Ecommerce problems full time, whereas our competition generally can’t or won’t. As a result, you’ll find features we have that they don’t, and features that are more fully fleshed out and flexible than theirs are. Just look at the capabilities we offer such as Net Terms, multi-buyer accounts and our Visual Design Editor, and compare it to what others have. You’ll see what we mean.
4. Listen to Your Customers
We are constantly evolving Zoey, and much of that evolution comes directly from the feedback of our customers. We’re constantly learning the pain points they have, large and small, and adapting Zoey to be able to assist with them.
This sometimes means businesses have multiple ways to resolve a workflow issue, and we’re able to accommodate methods that can work with any of those ways. In others, it means updating our capabilities when we learn of use cases we hadn’t envisioned when we launched a feature.
Even though we’ve been in business for nearly a decade, there’s still a lot more we can do to make B2B Ecommerce simple, and we continue to expand Zoey’s feature set to support more and more of what our customers are looking for in a solution.
Learn More About Zoey Today
Take a look at how we pivoted to stand out in the world of B2B Ecommerce platforms, by getting your own customized demo of Zoey. We’ll help you see how our comprehensive feature set can transform your business:
