How to Set Revenue Goals for Your SaaS Business

The SaaS industry will continue to grow as more and more businesses adopt SaaS solutions to perform various business functions. They also empower consumers because of their accessibility, affordability, user-friendliness, and value delivery. Due to this, the SaaS market is estimated to be worth approximately $197 billion in 2023 and is expected to reach $232 billion by 2024.

The growth of the SaaS industry indicates the revenue potential of existing and upcoming SaaS businesses. But 90% of SaaS startups fail to achieve the desired level of success and fail to generate revenue. Although SaaS businesses can become growth giants in a short period, sustained growth determines their survival. Therefore, setting clear revenue goals is essential to ensure long-term growth.

In this article, we'll explore how you can set the revenue goals for your SaaS business. We will lay out the ingredients you need to develop a unique recipe for sustained growth for your SaaS tool. Let's dig deeper!

Setting revenue goals

Achieving something starts with setting a goal first. And every business aims to earn profit while sustainably providing value to its customers and securing its long-term future. Like any business, especially for a SaaS business, the initial focus is acquiring customers before profits flow in.

Set a goal: how much do you want to make in a quarter and a year? Different business factors will impact setting your goal, such as listed below:

• Market size and growth potential
• Pricing strategy
• Customer acquisition and retention
• Competitive landscape
• Customer Lifetime value
• Operational efficiency
• And more

Here's why setting revenue goals is crucial:

• Revenue goals provide clear focus and direction for the entire organization, so different business segments can prioritize activities and decisions contributing to revenue goals.

• Revenue goals serve as a foundation for financial planning, enabling SaaS businesses to forecast and allocate resources effectively. By setting revenue targets, companies can determine how much investment is required in areas such as product development, marketing, sales, and customer support.

• Without setting revenue goals, performance measurement is not possible. And without measurement, there can be no improvement or growth. Setting and tracking revenue goals is essential for course correction.
• Revenue goals help SaaS businesses to take a proactive approach to plan for scalability and growth. By setting ambitious yet achievable revenue targets, companies can identify expansion opportunities, such as entering new markets, developing new product offerings, or acquiring customers faster.
• Lastly, revenue goal setting can give SaaS businesses a competitive advantage by differentiating themselves from competitors, gaining market share, and becoming industry leaders.

Let's dig deeper into how you can leverage your sales and marketing to achieve your revenue goals.

Analyze your sales channel

When setting revenue goals for your SaaS business, analyzing the sales channel helps you understand its impact on revenue generation. It allows you to identify which channels perform well and contribute to lead generation and revenue growth. You can measure the number of leads each channel generates to determine what's driving the higher conversion rates. This information can help you allocate resources and set revenue goals accordingly.

Analyzing sales channel also leads you to identify underperforming channels (generating fewer or no leads), so you can focus on leveraging the capacity of channels that can generate more leads and revenue. You can ask the following key questions to inform your revenue goal-setting process.

• How many sales channels do you have? (helps you assess the breadth and diversity of your sales efforts)
• Which channels are creating more leads? (helps you set realistic revenue goals for those channels)
• Which channel is dead? (helps you make informed decisions about whether to discontinue or reallocate resources from those channels)
• Which channel has under-utilized potential? (helps identify channels that have untapped potential)

Analyze marketing efforts for each channel

Another important factor to consider while setting revenue goals for a SaaS business is analyzing the marketing efforts you put into each sales channel. This analysis allows you to assess the effectiveness of your marketing strategies in driving revenue.

By analyzing marketing efforts, you can determine which channels primarily focus on inbound marketing (attracting leads through content, SEO, etc.) and which channels focus on outbound marketing (direct outreach, advertising, etc.). These insight help optimize resource allocation by understanding each approach's relative impact and cost-effectiveness.

Continuous tracking of the data on marketing efforts for each sales channel helps identify successful strategies and tactics that have proven effective in driving revenue. Reviewing past sales performance, you can identify revenue trends, seasonality, growth, and conversion rates for each sales channel. The following questions can be helpful in setting revenue goals:

• How many channels focus on inbound marketing?
• How many channels focus on outbound marketing?
• How many sales have you made in the last quarter or year (historical data)?

Improve your marketing strategy

To improve the marketing strategy for a SaaS business and align it with your revenue goal, you can follow these steps:

• Back Engineer Sales Data: Start by analyzing your current sales data to understand the number of sales you're currently making. It will provide a baseline to measure your progress and determine how many additional sales you need to reach your revenue goal. Consider factors such as average deal size, conversion rates, and sales cycle length.
• Set Specific Marketing Goals: Based on the insights gained by understanding sales data, set specific marketing goals aligned with the number of sales you need to reach your revenue target. Break down the goals into actionable targets for each sales channel. For example, if you need to increase sales by 20%, determine how many additional leads or conversions you require from each channel to achieve that target.
• Optimize Your Marketing Strategy: Track key metrics such as website traffic, lead generation, conversion rates, and ROI for different marketing channels. Continue to review the performance of your marketing strategy to make data-driven decisions and make any necessary adjustments.

Optimize sales and marketing teams

Optimizing the sales and marketing teams can significantly contribute to helping SaaS businesses reach their revenue goals. It creates alignment of goals, strategies, and messaging. It establishes a shared understanding of the target audience, value proposition, and revenue objectives. The sales team can work closely with marketing to provide feedback on lead quality and collaborate on lead qualification processes.

Optimizing sales and marketing teams also means providing the sales team with the necessary tools, resources, and training to sell the SaaS product or solution effectively. Collaboration and communication between the sales and marketing teams foster a culture of feedback sharing. Regular meetings, shared dashboards, and open channels of communication help align efforts and drive revenue growth. Optimizing the sales and marketing teams directly or indirectly impacts lead generation, conversion rates, customer engagement, and overall revenue performance.

Hire new people or upskill the existing ones

Hiring skilled people or investing in existing employees' skills is another important element in helping SaaS businesses reach their revenue goals.

By filling the skill gap, SaaS companies can leverage specialized skills directly impacting revenue generation. For example, bringing in individuals with expertise in digital marketing, sales, customer success, or product management can enhance the team's overall capabilities. Hiring new employees can increase the capacity of the sales and marketing teams to handle larger workloads and engage with more prospects and customers. These individuals bring knowledge and experience in specific markets or regions that can help the company expand into new territories.

Hiring and upskilling employees contribute to immediate revenue goals and support long-term growth and succession planning. Developing future leaders within the organization ensures continuity, knowledge transfer, and the ability to sustain revenue growth in the future.

Invest in the right tools

Investing in the right sales and marketing tools improves efficiency and productivity by automating and streamlining repetitive and low-impact tasks. Some of the sales and marketing tools that SaaS businesses can consider using to reach revenue goals include:

• CRM Platforms: Salesforce, HubSpot CRM, Zoho CRM, Pipedrive
• Marketing Automation Tools: HubSpot Marketing, Marketo, Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign
• Email Marketing Tools: Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor, Constant Contact
• Content Management Systems (CMS): WordPress, Drupal, Joomla
• Social Media Management Tools: Hootsuite, Buffer, Sprout Social
• SEO Tools: Moz, SEMrush, Ahrefs
• Lead Generation Tools: Leadfeeder, OptinMonster, Clearbit
• Sales Enablement Tools: SalesLoft, Outreach, Showpad
• Analytics and Reporting Tools: Usermaven, Google Analytics, Mixpanel
• Collaboration Tools: Slack, Microsoft Teams, Trello, Asana

The specific choice of tools depends on the business's unique requirements, budget, and existing technology infrastructure. Evaluating and selecting tools that align with the organization's goals and contribute to driving revenue growth effectively is essential.

A/B test

A/B testing is a valuable technique that can help SaaS businesses identify opportunities to reach their revenue goals. Businesses can constantly learn and refine their strategies by testing and iterating on different variations of pricing strategies, a web page, a landing page, an email campaign, or any other marketing asset.

A/B testing helps improve the user experience by identifying the elements that positively impact user behavior. Businesses can optimize the user experience to reduce friction, increase engagement, and drive conversions by testing different user interface designs, navigation flows, or product features.

Another area where A/B testing can be applied is personalization and segmentation. It leads to tailoring content, offers, or recommendations based on specific customer segments so that businesses can deliver more relevant and targeted experiences. These sales and marketing approaches based on A/B testing help you find outliers and room for opportunity in sales and marketing data to reach your revenue goal.

Focus on retention

Acquiring new customers is far more challenging for businesses to reach revenue goals. Studies show that a 5% increase in customer retention can increase profits by 25 - 95%. Therefore, focusing more on retention than customer acquisition can help SaaS businesses meet revenue goals. Moreover, customer retention offers benefits such as increased customer lifetime value (CLTV), reduced churn and revenue leakage, reduced customer acquisition cost (CAC), cross & up-selling opportunities, etc. Focusing on retention is a more cost-effective and sustainable approach for the SaaS industry to maximize revenue potential.

Conclusion

Setting and meeting revenue goals is a long-term game that requires tuning the different segments of your SaaS business. While various successful strategies are being utilized by businesses across the SaaS industry, using the right tools is another leverage. Usermaven is one such tool that tracks customer behavior and compliments your marketing efforts.

It's a website and product analytics solution for marketers and product teams. You can understand and drive insights from your customer data to better address their needs with simple yet powerful analytics offered by Usermaven. You can:

• Effortlessly analyze marketing channels to increase ROI.
• Uncover user journeys to make an informed decision.
• Understand in-app user behavior to foster product-led growth.
• Get accurate stats with Adblocker bypassing and cookie-less tracking, all while respecting user privacy.

Try the tool for free without committing to see what Usermaven can do for your SaaS business!

FAQs

1. How to grow revenue in a SaaS company?

Implementing various strategies can allow SaaS companies to grow their revenue. The choice of the right strategy depends on your SaaS business and customer base. Some of the popular ones are listed below:

• Acquire more customers by improving your marketing efforts, lead generation, and affiliate programs.
• Increase customer retention by focusing on customer success, improving product quality, and offering flexible pricing plans.
• Expand into new markets or verticals, either local or international, and collaborate with complementary SaaS companies or technology platforms.

2. How do you set SaaS revenue goals?

Setting revenue goals for SaaS involves a combination of strategic planning, market analysis, and data-driven decision-making. The following steps can be helpful in setting SaaS revenue goals in a structured way.

1. Define your business objective and what you want to achieve. The objectives will give you a vision and direction.
2. Conduct market research to understand the dynamics and revenue potential for setting realistic goals.
3. Determine the market share you aim to capture within a specific timeframe. Research industry benchmarks and evaluate your competitive positioning.
4. Evaluate your pricing model and determine if adjustments are needed to optimize revenue generation. Consider tiered pricing, upselling, or packaging options to maximize revenue.
5. Consider customer acquisition and retention, utilize data, and measure KPIs to regularly track and adjust your progress toward revenue goals.

3. What is the average revenue of a SaaS company?

The average revenue of a SaaS company can vary significantly based on various factors such as the industry, target market, business model, size, and company stage. Generally, SaaS companies can be categorized into the following tiers based on their revenue.

• Early-stage startups: These SaaS startups have low revenues ranging from tens of thousands to a few hundred thousand dollars annually.
• Small to midsize SaaS: These midsize SaaS have annual revenues from a few thousand to several million dollars.
• Enterprise SaaS: These are established businesses with higher annual revenues of millions or tens of millions of dollars.
• Large-scale SaaS: These are high-growth SaaS companies, usually referred to as "unicorns," that generate hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars in annual revenue.