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Free Poster: The Anatomy of a SaaS Business

At ChartMogul we’re constantly thinking about how to visualize the SaaS industry and the structure of SaaS businesses – it’s always great to convey concepts in a highly visual way that stick in the mind of the reader. We like to put things on our office wall, too – and now so can you, with this free download!

We’ve all seen the typical leaky bucket illustration, often used to represent Revenue Churn in a SaaS business. To be fair, although somewhat over-used, it’s a great metaphor for the loss of revenue (the water) from a business (the bucket), and the subsequent attempts to prevent this (sticking plaster over the bucket holes). We decided to take this metaphor a step further and give a high-level overview of the DNA of any successful SaaS operation.

poster-mock

Working with the crazy-talented local illustrator and artist Designed By Alice, we produced an illustration that summarizes the processes and teams that make up a SaaS business, as well as some of the “flow of economy” through the business. Allow me to introduce:

Marketing Team

The Marketing Team plays a pivotal role in channeling new leads into the business. Marketing activities like targeted content generation drive traffic to the website of the business, grow recognition for the brand amongst its target audience.

In our poster, the Marketing character is gathering buckets of new leads (water) and handing them on to the…

Sales Team

The Sales Team works hand-in-hand with the Marketing Team, working to nurture the inbound leads generated from content and other marketing activities. Their goal is to convert these leads into new business – i.e., get that water into the bucket! Inevitably, not all leads will be successfully converted – our Sales character is attempting the difficult job of throwing the leads (water) into our bucket (business). Perhaps he should move the ladder a bit closer.

So, some of the new leads eventually land inside our bucket. Great, we’ve got new customers and revenue in our business. But wait… what’s this? There are HOLES in the bucket?! Sounds like a job for the…

Customer Success & Support Team

Customer Success and Support in a SaaS business is all about keeping customers happy, helping them achieve their goals within your product, and minimizing the risk of them cancelling (churning). Depending on the size of your business, this may be two discrete teams, or even just two individuals.

So the Customer Success & Support Teams are fixing your leaky business (bucket). They’re finding the holes through which customers are leaving, and fixing the root causes of these problems.

To keep your slightly leaky SaaS business growing, you need to evolve and grow your product – you need a bigger bucket, and more great features for your bucket, to keep people using it. That’ll be down to the…

Product & Engineering Team

Last but by no means least, the Product & Engineering Team (or teams) are the driving force for moving your product and business forwards. They work together in a tightly-knit development process which takes company strategy and vision along with customer feedback as its input and iterates on the product with value-add releases. They may also need to design fixes for the more major leaks identified by the Customer Success and Support teams.

Note: Product people may not always wear a baseball cap with a spinner…

Download the Poster

We’re offering The Anatomy of a SaaS Business poster as a PDF download, free for you to do what you like with. You’re not required to submit your email address or any other information – it’s free, as in free.

However, if you see some value from it, and the other SaaS-focused resources we produce, then consider signing up for our Weekly SaaS Digest – you’ll get an awesome weekly summary of just the best content each week:

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Download PDF  (print quality, A3 size)

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Ed Shelley

Former Director of Content

@Mr_Ed

download industry PDF poster resource