SaaS Customer Life cycle - Live

This is part of a series of posts focused on the life cycle of a SaaS customer. The first post is here, and the previous post about implementation is here.

At this point some measure of congratulations are in order, right? The customer has moved from a prospect to signed contract and through implementation. The client is live. This is a significant milestone.

An important factor is that all monthly recurring revenue can now begin billing. It also means that all implementation costs (assuming there are any) can be billed, this does not mean that all implementation costs can be recognized in the month the client goes live. According to current accounting principles for SaaS organizations all implementation costs must be spread out over the first year of the contract. This is a fairly important item to make note of, especially when working on revenue projections and budgets. While it doesn't really need to be said, I will say it anyway: The faster you can get a client launched and live the better for everyone.

Aside from the financial considerations of going live, there is another important issue to keep focused on at this milestone. The hard work of building a strong relationship with all clients (to ensure they continue to choose your organization as their vendor of choice in the future) begins. All enterprise organizations will require departments to provide a cost justification of all contracts, especially in these tough economic times.

As a means to that end it is important to have developed best practices (previous post on this topic here.) to ensure that clients are succeeding and growing. This should include metrics. Since clients are looking to SaaS vendors in large part for their domain expertise in addition to access to their products this means that SaaS vendors need to take an active role in setting metrics for clients.

Part of the role of a SaaS vendor is to not only help clients succeed, but to help clients prove that success internally. One thing that all enterprise organizations can understand are clear metrics to indicate that a specific contract is worth keeping and continuing in the future. Ideally these metrics include some hard numbers in addition to any soft numbers (items such as increased awareness, brand improvement, morale boost, etc). Ideally all metrics that can be generated from within an organization's solution will be calculated and delivered directly to clients in some automated fashion. Monthly is the most common time period for these sorts of metric reports.

The less work any given client administrator or internal champion at the client has to do in order to put together a solid business case for your contract the better off you will be. This is not because anyone at a client is lazy, but more likely they are tasked with a number of other responsibilities. The more you can make program administrators and other champions within your client's organization look like a rock star, the better for everyone.

While going live is certainly something to celebrate, it should be looked at as the start of some more hard work.