Want Sustainable Business Growth? SaaS Management Makes It Possible

We all remember the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Businesses of all sizes were gripped with economic uncertainty, forced to take stock of the myriad of ways in which the “growth at all costs” mentality of business pre-pandemic had left them drained of their resources in this new and uncertain landscape. 

With the switch from in person to remote came the necessity to grow smarter, not harder by accomplishing more with less. Investing in effective SaaS Management is a smart tool for responsible business growth.

SaaS Growing Pains

Rapid growth is a phenomenal experience for scale-ups. It can mean success, but it can also mean failure. Growing companies experience numerous growing pains that can harm their longevity.

Organizations can feel these pains everywhere, but especially in terms of SaaS which becomes a challenge of scalability. 

This includes an unsustainable expansion of SaaS spending. The average organization spends $45 million a year on SaaS. For large enterprises, that jumps exponentially to $264 million. 

This is in part because the proliferation of SaaS applications across organizations has become the norm. The ease of acquisition of applications by individual employees to team leaders has reduced IT’s visibility on the SaaS portfolio. Thus, it is not uncommon for organizations to have too many apps. 

Today, the average organization has 269 applications in its stack. With larger organizations that have upwards of 10,000+ employees, this average becomes 650 applications. What’s more, the exact number of applications fluctuates.

New applications enter the portfolio. Old ones become mothballed without proper closure. 

The problem can seem untenable. Manual SaaS management via spreadsheets and traditional logs becomes time-intensive. Worse, it constantly becomes out-of-date, failing to ever achieve a full picture while keeping your team away from important work. 

The solution is naturally to accomplish more with less. 

The only relief for SaaS growing pains is a programmatic approach to SaaS management. This will save you money, and help you equip your employees to do their best work. All the while, you’re constantly optimizing your SaaS portfolio, doing more with less. 

Reduce Spending for Financial Runway

Reducing your SaaS spending allows an organization room to breathe. Whether this means setting aside a financial buffer or reinvesting your savings into new projects, SaaS management ensures maximum ROI for every SaaS investment. Which is essential for responsible business scaling.

It all begins with visibility. You can’t manage what you can’t see. A SaaS management platform like Zylo gives you exactly that. Know exactly what SaaS applications are running in your stack so that you can begin to establish the framework of SaaS management. 

With this visibility, you can begin to reduce spending for sustainable business growth: 

1. Eliminate unused applications – With visibility, you can determine the usage of applications across your stack. This includes finding mothballed applications that are running automatic renewals, costing your organization money without providing any benefit. A programmatic application of SaaS management routinely roots these applications out and helps you remove the dead weight harming your bottom line.
2. Reclaim unused licenses – You may have applications operating in your stack that do their job very well. However, they were poorly acquired. Now they’re running licenses with too many seats for your organization. Therefore, you are paying for more than you are using. Identifying these applications allows your organization to negotiate with the SaaS provider to only pay for the seats you need.

And these are just some of the ways SaaS management reduces spending to promote sustainable business growth. 

Streamline Equipping Employees with What They Need

An essential part of establishing a SaaS management program is enacting a system of governance for responsible acquisitions. However, there’s more to it than that. It means allowing for freedom within a framework.

The move to remote work and the ease of SaaS acquisitions have made employees accustomed to a degree of flexibility. What’s more, allowing employees to choose tools they know and love boosts employee effectiveness.

That’s why any good SaaS management system allows for employee flexibility within established guidelines. 

Zylo’s App catalog helps you do exactly that. The App catalog allows an organization to create a list for employees to see what tools are being used in the business. Which allows them to select tools from a curated, pre-vetted list of approved software specific to your organization. 

It also allows an organization to easily: 

• Drive awareness of business tools 
• Fast-track employee onboarding 
• Give users clear lines of communication 

Grow More With Less

Genesys is one such company that saw explosive growth in recent years. So, to maintain sustainable business growth and effectiveness of their SaaS stack they needed a management solution.

They turned to Zylo to do more with less and automate the process. Genesys’s Sr. Manager of Software Asset Management Sam Griffin shared with us how they achieved exactly that on the SaaSMe Unfiltered podcast.

“If you consider something like a workflow that we use in Zylo,” said Griffin. “Being able to have access to the information and automate the sending out of the emails to make sure that we’re re-harvesting the right licenses from the right people – it saves me hours.”

Griffin went on to contrast that to an experience with an application that had switched to a paid subscription model. Without the information that Zylo provided, they were unable to automate the process. That meant checking the footprint of 800 employees. In the end, the project took months to complete.

Whereas with Zylo, the workflow takes minutes.

Zylo also identifies areas where you can save money, allowing you to reinvest into your business. Some of the unique saving opportunities you can find within your SaaS portfolio include renewals, consolidation, and removal of underperforming apps.

Renewals present the opportunity to renegotiate a lower price with a vendor. When you consolidate duplicate subscriptions or applications that serve the same purpose, you can relocate those funds for a greater purpose. Eliminating underperforming apps lets you, the business owner, invest in resources that better serve your company.

By streamlining what and how much you are spending on, you free up invaluable resources to invest back into your business. 

The Bottom Line to Driving Sustainable Business Growth

The most important takeaway from this is that using SaaS management to drive sustainable business growth means finding ways to grow sustainably. Don’t just cut your spending budget. Allocate every dollar you spend to best serve your company. Money spent to “grow at all costs” only ends up costing you in the post-pandemic landscape.

Achieve sustainable business growth with SaaS management, and watch your business thrive.

Schedule a demo with us today and see how we can help your organization manage your SaaS assets, and save without sacrificing utility.