Once you decided to outsource and work with a SaaS provider, choosing the right partner that fits your business is the crucial part. Here are 8 tips you should consider in choosing your SaaS provider:
- Understands you: It is important that the SaaS provider truly understands and matches your business strategy, better yet if the provider can offer scalable software to your foreseen vision and continuous growth. Knowing provider’s plans to innovate and grow their software might help you to determine whether they would fit your long-term goals. Look at their bigger picture!
- Data Migration: There are SaaS providers that cannot fully support you in data migration, so they might suggest using third-parties. Make sure the service provider can help you at every step of the way and help you be at your desired level of digitalization.
- Timeline: Having a clear roadmap and timeline is also key to your decision-making process. Sure every company is different so the timeline also varies. However, a SaaS provider with good know-how is able to draw your roadmap and timeline at a very early stage of your call. You have your business timeline and you want your SaaS provider to meet those dates and launch your product to stay ahead of the competition, right?
- Exit-strategy: Your service provider also should be flexible with your commitment level. It is important that SaaS provider offers a trial period, to let you test the water before officially launching the product. Most SaaS providers offer a sandbox environment, yes, but you really need to see how it works for your company and if the need is matched. You need to have an exit strategy if things don’t go well and take your data with you. However, if you chose the right provider, it is best to stay with that partner rather than having multiple third-party companies. Stitching all those services can be really hard and really inefficient.
- Pricing model: Make sure the service provider doesn’t charge you any hidden fees. Most SaaS providers offer subscription models depending on your user count, API hits, or bandwidth usage. Pay-as-you-grow model is better than paying a huge amount of money upfront and it could give you room for further improvement and development.
- Certification: There are many licenses the SaaS provider can acquire such as GDPR, ISO 27001, SOC 2, etc. But this shouldn’t be a big factor in your decision-making process. Read their case studies and success stories instead of checking those certifications. The SaaS provider may have acquired all the different certifications but they could also be players with very minimal real-life experience.
- Security: Security is one of the primary concerns in today’s SaaS market. Thoroughly check your provider’s security measures and policies before and ensure your system’s security and data privacy. Robust security is key to a long-term business.
- Innovation and update process: Whether the service provider offers continuous innovation and an ever-evolving system truly depends on their model of SaaS / PaaS / IaaS, and this is a whole new topic. Make sure to ask your service provider how your service and product can be updated after its launch.
