The last few years have been much different than many years before. Where the main success criteria for many companies in 2020–2022 was “growth” many other things are of importance nowadays. Many of the readers will have heard of the term “grow at all costs”. SaaS companies collected lots of funding at very high multiplier valuations with the instruction to grow. 

The 2nd half of 2023 already seemed better, people started to talk about growth again, started to express ambition and the SaaS industry as a whole is taking growth steps again.

However, growth at all costs is still far from entering 2024. The new focus is “sustainable growth” or “profitable growth”.

The main success criteria to shoot for profitable growth are measured in the SaaS Magic number and Rule of 40. Both metrics not only show growth but also reflect the efficiency of growth. My first advice would be to start measuring these 2 metrics so you can see if the efforts and initiatives you’re running actually work. We often forget to measure if what we’re doing is actually giving us the desired results or even put a target on these before we run and start changing things.

My three practical tips for success in 2024 and efficient growth are:

• Establish and fine-tune the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Many companies still don’t have this written down and in the minds of every employee at the company. If you know which customers benefit most from your solution, time spent in sales and even customer support is greatly decreased. Your NPS increases, onboarding decreases, features are adopted, and value is understood. It seems like you’re cutting into your market potential and you limit yourself, but what you’re actually doing is focusing on what makes sense.

• Map out a buyer journey. Even within your ICP, customers might not be ready to buy your solution just yet, some still need to experience 60% of the pain points you identified for themselves. If you map out the journey customers take from first being annoyed by doing something manual all the way to when they’re using your solution, it will show you most of the things you can improve. You can focus your efforts on sales and marketing by moving away from “spray and pray” sales and marketing and going for personalized outreach and ABM campaigns, letting your customers know you’re there, especially for them. The information you collect during sales talks can be reused in onboarding. Your sales cycles are cut short as you only speak to prospects when they’re ready to speak to you. 

  In this market it becomes significantly harder to get that first meeting on the agenda given your prospects receive 10 times the number of emails from sales individuals than they did 5 years ago. Standing out is imperative and that is not possible if you’re trying to reach 10,000 prospects with 5 people, even with AI helping you out. Mapping out the buyer journey goes hand-in-hand with your ICP limiting the number of people you should speak to, meaning you can focus your efforts on quality over quantity and start seeing drastic increases in meeting booked rates and shorter sales cycles.

• Cheaper resources are not always the best way to keep costs down. Sure there should be junior roles, but maybe saving cost on your new Account Executive is the best financial decision. They may need more time to onboard, their targets are lower, the results are lower. Spending more money when the return is high means efficient growth. Remember, efficient growth doesn’t mean saving cost, it means spending money on the right things.

To summarize, your main success criteria for 2024 is getting that focus back on growth, but do it smart, spend money carefully but spend money on things that work. Look at sales, marketing, and customer success as a whole. Define how they work together not from your perspective but from the perspective your ideal customers say you need through an established buyer journey.