, Welcome to The Cirrostratus Group March newsletter. There are a variety of options for growing your SaaS business. There is of course the classic direct sales and internal marketing approach and the up-selling approach which I've talked about in previous newsletters and blog posts. This month I've highlighted a couple of other options to augment these approaches which may help you to increase your SaaS company growth rate. I'm always interested in hearing about your experiences with delivering cloud applications. Paul Ressler The Cirrostratus Group

Growing Your SaaS Business      Liz Cain, a partner at Openview Partners , recently wrote an excellent article outlining how to evaluate whether channel sales are right for your SaaS business. It includes the pros and cons of channel sales versus direct sales including guidelines for the appropriateness for channel programs at various levels of company maturity. If you're looking at the option of channel sales this article will help you sort out whether this is an appropriate approach.   Another approach is a variation on product led growth and has been referred to as product assisted growth. The article written by Travis Kaufman, VP Product Growth at Gainsight, describes how they use this hybrid approach for their sales process. They blend the strengths from both direct sales and product led growth approaches. This article has some new ideas of how to augment your direct sales by using the product itself as more of a selling/growth tool.

A key aspect of the user experience of your SaaS application is how well it performs on a regular basis for all types of transactions. With increasingly complex SaaS applications and customers in more varied locations, monitoring and more importantly improving SaaS application performance continues to be an area where SaaS providers need to make sure they have the most appropriate tools. If your application is straightforward a simple tool may work fine. If you have complex and real time transactions in your application then you will need better tools. The biggest changes in the last couple years have been better tools for resolving complex application performance challenges including using artificial intelligence capabilities.

Gartner just released their Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and it is available here for free from New Relic a major APM provider. There are also other evaluations/ratings for APM tools that include some of the less expensive and less comprehensive tools. G2Crowd is a good example and is available here.