Creating Competitive Edge: How to Differentiate in your SaaS Market

According to recent SaaS trends, the typical mid-sized company replaced 39% of its SaaS applications for ones with better functionality. Continual improvements in technology and market changes have made it easier for competitors to match or improve existing functionality, and that means that today’s SaaS companies are not only facing increasing competition, but they’re also tasked with consistently and meaningfully improving customer value. This pressure makes it increasingly hard for SaaS companies to create and maintain a competitive advantage.

So, how do you create a competitive advantage?

Every SaaS or business blog will give you similar—and vague—advice for staying competitive. I’d bet almost any Google search result would include some of the following:

• Focus on customer experience: Improve customer loyalty and retention through improved support, training, and personalization.
• Innovate: Prioritize developing features that provide new value and leverage new technology.
• Invest in partnerships: Create partnerships and integrations with other products or vendors.
• Conduct competitive research: Make sure you are researching your competitors and market trends.

Great, thanks for the advice.

But, really...what is one easy and clear way to create a competitive edge?

Embedded analytics. Yes, it's that simple. Embedded analytics. Analytics helps people figure out how fast, how often, or how well they are performing. With analytics, people are able to spend their time more effectively and efficiently.

So, how exactly does embedded analytics give your SaaS product a competitive edge?

Well, remember that vague advice? If we dive a little deeper, we can uncover some advice that’s actually useful. When you embed data and analytics directly into your product, you'll be able to quickly deliver on the most critical pieces of advice, such as:

• Increase customer value: Analytics helps your end users become more efficient and effective. And by adding analytics directly into your application, users will find your product more “sticky.”
• Improve customer experience: Adding analytics directly into your application and workflows allows analytics to be personalized to each individual end user, thereby improving the overall user experience.
• Innovate: Adding embedded analytics creates a new way to continually innovate. You can add new data sources to expand on new valuable insights, launch new advanced features like benchmarking, predictive, and prescriptive analytics, and self-guided data discovery.
• Form partnerships: Partnering with a vendor allows you to stay focused on your end users on understanding and solving their biggest pain points instead of spending time building solutions from scratch.

“By adding insights to our platform, we were able to maintain the edge we have over our competitors and help our customers meet their goals of improving sales productivity.” Elay Cohen
Founder and CEO, SalesHood

Embedded analytics offers more than just a competitive edge. It gives SaaS companies new ways for growth-hacking revenue, increasing user adoption, and retaining customer loyalty.

Product owners, it's time to ask yourself: Does your product need analytics?