A good business intelligence consultant can likely solve a host of important problems for a SaaS company; however, getting that first SaaS client can be difficult without having in-house technical expertise or a track record of success in the market.
SaaS companies often need help from someone with a degree of specialization in their set of problems. With this in mind, how can a business intelligence consultant with no SaaS experience get their foot in the door?
Getting fast traction
Moving into a new market (like SaaS) doesn’t have to take years of experience and continued education, but it does require a change in mindset.
In truth, the transition from generic business intelligence consultant to SaaS intelligence consultant can be made surprisingly quickly. To do so, a consultant must look beyond their own background and skill set.
This new way of thinking is the key to giving your customers what they need, instead of simply what you already have.
Increase your SaaS expertise and credibility overnight
As a consultant, there are two ways to expand your SaaS expertise without having to transform yourself into a subject-matter expert:
- Hire expertise
- Use specialized SaaS intelligence software
Both paths can boost your service offerings quickly, and each approach has its own strengths.
Hiring SaaS expertise
If you aren’t a SaaS expert, find someone who is.
You can hire them, partner with them, or even license their name. This option can give you instant expertise to offer SaaS clients, and in addition to their skillset, you may be able to leverage their reputation to give credibility to your SaaS and consultancy services.
This approach does come with some challenges, however, as they must be accounted for in your work-flow. Specialized expertise can be costly, and the time taken for analysis and reporting can cause timelines to be bloated uncomfortably for both you and your clients.
Using specialized software
New advances in AI are making it possible for a business intelligence consultant to deliver a SaaS-specific analysis and highly personalized reports very quickly. This kind of analysis can form the basis for your diagnosis of company problems and can be used to give a highly personalized feel to the solutions you’re already applying in other markets.
A single software product can immediately give a consultant a new service offering, bringing with it some advantages compared to human specialists.
- Analysis and reporting at a fraction of the cost of a human specialist.
- Speed. Two weeks waiting for a human report can be replaced with a two-hour software analysis and delivery of an AI-generated report.
- Clients can benefit from visual modelling and unbiased measurements of performance.
- Software analysis is more scalable, allowing you to serve multiple clients at once, which eliminates specialist bottlenecks.
A word of caution: AI reports are not always client-friendly and are not necessarily relevant to a SaaS company’s specific problems. Consultants should look for client-ready reports that highlight key business problems and require minimum translation efforts from the client.
Types of business intelligence software
The number of business intelligence software products can be daunting, so it’s important to narrow down your options. Here are three areas where a software product can extend your capabilities.
- Marketing Analytics - Analysis of customer behaviour, signups, retention, consumer data.
- Product Analysis - Product size, growth rate, development costs, code quality, scalability, project timelines, security.
- Financial Modelling - Cash flow, revenue, profitability, runway, valuations.
The software chosen should help you leverage the expertise you already have, and apply it in a specific market.
Finding more ways to grow than the competition
The business intelligence consultant who learns how to serve markets outside their own personal expertise has a mechanism for consistently finding more ways to grow than the competition.
With a single industry expert or a single specialised AI tool, they can gain the ability to access new markets and new revenue streams at will.
What do you think? Leave us your comments here!