What is Payments-Led Growth?
Payments-Led growth is a strategy for Vertical SaaS platforms to drive revenue by integrating payments within their product offerings.
It creates company-wide alignment across revenue teams—from product to sales and marketing—around payments—a significant, sustainable, and scalable business growth source.
Why Payments-Led Growth?
Stax started the Payments-Led Growth movement because we saw how the traditional vertical SaaS companies had limited growth relying only on subscription revenue, especially during the current economic climate.
Instead of relying only on subscriptions, we built a robust, simplified, frictionless Payments-Led Growth platform that uses flexible technology, payments and adoption expertise to help vertical SaaS companies scale revenue through integrated payments.
Payments-Led Growth makes it easier for you to integrate payments to provide a better experience for your customers, increase revenue growth, increase your valuation, and provide more valuable data for your company.
How Payments-Led Growth is Changing the Way Vertical SaaS Companies Grow
Problem: It’s getting harder and harder for SaaS companies to grow. Especially in today’s macroeconomic climate, with the SaaS industry facing intense hardships and plateauing growth.
More than 120,000+ tech workers in the U.S. have been laid off so far in 2023
SaaS’s first recession–industry drew down by 53% from Q3 2021 to Q1 of 2022
The average company market cap is down 57% from its 12-month highs
See 141% ROI With Integrated Payments
We commissioned Forrester Consulting to find the impacts and ROI of Stax Connect under the Payments-Led Growth framework. Learn how vertical SaaS platforms can expedite growth and create an additional stream of revenue, estimated at $900K according to the Total Economic Impact of Stax Connect study.
Most SaaS Platforms Rely On A Subscription-Only Model
SaaS companies are limited if they only grow through subscription. AND, turning profit on a subscription business is a long-term game. If you rely on subscriptions and want to turn a significant profit, it’s critical that your customers stay with you.
How subscription-only SaaS companies generate revenue:
This model of growth traditionally works—but in reality, sustaining growth is difficult.
- In a best case scenario, a vertical SaaS company could expect 30% YoY growth
- About 50% of all organizations are aiming to centralize their SaaS applications and condense them
- 70% of CIOs call out agility and scalability as their top motivators for using SaaS solutions
Many SaaS platforms are inundated with the pressure to grow their customer base, enterprise value, and retain customers. It’s common to face a customer plateau, stagnating your SaaS growth and limiting investment opportunities.
How can you provide robust technology that your customers need without limiting your resources, and create a new stream of revenue that doesn’t only rely on subscriptions?
Enter Payments-Led Growth.
“All software companies are payment companies…
they just don’t know it yet”
Suneera Madhani, Founder of Stax
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Payments-Led Growth
Payments-Led Growth allows your business to offer payment processing, giving your customers a better user experience while upholding a new pillar of revenue.
By adopting a Payments-Led Growth strategy, vertical SaaS companies can add to their existing subscription revenue and possibly eclipse it.
How Does A SaaS Company Implement Payments-Led Growth?
Integrating payments into your platform can make a big impact when it’s done right. To see the impacts of payments and grow your business, you need a partner that has:
- Payments Expertise
- Flexible Technology
- Adoption Expertise
Integrating payments isn’t a new feature for SaaS platforms. It’s a powerful strategy to leverage payments expertise, expand your payments technology, and accelerate adoption to successfully scale your business.
Understand Payments for Your Business
What happens when you decide to integrate payments into your business instead of letting your customer use a third-party for payments processing? In most cases, it makes for a stickier platform with more robust functionality, and a better user experience for customers.
With Payments-Led Growth, when a user subscribes to your SaaS services, you want to immediately show them the benefits of processing payments all-in-one software. Positioning yourself as an expert in taking and processing payments gives more incentive for customers to subscribe and stay.
Of course, you do SaaS stuff—we do payments. That’s why our Partner Success Team guides you to success with implementation, using payments to your benefit, managing risk, and handling security compliance.
You can also avoid days of waiting for underwriting approval and give your customers the ability to process payments within 20 minutes. We handle the validation and monitoring of all payment transactions processed.
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Ready to Board the Payments-Led Growth Rocket Ship?
Payments-Led Growth will accelerate your SaaS platform growth with a new pillar of revenue, reduce user churn, and boost your insights with valuable data.
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Integrate Flexible Technology With Payments
When SaaS companies decide to take payments, it can take weeks and even millions of dollars to integrate the technology. Other payment facilitators that offer integration options only hand over some documentation with little to no customer support.
With Payments-Led Growth, having flexible payments technology is essential—whether you want to white-label a payments product or build a custom integration off a single API.
With a white-label solution, you can start processing payments as soon as tomorrow with zero development and a proprietary white-labeled enrollment system built by Stax.
You can also integrate payments with an API, which ensures you can quickly add features as they become relevant to your business. For your customers to start taking payments, a simple and frictionless enrollment process can include using a white-labeled enrollment portal or custom enrollment flows from your API.
- Accept more than credit cards. Move funds between bank accounts electronically without needing a physical check or bank card.
- Securely store keyed and swiped payment methods for future use after the original payment is processed.
- Schedule future payments and set up payment plans to be processed automatically. Efficiently process recurring payments without asking for payment information with every transaction.
- Key in payments using a desktop or mobile device, or swipe payments using a mobile reader or Wi-Fi countertop terminal
- Split payments for customers that need to use multiple payment methods when paying an invoice.
- Reduce risk with automated surcharge compliance capabilities and expand user payment acceptance features across in-person, online, keyed, and mobile payments.
- Easily configure accounts to automatically send required card-not-present payments data for Level 2 processing.
- Decrease the amount of time it takes to get paid and conveniently send electronic invoices via email or SMS.
- Automatically update deactivated or expired cards that are stored for future and recurring payments.
- Easily view and respond to incoming chargebacks.
- Manage payments data across multiple locations or channels of the business from a single dashboard.
ACH Processing
Card Tokenization
Recurring Payments
One-Time Payments
Split Payments
Integrated Surcharging
Level 2 Processing
Email & Text Invoicing
Card Updater
Dispute Manager
Data Analytics
Accelerate Adoption And Scale Growth
It’s great to be an expert in payments and integrate flexible payment technology, but executing on Payments-Led Growth needs users to be profitable and worth the time. That’s why you need a strong go-to-market strategy that includes campaign support, email marketing, webinars, sales enablement, and more educational tools to inform your customers.
If you have worked with other payment facilitators before integrating payments on your platform, tokenizing and migrating merchants to your new feature can also strain resources. It’s important to have a dedicated payments team that can market, migrate, and sell payments.
Key Benefits of Payments-Led Growth For SaaS Platforms
Launching payments in your platform and monetizing transactions is a win for you. But there is more that you and your customers can benefit from by adopting Payments-Led Growth.
Better Customer Experience
With payments comes a stickier platform, giving users the ability to run their entire business in one place. Having an all-in-one solution where customers can process payments, view transactions, and manage revenue means they won’t need to jump ship in the era of SaaS.O.S.
Unlock A New Stream of Revenue
Monetizing transactions with a generous revenue-share model can support a new pillar of revenue for your business. Rather than relying solely on a subscription, you’ll see huge growth in revenue by giving your customers the power to take payments on your platform.
Increase Valuation
Enhancing your SaaS platform with Payments-Led Growth obviously comes with inheriting a new stream of revenue and can potentially double your MRR/ARR. Having a payments feature will also attract new customers and reduce your user churn. All this bundles into one conclusion: Increased valuation and more investors interested in your product.
Access to Useful Data
When your customers process payments elsewhere, you are in the dark about their true revenue potential, as well as other insightful data into your market. By owning payments, you can track key metrics and collect data on your customers’ processing volume, transaction fees, and more.
