Annual Contracts: Maybe Not All They Are Cracked Up To Be
And ... Maybe Every SaaS Contract Should Have An Automatic Out Clause
I’ve long been a vocal proponent of annual contracts. I felt like when I was a SaaS CEO and had to go profitable, they helped saved my rear. Close, say, a $125k contract, even after a healthy sales commission, that’s $100k+ in the bank right now! And if your burn rate is low (ours was probably $100k-$150k at the time we started to close bigger annual deals), that’s like a whole extra month of runway just on that deal. A multi-year pre-paid contract can be even more magical, and give you months of extra cash in a start-up.
This is still true. But as time has gone by, and I’ve worked with more SaaS companies, I’ve also seen the downside of annual contracts at many start-ups as well:
Annual deal collections can be tougher for start-ups. Bigger companies are good at this, but if you aren’t, you may not get the benefits of an annual contract if it takes you 4-6 months to actually collect the cash. Annual contracts require P.O., bills, “payment terms”, and often, repeated follow-up. Most start-ups don’t have a good enough finance person or firm to be good at collections. Forcing your sales team to do collections is OK in the early days, but doesn’t work perfectly either, and doesn’t scale. Monthly invoices can make things even worse, of course. But getting paid in a simple ACH or credit card payment each month can be magical.
Annual deals can create unnecessary customer friction, if they aren’t done right. Big customers will want to pay annually. So for sure, do that. It’s how their procurement departments work. But if you have an incentive structure where even SMBs are pushed to go annual … best case, that will add friction to your sales process. Is it worth it? I’m not sure. Let SMBs pick annual or monthly, at least as an experiment. You’ll see what they really prefer.
Annual deals get sent to legal for review, procurement for negotiation, etc. This makes sense for a $250k+ deal. But for a smaller deal, you are again just making it harder on the customer and slowing down the close. The odds if a deal gets sent to legal that it closes the same month are close to zero. This always at least takes weeks. Avoid it if you can.
Annual deals, done wrong, can create unnecessary (and even more importantly, perpetual) discounting. You almost always have to provide a 10%-20% discount to incent annual deals. Is it worth it? Maybe not as the account grows over time. In Years 2, 3, and 10, you may wish you had that discount back when you have to honor it, one way or another, in the renewal. You are robbing a bit of a long-term revenue stream if you over-discount to get an annual deal done now. This can compound with multi-year deals. If you tell a loyal customer in Year 2 you are taking away their discount … expect that loyalty to evaporate.
Annual deals mask churn. This can be bad, not good. You may like annual deals for a second reason — they take a year to churn. But that’s not really true. It’s only true in your financial statements and your numbers. But if a customer never renews in SaaS, or if they stop using your product even if they’ve already paid for it for the year, it’s basically like they never really existed at all. A customer you lose next year doesn’t help you at all to get to $10, $20m, $100m in recurring revenue. A deal has to recur or in the medium and long run, otherwise it just doesn’t matter. Worse, it may mask weak efforts in customer success and retention efforts, and disincent you to track and grow NPS early.
Annual deals are a tough fit with many API services and variable-usage services. It’s often better with variable revenue to move to an annual contract later in many cases, a few months later or even at renewal. But forcing customers to estimate variable usage before they are even in production, best case, again adds friction to a sales process. Is it worth it? I’d argue — rarely. In fact, MongoDB found revenue went up and sales cycles went down when they stopped forcing customers into annual contracts. More on that here.
Done right, with a strong collections team (or at least point person), thoughtful discounting, and a laser-attention on NPS, annual contracts are still a gift — no doubt. In fact, our team leveraged them to come up with a Collections Goal each month of 110%+ of our MRR. I.e., if our MRR was $500k, we needed to collect at least $550k that month in cash. We often beat it and hit 120% by setting that as our goal. That was great. It really was. More on that here.
But more important these days, when customers are veterans, and have been buying SaaS products for 20 years, is to let them buy the way they want. At least until you are huge, and have a dominant brand. That’s the fastest, easiest way to scale, with the most satisfied customers.
Don’t force annual contracts where they don’t fit.
Maybe Every SaaS Contract Should Have An Automatic Out Clause
Lately at SaaStr, we’ve become more and more buyers of SaaS software ourselves. Our own tiny little team and organization has grown, and we have to start putting the infrastructure in place for a $20m+ business.
And it’s been a vivid reminder of what I hate so much about buying software:
Vendors selling you software you never use or deploy.
Salespeople pushing you to sign multi-year contracts you don’t want.
Less tech-savvy buyers being told software does things it doesn’t do.
Being “qualified out” by a BDR.
Not being able to talk to a salesperson, having to go through a BDR.
Not being able to do a free trial, or even really try out a product first.
A salesperson discouraging you from doing a free trial, even when one is available.
A salesperson discouraging a pilot, even when one is possible.
The list goes on. Traditional SaaS sales is incented to close 1+ year contracts without no outs as quickly as possible, and where possible, for every possible seat you might ever use in Year 1. That’s the game.
And yet … it does add friction to many sales processes. Not necessarily the most enterprise sales processes, but often, many other ones. Freemium tried to revolutionize how we buy and try software, but that’s not a model that works for most solution-oriented products that require more evaluation and business-process change.
This edition of the SaaStr Insider is sponsored by A-Lign
So what’s the right answer? Maybe giving everyone an out.
Slack, in some ways, pioneered a hybrid of this by, at least for quite a while, only charging you for the seats you actually used.
The majority of Zoom customers now pay monthly
And MongoDB found they closed more when they stopped having their sales team push annual contracts! More on that here.
Maybe in the 2020s, it’s time to stand behind our products more and just let every customer cancel whenever they want. For any or no reason:
First, if the customer is unhappy and isn’t going to renew, in the long run, it doesn’t matter if they cancel on month 4 or simply don’t renew on month 12. They won’t be part of your long-term revenue base either way.
Second, SaaS buyers are all veterans now. It’s time to start letting them buy the way they want to buy. There aren’t many customers left who are new to any segment of SaaS, let alone SaaS itself. If they want to buy annually, great. If they want to buy quarterly, terrific. If they prefer utility pricing, maybe that’s the way there. If they want to pay with Bitcoin, maybe just let them. A little more on that here.
Third, we’ve all figured out that having sales processes that, in the end, close customers that don’t “stick” is a net negative. Having even 5% of your customers be sold products that simply don’t work for them not only drags down your NPS, it creates huge stresses on customer success, support, etc. It also creates drama for the sales team, too, if you have to deal with clawbacks and other related issues. These mis-sold customers are incredibly distracting to the organization.
In the long run, in SaaS, any customer that churns was never really a customer at all — unless you get them back later.
Maybe make onboarding, and buying, as simple as possible. Maybe just let the customer buy, at a given price point, however, they want to buy. Drive up your NPS, and close the deal even faster. And maybe just let them cancel and leave whenever they want. Just give them a pro-rated refund, and move on. And say thank you for trying us. And let them know they can have this refund whenever they want, no questions (or not too many, at least) asked.
I bet you close more.