Selling SaaS means no longer just demonstrating exciting features. Non-functional features have gained importance. And you can make money from them.

Despite the era of AI, SaaS is not dead. Customers still pay SaaS companies to fix bugs, upgrade components, apply security patches, and restore their data at 2 am when disaster strikes.

And SaaS product managers still spend lots of time talking to customers about new features, feature improvements, and edge cases. There is nothing wrong with that; that’s also what we do at Yonder, the SaaS company I co-founded.

However, product managers should keep one more thing in mind. In RFPs, there is usually a section called “non-functional requirements”, and that section has grown in length over the last few years. And even customers who procure directly often ask for non-functional requirements after the initial sale. During the initial sale, those non-functional requirements are often overlooked, because it’s hard to demonstrate them in sales demos, and because they are usually less visible than functional requirements.

But they are getting ever more important. And there is money to be made from them.

Let’s look into some real-life examples.

Customers pay for IT security features

It’s no secret that the internet has become a dangerous place, and that enterprise customers want to protect themselves. Yet they still buy SaaS tools, well aware that the underlying IT infrastructure of all those SaaS providers is not fully under their control.

5–10 years ago, it was enough to send through your ISO 27001 certificate, and IT security would shut up. No longer so. Nowadays, IT security departments ask for SIEM integration, IP whitelisting, and user provisioning/deprovisioning via SCIM.

None of these requirements is super-exciting. The exciting thing about those requirements is that enterprise customers are willing to pay good money for such requirements.

Customers pay for data sovereignty

Geopolitics is usually bad for a company doing business worldwide, but in one respect it’s a helper: Data sovereignty has come back into fashion. Not the old way, when people stacked servers in basements and under the boss’s table, but rather a way in which SaaS providers are asked to store customer data in a certain country.

Although this carries some overhead in IT infrastructure, thanks to orchestration tools like Kubernetes, this is even doable for an SME. And it’s not just doable, it’s also monetizable.

Customers pay for interfaces

Connectivity to other SaaS and AI tools is common nowadays. However, there are still a multitude of legacy IT tools in enterprise organizations: custom backup services, internal business intelligence tools, and the like.

If you can build those custom interfaces for your customers, you can tap yet another revenue stream.

Conclusion

I’m not saying that functional requirements don’t matter for SaaS companies. But if you’re selling to enterprise customers, you can make additional money with non-functional requirements.

Of course, you need a team to build those non-functional requirements in a secure and scalable way. However, you need a different attitude towards sales and product management: On top of the “regular” product and sales teams who demonstrate and design features, you need a technical sales team.