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# Guiding Questions
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 How you approach each of these key activities of the business planning exercise will be different for each company. As a starting point, we have assembled a series of guiding questions that may help you fill in important dimensions of your business case and can provide a better insight into the fundamentals of your model. Below is the list of guiding questions: 

## Assess the SaaS Opportunity
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+  What are your compelling factors for adopting SaaS? 
+  What is your projected customer acquisition two-year growth rate? 
+  How soon can you be profitable? 
+  How many of your existing customers are expected to adopt your SaaS offering? 
+  Are SaaS competitors encroaching on your market? 
+  Are there new segments of the market that are best targeted by a SaaS offering? 
+  Does the company see SaaS as an essential component of its future success? 
+  How long will it take your company to complete the transition to a SaaS model? 
+  What is the risk of not pursuing the SaaS initiative? 

## Define Target Segments
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+  What are the customer segments that you are targeting? 
+  What are the unique requirements of these segments? 
+  Are there any specific operational, performance, or compliance profiles of the different customers in this market? 
+  Which customers would you not target with this new offering? 
+  Will this offering be available to all customers or limited to new customers? 

## Evaluate the Market and Customer Strategy
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+  What channels will be used to access new customers? 
+  How will you differentiate your offering from competitors? 
+  What data do you have to validate market acceptance and readiness for this offering? 

## Model Market / Segment Growth
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+  How many customers do you expect to add in the first year? 
+  What is the profile of customers spanning the different segments? 
+  What level of churn do you expect from your customers? 
+  How many existing customers do you expect to move into the new model? 

### Finance
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+  What is the monetization model for the new offering? 
+  What is the target MRR for this offering (across segments)? 
+  What would the price need to be (for each segment) to be competitive? 
+  Will the company profit and loss structure change? 

### Sales Transformation
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+  What is different about selling SaaS? 
+  How will your sales organization need to transform to support a SaaS model? 
+  Will your sales compensation model change with SaaS? 
+  What incremental resources will be needed to support selling the SaaS offering? 
+  What costs will be associated with sales activities to these customers? 
+  Do sales teams have the skills that align with a SaaS delivery model? 
+  What incremental tooling and automation will be needed to support your sales strategy? 

### Marketing Transformation
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+  How will you reach new segments/markets that represent all new targets for the company? 
+  How will you build a brand for your SaaS offering? 
+  Will your marketing profile change to reach these SaaS buyer personas? 
+  What costs will be associated with marketing activities to these customers? 
+  What incremental marketing resources do you need? 

### Define Operational Model / Resources
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+  What incremental expenses would be required to support this model? 
+  What is the AWS cost model for operating the system (cost per tenant)? 

  (A *tenant* is a group of users who share a common access with specific privileges to the software instance.) 
+  Will new resources be required to build/manage your DevOps pipeline? 
+  How will agility and automation change the long-term operational expense footprint of your company? 

### Develop a Staffing Profile
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+  Does your team have the resources to take on this move to SaaS? 
+  What incremental staff would you need to hire? 
+  Do you have a customer success team that will be responsible for customer retention and loyalty? 
+  What costs are associated with staffing and hosting this solution? 
+  Do you have enough AWS expertise to build the SaaS solution? 
+  Do you have the right development and operational tools to develop, test, and deploy SaaS? 
+  Will you need new development resources for this effort? Will these be net new resources?