This week’s roundup features a recap of SaaStr 2019, cost-effective customer retention strategies, a guide to user adoption metrics and more!
Let’s get started…
SaaStr 2019: Observations and Key Learnings Driving the SaaS Economy
Writer Nick Gonios takes readers on an 8-minute journey through SaaStr 2019, sharing highlights from this year’s event alongside a few of the astute observations he took home with him. For those who didn’t attend this year’s SaaStr event and even for those who did – Gonios’ takeaways make for an interesting and highly thought-provoking read.
There are clearly 2 cohorts of SaaS company + investment capital in the market and the important learning is that SaaS founders must become of aware of these and recognise the type of capital they raise comes with certain growth trajectories and levels of risk which they need to be aligned with.
– Nick Gonios
The User Adoption Metrics That Matter for Your Customer Success Team
Totango‘s Mia Jacobs returned to the blog last week with a great piece on the user adoption metrics that matter most for your customer success team. Jacobs outlines the onboarding, adoption, and renewal/upsell phases while breaking down the three keys to accomplishing successful product adoption along the way. As mentioned in the article, adoption is about more than just usage. It’s about helping your customer get the most out of your services. This post is a great place to start improving your adoption process today!
A key component of driving lifetime customer value is building and maintaining a trusted relationship. Using the data insights from a customer success platform and adopting a customer-centered approach across your business should enable you to maintain an active dialogue with your customer which, in turn, generates more customer information to shape future engagement.
– Mia Jacobs
Product, Pricing, Marketing, and Data: Essential Building Blocks for SaaS Success
Abstract CRO Wendy Schott published this piece on Openview last week, and we absolutely loved it! As a self-proclaimed tech and data geek, Schott teaches readers how to combine tech and data with a few powerful marketing tactics to build the ultimate product-led strategy for SaaS success. While each of these three building blocks can—on its own—help you make great strides toward success, Schott explains how empowering the three to work together can transform your business and give you a serious market advantage.
Whether you’re a tech geek, a marketing fanatic, or a data nerd, things will work out best for you, your company and your customers if you realize the importance of combining efforts across these three core elements into one cohesive, product-led strategy.
– Wendy Schott
The Ultimate Customer Retention Strategy Your Company Needs to be More Cost-Effective
Though toting a bit of a clickbait-y title, Kilterly‘s latest piece on customer retention strategy is actually quite useful and informative. Penned by the company’s co-founder and president, Chris Arringdale, the “ultimate” customer retention strategy outlined in this article consists of 4 simple-yet-powerful steps. Arringdale directs readers to start by building strong customer relationships, providing transparency, collecting feedback and mapping their customer’s journey. But is it really that simple? Arringdale thinks so, and at it’s core–we tend to agree!
Many companies focus on the idea of obtaining more sales and increasing their customer base while forgetting how much of an impact their current customers have. Acquiring new customers costs five times as much as retaining existing customers. After putting your time, effort and resources into securing new customers, retaining them can ease the burden of searching for new ones, while saving your company money at the same time.
– Chris Arringdale
A Solid Customer Onboarding Experience Drives Higher Willingness to Pay & Retention
In response to a question from Jonathan Kim of Appcues, the brilliant folks at the ProfitWell Report set out to answer the question “does a solid customer onboarding experience drive retention and higher willingness to pay?”
ProfitWell product manager Neel Desai admits that this was the trickiest question they’ve received to date, because coding onboarding perception and then measuring willingness to pay is a non-trivial task. Let us just say that as huge fans of everything the ProfitWell crew does for the SaaS community, this fantastic presentation somehow still exceeded our already-high expectations. Desai reports on the data the team collected from nearly 500 different software products spread between B2B and B2C and nearly twenty five thousand customers of those products. The data brought forth not only answers the question that sparked the search, but many others along the way. And the best part? Desai presents the complete findings in only 3 short minutes!
Data indicates that great onboarding is essential to integrating the value of the product within the customer, or at the very least greases the skids of a customer to start to see the value in your product, significantly accelerating their journey.
– Neel Desai
5 Reasons Not To Raise Prices on Existing Customers. And 2 Better Ways to Do It Anyway.
SaaStr‘s Jason Lemkin reflects on the first time he tried to pull “the Old Price-Raise-Without-Notice tactic”, and warns readers not to attempt it themselves. But while discouraging readers to pursue risky price-raising tactics due to the elevated churn risk, Lemkin also provides two simple and brilliant ways to raise prices in a less aggressive manner. But his greatest piece of advice? Lemkin advises companies to focus more energy on driving up deal size, and spend less energy raising prices on the early customers that took a huge risk on them. Great advice!
Do a small increase, and telegraph it way ahead of time, and apply it equally. This is what Salesforce, Google and others do. I still wouldn’t do this until growth slows below say 30%. E.g, the core Salesforce CRM/SFA product is very mature and is growing < 20%. Here, raising prices say 5%-6% a year may irk some customers. But if you apply it to everyone, and give everyone 3-4 months notice, the issues will be fewer.
– Jason Lemkin
Happy reading!
Thanks so much for joining us for another SaaS roundup. We hope to see you here again next Monday!
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