Every successful software business I’ve come across has a stronghold on two things: who their customers are and where those customers find value in their product. They’re confident in their pricing strategy since they know it’s rooted in real data. The rest? Well, it turns out most of them are just guessing.
No one wants to feel like an anonymous cog in a machine. This includes your customers. They want to feel special. They want to be heard, understood, and treated like individuals. “But we’re product-led”, you say. “Our go-to-market is defined by a self-serve sales funnel without any human interference.?” That may be, but product-led does not equal anti-sales.
How do you handle B2B customers who want a refund on an annual subscription? You refund them, 100%. And you move on to bigger and better things. First, it doesn’t help to not process the refund. In SaaS, once a customer churns — it’s gone. Second, if you don’t do the refund, that’s a rip-off.
You’re probably already familiar with Google My Business. When someone searches for your business, you’ll show up on the right side of a Google search, or when someone searches for a product or service you’ll offer, you’ll show up in the local pack. Google has been making changes to it, which means it just got easier to generate leads and sales for you. Best of all, very few marketers are even leveraging these features.
“If you cannot measure it,” declared Lord Kelvin, “you cannot improve it.” SaaS sales and marketing teams can get overwhelmed by metrics. But without any metrics, it’s impossible to track growth. And without growth, a SaaS company is dead in the water. If growth is the best way to get out alive, marketing metrics do little unless they correlate with sales.
Rarely are deals closed on day one. It takes a lot of nudging and nurturing before a prospect is ready to throw money at you. That’s why following up with prospects is so important. Follow-up emails have the power to convert a ‘no’ into a ‘yes,’ but can be daunting. Start by defining an email follow-up plan for your sales team.
There are tons of ways in which B2B SaaS marketers can use Facebook ads. But coming up with fresh & bright ideas, can get taxing at sometimes. These creative examples from successful companies have tons of takeaways and will help you inspire your next Facebook campaign. Take inspiration from brands in your niche and see what’s working.
The four forces that affect a user’s decision to use a new product: The push to find a new solution due to current problems, The pull from what could be achieved with this new product, The inertia of not wanting to change, The anxiety around the risks of moving to a new product. To onboard users, you’ll need to understand the push, strengthen the pull, overcome inertia and calm anxiety.
Activation—which occurs after a user has had their aha moment and realized your product’s core value—is arguably the most critical metric for SaaS companies to measure and optimize. Improving activation doesn’t just impact the early stages of your users’ journey; a lift in activation has positive downstream effects on everything from customer satisfaction to retention to revenue.
Which products are considered truly excellent by their users, and what are their defining characteristics? Excellent products solve real problems for real people, and improve upon past status quos. Excellent products are simple and straightforward to use, even for people who aren’t especially tech-savvy. Excellent products spark delight.
How did your company adopt Slack? I don’t know your company’s story, but I’m guessing it went like this: Jane heard about Slack from a friend, so she signed up and started using it with her team. Pretty soon the whole company was on Slack, and no one can remember life before it. Most software companies dream of seeing people adopt their product like this. But they don’t know how to get there. From the outside, it looks like magic.
Getting your organization to use data correctly requires a shift in attitudes and workflows. It isn’t easy, but without a data-driven culture, you’ll end up saddled by unnecessary costs and missed potential. Making decisions based on instincts — or worse, unreliable data — makes it impossible to achieve optimal business results.
There’s no more vital metric for a SaaS company to keep track of than churn. Churn can be powered by a number of factors, and even small month-on-month increases in churn percentage can be ruinous to planning, so understanding what churn is and how to analyze it is paramount. What is churn analysis?
Customer data platform (often called CDP) isn’t a term you hear very often — especially outside of marketing. In truth, it’s a relatively new addition to the MarTech landscape. However, many sales teams have uncovered significant value using their organization’s CDP to execute on account-based selling initiatives. We’ve got three ways your sales team can do the same.
Onboarding reduces your churn, improves your conversion rates, and drives up both your LTV and potential upgrade revenue – immediately & in the future. But onboarding isn’t just about getting a sale. It’s about how to get the right people using the right things, as I’ve seen time and time again at Ramp Ventures and other SaaS companies I’ve worked with.