Archive of posts with tag 'Retention'

Helping Instead of Selling

August 30, 2020 • #

David Skok opens this post on selling with the classic sales training mantra — customers love to buy, but hate to be sold to:

Customers hate being sold to. They don’t mind getting expert help when they want to buy something. But much of the time they are not ready to buy, and one of the most irritating things is to have a salesperson try to get them to buy when they aren’t ready. Unfortunately too many people in marketing and sales positions don’t seem to understand this, and proceed to irritate their potential customers.

As one of the only “sales”people for the first 5 years of Fulcrum’s growth, I can attest to this working well for for myself. In my case my natural distaste for sales and total lack of experience doing it sort of forced me to figure out that this model was the only way I could get customers interested.

A self-service product helps, where you can rely on the ability to get the customer to buy something small at first that they can then grow into — a land-and-expand style of product. In SaaS, the game is all about expansion and retention. For the company, it’s not a life and death situation to maximize customer revenue right out of the gate. In fact, some of the strongest customers you’ll build are the ones that grow into your product organically over time. Champion-led adoption builds incredible gravitational pull around your product if you keep improving and continue expanding the value you’re delivering.

The best thing you can do in the early days is to help. Help prospects not only with your product, but help them with tips and tricks, help clean up their data, help connect other tools, and overall be a source of expertise that they can trust.

✦

Churn is a Company Problem

August 21, 2020 • #

Customer success teams in SaaS are most closely associated with measuring and preventing churn in business, often even having compensation or performance metrics tied to churn rates.

We look to CS teams to identify churn early, but the project of reducing it isn’t only in their hands.

This piece from Kyle Poyar makes the case with examples of how other teams should be participating in retention. After all, churn is only a signal of something missing about your business — the support wasn’t there, the product didn’t solve a problem, the pricing model didn’t work for them.

It’s a good thing to remember that churn is not some isolated phenomenon; it’s lagging evidence of a missing link in your value chain. If a customer leaves because you’re missing an integration, that’s a product problem, but one discovered long before they cancel their plan. If they resist adding new seats and are looking for excuses to remove users, perhaps the pricing and packaging model is a wrong fit for the problem being solved. Maybe you pushed to hard on closing the deal and sold to a non-ideal buyer inside an otherwise ideal company.

All of the examples are levers that impact churn, some very directly, some as second- or third-order mechanisms.

Tracking your churn rates is step one to diagnosing where it’s coming from. Approaching churning (or even just stalling) customers with a jobs-to-be-done and pain identification objective should help uncover the deeper causes of churn you can do something about in teams other than customer success.

✦

Browse the full archive →

✦