This week’s roundup includes keeping existing customers happy with intelligence, sales tips from Mark Roberge, grabbing the marketing spotlight in 2017,a 4-part video series on business growth, benchmarking the SaaS customer success & more.
SaaS operations must be wrapped with intelligence to keep existing customers happy
Real Business
It’s no secret that customer retention is far less expensive than acquiring a new customer, but how does a SaaS company improve its customer retention while continuing to focus on growth? Keeping current customers happy can highly reduce churn and therefore highly increase overall revenue.
“Success in SaaS is about the lifetime value of a customer, so steps that can be taken to build the relationship beyond the first deal are vital. Healthy customers usually add features or expand their user base year over year, so it’s clear they can have a massive impact on annual recurring revenue (ARR). With customers holding such multifaceted power over the ways in which we grow, it’s critical to have both the visibility into their experience, and the ability to respond to issues on a moment’s notice in order to ensure the overall health of the business.”
4-part video series for driving business growth
Fast Lane Formula
- Your Growth Score
- Your Best Buyers
- Your Rear View Mirror
- Your Growth Road Map
In the series, you’ll discover the do’s and don’t of growth, how to attract the best customers and avoid the bad, and evaluate what has and hasn’t worked for you and others. [Get access here.]
Sales tips for SaaS: 5 lessons you can steal from Mark Roberge
Drift
As the SVP of Sales, and then Chief Revenue Officer, Mark Roberge helped HubSpot grow from $0 to $100M+ in revenue, so it’s safe to say he knows a thing or two about sales. He is also one of the few sales experts that has seen and experienced the shift from Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) model to the Product Qualified Lead (PQL) model.
You can listen to the full podcast of the interview with Roberge, including his thoughts on how sales have changed and the interview techniques he uses. This article also includes the five main highlights of the podcast in written format. [Access podcast and highlights here.]
4 marketing techniques for grabbing the spotlight in 2017
Convince & Convert
Have you revisited your marketing strategy for 2017 yet? Your marketing game must be in constant state of evolution in order to keep up, let alone get ahead, if you want to stand out.
“Twenty-five percent of all American households have cut the cord and stopped watching live television, and the remaining 75 percent are increasingly recording their favorite shows and skipping the ads. Digital ads are losing their kick because nearly 70 million Americans are using an ad blocker, which represents a 34.4 percent spike from 2015. And worse, in 2017, the number of ad-blocking Americans is expected to jump to nearly 90 million.”
According to this article, 2017 will be the year to experiment in trying to mute your competition in order to stand out. Here are the four strategies this article advises you take in 2017:
- Be experienced.
- Use video.
- Use names.
- Know and use data.
7 strategies to benchmark SaaS customers to success
Customer Think
“Customer benchmarking: the practice of identifying where a customer can improve or is already doing well by comparing to other customers.”
This practice is what helps Customer Success Managers to deliver unique value to their customers and it is a highly encouraged in the SaaS market. This article outlines seven strategies to empower customer success managers with customer benchmarking:
- Using Industry Surveys
- Using Best-Practices Studies
- Using Vendor Surveys
- Using Data Scientists
- Using Business Software Reports
- Using your SaaS Product
- Using Specialized Benchmarking Software
“The first two are longstanding strategies that rely on third-party data. The other five strategies leverage the data that is a byproduct of the vendor’s customer relationships and usage of their solutions. The last two of these five progressively use artificial intelligence to further automate the task.” [Read the details here.]
Video of the Week:
Tweet of the Week:
Nearly 59% of a salesreps’ time is spent on prospecting, administrative task, meetings or training. Not SELLING. pic.twitter.com/5DXTudSDdW
— Andy Davidson (@CloudCoOpATX) December 4, 2016
