Each section also includes stories from successful SaaS businesses across Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Monetization, Metrics, and Measurement. He is highly invested in user onboarding and digital adoption, especially for SaaS, and he writes on these topics for the UserGuiding blog. Frankly, human interactions are concerning. A problem or pain point exists for a large number of people. moments early in their journey. secure hyper-growth for your business. Calendly identified different friction points that acted as conversion killers during its growth phase: Friction 1: In the trial-to-customer conversion - Whenever a trial period was over, there was no automated process in place to collect credit card information and activate the subscription. The majority of the self-serve experience will consist of this period in the user journey. The next few pages will arm you with questions, ideas and best-practices to help steer your revenue growth at every stage of your self-service workflow. Churn is inevitable. You need to guide your users through the product and make them feel at home."}}]}. As our annals of history record, the term was first coined in America just as the U.S. entered WW1. How do you identify and move the right levers at every stage of the customer's journey to fuel revenue growth? To stay vigilant in the competition and achieve your best possible growth, you have to start implementing self-serve into your business; and actually become self-serve first. Growth levers are powerful tools that you can 'leverage' for growth. Like it's value enough that I would tell another person at work about it or I would tell someone in my network about it. The growth strategies and channels that worked yesterday would likely not work so well today, and might yield even worse returns tomorrow. Boost your self-service business's growth, Remove the obstacles (read: uncover growth opportunities) lurking in your business, Drive operational efficiencies into every stage of your customer lifecycle. Price too low, you lose value. Fewer support requests, less hand-holding, and automatic upgrades mean higher profit margins per customer. Implementation, Freemium Model for SaaS The Good, The Bad, and The In-between, The Best Way to Win the Freemium Model Is by Challenging the Very Model Itself, What makes Freemium work? Thats a popular-potent quote from Gokul Rajaram, whose article on self-serve inspired me to write this article. This is why great companies are adopting a self-serve approach left and right: its just simply better. But the self-serve approach will always start with the User Onboarding. How do you convert more visitors into paying customers? Each feature can be benchmarked to determine the impact to PQL which is ultimately funnel optimization. Copyright 2006-2022 Bright Market, LLC dba FastSpring. As Gokul puts it in his article, self-serve adds rocket fuel to customer acquisition.. For Buffer, the social media scheduling & management software, a healthy count of scheduled tweets indicates that customers are getting value from the service. It's taken a few months of toil, but you've definitely hit Product-Market Fit. PQLs are more likely to become a customer than other leads. 2 Minton Place, Victoria Road, Bicester, England, OX26 6QB experts is here to make sure you go live ","acceptedAnswer":{"@type":"Answer","text":"Self-service in SaaS goes through excellent user onboarding. This is largely due to the affordability and lack of complexity the model offers to both companies and customers. Buffer Improves Retention through Trigger Based Emails [if Buffer Queue = Empty]. You've built a fine SaaS product, that solves a prominent pain-point. so Ive reached out to him and asked whether he would like to add to the subject: Seamless onboarding a customer is a critical part of building a stellar self serve product.. Soon well be looking at another massive leap forward with 5G-powered A.I. If a product truly adds value for you, you will engage with it more deeply. I think that's why inbound marketing works so well for Hubspot", says Hubspot VP of Marketing, Kieren Flanagan. The only thing that can is expansion. Increased productivity contributes to a stickier user experience that discourages customer churn. Mobile friendly forms for those hurried, less tolerant users. The more business customers you have, the easier it is to scale your own business. The sales model is what allows your company, business, or startup to grow and thrive. How much should we spend on customer service to retain an existing customer? Riddle's free-to-paid conversion was suffering. 75% of pre-sales activity for most companies is conducted online, without sales assistance. Inbound marketing is the essence of Hubspot. These have grown in popularity, and users are FAR more accustomed to turning to them, especially with more complex SaaS products. As they scaled, their customer acquisition strategy pursued different use-cases and required a platform that allowed for pricing experiments, including support for tiered as well as dynamic pricing for enterprise sales. | Early-stage is when the churn happens within the first few months of activation. Getting users to try your product early via a freemium edition or free trial gives them the chance to truly experience your product, free from marketing, sales, or any other distractions. Sure, they might have a sales function marking their marketing leads as "SQLs" (Sales Qualified Leads). Increasing knowledge share reduces both the emotional and the informational complexity of buying your product. Free trial is largely recommended as a must, if your product is competitively priced. Access free certifications, courses, and umbrella of subscriptions. The self-service sales model is one of the most popular models in SaaS today. Choosing the wrong model for your product can severely delay growth, while choosing the right model can lead to impressive growth, revenue, and results. Channels for users to advocate for your product and invite others. The best part of being in a growing self-serve market is that your users already have intent. They not only made their customers aware that their Buffer queue was empty, but provided other popular applications they integrated with to make the sharing process more seamless. All this preferably without coding; lets not get the developers involved . If it's positive, the company's sales team is working hard to fill a leaky bucket. before choosing a Subscription Billing and Here are four crisp points to help you evaluate if the freemium model will work for you: So if I was going into a new market, and I was thinking about freemium, I would think about what is the most value I could give away that would allow users to see some amount of value with the freemium product, that would make it shareable to their colleagues. Short is the new black. So yes, you should put emphasis on Self-Serve. Increase awareness and build a differentiation in an established, commoditized market. 3/4 users would rather self-educate about a product rather than learn by a salesperson. Self-serve first is when the entire company is built around self-serve, when self-serve is the core foundation of the company.. If you are at this point, you may already be looking into product usage metrics at drawing predictions of when a user is likely to upgrade, expand their purchase, or renew their subscription. Even if you can get it down >1%, it's still going to hurt your growth. Customer accounts are like high-yield savings accounts where money keeps coming in every month, without much effort. Self-service SaaS companies land paying customers by being strategic about the product packaging i.e limiting the right set of features to the paid plans and thereby converting free users into paying customers. To be successful in this endeavor, its best to ensure youve built tremendous value into your product. You build strategies that will, 20 Product Marketing Metrics and KPIs Youre Missing Out On, Metrics and KPIs play a key role in each internal team reaching the short-term goals they set at the start of each period or the long-term ones that are decided, 9 Examples of Great Product Marketing Thatll Inspire Your Next Strategy, a list full of great SaaS product examples that would definitely be of help to both marketing teams by helping them create a new go-to-market strategy to promote their product, Product Marketing Manager Job Description required skills and responsibilities in 2022, The holder of this title must be able to harmonize all respective tactics that are included in the process. User converts automatically with a much faster sales cycle. How to guide him to the A-ha moment to realize value soon? Plus, the easier and more beneficial it is for these high-profile customers to purchase your product, the quicker youre able to save money and resources while growing your businessalso known as scaling. Management platform? The problem, however, was with converting them into paying customers. When you lean towards a self-serve approach, with all your funnels rolling out the exact same each time, it will be easier to figure out flaws. Chargebee is designed to drive the subscription management engine of high volume self-service SaaS on auto-pilot. You may sit users through hours and hours of product onboarding or training videos to get started (and earn a college degree while they're at it). Research shows that 90% of consumers now expect a brand or organization to offer a self-service customer support portal.. If it makes you happy, you visit it more frequently and become an active user. Youll need user onboarding automation with various elements for each segment of your users and analytics for your user onboarding to optimize the processes. As Ive mentioned before, Gokuls article inspired me to explain the importance of user onboarding in terms of creating a self-serve product. A free trial is a customer acquisition model that provides a partial or complete product to prospects free of charge, for a limited time. Theres a higher value to be found in business clients and customers. Once theyve tried it out and proved its functionality, theyll be far more willing to upgrade and expand the value of the product. How long will it take for a customer to realize it? While acquiring, activating, and retaining users represent one side of operating a successful SaaS business, monetizing through growth experiments represents the other. Every growth experiment, no matter the results, yields an opportunity to learn about your business and users, and grow further. FastSpring B.V. Fred. It doesn't matter how many active customers your acquisition strategy acquires, if none of them stick around after signing up. By the time your sales team interacts with them, a prospect would have already formed an opinion about your product and its available alternatives. How to get started with the Self-Serve Approach, Reaching Towards the Ideal Feet Firmly In Place, Product Marketing vs. Marketing A Guide to Exact Differences, Remember when Ron Swanson did not understand how the internet works and threw his computer into the trash? Is your product designed to demonstrate value in the limited trial period? Follow-up through each stage of the sales cycle. Your product is DIY. How tempting is the idea of opening that box and assembling it yourself? speed. And if you go to, Google Trends and look at, even just type in "how-to," it's pretty interesting just to see the trend for people searching how-to, as more and more people self-educate. Roeskestraat 115, 1076 EE Amsterdam, Netherlands Users who experience such key actions are more likely to convert to customers. An In-Depth Tear Down of Six SaaS Growth Levers. Word-of-mouth is, undoubtedly, the most powerful marketing medium at your disposal. You need to earn your word-of-mouth recommendations. Lessons from Dropbox, Evernote and a Lemonade stand. For a self-service SaaS, there are seven states in the customer lifecycle: Now let's take a closer look at some of the most important SaaS metrics for measuring self-service growth. Almost all product-led SaaS businesses follow a Self-serve revenue growth framework. Acquisition channels are saturating. However, the big majority of users should be onboarded through self-serve funnels. A self-service strategy relying greatly on the product, changes how companies track the effectiveness of customers moving through different lifecycle stages: from signup to PQL, from PQL to customer, and from customer to active customer. For instance, a range of product usage insights could throw light on the reasons why someone might leave your product, the signs that a customer is getting ready to leave, and the existing value gaps. And thats where UserGuiding can make your life easier: User onboarding software exists to serve a single purpose; Give you the onboarding material you need right now. A gentleman-grocer named Clarence Saunders received a patent (Patent #1,242,872), recognizing his new visionary way for consumers to get groceries. Prospects signup, check your product out, and whip out their credit cards without a human having to force it out of them. Have any of that kind of thing currently in your life? The average number of steps to reach the key action could be anywhere between. When was the last time you needed to contact your email providers support staff? Either of the editions should make it incredibly easy for people to use your product and realize value soon. get all the growth insights you need. It challenges the very assumption that sales productivity is the key to growth. Most people use analytics the way a drunk uses a lamp post, for support rather than illumination. Graphically-inlayed or embedded hints in the UX are also more common than they used to be and often extremely effective with little-to-no friction. If you have seen Parks and Recreations, Top 10 Product Marketing Courses and Certifications in 2022, In today's world, bringing a product to market is no easy job. Getting to the product-market fit is a continuous process. The product virality formula is calculated by multiplying the number of customers at the beginning of a time period by the viral k coefficient (which measures the conversion rate of new customers invited by existing customers to start using a product). Since Customer Churn impacts your growth metrics like Total Active Users it can have a crushing effect on your morale. How much can we comfortably spend on marketing and sales for customer acquisition? And users no longer want to fill out lead forms or submit a request for accessing a free trial. In other words, some customers dont necessarily want to interact with your sales team until theyre actually ready to make a purchase. Whether were talking the smartphone app revolution, social media, gas stations, and grocery line checkouts, to self-serve bank tellers and mini self-serve movie dispensers outside drug stores (Redbox) self-serve infrastructure is ubiquitous in the physical AND digital world. The self-service revenue growth framework cuts across these 5 essential stages: The cost of acquiring new customers has increased by over 50%. Are Free Trials Right for Your SaaS business? Friction 3: Adding more users - Customers who wanted to add 10 more users to the plan had to contact Customer Success and wait. Calendly's greatest customer acquisition strategy comes from its users and they value they experience. You've figured the formula to simplify your customers' workflows without having to entirely depend on the sales team. The customer trust in businesses is eroding. User experiences the product to see immediate value. "}},{"@type":"Question","name":"How does self-service work in SaaS? High revenue per employee (RPE): SaaS was always built to scale well, but with a self-service approach, you're able to do more with far fewer people on your team. Be prepared to constantly test, analyze and build your onboarding flow. Customer lifetime value (CLV or LTV) is a prediction of how much revenue your business will receive from a single customer over the duration of your relationship. la, the Aha moment. Involuntary churn is when customers churn due to payment failures, card expiry or change, gateway errors, etc. Or your product could guide them to discover the key functions they need to achieve what they want to do. But not all of them. Product-qualified leads (PQLs) are typically activated usersfolks who have completed a key action within your product, had their aha moment, and have seen the value that your product can offer first-hand. If your product is something that your users can instantly start with on their own and use until they achieve the complete value without the intervention of any other person, they will feel extremely satisfied. Even with a great product, amazing support, and top-notch training, some customers are just going to leave. Fast sales cycles: With a free trial/freemium plan, a great onboarding flow, and a highly sticky product, customers can experience immediate value and upgrade in no time. Why should I be concerned with the Self-Serve approach? Build trust by educating prospects, instead of selling to them. Every day endless amounts of money are spent on Google advertising, and almost no one, ever, contacts any kind of support agent at Google. Bright Market LLC dba FastSpring Limited. expert masterclasses. With UserGuiding, you can easily gather your guides and articles in a Self-Help Center. How long does it take for prospects to realize initial value on average? As a recurring business, you need to focus on building a sticky product that people love coming back to. And the best (and most challenging) part about it - you can't buy it off a store. They help track product engagement at an account level i.e at a team level (as opposed to individual customer level). And when that happens, a considerable proportion of the energy, time, and money invested in onboarding goes down the drain. The key to successful implementation is to pick the right lever for your growth system (picking the wrong one can lead to deadly results). Whereas deep comprehension of your brand gained through experience, eliminates the need to be informed by a salesperson about what your product can do, how to buy it, and how to use it.. PQLs provide insights into customer intent and predict how likely a user is to progress to the next stage of the customer lifecycle. A truly viral product turns every user experience into a self-propagating marketing and sales machine. A dormant account, on the other hand, is seen as the first step on the road to cancellation. You need not go down the funnel to find your key actions. How do you hold on to them long enough to recover your acquisition cost? Finding examples of self-serve first companies isnt tough; theyre in just about every direction. Friction 2: Switching to a different plan - A customer was in the annual plan and wanted to cancel two months into the plan. Conversely, self-service models are far less expensive to sell. Learn to unlock all revenue secrets to Riddle is a Germany-based quiz making platform that allows publishers to create quizzes, personality tests, and other interactive formats to engage their audience. That's what this comprehensive guide should help you answer. PMMs should design a go-to-market strategy based on, What Is a Push Notification? Sales reaches out to leads from there.. Learn everything that falls under the There's no magic spell to reduce churn, you simply have to ensure that your customers continue to realize value from your PRODUCT. Helps gather sticky or serious evaluators while weeding out "servicing cost" from low Size of Wallet users. The goal of every self-service SaaS business should be to get the product in the hands of the user as quickly and seamlessly as possible. Some of those experiments should be around: The more important thing to take care of here is to take contextinto account. As a software business, this is exactly how your customers feel. A truly delightful customer experience, limitless customer acquisition possibilities, failproof churn management all focus on streamlining and strengthening the entire self-service channel for revenue growth. 2020 unquestionably marked the beginning of the next phase of our product-led era. Activation is the art and science of turning acquired users into active customers. We know that it'll adapt to most if not all situations that'll come up in the future. Who are our most valuable customers and how can we better target this demographic for future sales? If your product makes customers so delirious with joy that they can't stop talking about it to everyone they meet, it's high time you designed a strategy to capture that word-of-mouth already. There can and will always be enterprises that will require quotations or customers thatll need some more details.