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08: Churn - Figuring it out and fighting it
Helpful links from the episode:
- Hotjar
- Heap Analytics
- Mixpanel
- Appcues
- Google Analytics
- Net Revenue Churn
- Net retention
- ProfitWell
- Baremetrics
FULL SHOW NOTES
[intro music]
00:10 Aaron Weiche: Episode eight, Churn, Figuring It Out and Fighting It.
00:16 INTRO: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast, sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrapped SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins and losses shared in each episode, from Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.
[music]
00:45 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. I'm Aaron.
00:48 Darren Shaw: I'm Darren.
00:50 AW: And we are back at you with Episode Ocho, which I feel like is, every week I like seeing that or every time we talk, Darren, I like seeing a bigger number. It makes me feel like we're really accomplished and we're almost hitting double digits.
01:05 DS: I know, that double digit's gonna be a huge milestone.
[laughter]
01:07 DS: We should have a champagne party of some kind, big celebration.
01:12 AW: Nice, nice. We'll do a virtual toast.
01:14 DS: Yeah, sure, definitely that.
01:16 AW: So we're at least in a better cycle. We're back to talking every two weeks, the last three recordings that we've done, anyway and anything pop in with you in the last couple of weeks?
01:27 DS: It's been much of the same. It's only been two weeks so we're still working on the same things here. We're working some of our services and I'm excited we'll get in this Google My Business syncing working with our platform so that's gonna allow us to build out a ton of amazing stuff. So that's all up and running and we're working on that, launch of our, update to our Rank Tracker is coming. So our rank tracking platform will now support screenshots, so taking screenshots of your listings so that you can be like, "Did I really rank there?" and checking that out, so I'm excited about that. It's coming down the pipeline pretty soon.
02:05 DS: Designs are all finalized on our Local Citation Finder, so the team that's working on the rank tracking stuff, once that gets launched, which is pretty quick, they're gonna shift over to implementing all of these designs to our new Local Citation Finder. I don't know, lots of stuff in the works, lots of things going on, tons of sales calls lately.
02:29 AW: Nice.
02:30 DS: Yeah. So it's been good.
02:31 AW: Gotta love that, especially since we talked all about sales in our last episode.
02:35 DS: It must have been that, actually. People were like, "Oh, Darren Shaw, Whitespark, we better call them, give 'em a sales call." Yeah.
02:43 AW: Yeah, well, I mean, the things we talked about last time, that's... Now that I've literally finished seven weeks of travel every single week but my number one and I already, from putting a couple things out on LinkedIn today, have a few new intros but I have to find at least one, if not as many as three salespeople to help get us to the next level. We have enough going on and we have the right things and we just need to be talking to more people and I need to get them up and running to have an impact yet this year, which is crazy to think but...
03:27 DS: Sales is so time-consuming. So it's, for you as the CEO, trying to manage so much of that, it's really valuable to bring on some people to help out.
03:36 AW: It totally is and I'm a little bit scared about... Not scared but I just realize how much work it's gonna be to train one, two or three, hopefully all together. But knowing, all right, if I sink my teeth into that hard for 30, 60, 90 days, then it will pay off, right? It's a necessary evil, so.
03:55 DS: Yeah, I would... One thing we're trying to do with training is to group it as much as possible. So when we hire, we try to hire three people at the same time and train 'em all at the same time so that they'll get that. And then we've also started screencasting and recording all of our training sessions. So later we could have someone else do the training and they can refer back to that as a reference or eventually dial it in to the point where it's all recorded, be like, "Oh, welcome aboard, here's your training package. Let us know when you've worked through all that and then we'll have a call, right?"
04:29 AW: That's awesome, that's great efficiency. I need to do a better job of that. I hope I'm able to hire two salespeople at once so I can duplicate the output of that training. I've been trying to, even after this call, to record this today, I have a sales call and I've been recording those as of late just so when we do hire, I can say, "Here's a dozen sales calls in the last month. Now you can listen to all these and pick things out, start to think about your pitch and your story and what kinda questions are asked and things like that. So."
05:04 DS: Do you give your prospects a heads-up that you'll be recording the call for training and quality assurance purposes?
05:13 AW: I usually don't say that. Sometimes I'll just tell them it's for their purpose, right and then I'll send the link to the recording along with the materials I shared.
05:20 DS: That's good to do, yeah.
05:21 AW: I've found in doing that, why not give them every piece of that? That way if they have to share up or down, they have that available. Sometimes people even ask for it but yeah, I don't always let 'em know the wire is tapped either, so I probably should do that. [laughter]
05:38 DS: Oh, yeah, you should. You're breaking some FTC laws, I think, if you don't.
05:43 AW: Totally. They're coming for me. I'm sure I'm already on their list.
05:48 DS: Yeah, ding-dong. [laughter] Right in the middle of the podcast, all right.
05:53 AW: Other than that, we just wrapped up... Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, we had our exec team summit. So for us, that it basically ends up being six, seven of us that kind of lead different areas in the company. We try to have at least three or four face-to-face that we just call our exec summit. We pretty much map out the three days solid to get face time, both where things are at hiring financials, what's next, planning, ideation, try to fit all that in, spend some time together, have dinners together.
We actually did it here in Minneapolis this time with having five of our exec team are now in Minneapolis out of the seven. So that made it a lot easier and then those of us that are here in the Twin Cities, we stayed at a hotel Monday night and Tuesday night just so we could spend more time together and not be commuting back and forth and everything else.
06:53 DS: Right, yeah. Sounds great, that's really helpful. I feel a little bit on my own from an exec perspective. It's mostly me as the primary exec. I certainly have some key team members that I lean on for a lot of those decisions and collaboration and discussing things but in the end, I'm the only, I'm the sole director of things really. So it's nice to have that team around you that you can work with in that capacity.
07:25 AW: Yeah, I adopted the philosophy at my last agency when we grew that and I was basically in the COO role but I really saw that our compa...
View all episodes
By Aaron Weiche
5
1010 ratings
Helpful links from the episode:
- Hotjar
- Heap Analytics
- Mixpanel
- Appcues
- Google Analytics
- Net Revenue Churn
- Net retention
- ProfitWell
- Baremetrics
FULL SHOW NOTES
[intro music]
00:10 Aaron Weiche: Episode eight, Churn, Figuring It Out and Fighting It.
00:16 INTRO: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast, sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrapped SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins and losses shared in each episode, from Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.
[music]
00:45 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. I'm Aaron.
00:48 Darren Shaw: I'm Darren.
00:50 AW: And we are back at you with Episode Ocho, which I feel like is, every week I like seeing that or every time we talk, Darren, I like seeing a bigger number. It makes me feel like we're really accomplished and we're almost hitting double digits.
01:05 DS: I know, that double digit's gonna be a huge milestone.
[laughter]
01:07 DS: We should have a champagne party of some kind, big celebration.
01:12 AW: Nice, nice. We'll do a virtual toast.
01:14 DS: Yeah, sure, definitely that.
01:16 AW: So we're at least in a better cycle. We're back to talking every two weeks, the last three recordings that we've done, anyway and anything pop in with you in the last couple of weeks?
01:27 DS: It's been much of the same. It's only been two weeks so we're still working on the same things here. We're working some of our services and I'm excited we'll get in this Google My Business syncing working with our platform so that's gonna allow us to build out a ton of amazing stuff. So that's all up and running and we're working on that, launch of our, update to our Rank Tracker is coming. So our rank tracking platform will now support screenshots, so taking screenshots of your listings so that you can be like, "Did I really rank there?" and checking that out, so I'm excited about that. It's coming down the pipeline pretty soon.
02:05 DS: Designs are all finalized on our Local Citation Finder, so the team that's working on the rank tracking stuff, once that gets launched, which is pretty quick, they're gonna shift over to implementing all of these designs to our new Local Citation Finder. I don't know, lots of stuff in the works, lots of things going on, tons of sales calls lately.
02:29 AW: Nice.
02:30 DS: Yeah. So it's been good.
02:31 AW: Gotta love that, especially since we talked all about sales in our last episode.
02:35 DS: It must have been that, actually. People were like, "Oh, Darren Shaw, Whitespark, we better call them, give 'em a sales call." Yeah.
02:43 AW: Yeah, well, I mean, the things we talked about last time, that's... Now that I've literally finished seven weeks of travel every single week but my number one and I already, from putting a couple things out on LinkedIn today, have a few new intros but I have to find at least one, if not as many as three salespeople to help get us to the next level. We have enough going on and we have the right things and we just need to be talking to more people and I need to get them up and running to have an impact yet this year, which is crazy to think but...
03:27 DS: Sales is so time-consuming. So it's, for you as the CEO, trying to manage so much of that, it's really valuable to bring on some people to help out.
03:36 AW: It totally is and I'm a little bit scared about... Not scared but I just realize how much work it's gonna be to train one, two or three, hopefully all together. But knowing, all right, if I sink my teeth into that hard for 30, 60, 90 days, then it will pay off, right? It's a necessary evil, so.
03:55 DS: Yeah, I would... One thing we're trying to do with training is to group it as much as possible. So when we hire, we try to hire three people at the same time and train 'em all at the same time so that they'll get that. And then we've also started screencasting and recording all of our training sessions. So later we could have someone else do the training and they can refer back to that as a reference or eventually dial it in to the point where it's all recorded, be like, "Oh, welcome aboard, here's your training package. Let us know when you've worked through all that and then we'll have a call, right?"
04:29 AW: That's awesome, that's great efficiency. I need to do a better job of that. I hope I'm able to hire two salespeople at once so I can duplicate the output of that training. I've been trying to, even after this call, to record this today, I have a sales call and I've been recording those as of late just so when we do hire, I can say, "Here's a dozen sales calls in the last month. Now you can listen to all these and pick things out, start to think about your pitch and your story and what kinda questions are asked and things like that. So."
05:04 DS: Do you give your prospects a heads-up that you'll be recording the call for training and quality assurance purposes?
05:13 AW: I usually don't say that. Sometimes I'll just tell them it's for their purpose, right and then I'll send the link to the recording along with the materials I shared.
05:20 DS: That's good to do, yeah.
05:21 AW: I've found in doing that, why not give them every piece of that? That way if they have to share up or down, they have that available. Sometimes people even ask for it but yeah, I don't always let 'em know the wire is tapped either, so I probably should do that. [laughter]
05:38 DS: Oh, yeah, you should. You're breaking some FTC laws, I think, if you don't.
05:43 AW: Totally. They're coming for me. I'm sure I'm already on their list.
05:48 DS: Yeah, ding-dong. [laughter] Right in the middle of the podcast, all right.
05:53 AW: Other than that, we just wrapped up... Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, we had our exec team summit. So for us, that it basically ends up being six, seven of us that kind of lead different areas in the company. We try to have at least three or four face-to-face that we just call our exec summit. We pretty much map out the three days solid to get face time, both where things are at hiring financials, what's next, planning, ideation, try to fit all that in, spend some time together, have dinners together.
We actually did it here in Minneapolis this time with having five of our exec team are now in Minneapolis out of the seven. So that made it a lot easier and then those of us that are here in the Twin Cities, we stayed at a hotel Monday night and Tuesday night just so we could spend more time together and not be commuting back and forth and everything else.
06:53 DS: Right, yeah. Sounds great, that's really helpful. I feel a little bit on my own from an exec perspective. It's mostly me as the primary exec. I certainly have some key team members that I lean on for a lot of those decisions and collaboration and discussing things but in the end, I'm the only, I'm the sole director of things really. So it's nice to have that team around you that you can work with in that capacity.
07:25 AW: Yeah, I adopted the philosophy at my last agency when we grew that and I was basically in the COO role but I really saw that our compa...