SaaS Boss

In this episode of SaaS Boss show I interview Emilia Korczynska about how your onboarding affects retention and how you can improve your retention.

In this episode we discuss:

The median annual churn rate for SaaS businesses under $10 million in revenue is 20%. Good churn rate is 5-7% annually. This means 0.5% churn on a monthly basis. In other words, this means losing approximately 1 in 200 customers, or losing $1 out of $200.

Majority of founders aren't there yet.

Personalize - only 40% use a welcome screen, treat different personas differently to maximize retention and key feature activation.

Use video - under 20% use video

Use interactive walkthoughs on the welcome screens - only 24% of SaaS tools use interactive walk through

Retaining customers during the crisis: use in-app communication, monitor client behavior like not logging in, offer extra help and get your customer success to step in and help users keep achieving their goals, invite users to jump on the call.

In this episode of SaaS Boss show I interview Morgan Williams where he shares with us his process to doing cold email outreach effectively that gets people to respond and increase SaaS sales.

The things we discuss:

-A 3-step process for building a winning cold outreach campaign

-Two things you can do to immediately improve your response rate

-How to use AIDA to turn cold emails into sales meetings - copywriting formula - copywriting framework, sales letter framework

-Tools for email finding software and email sending software and followup

-Biggest problems founders make is not send enough emails and not following up more often

-What to do when someone responds?

Setting up email authentification

Warming up the domain - start with 10-20/day and ramp up to 160/day.

Crafting emails

Books mentioned in this episode:

Ca$hvertising by Drew Eric Whitman

My Life in Advertising and Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins

Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene M. Schwartz

In this episode of SaaS Boss show I interview David Katic about secrets to designing best converting SaaS website. The 10 secreats we discuss are:

-Articulate your perfect customer

-Gathering customer data

-Segment and filter

-Authority and expertise

-Social proof

-Scarcity (not the cheesy one)

-Story

-Processes

-Great offer

-Follow key design principles

Get free downloadable guide that summarises the 10 secrets we discussed:

https://www.digitalgrowthgenius.com/free-guides/

David's tool to diagnose the key problems on a website:

https://www.digitalgrowthgenius.com/diagnose/

David's YouTube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0txIps02TkeSLij0gFV2jQ

In this episode of SaaS Boss show I share a quick idea how you can keep customers who are affected by Coronavirus and want to cancel their subscription and instead keep them as your customers.

In this episode of SaaS Boss show I interview Lloyd Yip. Lloyd is a sales and marketing advisor to SaaS companies. In Episode #16 Lloyd and I discussed getting your first sales with cold outreach. In this episode we talk about scaling past $5k MRR with cold outreach and other organic (read NOT SEO) strategies.

In this episode we discuss:

Scaling past 100 sales

Free channels you can use (partnerships, communities)

Building cost effective client acquisition engine

Channel selection based on ticket size.

Formula for effective demos

Connect with Lloyd here:

lwyconsulting.com

https://m.me/lwyconsulting?ref=r10kwebinar

In this episode of SaaS Boss show I interview Tory Smith and we talk about pros and cons of demo vs trial

Things we discuss:

When choosing between trial or demo, lots of things to consider: price, complexity, stage. What should we consider when deciding whether offer a trial or a demo?

70% of SaaS companies offer free trial. Why is trial so popular?

What goes through prospects mind when they only see demo?

If given an option, prospects will go with self service

When is offering a demo better than trial?

When is offering trial better than demo?

Intercept the trial with a demo - a great way for more complicated SaaS companies to still benefit from higher conversions when offering trial but also help guide and get an opportunity to "up-sell" the leads to doing a demo.

Seth Godin is an entrepreneur, best-selling author and speaker. He has written 19 best-selling books including classics such as The Dip, Linchpin and Tribes. He has also inspired numerous people around the world via his talks on marketing and effective leadership.

A few weeks ago, I attended a workshop by Seth Godin in which he talked about management and leadership. I got a chance to ask him a question about that during the workshop.

I share my thoughts on why learning management skills is important for SaaS founders, and why you still need to learn how to be an effective manager, even if you hate delegating and would much rather do everything yourself to avoid the energy draining activities of assigning tasks and managing your employees.

And Seth Godin answers my question about how can we find employees who we don’t need to manage.

Show Notes

[1.09] - Seth Godin differentiates between management and leadership.

Managers work to get their employees to do what they did yesterday a little bit faster and cheaper.

Leaders know where they would like to go, they understand that they cannot get there without their team to make something happen.

[2.07] – I share my thoughts on why you can’t do everything alone.

You cannot grow past a certain stage by yourself. There are so many strategic things you need to work and it won’t be wise for you to spend your time on things you can get someone to do for $10 an hour if you learn how to delegate properly.

When you are on a bootstrap budget in most cases you can’t afford to hire people who you don’t need to manage because those people are really expensive.

So I think you need to learn how to become a good manager and with time you will learn how to be a leader.

[4.16] – Seth answers my question on how to find people you don’t need to manage?

He says that when he talks about people managing themselves, he is not saying he wants people to do what he wants them to do without saying anything.

He is talking about giving people around you the authority, the leverage and the space to do something you wouldn’t have done.

It’s not that they need to read your mind, but that they are actually in charge and when they have a question, they should ask. When they don’t have a question, they should do something.

Resources

Seth Godin’s website

In this episode of SaaS Boss show I interview Lloyd Yip. Lloyd is a sales and marketing advisor to SaaS companies. In this episode we discuss actionable steps to getting your first sales. Many founders are reluctunt doing cold outreach, and so you wait until you build your product to start getting feedback from potential customers.

In this episode we discuss:

Attaining product market fit for SaaS companies and getting early traction

Ways to get first few salates using LinkedIn outreach

Scaling to your first 100 sales and free channels you can use

Building cost effective client acquisition engine

Connect with Lloyd here:

lwyconsulting.com

https://m.me/lwyconsulting?ref=r10kwebinar

In this episode of SaaS Boss show I interview Thomas Smale of FE International.

There is plenty of advice on what it takes to have a successful exit when you want to leave your business. However, before going down that road, much thought and planning should go into getting an accurate valuation so that you can have a profitable exit as well.

At FE International, Thomas Smale has consulted or worked on over 800 transactions. He's pulled together some of the best practices from most experienced investors and snippets of knowledge from their acquisitions to provide some guidance for new and seasoned buyers alike to answer: how do you value a SaaS business?

Things we discussed:

Outlook on the market due to COVID-19

SaaS valuations

What founders should know to get the best offer for their SaaS company

The process of selling a SaaS

Will the founder or the team need to stay after the sale?

What can we do now if we consider selling a company in a year?

What do buyers look for in a company they are purchasing?

and much more.

https://feinternational.com

In this episode of SaaS Boss I interview The SaaS CFO Ben Murray about SaaS metrics, what metrics you should track, how you should track them, what pitfalls to watch out for and much more.

Ben Murray is known as the SaaS CFO and he helps software companies achieve financial improvement and transparency by partnering with stakeholders to link operations and finance.

Things we discussed:

What basic SaaS metrics you should be tracking

How your accounting process can help or break your metrics

How to account for annual subscriptions and calculate accurate MRR

How to start with forecasting SaaS metrics