Dan Martell - April 16, 2018


How To Increase Activation & Adoption Of Your SaaS Product


Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

198.93608

Word count

1,633

Sentence count

64

Harmful content

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, Dan Martell talks about the importance of increasing your customer's activation and adoption of your SaaS product without changing your product. Without that, you'll keep losing customers and you'll have to find new customers to make up for the ones you lost.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.120 Hi there, I'm Dan Martell,
00:00:01.120 serial entrepreneur, investor, and creator of SaaS Academy.
00:00:03.600 In this video, I'm gonna teach you the five steps
00:00:05.600 to increasing your activation and adoption
00:00:08.040 of your SaaS product without changing your product.
00:00:10.760 And be sure to stay to the end
00:00:11.720 where I'm gonna share with you an exclusive guide.
00:00:14.680 It's called the Churn Buster Checklist 1.00
00:00:16.160 to help you reduce churn.
00:00:17.160 It's my nine box model.
00:00:18.480 I'll tell you how to get access to that in a bit.
00:00:30.000 So reducing your churn is the ultimate outcome
00:00:36.440 of improving activation and adoption of your product.
00:00:39.320 And without that, you end up continuously
00:00:41.520 having to find new customers
00:00:43.020 to make up for the ones you lost.
00:00:44.700 You know, recently I was working
00:00:45.520 with one of my coaching clients
00:00:46.580 and we started working together.
00:00:48.120 They had an 18% month-over-month churn
00:00:50.840 which made it absolutely impossible
00:00:52.660 to really scale the business.
00:00:54.100 Your lifetime value's too short.
00:00:56.020 The cost to acquire a customer,
00:00:57.480 the payback period didn't really work out.
00:01:00.000 And what we did is we went through my churn buster
00:01:02.560 checklist and implemented these five steps to allow them to
00:01:05.960 get that number down to 4%.
00:01:07.640 And what the coolest part of that whole story is,
00:01:10.100 is that 4% with their expansion revenue,
00:01:12.300 they were able to achieve net negative churn for the first
00:01:15.860 time ever and they've kept that up.
00:01:17.600 That means that on a monthly basis without growing new
00:01:20.100 customer accounts they were able to grow their monthly
00:01:22.600 reoccurring revenue because the expansion outpaced their
00:01:25.760 contraction churn either through cancellation or downgrade.
00:01:29.960 So, in this video, I'm gonna teach you the five steps
00:01:32.900 to activate and adopt your customers as fast as possible.
00:01:36.060 Step number one, build an on-ramp.
00:01:38.600 If you follow me on social media, Instagram stories,
00:01:41.140 or know about me in general, you probably have learned
00:01:44.380 that I'm a bit into CrossFit, and one of the principles
00:01:48.440 of CrossFit is when somebody joins,
00:01:49.980 they have an on-ramp period, and what that is
00:01:52.240 is really your opportunity to teach them movements,
00:01:54.920 to explain them the language, the structure,
00:01:57.620 the best practices, what they can expect in an upcoming class
00:02:00.960 and you do all of that before you drop them
00:02:03.460 into their first group class.
00:02:05.420 The reason you do that is because you don't want them
00:02:07.300 to feel out of place.
00:02:08.260 Now I will say most software products don't have an on-ramp.
00:02:12.500 They don't have an activation step or first time user
00:02:15.000 experience.
00:02:15.840 That is the first step in really making sure that your product
00:02:20.140 gets a customer situated so they know how to get in there
00:02:23.020 and then instead of just dropping them on the dashboard
00:02:26.780 where they might not know what's the next action.
00:02:28.380 You actually walk them through step by step
00:02:30.380 what you expect them to do next.
00:02:31.880 Step number two, create a support network.
00:02:35.280 Now, as much as you want to have your customer self-serve
00:02:39.820 and get activated and adopt the product on their own,
00:02:41.960 the truth is is maybe they're gonna need somebody
00:02:44.600 to handhold them and the cool part is
00:02:46.260 it doesn't always have to be you.
00:02:48.240 Yes, you have customer support people
00:02:49.840 that are responding to issues and challenges
00:02:51.840 and essentially tickets, they're in a responsive mode,
00:02:54.440 What I want you to consider is creating a support network
00:02:58.080 for them, reaching out proactively from your customer
00:03:01.020 success team to ask them if they need some support
00:03:04.040 or creating an online group, maybe a Facebook group
00:03:07.420 or a Slack channel that you invite them to so that they
00:03:10.020 can ask questions to other customers that can explain to
00:03:12.860 them how they've overcome those challenges themselves.
00:03:15.620 And by doing that, you start to build relationships
00:03:18.260 and connections and amongst your customer base,
00:03:20.100 that's how you're gonna get people not only to help you
00:03:23.400 to support your customers but also create connections
00:03:25.460 so that they continue staying with the product,
00:03:28.140 adopt it and feel like they're part of a movement
00:03:30.540 and not just using a tool.
00:03:32.000 Step number three, you need to project a future.
00:03:35.580 If a customer doesn't know what their life could look like,
00:03:38.980 they might have a problem that they expected your solution
00:03:41.220 to solve but maybe they don't really understand how
00:03:44.580 that solution's gonna look once it's finally solved
00:03:46.820 out into the future and the best way to do that
00:03:48.960 is to do case studies.
00:03:50.500 You have a video on creating a customer case study
00:03:52.800 And in that video I talk about how to extract those wins
00:03:55.600 from customers so that you can tell those stories
00:03:59.080 to tell new customers what the potential future
00:04:02.140 could look like.
00:04:02.980 So creating a future for your customer
00:04:04.640 so that they have a strong understanding of not only
00:04:07.020 can I get this problem solved but their nirvana
00:04:09.660 in my industry, a company that looks kinda like me,
00:04:12.480 here's what they achieve with this solution,
00:04:14.280 really allows them to go on the search inside your product
00:04:18.160 how to configure and tweak and add those extra features
00:04:21.160 to get an even enhanced outcome
00:04:23.160 that they may not have realized is possible with your tool.
00:04:27.200 Step number four, monitor for lows.
00:04:30.040 One of the things I teach my coaching clients
00:04:31.940 is a framework called the Member at Risk Monitor
00:04:35.500 and the concept is very simple.
00:04:37.240 There's certain levels of activities for your product
00:04:39.820 and it's different per company
00:04:41.420 where you expect a customer or their team
00:04:43.540 to engage in the product.
00:04:44.620 That might be responding, logging in,
00:04:46.680 creating, configuring certain things
00:04:48.980 And what you want to do is set up that monitor
00:04:51.320 so that there's a dashboard that shows all of your
00:04:53.460 active accounts and starts using a simple traffic light
00:04:56.460 system, you know, red, green, yellow, to let you know,
00:04:59.020 are those accounts good?
00:05:00.300 Are they proportionally active based on what you've seen
00:05:03.860 in the past for a customer that's retained and stayed
00:05:05.860 with you and adopted the product?
00:05:07.340 If somebody turns from green to yellow,
00:05:09.840 that's your opportunity to proactively reach out.
00:05:12.100 And that's the difference between customer success
00:05:13.940 and customer support is one is about reacting
00:05:16.880 to customers' challenges.
00:05:17.800 The other one is actually, we live in a cool world
00:05:19.760 where we can do this, we monitor.
00:05:21.680 So you need to move to a point where you're monitoring
00:05:23.940 for lows in activities, in usage, in feature adoption
00:05:28.320 and make sure that you proactively reach out
00:05:30.440 and ask the customers anything to help them with.
00:05:33.320 If they get to red, you know there's a high probability
00:05:35.520 to churn and you wanna make sure you're picking up the phone,
00:05:37.880 you're leaving voicemails, you're doing whatever you can.
00:05:40.460 Imagine you have a good friend,
00:05:41.620 they're going through a hard time
00:05:42.820 and you know you can be helpful to them,
00:05:44.660 you've gotta treat it the exact same way
00:05:46.300 and get your team rallied around that outcome.
00:05:48.800 Step number five, flip the cancellation.
00:05:51.640 Now here's how that concept works is first off
00:05:54.300 in your early days, I actually think it's better for you
00:05:56.780 not to allow customers to cancel from your website
00:05:59.120 and I know from a user experience point of view
00:06:01.040 you might say well that seems a little aggressive
00:06:03.220 but the truth is is your only mission in the early days
00:06:06.880 is to figure out what's missing in the product.
00:06:08.820 What did the customer assume they were gonna get
00:06:10.900 versus what they received or they used
00:06:13.260 and what's the gap between that
00:06:14.960 because that's your opportunity to fix the product,
00:06:17.200 enhance it to get customers, in the future at least,
00:06:19.800 to stick around.
00:06:20.640 So if you're not getting that feedback
00:06:21.940 and people are just canceling,
00:06:23.300 then you're doing yourself and future customers a disservice.
00:06:26.380 The way you flip the cancellation
00:06:28.140 is you talk to the customer about that challenge
00:06:31.680 and then just ask them, hey, if we were able to overcome that,
00:06:34.580 if we were able to get you this outcome
00:06:36.140 that you thought that we could when you've registered
00:06:39.780 and you know that you can do that
00:06:41.460 and I'll even assign an account manager
00:06:43.320 to make sure that we not only set it up, configure it,
00:06:45.620 that we monitor every month for the next three months
00:06:48.200 to ensure that your team's adopting it,
00:06:50.400 that you're getting the value.
00:06:51.400 If we could do that, would you stay with our product?
00:06:53.960 And you'd be surprised how many people will say yes.
00:06:56.960 If you've worked really hard to get a customer,
00:06:59.400 then just because they're in this moment of frustration
00:07:02.680 and they're ready to cancel, don't give up on them so easily
00:07:06.100 and that's flip the cancellation.
00:07:07.620 So quick recap, number one, build an on-ramp
00:07:11.040 to help your customers get situated.
00:07:12.920 Number two, create a support network to ensure your customers
00:07:16.420 feel like they're part of a community and a movement.
00:07:18.520 Three, project a future of possibilities.
00:07:22.320 Four, monitor for lows so you can proactively engage.
00:07:26.020 Number five, flip the cancellation.
00:07:28.620 Don't let them leave without supporting them
00:07:30.620 in the best way you know how.
00:07:32.020 As I mentioned at the start of the video,
00:07:33.320 I want to share with you an exclusive download called
00:07:35.520 the Churn Buster Checklist. 0.99
00:07:37.020 It's a nine box model that's going to walk you through
00:07:40.020 the nine specific areas that you need to be considering
00:07:42.920 in your product, in your approach to avoiding cancellations
00:07:46.420 for your customers to resolve.
00:07:48.420 If you want that checklist, click the link below
00:07:50.820 in the description box.
00:07:51.920 It is there for you.
00:07:53.720 If you like this video, be sure to click the like button,
00:07:56.520 subscribe to the channel, and share this video with a friend.
00:07:59.620 Thanks for watchin', and I'll see you in the next video.
00:08:02.320 Little story.
00:08:04.320 Little story.
00:08:05.620 Gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta little story.
00:08:08.220 Story.
00:08:09.620 I got a good story.