Archives for June 2015

Customer Psychology and the Unexpected Power of Surveys

Surveys can be dangerous if used wrong, but can be super-powerful if used correctly! Whether it’s the Net Promoter System to gauge customer satisfaction, doing pre-launch customer development work for your startup, or one of the myriad methods we use to interact with and learn from our customers, prospects, and other people, surveys are by […]

How Social Proof Actually Works in Marketing

I’m not a psychologist, but I play one every day as I try to figure out why people (users, customers, visitors, etc.) do what they do… and how to get them to do more of what I want them to do. I spend a lot more time reading books about – and otherwise studying – human […]

Customer Success Starts at Sales Done Right

After getting a demo of their new product from their Chief Data Officer (Luke Deka) while I was in Poland, I was excited to catch-up with Greg Pietruszynski, CEO of Growbots, when I got back to San Francisco. We talked about lots of different topics, but the post that my friend Steli Efti from close.io […]

Achieve Network Effect on a Smaller Scale

I was talking to my friend Piotr Zaniewicz the other day about the importance of network effects on SaaS businesses. I mentioned how the common misconception around network effects is that, in order to achieve a real network effect (this is the reason some people say B2B SaaS can’t be “viral”), the level of critical […]

Podcast: Customer Success is the Foundation of Your Success

Micky from Kahuna Accounting sent me an email to share that they grew their B2B business from 0 customers/0 revenue to 180 customers and $40k/month ($480k Annually) in just over a year, and a major part of that was their use of the Ideal Customer Profile framework. So Micky wanted me to share with other […]

3 Secrets of High-Converting SaaS Free Trials

While just about every B2B SaaS company offers a Free Trial – especially those with self-service sales models – in my experience, the percentage of SaaS companies that feel their Free Trial is “successful” is fairly low. Disappointingly low, actually. And it absolutely doesn’t have to be that way and in this article I’ll show […]

How To Get Sales To Help Test your Ideal Customer Profile

I was talking to the CEO of a SaaS startup on Clarity about a dilemma many companies go through. They’ve decided it’s time to get deliberate about their progress and start testing their Ideal Customer Profile… but there’s a problem. They already have sales develop reps (SDRs) generating leads and account executives (AEs… aka sales people) closing […]

Stick Point: When Your SaaS Customer is Truly a Customer

In my recent article on accurately calculating your SaaS metrics, I mentioned how some customers shouldn’t be considered customers yet. I referred to the fact that there’s a “stick point” or that point in time in the early part of the customer lifecycle where – if a customer makes it that long – they’ll likely stay […]

Free Trials Do Not Devalue Your Enterprise SaaS

The CEO of a SaaS company reached out to me the other day and he had a very dangerous misconception that could seriously impact their potential as a company. I hope by talking about it here I can save more SaaS companies from falling into this trap. They sell to large customers and the dangerous misconception was that […]