Customer Success: The Difference between Stretch and Bad-Fit Customers

What are the characteristics of a Bad-Fit Customer for your business? It’s great to know who your Ideal Customer is (my Ideal Customer Profile Framework is constantly updated), but it’s much easier – and I say required – to first identify the types of customers that are a bad fit and the characteristics that make […]

You Have to Know why Your Customers Churn

When customers churn, that’s a problem. Even if their churn was “unavoidable” it still hurts. Churn hurts on several levels: from lowering revenue to hurting employee morale. And churn means something happened to the customer (out of business, acquired, etc.) or – and MUCH more likely – they didn’t achieve their Desired Outcome through their […]

Qualifying Leads in a SaaS Free Trial

I got this set of questions on Twitter: “Is there a certain level of activity during the free trial that is likely to predict conversion from free to paid? Also, how do other companies handle Sales vs. Marketing Qualified Leads (SQL vs. MQL) when it comes to Free Trials?” I thought that was an awesome […]

The Fiction that Friction Improves Customer Onboarding

A few months back an article was published that talked about how this popular brain training game (I can’t remember what it’s called) made their onboarding process MORE complex – not less – and increased their active users by 10%. While the article was very clear on when to add friction, most of the discussion […]

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 […]

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 […]

4 Undercover Ways to Hack Social for More Sales

How often do you hear the term “Social Selling” and either can’t figure out what it actually means or just want to call shenanigans on it? You know you’re not going to close a six-figure deal on Twitter, right? That’s not reality. But that doesn’t mean that Twitter (or any social network) can’t be leveraged to accelerate […]

The Success Gap: A HUGE Opportunity You Haven’t Considered

There is often a gap between the functional completion of your product and the customer’s Desired Outcome. I call this the Success Gap. And this Success Gap that stands between what your product does and your customer’s Desired Outcome is a huge risk for you. It’s also a huge opportunity if you bridge the gap […]

Your SaaS Metrics Are Wrong if You Include These Customers

A user is someone that uses your SaaS product, right? Or is it someone that signed-up? Or someone that’s active? Or someone that logged in a few times? Hmm. Okay, so maybe defining a user is hard, but defining a customer is easy, right? A customer is someone that pays you for your product or […]

Active Users are a Vanity Metric

Active customers churn. And when they do we’re shocked and confused. How can this happen? Your customer was very active, logging-in several times in the last month. I think it’s fair to say that if Active customers churn, then “active” – as a customer “state” – clearly doesn’t equate to success. So if it doesn’t […]

CAC Strategy is the Key to Scaling your SaaS Company

Starting a SaaS company and scaling a SaaS company are two very different things. The same is true for “scaling” a SaaS company in the very early days vs. scaling a SaaS company through the growth phase. And since every company is different and experiences those “phases” at different times in different ways, you have […]

Let Your Customers Write Your Marketing Copy

I spend a lot of time talking to SaaS companies about how they should identify their Ideal Customers, understand how they operate, know what their Desired Outcome is, listen to what they say, etc. etc. Whether it’s a focus on acquiring new customers, working to engage prospects already in the pipeline or customers you’ve just acquired… or […]

Exposed! A Top-Secret “Enterprise Pricing” Growth Hack

When it comes to SaaS, you basically have two sales models: high-touch and self-service. Small, bootstrapped SaaS companies often like to go the low-touch, self-service way. Large, venture-backed startups often like to take the high-touch, Enterprise sales approach. And sometimes it’s the opposite of that. It depends. There are just so many different factors that […]

The Only 3 Acceptable Pricing Page Discount Tactics

I get this question from time to time: “Lincoln, is it okay to offer discounts right on your pricing page?” Short answer: No. The longer answer, with some nuanced yesses thrown in,  along with some tactics that you can employ, is below…

Engaging at Scale: The Secret to Automating Personal Emails

About a year ago I shared my super top-secret way to automate personal emails more effectively – called the “Customer Success bot” method – with the awesome folks on my mailing list. Since then, I’ve come up with several new uses for this framework that have proven to be incredibly effective ( I’ve shared those […]

5 Growth Hacks to Supercharge your Invite or Referral System

When was the last time you referred your friends or invited co-workers into an app after you just signed-up for the free trial? When was the last time you imported your address book right after you opened an app for the first time? Right. So why do you expect your users and customers to behave differently? Unless […]

The Myth of Unavoidable Churn

When it comes to customer churn, there are two kinds: avoidable and unavoidable. But I guarantee that the amount you label as “unavoidable” is actually much smaller than you think. I know, but… “Most of our churn is out of our control, so it’s unavoidable” “We sell to SMB and in that market churn is inevitable.” Accepting that […]

The Secret to Successful Customer Onboarding

Também disponível em Português por Mathias Luz Customer onboarding has come up a lot lately, which is great since having a poor onboarding experience for your customers can pretty much kill your growth… if not your business. The first in-app experience your customer has with your product sets the tone for your relationship, and if it’s […]

7 Sanity Checks for Sending Cold Email

Email Prospecting, the once-secret method (still) used (to great effect) by the hottest companies to get the attention of the biggest enterprises out there – even if all they talk about publicly is inbound marketing, adwords, and social – is no longer a secret. Thanks to folks like Heather Morgan of SalesFolk, Aaron Ross, author of Predictable […]

10 Growth Hacking Lessons from Dodgeball

I hit Nick Mehta, CEO of Gainsight, right in the gut. And then I took a hard shot to the chest by Gainsight’s New Business director. Working in a startup is rough, lemme tell ya. As Nick and I stood on the sidelines during this company outing – battered, exhausted and laughing – watching the remaining […]

How-to Avoid SaaS Free Trial Abuse

At the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas, a security research duo showed how they built a cryptocurrency-mining botnet by leveraging cloud platform services – like Amazon Web Services, Heroku, or Google App Engine – using only Free Trials and Freemium accounts [PDF]. Cue the overly-dramatic sky-is-falling music as we mourn the demise of SaaS Free Trials […]

Customer Success: 22 Ways To Reduce Churn With Growth Hacking

As the SaaS industry continues to rapidly mature, more folks are looking at churn in SaaS companies – investors, analysts, executives, consultants, etc. – and more and more methods of measuring churn are going to surface… and that’s awesome. Of course, the problem is that, while analytics and metrics and new ways of measuring churn […]

Freemium or Free Trial? There’s a Better Question

I answer this question all the time… should we go Freemium or Free Trial for our SaaS app? And I get this question from companies of all stages and sizes, including pre-launch Startups, software companies moving to – or adding a product line based around  – the SaaS business model, or for later-stage SaaS companies […]