Never is it more clear that random effort yields random results than when you look at the “marketing” of far too many SaaS companies…. maybe even yours. Take a look at a SaaS company that’s stagnating or failing to reach their goals, and you almost always find this random hodgepodge of tactics that they “tried” […]
SaaS Growth Hacking: An Interview with Lincoln Murphy
July 1, 2013 Article by Lincoln Murphy
After I published “Rise of the Growth Copyists” where I said that really successful SaaS growth hacking is creative and that most just copy others, the guys over at GrowthHacker.tv reached out to me and wanted to setup an interview with me. Definitely check it out… a good time was had by all…. but before […]
Engagement is the key to lowering SaaS Churn
June 22, 2013 Article by Lincoln Murphy
If you’re dealing with a high SaaS churn rate, a lack of customer engagement could be the reason. Customer retention – or conversely customer churn – is a common struggle for expansion-stage SaaS companies, and while some of it may come as “growing pains,” there may be other causes… customer engagement may be the biggest […]
SaaS Marketing: Rise of the Growth Copyists?
May 17, 2013 Article by Lincoln Murphy
Let’s be clear… when it comes to your SaaS marketing plan, finding inspiration in the work of others is very different from copying them outright. The American playwright Wilson Mizner famously said: “If you copy from one author, it’s plagiarism. If you copy from two, it’s research.” So as a SaaS provider, if you copy […]
Who’s your ideal customer?
April 15, 2013 Article by Lincoln Murphy
Over the years I’ve helped hundreds and hundreds of SaaS providers from around the world rapidly accelerate customer acquisition and reduce their SaaS churn rates. And in just about every instance I found myself asking them the same questions. The fact that these questions were not easily answered or – if they were – that the answers […]
SaaS Customer Success: Eliminate ‘Dead Ends’ to Drive Engagement
March 30, 2013 Article by Lincoln Murphy
What if I said there was something you were doing right now that was actively reducing your SaaS customer success? What if that thing you’re doing was standing in the way of driving higher levels of engagement and was reducing the amount of expansion revenue you’re generating while potentially increasing churn? What if I said […]
SaaS Customer Success: Start with Quick Wins
March 23, 2013 Article by Lincoln Murphy
SaaS Customer Success starts by orchestrating “Quick Wins” for your customers, helping them bypass their natural tendency to seek out reasons not to use your service! I was in Silicon Valley recently and I found myself talking about this idea of “Quick Wins” several times within the context of SaaS Customer Success and I wanted […]
SaaS Churn Threats: Identify and Retain At-Risk Customers
March 4, 2013 Article by Lincoln Murphy
Now that you are attracting the right customers and monitoring for and driving engagement to lower your SaaS Churn Rate, you need to start monitoring and getting proactive on Churn Threats. SaaS churn threats aren’t just a signal that you have an at-risk customer; these are literally threats to your business, your revenue, your valuation […]
SaaS Churn Rate Improvement: Monitor and Drive Engagement
February 25, 2013 Article by Lincoln Murphy
In my last post I shared some actual ways to reduce your SaaS Churn Rate, including attracting the right customer and managing expectations. In this post, I’m going to go deeper, and share some awesome methods for improving customer retention by leveraging the power of the SaaS business model, specifically the ability of the provider […]
SaaS Churn Rate Reduction Starts with Attracting the Right Customers
February 19, 2013 Article by Lincoln Murphy
Customer churn can have a devastating effect across your entire SaaS company. From the negative impact on your company valuation because your SaaS churn rate is too high, to the drag on growth you feel when you have to replace lost customers or revenue before you can make forward progress… churn is bad news. Over the […]
Common Conversion Activities (CCA): SaaS Free Trial Metric
December 21, 2012 Article by Lincoln Murphy
Before you read this article – which is really for companies that already have a good amount of customer data – I suggest reading a much more recent article “The Secret to Successful Customer Onboarding” which gives a much better perspective on how to design an onboarding (including Free Trial) flow. Once you’ve read that, come […]
Growth Hacking: 43 Ways to Drive Traffic to your Website
December 17, 2012 Article by Lincoln Murphy
WARNING: In 2014 2015 2016, relying heavily on SEO to drive traffic to your website is a recipe for failure! Okay, that might be a bit harsh… maybe SEO isn’t dead, but things have changed and you need to look beyond SEO to drive traffic to your website. If you put all your eggs in […]
How to Develop your SaaS Pricing Model
November 1, 2012 Article by Lincoln Murphy
Developing your SaaS Pricing Model isn’t Rocket Science, but even in the Rocket Science business, you need to price your work so you can sell it and make money! This post is awesome (IMHO), but there’s an even better, more recent one that’s specific to early-stage SaaS companies: Pricing Strategy Framework for SaaS Startups Just so […]
SaaS Free Trials: The Shorter the Better?
March 12, 2012 Article by Lincoln Murphy
Most people don’t realize that the length of a SaaS Free Trial is just a marketing gimmick designed to get prospects into the trial. Sure, 30-day Free Trials are the de facto standard for SaaS apps, but whether it’s 7, 14, 15, or 30-days, few providers can say WHY they came up with that length. […]
Your Signup Form is Hurting Your Free Trial Conversions!
January 10, 2012 Article by Lincoln Murphy
I had a SaaS vendor ask me the following question when I mentioned “average” Free Trial conversion rates: When we look at broad Free Trial conversion ratios, I would assume some of the variances may depend on how much information is required to sign up for a free trial. For example, there are a number […]
SaaS Customer Success: Technology Will Fail, but Service Must Never
December 20, 2010 Article by Lincoln Murphy
As a SaaS company focusing on Customer Success, you are in a unique position to offer proactive support to your customers; anything less is unacceptable! Alternate title: SaaS Vendors Should Learn What NOT To Do from Citrix So, I’m not sure if you heard (you probably did if you follow me on Twitter!), but the […]
As SaaS Matures, so will SaaS Pricing
June 21, 2010 Article by Lincoln Murphy
The common SaaS per-user, per-month subscription revenue model is rapidly evolving. From time to time I feel I must remind everyone – buyers, sellers, pundits, commentators, & analysts – that SaaS is not a pricing model or pricing strategy. From the vendor side, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is a unique Software Business Architecture where service is the […]
SaaS Pricing: Please Learn From the Zendesk Fiasco
May 18, 2010 Article by Lincoln Murphy
It is time for SaaS & Web App startups to sit up and pay attention. SaaS Pricing is very important to your venture but not just to ensure you make a profit or cover expenses. It is so much more than that and you should seek to get it as right as possible out of […]
SaaS, Web Apps, or Just ‘Apps’?
April 20, 2010 Article by Lincoln Murphy
On my last trip to San Francisco I sat down with Matt Childs of DreamSimplicity to talk about the state of SaaS. We shot some video as we talked about how Google & Apple have changed the distribution landscape for SaaS & Mobile making App Stores & Marketplaces a new reality for SaaS vendors and […]
SaaS Pricing: Commodity Metrics and the $240 GB
March 31, 2010 Article by Lincoln Murphy
SaaS pricing strategies that use low-value commodity metrics – like storage – to differentiate tiers force customers to make price comparisons that shouldn’t be made. Updated for 2014 This topic came up with a client who wanted to pass on the storage costs associated with the use of the system to their end-customer. We quickly […]
SaaS Pricing: Versioning for Market Segments
March 5, 2010 Article by Lincoln Murphy
Rags Srinivasan posted a great article titled “The Science of Optimal Versioning in SaaS” to his blog that talks about SaaS pricing. In the article, Rags talks about taking apply SaaS pricing to through different bundles of features at different prices for various market segments. The whole article is great, so I encourage you to […]
SaaS Companies Should Learn from Netflix
May 19, 2009 Article by Lincoln Murphy
Web Apps with Proactive Customer Service will win more – and keep more – customers than their competitors and Netflix should be the model. I often extol the virtues of the SaaS Business Architecture for vendors beyond just the typical “cost savings” and “operational efficiency” that most pundits and analysts like to talk about. I […]
