What’s a reasonable conversion rate from free trial to a paid customer? I get some form of this question from time to time and I’ve answered it several times over the years. Well, I got it again so it’s time to revisit this very simple question. As with most “simple questions” the question is easy to […]
Acceptable Churn Rate for Small Accounts
Article by Lincoln Murphy
What drives a company to focus on Customer Success is changing. In the past, churn (or retention, depending upon how you look at things) was generally the catalyst. Once churn is under control, the catalyst changes to expansion; driving use, consumption, and revenue within existing accounts. And these days, startups are building Customer Success into […]
Success is Uncomfortable
Article by Lincoln Murphy
I’ve talked before about holding customers accountable and how customer success isn’t about making customers happy. Sometimes you have to push customers out of their comfort zone and – if you’ll allow me to channel my inner Tony Robbins -progress is rarely made within our comfort zone That means moving toward success – whether for […]
The Risk (and Opportunity) in Stealing Customers
Article by Lincoln Murphy
Picture it, São Paulo, Brazil, October 2015. After one of the sales and customer success workshops I did, a few of us went out for a snack – fried polenta sticks – and to talk shop… and the idea of Success Gaps came up. In particular, we talked about prospects that experienced Success Gaps with your competitor’s […]
A Foolproof Way to Get Testimonials Without Asking for Them
Article by Lincoln Murphy
Personally, I’ve always found it difficult to ask for testimonials. It just doesn’t come naturally to me. In fact, one of the reasons I like doing calls on Clarity is that the platform closes the loop with the client for me, asking for a star rating and optional comments; to me, that part alone is […]
Success Milestones: The Path to the Customer’s Desired Outcome
Article by Lincoln Murphy
I talk about Success Milestones all the time, not just in the context of Customer Success, but in the context of the overall success of my SaaS clients and the companies I work with. The concept of Success Milestones is a relatively simple one to grasp, but the power and the value of this way […]
This Customer Acquisition Mistake Can Kill your Growth
Article by Lincoln Murphy
Também disponível em Português por Mathias Luz Can the customers you’re actively going after actually achieve success with your product or through their interactions with your company as things are today? If not, that’s a problem. The reasons they might not achieve success range from their readiness (they don’t have the necessary data or internal […]
Stop Using these Anti-Customer Terms
Article by Lincoln Murphy
Ugh… isn’t dealing with customers that don’t get it and having to hold their hand along the way or check-in with them to make sure they’re okay, annoying? It’s so nice when you can hand ’em off to someone else, right? I hear that all the time from clients, on Clarity calls, and from companies […]
7 Reasons to Optimize your SaaS Free Trial
Article by Lincoln Murphy
For SaaS vendors, the Purpose of a Free Trial is to create a customer. Period. If you don’t agree with that statement then you really won’t like pretty much everything else I’m going to say in this article. Free Trials are not for tire-kicking freeloaders – and if that’s what you’re getting in your free trial, […]
Desired Outcome is a Transformative Concept
Article by Lincoln Murphy
Também disponível em Português por Mathias Luz One of the most powerful concepts I’ve ever come across in business is the idea of the customer’s Desired Outcome. And if you’re thinking “one of the most powerful concepts in business” seems like a pretty hefty charge, you’re right; this concept has transformational properties. When I first […]
The Seeds of Churn are Planted Early
Article by Lincoln Murphy
“The Seeds of Churn are Planted Early” is a phrase I came up with in early 2013, published shortly thereafter, and have said and used many times since. I wanted to go on record with that – BTW, if you see the term’s use outside of my work or that of Gainsight’s, maybe send them this […]
5 Situations When Massive Churn is Just Fine
Article by Lincoln Murphy
The mantra of “grow at all costs” – that seems to include acquiring wrong-fit customers (those who aren’t your Ideal Customers), churn be damned – has popped up several times lately and my reaction to it is two-fold. First, I immediately thought how stupid this is and how it flies in the face of everything […]
5 Lesser-Known Ways Churn Hurts your Company
Article by Lincoln Murphy
The common refrain by SaaS experts that think business is just a math problem is that if a customer stays long enough to pay back the cost to acquire them (the metric is called Customer Acquisition Cost or CAC), they became a “profitable” customer (“unit economics” don’tcha know) and everything is great. Just do more of […]
Podcast: Getting Inside the Minds of Your SaaS Customers
Article by Lincoln Murphy
How do you define success for your SaaS customers? While it sounds simple, it’s not. Success is only achieved when your customers reach their Desired Outcome by their interactions with your company. But first, you have to understand what it is that your customers want to achieve — and that can take some work. I […]
The Fiction that Friction Improves Customer Onboarding
Article by Lincoln Murphy
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
Article by Lincoln Murphy
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
Article by Lincoln Murphy
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
Article by Lincoln Murphy
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
Article by Lincoln Murphy
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
Article by Lincoln Murphy
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
Article by Lincoln Murphy
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
Article by Lincoln Murphy
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
Article by Lincoln Murphy
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
Article by Lincoln Murphy
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
Article by Lincoln Murphy
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
Article by Lincoln Murphy
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
Article by Lincoln Murphy
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
Article by Lincoln Murphy
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
Article by Lincoln Murphy
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
Article by Lincoln Murphy
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
Article by Lincoln Murphy
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
Article by Lincoln Murphy
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
Article by Lincoln Murphy
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
Article by Lincoln Murphy
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
Article by Lincoln Murphy
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
Article by Lincoln Murphy
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
Article by Lincoln Murphy
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
Article by Lincoln Murphy
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
Article by Lincoln Murphy
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 […]
SaaS Free Trial Extension Requests are a Bad Sign
Article by Lincoln Murphy
I got this question about SaaS Free Trial Extension requests and I thought I’d answer it here, for all to see. “Lincoln, that was a great guest post by Steli Efti from Close.io on sales mistakes that lead to churn. I was reading Steli’s blog and found a recent post where he says “short trials […]
