Having a clear definition of your Ideal Customer is one of the most important things you can do for your business. Your Ideal Customer Profile – ICP – dictates (or should dictate) everything from the features and functionality of your product you build or what makes up your service offering, to the words you use and the emotion […]
4 Sales Mistakes That Lead To High SaaS Churn
June 21, 2014 Article by Lincoln Murphy
I’ve said many times that the seeds of churn are planted early. Whether it’s in your marketing – both the things you say but also the types of customers you target with your messaging and outreach – to the things you say and do during the sales process, you could be acquiring customers that already […]
SaaS Free Trial: Requiring a Credit Card is Shortsighted
June 14, 2014 Article by Lincoln Murphy
I got this email asking whether to require a Credit Card to start a SaaS Free Trial or not and what the best Free Trial length is. So instead of just answering him directly, I decide to use it as the basis for this article. Here’s the email: Hey Lincoln, some dude told me to ask […]
5 Steps to Unstick Your User Onboarding Flow
May 12, 2014 Article by Lincoln Murphy
The other day I got an email from a SaaS CEO friend of mine telling me his product team is finally ready to tackle a major problem with their onboarding flow during their Free Trial. It turns out they have one screen in the flow that is causing them big problems. And in this case, […]
How-to Use SaaS Pricing Discounts to Grow Revenue
March 24, 2014 Article by Lincoln Murphy
When it comes to SaaS pricing, discounts are both awful and awesome. Unfortunately (or not), we just don’t live in a world of absolutes. Generally, I like to avoid discounts because the way they’re done most of the time can will devalue your offering in the eyes of the customer. And that’s because most of […]
Customer Development Hacks for SaaS Startups
March 13, 2014 Article by Lincoln Murphy
The two main concerns SaaS vendors looking to ramp customer acquisition have are 1) how do I get my product in front of my ideal customers and 2) how do I identify those ideal customers in the first place… the answer includes Customer Development. For super-early SaaS startups, however, the second question is the main […]
The Greatest Word of Mouth Follow-up Question… Ever!
March 10, 2014 Article by Lincoln Murphy
Companies – SaaS or otherwise – tell me all the time that Word of Mouth (WOM) is one of, if not the top, method for acquiring new users and customers. While that’s great, what can you really do with that information? Here’s an idea…
How to Get in Front of your Ideal Customers
February 21, 2014 Article by Lincoln Murphy
When it comes to marketing, distribution is key… getting your product in front of your prospective customers is the most important thing. And yes… there’s more to life than AdWords. But no matter what distribution channels you leverage, the most important thing you can do is get to know your customers and prospects better than […]
Email Marketing: How Vero Got a 450% Increase in Conversions
February 11, 2014 Article by Lincoln Murphy
For SaaS vendors of any size and at any stage, email marketing – from newsletters to transactional messages – can be an amazing customer acquisition and retention tool. Nothing has replaced, displaced, or outpaced email as a super-effective medium to engage your audience – from prospects to customers – and it doesn’t seem likely to […]
Customer Success: 22 Ways To Reduce Churn With Growth Hacking
January 30, 2014 Article by Lincoln Murphy
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 […]
The best way to grow your SaaS business
January 20, 2014 Article by Lincoln Murphy
If your SaaS addresses a big- or specific-enough problem that people are willing to pay to solve, you can probably achieve enough growth to result in a decent-enough sized business… in spite of your efforts. But you didn’t set out to build a “decent-enough” sized business, right? Don’t you owe it to your shareholders and […]
Case Study: Growth Hacking Pre-Launch Revenue
January 15, 2014 Article by Lincoln Murphy
Whether you’re pre-launch, post-Product / Market Fit (P/MF), or an expansion stage SaaS vendor, Growth Hacking – the methods, tactics, and especially the mindset behind it – can be leveraged by companies at all stages to accelerate growth. Of course, the stage of your company dictate what growth you’re trying to hack achieve, the success […]
WTF is a Growth Hacker, anyway?
December 27, 2013 Article by Lincoln Murphy
A recruiter looking for a Growth Hacker contacted me recently and my immediate reaction was “I wonder what that position was called two-months ago.” That seemingly innocent LinkedIn message from a recruiter just trying to do their job, combined with the facts that any marketing tactic is now considered a “Growth Hack” and anyone with […]
Predictions for Customer Success in 2014
December 26, 2013 Article by Lincoln Murphy
It’s safe to say that 2013 was the year of Customer Success, especially in the SaaS industry. But where do we go from here? What does Customer Success look like in 2014? Luckily, I’m friends with someone who’s job it is to know – or at least attempt to predict – what’s going to happen […]
Autoresponders are Dead: 5 Types of Follow-up Emails
December 24, 2013 Article by Lincoln Murphy
Whatever the scenario for the SaaS vendor – during a Free Trial, as a free user of a Freemium, for Demo requests or Enterprise Pricing Inquiries, or after a prospect becomes a paying customer, I get asked all the time what the best email follow-up sequence is. While addressing the ideal follow-up email sequence may […]
SaaS Pricing Model: Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems
December 15, 2013 Article by Lincoln Murphy
This is a post about SaaS pricing models… but it starts with a story about human behavior. We all know that money doesn’t buy happiness – it buys freedom, and it’s with that freedom that you can choose to do things that make you happy. Money is just the means. But quite often, as people […]
The Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) Myth and Misguided Optimization
November 15, 2013 Article by Lincoln Murphy
For any company – especially those in the expansion stages – Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is a key metric to focus on. And for most companies and their CFOs and COOs, it’s all about making that number as low as possible. But in my experience, it’s not just about lowering CAC so you pay less to […]
5 Rules for Successful Growth Hacking
October 29, 2013 Article by Lincoln Murphy
Growth Hacking is all the rage right now. In-fact, anyone even slightly involved with marketing or product development in tech companies now calls themselves a Growth Hacker. Now, once everyone identifies as a Growth Hacker the term will be meaningless… but what goes into Growth Hacking (or whatever it’s called in the future) will persist […]
Use Partner Offers to Quickly Grow Your Business
October 25, 2013 Article by Lincoln Murphy
The other day I received an email with a very specific SaaS marketing question: “we have the opportunity to send an offer to the email list of one of our Integration Partners… do you have any tips for us?” Well, since having the opportunity to send an offer to a partner’s email list can be an […]
Growth Hack: Warm-Up Your Leads Before You Email Them
October 16, 2013 Article by Lincoln Murphy
When it comes to SaaS growth hacking, an email address is a powerful thing. If you have a list of email addresses – house lists, scraped, or bought – you can do some “pre-targeting” to increase the likelihood of engagement (that they’ll open, read your email, and click a link) before you ever send them […]
When Customers Go Dark: Customer Success to fight the Zombies
October 12, 2013 Article by Lincoln Murphy
So I got this email the other day asking me a SaaS Customer Success question that’s really more about ethics and karma than running a SaaS business. The gist of the email was what to do if a customer has been paying for 6 months but never started using the SaaS product…. these are what […]
SaaS Customer Success: Best Practices for Unplanned Outages
October 2, 2013 Article by Lincoln Murphy
So I got an email recently about best practices for dealing with unplanned outages from a SaaS Customer Success standpoint. I’ve attempted to answer the question in a meaningful way, but I am the first to acknowledge that there is a lot more to it than just what I talked about in this post. That […]
SaaS Marketing: 21 Growth Hacks to Test Today
August 29, 2013 Article by Lincoln Murphy
Below are 21 SaaS marketing growth hacks you could test right now. Of course, these are tactics and while everyone loves tactics, if they don’t make sense within your very well thought-out SaaS marketing strategy, you should probably not implement them, right? In fact, you should also probably make sure you have a well-thought-out SaaS […]
SaaS Sales Funnel: Stop Optimizing for the Wrong Customers
August 8, 2013 Article by Lincoln Murphy
“OMG… That’s not who’s signing up for my app!” exclaimed Jerry, after we discovered who his ideal customers are and that he’s been optimizing his Sales Funnel for the wrong customers. You see, Jerry owns a custom software dev shop that spun-out a web app they used internally for managing parts of their business as […]
No More Email from Your SaaS App? Introducing GMail Tabbed Inbox and Categories
July 24, 2013 Article by Lincoln Murphy
Attention SaaS Providers: If you use email in any way to communicate with your users, customers, and prospects, you should care about GMail’s recent additions: Tabbed Inbox and Categories. As a SaaS provider, you leverage email for marketing with things like your newsletters and your Free Trial follow-up sequence. But you also send transactional messages […]
SaaS Churn: Measure Revenue or Customer Retention?
July 15, 2013 Article by Lincoln Murphy
Okay, this is it… finally, my definitive answer on measuring SaaS churn! I’ve heard it all before… things like “Lincoln, you talk about churn a lot, but you don’t ever say anything!” First, that’s just hurtful. Second, all of these “how do I measure the success of a SaaS business?” questions depend on so many […]
SaaS Marketing: Random Effort Yields Random Results
July 3, 2013 Article by Lincoln Murphy
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 […]
SaaS Free Trial: Require a Credit Card to begin?
April 25, 2013 Article by Lincoln Murphy
So, should you require a Credit Card to get started in your SaaS Free Trial? TL:DR – By asking for a Credit Card up front, you will get fewer prospects into your Free Trial with no guarantee of converting more paying customers. Now, if you’d like to know why that is, read on…
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 […]
SaaS Churn Rate: Go Negative with Expansion Revenue
February 11, 2013 Article by Lincoln Murphy
I mentioned, “Expansion Revenue” and “Negative Churn” in my post SaaS Churn Rate: What’s Acceptable? and I wanted to expand on those concepts a bit. But first… UPDATE 1 : Dollar Revenue Retention – DRR – is the latest SaaS churn rate metric you need to know about (after you read this post, of course). UPDATE 2: Actually, […]
SaaS Customer Onboarding: 3 Steps to a Successful Welcome Email
February 7, 2013 Article by Lincoln Murphy
For many SaaS and Cloud providers, email will be the main fuel for your Engagement Engine that you use to drive potential customers through your Free Trial to conversion or to drive new customers to become deeply invested in your service. SaaS customer onboarding starts with the welcome email, so when I saw this great post […]
SaaS Market Positioning: How to Compete in Crowded Markets
January 29, 2013 Article by Lincoln Murphy
Welcome to 2013 2014 2015 (still applies!)… it’s now time to figure out why your SaaS company even exists and what your market positioning is! If you’re a SaaS or Cloud provider in the Email Marketing, CRM, Project Management, File Sharing, Collaboration, Marketing Automation, Analytics,… or frankly most horizontal product categories… it’s time to do […]
