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
March 20, 2015 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
February 26, 2015 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
February 24, 2015 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
December 22, 2014 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
December 21, 2014 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
December 21, 2014 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
December 19, 2014 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
December 10, 2014 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
October 22, 2014 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
September 22, 2014 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
August 14, 2014 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 […]
Understanding Your Customer’s Desired Outcome
August 4, 2014 Article by Lincoln Murphy
So… what does Success look like for your customer? That’s the question that’s at the base of my wildly popular “The Secret to Successful Customer Onboarding” article. BTW, this article is good… but I have another one that goes into more detail on Desired Outcome you should check out, too. But it’s not actually a […]
How-to Avoid SaaS Free Trial Abuse
July 27, 2014 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
July 15, 2014 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 […]
The Best SaaS Free Trial Length
July 13, 2014 Article by Lincoln Murphy
Here’s a secret no one talks about: SaaS Free Trial Length is a Marketing Gimmick. There isn’t a best SaaS Free Trial length that works for every SaaS company, in every category, for every market. I know, that contradicts my reputation for saying “always do this” or “always do that” but that’s the way it […]
Ideal Customer Profile Framework
June 25, 2014 Article by Lincoln Murphy
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 […]
3 Email Lead Capture Hacks to Get More Customers
June 13, 2014 Article by Lincoln Murphy
Sadly (for us… pretty awesome for them, I suppose) Stacklead was acqui-hired by LinkedIn and is being shutdown. If we’re honest, email lead capture is pretty much why we have a website. I mean, aside from making a sale the first time someone hits our site, the main goal of everything we do – especially […]
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 […]
Time Management for Startups: Quantify, Prioritize, and Automate
January 23, 2014 Article by Lincoln Murphy
I have a confession… Sixteen Ventures – the best little SaaS Growth consulting shop in all the land – is just me… and I have a time management problem! I do everything… from writing blog posts to writing proposals and from interacting on Social Networks to Networking at Industry Events. One day I’m working with […]
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 […]
Freemium or Free Trial? There’s a Better Question
January 9, 2014 Article by Lincoln Murphy
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 […]
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 […]
