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 […]

How to Create an Affiliate Program for your SaaS

September 13, 2013 Article by Lincoln Murphy

The CEO of a vertical-specific SaaS vendor with a relatively high priced offering emailed me the other day with a question about creating an Affiliate Marketing program to accelerate growth. I gave him a fairly detailed answer and I thought I’d elaborate on that answer even more and share it with you… enjoy. “Hey Lincoln, […]

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 […]

SaaS Freemium Customer Acquisition Costs

July 25, 2013 Article by Lincoln Murphy

I got an email the other day asking about Freemium Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) and whether or not to include the cost of supporting and marketing to free users in the cost of acquiring paying customers. Here’s my quick answer and some other resources for you to check out.

SaaS Marketing: Are you Lazy or Deliberate?

July 21, 2013 Article by Lincoln Murphy

When it comes to SaaS marketing, we know that Random Effort Yields Random Results… but it gets worse. The problem I see too often – and the catalyst for this epic post – isn’t Random Marketing, but what I call Lazy Marketing. And lazy marketing is perhaps a more insidious form of marketing, if for no […]

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 […]

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 Retention is the key to Long-term Profitability

October 16, 2012 Article by Lincoln Murphy

Profitability is one goal that most of the SaaS CEOs who ask me for help all share, and SaaS customer retention is the key to achieving that goal. Though, while they’re all focused on achieving profitability, how that is measured varies from company to company, for the sake of this post we’ll consider profitability to […]

SaaS Churn kills Growth; Customer Retention is a Growth Accelerator

October 15, 2012 Article by Lincoln Murphy

SaaS Churn Kills Growth, Profit, and ultimately your SaaS Business… together we can end Retention Deficit Disorder today! Very often when I’m asked to help grow a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business, the CEO is often focused on Customer Acquisition strategies… the “how can we get more people into the top of the funnel?” issue. But when […]

SaaS Customer Retention Requires Ongoing Realization of Value

October 15, 2012 Article by Lincoln Murphy

Improve SaaS Customer Retention by helping your customers Continually Realize Value When we buy something without trying it first, this is based on what I call “Perception of Value.” When we buy something after trying it, this purchase is based on our “Realization of Value” during the trial. Makes sense, right? But what about Customer Retention? […]

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