- Hey there, Dan Martell here, serial entrepreneur,
investor and creator of SaaS Academy.
In this episode I'm gonna share with you
how to identify customers that could cancel
and make sure we build a strategy to retain them
so we can increase our revenue
and be sure to stay at the end,
we're gonna share with you,
how to get access to my EBR flow planner,
executive business review.
It's the meeting structure you need to be having,
with your customers
so that you can expand the revenue amongst them the upsells
and cross sells
and also just get them activated and winning.
Let's get into it.
(upbeat music)
Now I'm not sure if you experienced this,
but back when COVID Coronavirus hit,
a lot of my clients I coached dozens of SaaS founders,
and many of them work with restaurants,
gym owners, retailers, et cetera.
And they were like bracing for the impact.
But essentially what we did is,
I created the crisis navigator roadmap
to help them think through not only
how to keep those customers,
which I'm gonna share with you today,
but also how to look at the opportunities
to either do a minor or major pivot
for them to grow their business.
I'm gonna leave a link below so you can get access
to the crisis navigator roadmap as well.
But this is a specific strategy that we use personally,
even in my own businesses to lose less than 1%
of our customers to cancellation
in the midst of the worst economic recession
and global shutdown in history.
This is how we did it.
Number one, measure health score.
So in the world of customer success,
one of the key metrics we need
to be monitoring is called the health score.
Some companies call it the CHI,
the customer happiness index.
Other companies call it,
well, I call it the member at risk monitor strategy,
but essentially you need to put your customers
in one of four buckets.
Are they red,
like haven't used a product, logged in,
aren't really engaged in any of the core modules
that you know make sticky customers red?
Yellow, they were but now they're not.
Green, they're good, they've been using it.
And my favourite colour is purple.
Are they referenceable ambassadors,
leaving you testimonials saying yes
to do reference calls, et cetera.
But the only way to do that
is we need to figure out the health score.
And then what we do
is we identify the reds and we execute
what's called a red playbook, okay.
In your customer success process,
you should be creating playbooks for different scenarios
to take somebody that's red all the way to green,
ideally purple, so that you can save those accounts.
So making sure that you at least have the list
so that you can reach out and approach them,
that's number one.
Number two, review sales slash CS notes.
So my whole premise on software in SaaS, okay,
is success as a service.
I really believe people don't, you know,
buy a tool to have a tool,
they hire a product to do a job.
They have a need that they need to accomplish,
and they bought your software.
And the best place for you to figure out,
why the initial conversation started
is for you to go back to the sales notes.
So this is where your account executive,
we've talked to them about, where they're at today,
the needs they had,
what they would use as a way to measure success.
And then also,
when your customer success team was onboarding the account,
they probably had similar conversation, kickoff calls,
activation calls, et cetara.
Well, you wanna review those notes,
before you reach out to the customer,
you need to know more yourself than they remember
what they shared with your team in regards
to the specific problems they wanna solve with your product.
Number three, multi-channel communication.
Now this is something I learned, you know,
selling over $30 million in software,
is if you're doing follow up,
you need to use multiple channels.
If you assume that emailing the person,
you know, every third day for two weeks is follow up,
you're missing the boat.
The way I think about is I want to approach every channel.
Cause some of these clients
that potentially are about to turn
or cancel are not renewing their next renewal timeline,
they're not gonna reply to your email.
So I like to call, leave a voicemail, reference my email,
I like to hit them up on LinkedIn, message them.
Hey, John, I just want to reach out.
Quick question.
You got three minutes, let me know.
So keep it short and sweet.
Don't give them too much context,
if you wanna kind of get them in micro-commitment
and then roll it up into a full conversation.
I'll hit them up on Facebook Messenger.
I'll even go as far as reaching out to other team members
that might be registered in the product and ask them,
hey, is John still with the organisation,
I emailed him last week and haven't heard back.
Now you want to be a little bit more delicate on that.
But it is fair play,
your role and responsibility is to get those accounts
on a call where you can do step four
and if you aren't willing to go multi-channel
then you're probably gonna reduce your potential by 70%.
Literally, it's in the text messages,
in the LinkedIns, in the Facebook Messenger,
the team message where that person hears,
and he is like, man, this person's not going away,
I gotta reach out to them to make it stop.
And that's when you have the opportunity to engage.
Number four, re-sell vision.
So once you've got them to agree to a phone call,
you can go 15 minutes, you can go 30.
The way I like to think about that call
is it's very similar to, you know,
a product demo or a sales conversation or strategy session,
is we want to ask them kind of, you know,
what's going on in their world?
You know, like, nobody cares about what you have
to say until they know that you care.
So I wanna know, what's been the impact?
What have you done?
What are the strategies?
Like just really try to understand their perspective,
their world first.
Once you do that,
I'll even start off the call by saying,
hey, I just wanna let you know that I'm not here
to renew you in the software or get you to buy more stuff.
I'm here to help.
And from that perspective,
there you know,
they relax a little bit and allows you
to have an open conversation.
If they're on their heels and they're very defensive,
then it's gonna be like pretty much impossible for you
to have a conversation that leads with them saying,
all right, let's do it.
Let's renew, I'm recommitted to the software,
I'm recommitted to the outcomes that I want to achieve.
And the big thing is you're trying
to essentially reconnect with the gap.
You know, I think a sale is made,
and I got this from my buddy Jacco at Winning by Design,
incredible customer success and sales consultancy.
But the gap is where they're at today
and what that new world look like.
And the only way we can get people to go on that journey,
cause it's a prioritisation process.
It's an investment, it's a team collaboration.
It's a commitment.
Is we need to figure out what's the critical event
that made it and now thing,
like why did you buy the software?
What was the reason?
Is that still a priority, is still something
that we need to talk about?
Or is there a new critical event?
So we want to do that
and then the seconds we have
to connect the emotional connection to that outcome,
what's your life gonna look like?
How is it gonna feel,
once you solve those big major challenges
from a personal level?
Sometimes it's getting a promotion,
making sure your team isn't stressed out,
making sure the customers not having a bad experience,
cause things are getting dropped.
Whatever the motional impact that has to be uncovered,
and that is stretching the gap and it's in that gap
where the sale is made from.
You know, think of like a rubber band
from on this side where they're at today,
you stretch that rubber band to the other side,
you put the peg into the potential,
that gap is where the renewal, the saving of the account,
and in sales, the sale is made,
because without that, no customer is gonna buy.
Number five, set milestones.
So once you've accomplished the recommitment,
to reengage them into the vision
that they had for deploying your software,
now you want
to set a plan over the next 90 days with clear schedules.
My whole thing is I'm not here to do the work for you,
I'm here to support you
and coach you and get you the resources
and templates you need.
But I need commitments from you,
to me and what timeline that's gonna occur
so that I can hold you accountable.
And it's in doing that,
the accountability and the follow up
where the account actually gets from red to yellow to green,
executing that playbook,
holding them accountable to what they said,
the commitments they made.
And I like to use a, you know,
a structured meeting to make sure that when we start,
we have clear understanding where we wanna go,
break it down into key projects,
understand the resources required
and then make sure we have a timeline to execute that,
but setting the milestones and holding them accountable
is how we actually get the account from you know,
dormant or inactive to full deployed,
activated and loving the product.
So quick recap, how to identify at risk customers
and keep them from leaving,
number one, we have to measure health score.
Number two, we have to review the sales
or customer success notes.
Number three, we have to use multi-channel communication
to get them on a call.
Number four, on that call,
we need to re-sell vision
and number five,
we need to set milestones for success.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this episode,
I wanna share with you literally one
of the most powerful frameworks I've created
for customer success and retention.
It's called the EBR flow planner.
EBR stands for executive business review.
You can click the link below to grab your copy
where I talk about the five hot principles
and the nine steps to executing this meeting agenda.
It will allow you to not only retain customers,
but my favourite thing in the world, to expand the account.
It's called expansion revenue.
It's how we do, land and expand within your software
and account base.
So be sure to click the link below
to download your executive business review flow planner.
And if you liked this video,
be sure to subscribe to my channel,
hit the notification button so that you'll be notified
when new episodes get released.
And also leave a comment and let me know
if there's any other things strategies,
ideas or questions you have around this topic
that I might be able to serve you with.
And as per usual,
I wanna challenge you to live a bigger life
and a bigger business and I'll see you next Monday.
(hand clapping)