Hi there, I'm Dan Martell, serial entrepreneur,
investor, creator of SaaS Academy.
In this video I'm gonna teach you the five steps to increasing
your activation and adoption of your SaaS product
without changing your product.
And be sure to say the to the end where I'm gonna share with
you an exclusive guide, it's called the churn buster
checklist to help you reduce churn.
It's my nine box model.
I'll tell you how to get access to that in a bit.
(upbeat music)
So reducing your churn is the ultimate outcome of improving
activation and adoption of your product and without that you end
up continuously having to find new customers
to make up for the ones you lost.
You know recent I was working with one of my coaching clients
and we started working together they had an 18% month over month
churn which made it absolutely impossible
to really scale the business.
Your lifetime value's too short.
The cost to acquire a customer, the payback period didn't really
work out and what we did is we went through my churn buster
checklist and implemented these five steps to allow them to get
that number down to 4%.
And what the coolest part of that whole story is is at 4%
with their expansion revenue, they were be able to achieve
net negative churn for the first time ever
and they've kept that up.
That means that on a monthly basis without growing new
customer accounts they were able to grow their monthly
reoccurring revenue because the expansion outpaced their
contraction churn either through cancellation or downgrade.
So in this video I'm going to teach you the five steps to
activate and adopt your customers as fast as possible.
Step number one, build an on-ramp.
If you followed me on social media Instagram stories or know
about me in general you probably have learned
that I'm a bit into CrossFit.
And one of the principles of CrossFit is when somebody joins
they have an on-ramp period.
What that is is really your opportunity to teach them
movements to explain them the language,
the structure, the best practices.
What they can expect in an upcoming class and you do all
that before you drop them into their first group class.
The reason you do that is 'cause you don't want them
to feel out of place.
Now, I will say most software products don't have an on-ramp.
They don't have an activation step
or a first-time user experience.
That is the first step in really making sure that your product
gets a customer situated so they know how to get in there and
then instead of just dropping them on the dashboard where they
might not know what's the next action,
you actually walk them through step-by-step what you expect
them to do next.
Step number two, create a support network.
Now, as much as you want to have your customer self-serve and get
activated and adopt the product on their own,
the truth is maybe they're gonna need somebody to handhold
them and the cool part is it doesn't always have to be you.
Yes, you have customer support people that are responding to
issues and challenges and essentially tickets.
They're in a responsive mode.
What I want you to consider is creating
a support network for them.
Reaching out proactively from your customer success team to
ask them if they need some support or creating an online
group, maybe a Facebook group or a Slack channel that you invite
them to so that they can ask questions to other customers
that can explain to them how they've overcome those
challenges themselves and by doing that you start to build
relationships and connections.
And amongst your customer base, that's how you're gonna get
people not only to help you support customers but also
create connections so that they continue staying with the
product, adopt it and feel like they're part of a movement and
not just using a tool.
Step number three, you need to project a future.
If a customer doesn't know what their life could look like they
might have a problem that they expected your solution to solve
but maybe they don't really understand how that solution's
gonna look once it's finally solved out into the future.
And the best way to do that is to do case studies.
I have a video on creating a customer case study and in that
video talk about how to extract those wins from customers so
that you can tell those stories to tell new customers
what the potential future could look like.
So creating a future for your customer so that they have a
strong understanding of not only can I get this problem solved
but their Nirvana in my industry,
a company that looks kinda like me here's what they achieve with
this solution really allows them to go on the search inside your
product how to configure and tweak and add those
extra features to get an even enhanced outcome
that they may not have realized is possible with your tool.
Step number four, monitor for lows.
One of the things I teach my coaching clients is a framework
called the member at risk monitor and
the concept is very simple.
There's certain levels of activities for your product,
it's different per company, where you expect a customer or
their team to engage in the product.
That might be responding, logging in, creating,
configuring certain things and what you want to do
is set up that monitor so that there's a dashboard that shows
all of your active accounts and starts using
a simple traffic light system.
You know, red, green, yellow to let you know are
those accounts good.
Are they proportionately active based on what you've seen in the
past for a customer that's retained and stayed with you and
adopted the product?
If somebody turned from green to yellow,
that's your opportunity to proactively reach out.
And that's the difference between customer success and
customer support is one is about reacting to customers
challenges, the other one is actually we live in a cool world
where we can do this, we monitor so you need to move to a point
where your monitoring for lows in activities,
in usage, in a feature adoption to make sure
that you proactively reach out
and ask the customers anything to help them with.
If they get to red, you know there's a high probability to
churn and you want to make sure you're picking up the phone,
you're leaving voicemails.
You're doing whatever you can.
Imagine you have a good friend, they're going through a hard
time and you know you can be helpful to them,
you've got to treat it the exact same way and get your team
rallied around that outcome.
Step number five, flip the cancellation.
Now here's how that concept works is first off when your
early days, I actually think it's better for you not allow
customers to cancel from your website.
And I know from a user experience point of view,
you might so that seems a little aggressive.
But the truth is is your only mission in the early days is to
figure out what's missing in the product.
What did the customer assume they were going to get versus
what they received or they used and what's the gap between that
because that's your opportunity to fix the product,
enhance it to get customers in the future
at least to stick around.
So if you're not getting that feedback and people are just
canceling then you're doing yourself and
future customers a disservice.
The way you flip the cancellation is you talk to the
customer about that challenge and then just ask them,
"Hey, if we were able to overcome that,
"if were able to get you this outcome that you thought that we
"could when you registered and you know that you can do that
"and I'll even assign an account manager to make sure that we not
"only set it up, configure it, that we monitor every month for
"the next three months to ensure that your team's adopting it,
"that you're getting the value,
"if we could do that would you stay with our product?"
And you'd be surprised how many people will say yes.
If you've worked really hard to get a customer,
then just because they're in this moment of frustration and
they're ready to cancel, don't give up on them so easily and
that's flip the cancellation.
So quick recap, number one, build an on-ramp to help your
customers get situated.
Number two, create a support network to ensure your customers
feel like a part of a community and a movement.
Three, project a future of possibilities.
Four, monitor for low so you can proactively engage.
Number five, flip the cancellation.
Don't let them leave without supporting them in
the best way you know how.
As I mentioned at the start of the video,
I want to share with you an exclusive download called the
churn buster checklist.
It's a nine box model that's gonna walk you through the nine
specific areas that you need to be considering in your product
in your approach to avoiding cancellations for
your customers to resolve.
If you want that checklist,
click the link below in the description box.
It is there for you.
If you liked this video be sure to click the like button,
subscribe to the channel and share this video with a friend.
Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video.
Little story. - [Jared] Little story.
- [Dan] Gotta, gotta, gotta little story.
Story!
I got a good story!