How to make the most of lifecycle in SaaS

Most B2B SaaS companies spend too much time on new customer acquisition and too little time on expansion, retention, and referral.

The PE-backed companies we work with get this playbook. Here's what we do:

1. Measure these 4 areas for customers

- NPS – it's a leading indicator of how much people like what you do and we think it's linked to churn (high NPS is correlated with low churn)
- Products subscribed – how embedded is the platform you're selling in the client's business. If there are multiple 'products' in use, then not only is your expansion revenue growing but you're also likely to see less churn as the switching risk increases
- Seats sold – pretty simple. If more people are using your product in a business, there are more voices to protest on your behalf if someone wants to switch to a competitor. Get those seat numbers up!
- Last price increase date – companies expect prices to rise most years. Everyone acts outraged when it happens but real talk: raise your prices periodically. You'll see more revenue and almost no-one will care long term. The trade off between losing some customers and gaining a lot of revenue is an obvious one most of the time.

2. Prioritize growing by doing the following:

- Reach out to the happiest customers first
- Show them how subscribing to product B if they already pay for A has a "better together" effect.
- Recruit more of their teams into the product suite.
- Add new features to renewals on the existing platform to reward customer loyalty, and then sell through higher pricing on product B.

3. Some of this is CS work, so how can marketing help?

- Target high NPS customers with email and revenue expansion ads.
- Show high NPS customers a webinar highlighting product B
- Use marketing automation to ask a question (sent from AE's inbox) to activate customers who have partial org adoption
- Create a calculator to pinpoint the total value added since the inception of the relationship (money made, money saved, time saved)

Demand generation isn't just "paid ads" or "email marketing". It can be so much strategic and impactful than that.

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SaaS Marketing Bites is produced by B2B SaaS marketing agency Powered by Search. It's hosted by Head of Growth Marc Thomas. You can follow @iammarcthomas or Powered By Search CEO Dev Basu @devbasu on Twitter for more updates and marketing insights. 

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