Brennan Dunn – 6 Tricks That Helped Me Triple My SaaS’ Growth Rate – MicroConf Europe 2014

The MicroConf Europe 2014 Hub Page has notes on all the talks and additional information.

Website: Planscope.io
Twitter: @brennandunn
Slides: here

• I am a hacker & I like growth, but I don’t like the term “growth hacking”
• I am a solopreneur – with a bunch of different products
  • I don’t work that much, because of my wife & kids (a.k.a. my board of directors)
  • Frequent Question: “How big is your team?”; Answer: “About a quarter of a person”

Why We Are Here

• We are all here to grow
• We are all here to make more money

The All Important Sales Funnel

• e.g: Visitors –> Trials –> Activations –> Paid
• Activation: “Somebody who is actually utilizing your product in their day-to-day workflow”
• If you improve one step of the funnel, it improves all the other parts of the funnel TOO!

Lessons

Lesson 1: Reaquiring Drive-Bys

• People need to come back to your website for them to buy your product
• random visitor: “Google, how do I raise my rates?”
• Avoid “One size fits all” retargeting
  • Are they looking to double their rates or searching for software? –> Address those people differently
• Visitors to marketing site –> Retarget on display network (Interested in product)
• Visitors to blog –> Retarget on Facebook, drive to email course signup landing page
• Retargeting is more than just converting visitors
  • Trial users: Invitation to join the founder for 1-on-1 onboarding
  • RSVP for an upcoming webinar or mastermind
  • Videos or blog posts of success stories or usage guides
  • Product updates
  • Compliment and reinforce your trial lifecycle communication

Lesson 2: Segmentation

• Goal: Make this a product-for-one
• Customer: “I own a development consultancy, and we bill $10,000 a week”
  • Adjust the product to what you just learned about THAT customer:
    • Lifecycle emails: “When I ran my consultancy, I…”
    • Onboarding: Sample project with development-y tasks, rate of $10k/week
    • In-App messaging: reporting verbiage, button labels, etc.
• Further ways to individualize
  • Listed in 3rd party integration marketplace? You have referrer data – auto-default to linking with the referring tool
  • Create specialized landing pages for each persona “I run a 20 person agency… there’s no WAY a tool that works for freelancers could help me.”
  • Level over 9000: Figure out how, why, and where they first showed up on your site, and profile/cookie them for later
• Takeaway: a perfectly placed IF-condition can go a long way toward improving conversions

Lesson 3: Trial Scores

• Goal: Learn & Optimize Outreach during onboarding phase
• “What is common about people who convert to paid?” (for planscope)
  • have created a project
  • invited a client to join project
  • invited their team members
  • added 3rd party invoicing integration
  • used internal communication
• Turn that into a score for each customer in trial (Client Happiness Index)
  • Tailor your lifecycle emails according to their Client Happiness Index
  • Your #1 is to nudge people toward converting
• Takeaway: Write & Test your automated emails inside GMail before putting them inside a cron job

Lesson 4: Educate Everywhere

• Goal: Focus on the customer, not the product
• Your product is only a small part of your customer’s business
  • Educate them on topics related to their business
• “Click this button. Now enter a rpice in here. Then, click…” VS. “Here are some tricks you can use to win this new project…”
• Send helpful content right after events in your app.
  • e.g. send a “My help is to improve your chances of winning your proposals by 2-3x. Here are a few tips:” email right after they created their first estimate
• Celebrate your customer’s successes – and gather some great testimonials along the way
• Takeaway: What actions ALIGN with why someone actually wants your product?

Lesson 5: Do an Exit Interview

• Goal: Go beyond what funnels can tell us
• Not-so-obvious reason to collect credit card upfront: Requires people to cancel
• Ask people why they are cancelling & how you can improve
• Collect the responses, categorize them
  • Product reasons
  • environmental reasons
    • some won’t help you
    • but “I ran out of client work” –> you can teach them to get more business
• Takeaway: People are at the high water mark of their emotional entanglement with your product when they cancel

Lesson 6: Ways to Increase CLTV

• The goal of the trial is to establish product fit. When done, CHARGE.
• Decrease churn, e.g. by offering them a discount when they are likely to churn

Misc

• Look for repeatable quests that get you to that next level faster

Questions & Answers

• What do your customers mean to you?
  • My customers were struggling with cashflow, it’s great to help them
  • “Raising my rates is what allowed me to finance my wedding” –> Best. Feedback. Ever.
• Can you expand on your use of CRMs to provide 1-on-1 onboarding?
  • Push customer happiness index into close.io, multiply by CLTV,
• You have switched positioning from freelancers to agency. How did you adjust your content marketing?
  • There are different terms for “people who work for other businesses on a project basis”: freelancer, consultancy, consulting agency
  • Agencies don’t think advice for freelancers works for them
  • “Duplicating”/Cloning content for freelancers and agencies
• How did you do 1-on-1 onboarding?
  • I remotely joined them on their computer, trying to work their way through the app and get confused

 

-Christoph