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Quora Answers, SaaS, Tools

“What are the best SaaS platforms you’ve used? What was great about them?” Answer by @NikkiElizDeMere

February 2, 2019 by

Best SaaS Platforms

My criteria for “best” platforms might be a little unorthodox, but here are the factors I take into account:

  1. Usability – how user-friendly is it for its target audience?
  2. Functionality – how much does it make my life easier/better?
  3. Is the company behind it good? – Do they put customer experience first? Are they good people? Are they transparent?

With those criteria in mind, these are the best SaaS platforms I use on a regular basis, recommend often, and really enjoy.

Ahrefs – all-in-one SEO tool

Ahrefs is one of my favorite SEO tools for finding keywords and brainstorming ideas because it has a few features the others don’t. They show estimated traffic for all pages ranking in the top 10 for any keyword phrase, the ranking history of your pages for any keyword, and even have a “content gap” feature that shows what content your competitors rank for, but you don’t.

Ahref SaaS Platform

Airtable – spreadsheet + database

When you need something more than a multi-tab spreadsheet, Airtable is what more and more SaaS folks are using for project planning, sales tracking, drag-and-drop list-making and building custom applications. You can use it for so many things, like CRM and task management, or sorting and filtering customer feedback.

Airtable SaaS Platform

Appcues – user onboarding checklists

Appcues is an in-app user onboarding checklist that engages and guides new users through the onboarding process and deploys NPS surveys. Two very important functions to include in SaaS products! It’s one tool that does just a couple things, but does them really well. And it’s also a cool company that’s devoted to customer success – their blog is amazing.

Appcues SaaS Platform

Basecamp – project management & team communication

Basecamp is not only a great project management tool, with an incredibly user-friendly platform, it’s a very unique SaaS company. Their signal vs. noise blog actively works to tear down the hustle culture, as does their book It Doesn’t Have to be Crazy at Work, with messages that are completely aligned with what their product does: Helping businesses run efficiently and calmly.

Basecamp SaaS Platform

Buffer – social media management platform

Buffer is an ultra-user-friendly staple of social media management. The platform makes what can become a time-suck far more streamlined. I love that they have a “Happiness Team” with a focus on really listening to customers and improving CX as much as possible. I also love their Transparency Dashboard, where they make salaries, revenue, code, diversity and values public.

Buffer SaaS Platform

Hotjar – heatmaps, session recordings

Hotjar, as a tool, was created to tell you what customers are doing on your site, and try to answer the all-important question of why they’re doing it! Using heatmaps, session recordings, conversion funnels, form analysis and customer feedback polls (like NPS), it’s a thorough user analysis and feedback tool. This is another company that gets props for transparency. Their blog is an exercise in radical honesty.

Hotjar SaaS Platform

Hull – real-time B2B customer data platform

Hull.io is on the cutting edge (overused term, I know, but really!) of capturing and analyzing the entire customer journey, even when that data is stored in multiple places, in multiple tools. For data-driven growth teams, it’s an incredibly powerful platform.

Hull.io SaaS Platform

Intercom – customer messaging platform

Intercom easily integrates with your site and/or product enabling in-app messaging, user segmentation, event tracking and message automation. But I’m a customer success advocate, so it’s Intercom’s customer education content that really impresses me. If you’re an autodidact like I am, you can’t not succeed with Intercom because they give you all the information you need.

Intercom SaaS Platform

InVision – Digital product design, workflow & collaboration

The InVision platform is such a beautiful solution for faster product design workflows. You can design a prototype, make it interactive, show it to customers, gather feedback, and simplify the handoff from design to development. And, they’re a genuinely forward-thinking company. InVision’s newsletter regularly ends up in my Swipe file. Shoutout to Kristin Hillery when she was editor for keeping the quality so consistently high, and featuring diversity and inclusion-based topics.

InVision SaaS Platform

Notion – like having all the work apps in one place

We use Notion for The Shine Crew, and we love this platform for collaboration and organization. It’s so useful, whether you’re an individual user or a team (or a Shine Crew) – it has everything you need to organize your life, without a giant stack of tools.

Notion SaaS Platform

Segment – customer data infrastructure

Segment syncs customer data from your favorite tools, puts everything in one dashboard, and enables you to synthesize that data into traits and audiences for more effective and accurate customer personas.

Segment SaaS Platform

Unbounce – landing page, pop-up and sticky bar builder

Everyone I’ve ever met at Unbounce has been so friendly and genuine – it’s really a lovable company. And, the product fills a real need in the market: the ability for anyone, without specialized knowledge, coding or web design tools, to make a professional-looking landing page that converts.

Unbounce SaaS Platform

Wootric – customer feedback collection & measurement

Wootric is a women-founded, women-lead company that is doing some remarkable work using machine learning and artificial intelligence to improve customer experience with smarter qualitative feedback analytics. In short: They give you several modern ways to collect a lot of user feedback, both qualitative and quantitative, in any customer communication channel, analyze it at scale, and take action in your systems of record.

Wootric SaaS Platform: NPS / Net Promoter Score

Vervoe – AI-powered hiring platform

An amazing team and an amazing concept make Vervoe one of my favorite SaaS platforms. They’re actively trying to do away with the resume and make the job search and hiring process easier and faster for everyone involved. Instead of having applicants upload a resume or CV, they offer real-world scenario skills tests and video interviews, so the top performers shine.

Vervoe SaaS Platform

💗 Check out Nichole’s services for B2B SaaS startups 💗

Churn, Customer Success, Quora Answers, Retention, SaaS

“What’s the best strategy you’ve used to decrease churn in your B2B SaaS business?” Answer by @NikkiElizDeMere

July 24, 2018 by

I don’t own a SaaS company myself, but I am a consultant for many SaaS companies. What I’ve seen work best for my clients when it comes to churn is to first look at how they’re doing from a Customer Success perspective.

  • Are they attracting customers who have the potential for success with their product?
  • Does their onboarding process get their new customers closer to reaching their ideal outcomes (and does the SaaS business understand what their customers’ ideal outcomes are – because that’s not a given).
  • Has the onboarding process been optimized to help new customers bridge success gaps, celebrate milestones, and trigger red flags for customer success (or customer service) if the new customer runs into trouble?

These first three steps are vital to setting up customers for success.

From there, I recommend not starting from a place of “Why are customers churning?” but rather “Why are my best customers staying?”

Focus on doubling down on what you’re doing well. You can’t afford to divert resources from what people love about your product and company so you can try to plug the holes in your bucket.

Finally, you can look at which customers are leaving (and check whether or not they’re your ideal customers – maybe they should leave), and why they’re leaving.

Then organize the Whys by what you can fix fastest, with the least amount of resources, for the biggest impact, and tackle them one by one.

I also recommend creating a community for your SaaS, whether it’s on Slack (BubbleIQ reported ZERO churn among the customers in their Slack community), Facebook, or it’s a DIY-community that you’ve built, that way you can get super close to your customers.

I originally answered this question on Quora.

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Churn, Customer Success, Quora Answers, SaaS

“Is it a good idea to switch the monthly plans with quarterly to reduce the churn rate in an SaaS business?” Answer by @NikkiElizDemere

August 23, 2017 by

Churn isn’t caused by sending the bill, or having a quarterly or monthly plan. You could ask subscribers “Are you still in? Want out? You sure?” every single day and if they are making real, tangible progress towards achieving their desired outcomes with your product, they’ll say “Dude, don’t be so insecure. I freakin’ love you.”

Or something to that effect.

Thing is, they’ll stay with you for one reason, and one reason only: If your product is helping them achieve their goals (and doing it better/faster than your competitors).

Now, it would be lovely if churn was as simple as that. It almost is, but there’s another component to the issue.

Do the customers who are churning have the potential to succeed in the first place?

Think of churn as a symptom, not the disease, and it’s usually caused by customers who either don’t have Success Potential or aren’t reaching their Desired Outcomes. So instead of A/B testing your plan cycle, focus on checking whether customers who are churning have success potential in the first place (Lincoln Murphy has a very handy checklist in the second article), and if they don’t, it means your marketing may be attracting the wrong people and/or your sales team may be selling to the wrong people.

If the churning customers do seem to have success potential, then you’re going to have to dig deep (ie. voice of customer data, surveys, interviews) to find out what these “ideal” customers aren’t getting from you that they need.

I originally answered this question on Quora.

💗 Check out Nichole’s Services for SaaS startups 💗

Quora Answers, SaaS

“How do I acquire SaaS customers?” Answer by @NikkiElizDemere

August 22, 2017 by

As with any customer acquisition, you first have to make sure you’ve got a solid foundation before you get into marketing efforts.

You have to understand your ideal customers and develop a compelling value proposition. Who are they? Where do they hang out? What are their desired outcomes? What words do they use to describe their problems and desired outcomes? What do they expect to get from you? What do they hope to get?

Don’t know? Don’t guess. Ask them.

Based on the qualitative data you gather and your product, the next challenge is to come up with a unique value proposition that establishes product-market fit – in the language with which your target market will identify. (Sometimes I refer to this as language-market fit.)

We’re doing some high-level English major work here. We’re talking diction: Word choice. And we’re using it to power your marketing so when a customer for your SaaS startup (or otherwise) hits on your value proposition, they’ll immediately know you are for them.


Image source: Image created by Yasmine Sedky (@yazsedky) for Nichole.

A value proposition accomplishes four tasks:

  1. Defines who your ideal customer is
  2. States what your product does
  3. Establishes why you’re unique
  4. Shows the end benefit

Value propositions are complicated, but when you distill it down, the idea is really simple: To get customers, you have to tell them why they should work with you based on what you uniquely offer that is also important to them.

Now, once you have that foundation, the challenge becomes getting your product in front of your ideal customers.

Perhaps even more than other markets, SaaSpreneurs are looking for thought leaders to tell them how to do things just a bit better. So they’re here, on Quora. They’re on Medium. They’re on blogs like SEOMoz, and sites like Hacker News, ProductHunt, Growth Hackers, Reddit, and LinkedIn.

They’re everywhere.

Which isn’t to say you’ll get equal ROI from each of these outlets. You won’t. And you’ll spread yourself way too thin if you try to hit all of them.

Traction & Growth Channels

This is where “traction channels” come into play, and a very useful tool called the “Bullseye Framework.”

Image source: Strategize, Test, Measure: The Bullseye Framework by Brian Balfour (@bbalfour)

Traction channels are marketing and distribution channels that focus on customer acquisition.

They’re where you strategically choose to place your content to attract leads.

The secret to traction channels is that most startups use only a few – and there are hundreds (if not thousands).

Most businesses flood just a handful of channels and ignore the rest. They choose the ones they’re most familiar with, but you really can’t know what channel will work best for your product or service, and your audience, until you test.

That’s where the Bullseye Framework comes in – introduced in Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares’ e-book, Traction.

Weinberg and Mares identified 19 different traction channels in their e-book, Traction, including traditional media, social media and various types of marketing.

Here are a few channels from the e-book just to give you an idea:

  • Viral marketing – encouraging users to refer other users
  • Traditional media outlets & offline ads (tv, radio, print ads)
  • SEO / Inbound Marketing
  • Engineering as marketing – developing free tools, micro-sites and widgets to drive leads
  • Strategic partnerships with other companies
  • Existing platforms – i.e. using Facebook or Apple’s App Store, or even Medium to grow your audience
  • Speaking engagements
  • Community building

The Bullseye Framework is designed to whittle down the list into a few that have the best chance of maximizing your ROI. Because creating really great thought-leadery content requires a significant investment of time, if not money.

Bullseye in a Nutshell, According to Traction

Step 1: Brainstorm at least one idea for how you could use each type of traction channel.

Step 2: Rank your ideas according to which seem most promising, which could possibly work, and which seem unlikely. It might be helpful to give yourself a measurable goal, like which channels are most likely to yield 100,000 users in the first six months after launch (that, incidentally, was Mint’s lofty goal).

Step 3: Prioritize – Choose three channels that seem most promising.

Step 4: Test your three channels with the aim of finding out Cost to Acquire for each channel, how many customers are available through each channel, and whether the customers you are getting through each channel fit into your ideal customer profile.

[I’d watch out for Step 4 though, because some very important channels yield long-lasting, sustainable results, but don’t deliver quick wins. Yes, I’m talking about inbound marketing, content and SEO, as well as some others that can fly well under the radar.]

Step 5: Focus on the most promising channel. Weinberg and Mare recommend focusing on one traction channel at a time, the idea being “At any stage in a startup’s lifecycle, one traction channel dominates in terms of customer acquisition.” But again, they seem to ignore the long-term benefits of building solid content.

I would argue that startups should focus on one traction channel for quick wins, and another for long-term gains.

Here’s my list of traction and growth channels for the SaaS market to test, divided into quick wins and long-term gains.

These channels should be based on the customer.

Quick-win channels:

  • BetaList – Submit your startup on BetaList to find early adopters for your product and get valuable feedback.
  • Contests, giveaways – try Wishpond
  • Events – Launch parties, festivals, conferences – 32 examples of marketing using events
  • JustReachOut is a tool that was created specifically for startups to pitch journalists (though it is a paid resource)
  • Introduce your product on Medium – Examples: Welcome to Glitchand Introducing Yo Stories.
  • Paid Campaigns
  • Press / PR campaigns
    • For media coverage, you can use a website like Help A Reporter (HARO) to connect with journalists and bloggers needing sources for future articles. The daily HARO newsletters break down the source requests into categories, so scanning to see if your expertise is a fit is easy (plus, it is free!).
  • Product Hunt – Is your product available (i.e. not just in test mode)? Launch it on Product Hunt, a community where product enthusiasts can easily discover new products.
  • Social media – Social media buzz is one of those things that is often more easily said than done. But, companies like InVision have used the simple tactic of giving away free company t-shirts to drive impressive customer acquisition. And even early stage SaaS companies can afford a few t-shirts. (This tip is from Kate Harvey, Content & Search Marketing Manager at Chargify.)
  • Zest.is – A new-tab feed of content suggested by marketers, for marketers

Long-term gains, channels usually based on creating high quality, relevant content:

I’d recommend using the Bullseye Framework to narrow down this list and find a channel or two that work best for you for both the short and long-term. And try new channels when you’re initial channel stops working.

Ultimately, acquiring SaaS customers requires the same research and strategies as acquiring any other type of customer. The difference lies mostly in where to find them. The SaaS community is an especially active one on forums and online communities like Product Hunt, Growth Hackers, Medium, Quora, and private groups on Slack, Facebook and LinkedIn.

That’s good news, because knowing where to find your customers is half the battle.

The other half is proving your worth.

 

💗 Check out Nichole’s services for B2B SaaS startups 💗

Customer Success, Product Management, Quora Answers

“What actionable steps can we take to improve communication between Customer Success team and Product team?” Answer by @NikkiElizDemere

August 2, 2017 by

Image source: Image created by Yasmine Sedky (@yazsedky) for Nichole.

Improving communication between customer success and product teams involves more than creating a Slack channel, or implementing any number of systems that – on the surface – facilitate communication.

You have to give them reasons to want to communicate.

Teams tend to be insular. Data tends to get siloed. And to really bridge those gaps, there needs to be an understanding of what other teams have to offer.

Customer Success’ purpose is to ensure customers reach their ideal outcomes with the product. To do their jobs, they track a tremendous amount of user data, setting up alerts when user actions indicate the potential for churn, observing where customers fall off of onboarding or use, collecting voice of customer data on what they want and what they may not be getting.

Basically, they have all the information Product needs to do their work better.

The challenge for Customer Success is to show Product managers how their information can help Product reach their goals faster and better – and do so in language Product folks can understand. Because there is a language gap. Customer Success tends to be more touchy-feely; they’re all about creating “delight.” Product teams are all about creating… the product.

I’m not saying there aren’t wildly creative verbally-inclined Product managers with crystals on their desks, I’m just saying that bullet points with metrics are generally appreciated.

Actionable steps to improve communication between Customer Success and Product Management:

  1. Tell Product what you have to offer. You can create a customer-centric priority list of what changes are likely to have the most impact (Dev teams typically like to do the biggest impact, easiest-to-implement fixes first).You can work together to find metrics to measure the success of proposed product improvements, changes and additions.
  2. Give’m a break. When customer support tickets reach Product Dev, it takes away valuable time from the work they’re doing to make products better. As Customer Success, if you can proactively predict the most common issues your customers have, and address them through DIY and FAQ content, it will lighten the load of support tickets that make it to the Dev desk.
  3. Pre-organize and think through feature requests. Dev can become a dumping ground for everyone’s “bright” ideas, and it seems like all problems become feature requests. Customer Success can help prioritize features according to which will solve pain points and bridge success gaps for their target audience. This isn’t to say that Product should take its marching orders from Customer Success – not at all. Rather that it should be a collaborative effort to prioritize projects based on user impact, effort required, and company priorities.

Essentially, we’re all working towards the same goal: Delivering the outcome that is the reason the customer bought your product in the first place. Customer Success can help Product Dev bridge that gap by sharing their understanding of what the customer wants – and sharing the successes experienced by delighted customers.

Related, detailed articles that I’ve written:

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