The start not the end of a customer lifetime
All that aside, a different thought struck me as I was driving home. In my mind, these guys are already a customer. They are busy people with high pressure jobs that are literally life and death. And they gave up 3 hours of time between them to help me out.
Since I have gained value, I must owe them more value in return. Its an obligation plain and simple. Retention first not acquisition first
That took me back to thinking about this article from Price Intelligently which argues for a retention first mindset rather than an acquisition first approach. The authors have approached this from a metrics standpoint. And they demonstrate clearly that reducing churn can be a straight path to rapid growth.
But metrics are outcomes not strategy. Churn and its relative LTV are good examples. They capture an important concept. Yet they result from measuring customer lifetime at the end not from the beginning. That can’t be right! Nonetheless, I liked the principle when I first read the post. I was also a little bit doubtful to be honest. Retention first sounds very attractive to someone who prefers building relationships to cold sales. So was I just playing to my own preferences? My customer meeting has put that niggling doubt to bed. Good business works on human relationships. Not just transactional benefits. That’s why numbers and benchmarks are useful tools but no way to run a business. B2B SaaS - relationships not pipeline
So for me, retention first is a simple principle. One that applies to any B2B SaaS from day one. And it works like this:
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AuthorKenny Fraser is the Director of Sunstone Communication and a personal investor in startups. Archives
September 2020
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