Top 5 Ways to Reduce Churn for your SaaS in a Recession

When things are going well for your business, you stop giving the attention to every single one of your customers as you should. However, in times like this is when where we have to go above and beyond for every single one of our customers to stop them from turning away from your SaaS product. My name is Akhil Jabbar. I am the GP and founder at Horizon Capital, and today I'm going to be talking about the top 5 ways to reduce churn for your SaaS product in a recession. Number 1, retune your digital engagement strategy. Now what do I mean by that? Stay in touch with every single one of your customers and make sure that your support team is reaching out to them, speaking to them in a practical way. Okay, make sure you empathize with them and get the information you need to be able to proactively create digital marketing resources. So what I would suggest you guys do is segment your customers by the challenges that they're facing and providing them with unique solutions. So get on the call with them, speak to them, send them an email, and ask them, what are you guys facing? What are the problems you guys are having right now? I know you guys are having a hard time. Tell us exactly what the problem is and let's come up with some solutions. And then segment your customers based on the problems that they're having. And then from there, what you can do is start creating campaigns, resources, and promoting those solutions on your digital marketing channels. So on your social media pages, on your website, create resources, create blog articles that actually address those problems that they bring up to you. So that's what I suggest as step number 1. Step number 2, be proactive and deliver value. So be proactive and reach out to your customer before they churn. So what usually happens is we're just waiting for customers to reach out to us and say, hey, look, I'm looking to cancel. But at times like this, it's extremely critical to reach out and show that you care. So be proactive. We all, you know, in financial stress, when we're times where we're super stressed with our business, our own financial issues, we place a greater emphasis on the value of every single one of our dollars. We want to make sure that our product, our SaaS product, is a need-to-have and not a nice-to-have, and we don't get cut out there. Okay, so reach out to them with the solution. Don't wait for them to come to you, and that'll reduce, uh, the renewal and contract fees. And what would happen is you want to help them during that time. So you can suggest to them to reduce, maybe reduce your contract fee, maybe reduce the renewal fee, or maybe even offering them like a flexible payment option Or maybe, you know what you can do is offer them free access to your higher tier platform at times. Or just say, hey, you know what, I'm going to give you guys an extra 3 months at our premium plan just to help you guys out. And maybe it'll help you guys during this storm. Okay. So give them a solution that maybe you can before they come to you and say they want to cancel their account. So that's number 2. Number 3, communicate effectively. Now, what do I mean? I mean, collaborate effectively with the rest of your team. Okay, you have all different departments. Make sure your customer success is in touch with everybody on your team. So I'm talking about your support team, your marketing department, and your sales team. Make sure they're all aligned on how to treat your customers, especially during these difficult times. So let's start with the support team. Have them identify what questions customers are coming out to and reaching out to you most often. What are they complaining about? What are the problems they're having? And gather that information as the customer success manager. Okay, and then from your marketing department, what you want is ask them to create those educational pieces, so the content that they need for customers to do a better job at using your product. Okay, and then from the sales side, you want to speak to your sales team, identify which customers might need an extra license. Maybe they need more features. You know, they've spoken to them during the demos, they've identified the needs of the customers. Talk to them and ask them Hey, they actually said they might actually like these couple of features and might help their business, but maybe they just couldn't afford it. So if we know that, we can go out and reach out to them proactively like I mentioned before and say, hey, you know what? I know you mentioned a couple of months ago that you would like to have this feature. During these difficult times, we're gonna give it to you guys for free for the next couple of months just as a nice gesture to help you out. Okay, so that's a couple of examples on how you wanna collaborate across your team and make sure You guys are all on the same page on how to help your customers. Number 4, perfecting your onboarding experience. Guys, the onboarding experience is probably the number 1 or number 2 reason why customers actually churn from your product. Okay, so you have to go above and beyond to make sure you perfect that whole process. So what I suggest you guys do is check out my podcast with Jeff Epstein, who is the founder of onboard.io, who has a fantastic onboarding experience. That's what they talk about. Awesome. We actually created a whole podcast about 40 minutes long that we talk about the entire process if you want to dig into it more. Otherwise, what you can do is check out a really good SaaS business that has done really well at perfecting it, which I suggest is called getambassador.com, or Ambassador is the name of the platform. So you guys can check that out. Now, your onboarding process, the real value of that is to get them to that aha moment. Okay? They want to understand the value of what you're getting them. So during the sales process, you've shown them, you've highlighted it, but they haven't actually seen the value of it. So that's what I call your time to value. You need to reduce the time of how fast the customer sees the value of your SaaS product. Okay, so this is the point where your customer success, when they're onboarding them, they wanna see and experience the real benefits of your service as quickly as possible. Okay, so make sure in your process, you can show them, highlight it, get them to use the product, get them to integrate it and set up as quickly as possible so they can start using it and seeing the real benefits of your product as soon as possible. Number 5, build a community. Now that people are struggling, they have a lot more maybe time that they need help with. And this is where you can come in with your wisdom. You guys know your product better than anybody else. Out there, okay? You guys have the wisdom, the knowledge. You guys can share your best practices and your digital and remote communication strategies to share with your customers. So what you can do here is you can create a community, okay? There's a lot of nice communities out there such as Slack groups, Facebook groups. You can create like a weekly Q&A webinar or an AMA, which is an ask me anything. So maybe set it up every Wednesday at 2:00 PM where your customers can join you And you guys just answer questions that people have. Just show that you're there. You're just doing goodwill for the users. You can even do like a virtual event, maybe schedule one of those, or just like a community forum board online on your website. So those are just a bunch of different ideas that you guys can use to build a community. And what you'll find is that over time, yes, it may take a lot of work and effort to engage with them. So what you'll find is that by, you know, this does take a lot of time and effort. To build these communities, but you will find that the reward is well worth it because you're building loyalty, you're building friendships, and you're building trust with your customers. And over time, what they're going to do, they're going to stick with you during good or bad, and they won't leave to the competitors because they know you've actually gone above and beyond to actually help them with their solution, and now they feel part of your community. Okay? So guys, that's the top 5 ways I talked about today. Number 1, retune your digital strategy. Be proactive and deliver value to all your customers. Number 3, communicate effectively across your entire team. Number 4, perfect your onboarding experience. And lastly, number 5, build a community. All right, so hopefully this was helpful to you guys. Start implementing it today in your SaaS company. We know it's a hard time for everybody, and I hope you guys see good results. If you guys enjoyed this episode, comment below, like this video, and make sure to subscribe. Thanks for watching. subscribe to our YouTube channel, SaaS District, and we'll see you guys on the next episode. Thank you.