How To Boost Your Net Retention Revenue (NRR) to Over 140% with Insider's CEO and CMO

I'm Hande, one of the co-founders and CEO of Insider. I'm sorry to say that I'm not the star of the show today. She is the star of the show.

Why?

Because we are going to talk about customer retention. And she's my CMO, and maybe you can take the liberty of introducing yourself, Merve.

Sure, I'm Merve. Very nice to meet all of you. It's so nice to be here with the crowd, learning from each other, from each other's challenges, being on the same boat and trying to create those unforgettable journeys together. Working with Hande for the past 8 years, and it's a special moment to be on the stage with her as well. So welcome again, and I hope you enjoy the session.

Perfect. So retention is the new acquisition, and this is why today, thanks to our experiences, we are going to talk about customer marketing and how we can build a customer marketing strategy strategy which can take us to 140% of net revenue retention. And for B2B SaaS companies, as you all know, net revenue retention should be without any discussion the North Star metric. You can't think about a B2B SaaS company which has like, you know, less than 1,000, 10, 1,000, sorry, 110 or 100 percent net revenue retention. So that's why it's the North Star, inevitable North Star metric for the B2B SaaS companies. That's why we are going to talk about how customer marketing can help to reach 140% of net revenue retention.

Yeah, so just before we start, actually, I want to say something over here. Like, we didn't actually compile things from Google or ChatGPT for you today. That could have been the case, but we actually sat down and thought about our challenges, our learnings throughout building a customer marketing function. And we came up with the 10 game-changing strategies for you, and we wanna share them with the common practices and the game-changing ones so you can compare it for yourselves. And tactics are tactics, and we all know tactics are tactics, but the most important thing is actually to not the tactics themselves. It's the creating those scalable, repeatable, and consistent programs that actually bring us the real results. If you're doing things in isolation and if you're comforting your heart at night saying, I'm doing enough customer marketing, probably you're not, because it's the consistency and the repeatable and scalable programs we're going to share with you that we actually saw work and that actually had a significant impact on our retention and hopefully to our NRR metrics. So Hanyu, why don't you start us with the first tactic?

Before starting, I would like to add something because when you say something, it creates another idea in my mind. Maybe sometimes and most of the times, it's better to define those importance of the things with some analogies. For me, those tactics are like brushing your teeth. Imagine that it's nighttime, you went to your bed. Ah, you realize that you forgot to brush your teeth. And it is damn difficult to wake up again and going to like, you know, bathroom and starting to brush your teeth. But at the same time, once you get up from this bed, once you like, you know, get to the bathroom and you start to brush your teeth, it's very easy. Just 2 minutes. So those activities, easy to mention, as easy as like, you know, brushing your teeth, but at the same time, it is as difficult that like brushing your teeth. I just wanted to remind you that.

And good leaders get up and brush their teeth. Hopefully.

We also forget it some time to time. But the tactic one, tactic, not because of that we know it, you know, well, Or we do it like, you know, great tactics from our learnings. I would like to indicate that. And the first tactic is segmentation. Building a segmented communication plan. Think about your marketing software. You always give like, you know, importance to segment the users while you are trying to reach them out. So that's why we know that the common practice of segmentation is actually segmenting your customer base on their like, you know, upside potential, everything. We all do that. Or we create email nurture programs or webinars or events, expose them to the new products and features. We all do that. However, the game-changing practice will be, would be, is segmenting customers based on their persona, upsell potential, tenure, maturity, and like many others, attributes. And by knowing that, C-levels actually don't care about product and features at the end of the day. Whenever you do a sale or whenever you would like to remind them something, they would like to feel special and they actually buy you at the end of the day, what you say, than your products, especially C-levels by the way. I'm not talking about your your hero in this partner or in this customer. But C-levels, they want to see only results and results. So that's why segmenting them based on their personas and choices, maturity, even knowing their birthdays and touching them at the right time with the right messages, just like we do at Insiders, is the key in here. So you should have a real segmented— it's not like, you know, very general segmentation. You should have a real segmented communication plan with your C-levels of your customers, because at the end of the day, they are the ones who are going to approve your budget. Even doing a nutrition with success story to one of your, like, you know, existing clients Doesn't work that much. I know that Merve will kill me too because I say this, but treating them with a very special thing, very special to their business. It can be news, it can be a new development in tech, it can be something special to their industry, and a personal message of that would be great because it means like a special touch. So after this tactic, Maybe we can talk a little bit about the tactic too.

Let's do it. Okay, we always think, talk about, you know, think outside the box, but this is an actual gift box and we all send it to our customers. And what is in a typical gift box?

Just like Sasa is giving a box full of like, you know, gifts.

I love those bags. Just kidding. So actually, Every SaaS company sends a box as for an onboarding box. Saastr gave us a lovely bag today. We have snuggies, water bottles, mugs, candles, chocolate, cookies. We have a lot of them at home. We even do, which is totally fine. But if you really wanna go to the next level with your gifting program, you need to take the gifts outside of the box. And you should not be focusing on providing things to people. You would be, as Honda was talking earlier, people care about the relationships. They buy you, they trust you. So it's really important to create experiences for people because think about it, you go on a date or you try to start a new friendship and what's really important is not getting each other gifts. It's about understanding each other's soul and building that relationship. The foundations of that relationship is really about first impressions. So the game-changing practice is, you know, maybe just sending a digital frame in a box, which we did at Insider. So real tactic here. And the digital frame was personalized to the person who's receiving it. So you tap on the digital frame, which is a photo frame, which we all have, you know, photos of kids and people on our desk. It's a living thing over there. It will stay on the desk. And it started with Honda's personalized video. So Hande was like, hello James, you know, very nice to have you as a part of our community.

But you need to confess how you did this.

Yes, I did this.

Of course, I have to shoot it like, you know, a video for like, you know, everyone. And I know that this video is not going to be public. Of course, we also use AI for this. Yes, I just like, you know, read the text and then they embedded the names inside.

Yeah, Hande was great. And we did, we use a deep—

AI was great.

AI was also great. We did deepfake and it was like, hello, James. Hello, Catherine. Hello, Chris. And it was, it was just changing the video. It gave us scale because we had to send this to every single onboarding customer. And the other thing, the other step would be, and we didn't do this yet, so if anyone does it before us, just let us know. We thought about like maybe having a basketball game or maybe having like a baseball game, whatever you guys like with your customers. And just kicking it off, yes, you have the things again. You have the jerseys with your branding on. You know, you have the socks with your branding on and your water bottles and your little candies or whatever, the beers at the end of the game. But you actually kick off the relationship at a different level. It's a different vibe, you know, like we're vibing here today. Like it's a different vibe, you know, it's not like the regular workday. So I think the outside of the— taking the gifts outside of the box and creating those experiences experiences is really going to be the future of customer marketing. It's all about relationships. Even if you send them a freaking scooter, it's not gonna buy you that relationship.

As we all know, leadership is an endless journey, and we are still like— I'm still learning like, you know, every day and every day. And most of the time I feel like I'm still not like, you know, good leaders. However, one of the very first things that I learned in my leadership like, you know, journey was Making the onboarding for all the people that you have hired in the company unforgettable. So they will never forget this day. So it's going to be a great value for the retention for long term. And it's same for the customers. Both technically, you should be providing an opportunity to make it unforgettable. And you can also support this with customer marketing. Give them an onboarding that they can never ever forget about.

And just on that note, just thought about it. I think the day Hande hired me, she was in her, you know, pink tights and she was like coming from the gym. It was a Sunday morning. I had an interview with her and I think it was that day that really captured my heart and soul. And that relationship has been there for 8 years. So it's all about, I think, those moments. She made it unforgettable for me. She was writing our dreams on a piece of tissue paper in an Italian restaurant Sunday morning. So I think focus on the relationships. Don't focus on— if you don't have budget, great. It makes you more creative. Get a basketball, run out there, and get the relationship going with a great game.

I think tactic 3 is mine.

Yes. OK.

Here we go. So reinventing your traditional upsell flow. So the common practice for the upsell is of course having meetings to talk about the new features, emailing your new features, and having meetings again, and emailing again. Have you ever heard about the new product, new feature, sending the videos, etc.? But what we do, what is it like, you know, game-changing practice. This year I started to, for example, shoot videos for our new products that I'm using those new features by myself and start to share them with the customers. I use the, like, you know, control panel. I create the scenarios myself. We are shooting those videos and we start to send them to the customers. So this product works, by the way, like concepts, or CEOs like using the panel and sharing these old videos. And making them feel like they are not going to just use a new feature, making them feel like they are using something with another community who is really getting value out of it. They are also using this. And maybe making them even physical, creating product walks by the bay, Product talks in another location, combining with some of the other concepts are always very helpful to make them feel like it's not only about the new features, it's about the new experience that special people, that we can experience with the other special people. So that's why under this context, you can send them branded also things like t-shirts, hoodies, water bottles, yes, you can do this. But whatever you think about that you can send them to make them feel like this community experience will be important because since the ancient times, every single human being would like to feel like they are part of a community or a tribe. Ideally a special one, ideally a strong one, Ideally, like, you know, an intelligent one. So this is what you can actually offer them.

Great. So tactic 4, active upsell. What the hell is it? Actually, we created this term. So let me cover the common practice first. So usually in SaaS products, you have a freemium model. You try to get excited. People get excited. They try your tool, and then they want to buy more. But this is at like a platform level. And then you have, you know, automated features or messages or, you know, an academy in the platform that you can go and learn about the product. This is a standard. This is a common practice. So product-led growth. I think there are sessions about it today as well, like where it's getting really important for companies like ours and the game-changing practice for upsells using your product. Is actually a term that we coined at Insider, active upsell. An active upsell is about basically, you know, as Hande explained, when you have a new feature, your account manager, your customer success teams, what do they do? They email, they try to convince, they try to convince constantly that this product is going to be really great. It's worth their investment. Buy it, try it. Trust me, this is all fine. It's working. It worked until today. However, how do you take it to the next level? You get active about it. You don't get passive about upsell. And what you do is you open a little feature. I mean, this might not be relevant for everyone in the room, for every software, but for us it was very relevant. So we open a little feature. Let's say they got 246% conversion rate using one of our products, X product. And this is a great result. If the platform spoke to them and said, hey Dylan, you know, we have, you have achieved this amazing results and now you can actually try this new feature for free and we're gonna take you through a product lab, we're gonna hold your hand and you're gonna get great results from this. You make them get the results and then once you have the results, if they're the decision maker, they're gonna be like, wait, this is gonna pay back for my investment. And if it's— if they're not the decision maker, they can go back to their CEO, CMO, and they can say, here is the results. And they create internal buy-in for that product. So you don't spend your time or waste your time on actually convincing— days, emails, calls, presentations, QBRs— and then you actually show them the value before they actually make the investment. So we call this active upsell. We started experimenting with it. And it's, it's a powerful tool. And I think you should, you guys should try it. The other thing is the dynamic content and the personalized feature experiences. As I mentioned, you know, don't just put those pop-ups everywhere speaking to no one. Again, doing personalized messaging, dynamic messaging, guiding them within the tool and platform will allow you to create inbound upsell opportunities. And it's going to start creating an engine that's It will start creating an engine that will actually take you away from just doing customer events. Because if you want a strong upsell revenue opportunities coming especially from marketing, you need to also think about your product as a main channel and you have to think about digital strategies.

Okay, tactic 5, which is about creating that loving feeling in your community. So second, maybe tactic about the community. Yes, because community is the key. I remember that in last year's Reshape, we had more than 20,000 people joining us, digital marketers. By the way, we have an event, global event called Reshape. Every year we define the digital events in the world with the participation of the world's top global brands and they are like C-levels. For example, last year we also hosted featured speakers like Barack Obama and Richard, Sir Richard Branson. And in all of those events, yes, we had like, you know, a lot of participants, a lot of attendees. However, we decided to have also local Reshapes during the year where we only run this for the local community. In our locations, in Sardis locations like Japan, in Seoul, in Tokyo, in London. And those community events, local community events, which was much more successful compared to this like, you know, big and expensive events. Why? Because local touch and bringing them together as a community is much more powerful and is more touchy compared to like, you know, those very big events. And creating that kind of loving communities, common practice is creating disconnected program without real community engagement. Real community engagement is the key in here. And just writing to the Slack groups, just sending them like, you know, some, again, uh, emails, or running product webinars that you can never be sure that who 'Who is listening? Who is understanding?' Those are not like, you know, old-fashioned and old-school tactics. So that's why the game-changing practice is building an active community that triggers a sense of belonging, requires consistent and at the same time connected programs. For example, not just webinars, gamified webinars, seminars, repeatable scalable customer events, customer advisory boards. For example, we have established a customer advisory board in each country, not to just to understand the, you know, their needs, not just to understand the dynamics of this market, not just to understand their ideas, also for the referrals. We are trying to also understand, you know, whom they can introduce us, how we can actually recruit our leads Because at the end of the day, they become the biggest word of mouth for your brand. And that's why actually building meaningful, valuable conversations in your online community. By the way, to be honest, and I know that I'm going to have a lot of maybe negative reactions about it once this speech is going to be public, I'm a big enemy of the Online. I mean online communication. I believe that world has lost a lot of things due to like, you know, working from home concept, the human interaction, and many things. It's not about only business. Sometimes when you just walk in the office, when you see someone, when you look at the face, then you immediately grab that or catch that he's not or she's not feeling good. We lost that kind of interactions. So that's why the same thing applies for the customer. I like one of the things that Jason mentioned before. By the way, he's also part of our advisory board and was also one of the shareholders at Insider. He mentioned that get on this jet. By the way, as entrepreneurs, not jets. We are getting on the just planes, economy class. But just get on this plane, shake that hand, talk about your products and experiences face to face. That means like a huge difference. So this community building thing also with your customers ideally should be face-to-face and that's how they are going to feel the real emotions in the room. Tactic 6 is yours. I talk too much.

Yes, I'm actually gonna speed up a bit because I know you guys might have questions so we want to leave time for that. So loyalty programs. There is a There's a lack of loyalty programs in most SaaS organizations. It's not our priority, but it should be going forward. And mostly we try to buy attention. We give Amazon vouchers, gift cards, this, that. But again, we are even as adults, we are kids inside and we like playing. We like gamification, right? And we like being a part of a community that we can share our triumphs as well. So basically the game-changing practice here, there's a lot of game-changing practices here, but one of them is, you know, creating a point system. We're asking a lot from our customers. Just think about it, like NPS, G2 reviews. Please come to our conference and speak there. Give us a case study. Give us a testimonial. Give us that. Give us a lot of things, right? Buy this product from us. So thinking about what we ask from them, we can reward them with a point system. So 50 points for your G2 review, 200 points for your lovely speaking opportunity at Reshape with Hande maybe, or with some other panelists. And that way they're accumulating points and they're— they can access this through your platform, or you could create a separate platform. Where they can log in and see their points and turn it into something that's meaningful for them, not meaningful for us. So what does that mean? They can turn this into a donation for their favorite charity, or they could turn it into like a consultation with one of our account managers for the upcoming product release or a better product usage. So they can turn it into something they find meaningful, not us. So you can start thinking about how you can differentiate your loyalty loyalty programs.

So tactic 7, gamifying your customer referral programs. And the common practice about is this, generally a single fixed reward for referrals. By the way, as we were— we are talking about the, you know, concept of retention is a new acquisition. And again, even for the new customers, utilizing your existing client base Making them your, like, you know, your brand's, you know, best advocates is the most important strategy for the B2B SaaS companies like us, especially in those times, at those, like, you know, economic fluctuations. So that's why just monetary incentives for the referral programs that you are going to get from your— or you are going to get referrals from your existing customer base is again, like, you know, lack of lack of, like, you know, I think reality, lack of strategy. So that's why the game-changing practice for the referral program is actually tiered incentives based on the number and quality of the referrals. It doesn't have to be like, you know, one size fits all. It doesn't have to be only one program for all the referrals. Based on this customer, based on this person who actually provides you this referral, referred you should have like a special treatment based on their own likes. Think about yourself. You have your likes and dislikes in those life, right? And it's same for everyone. Everyone has their likes and dislikes. So you should be able to find these likes and try to reward them based on them, and this is actually how you can make your referral programs much more meaningful. And of course, gamification can be part of it because with leaderboards, badges, or point systems, you can actually run like a much more fun referral programs that you can reward them in a much more intelligent and more personalized way. Taktik8, great. Only 9 minutes left. We are talking too much.

I know, we're talking too much again. Building enduring review programs that last. So I'm sure most of you guys have presence on one of the review sites out there, and you're trying to climb up in the grids, which is really important for SaaS because they actually turn into new acquisition revenue as well. So basically here, the common practice is blasting everyone again with these review campaigns where you send the same email to all your customer base and expect them to magically turn into Happen that way. Quit mass communication. It's really important to start with your happy customers. Why? Happy customers say happy things, and it's very important for you to start with them to get your top amazing reviews. And also, if you really want to send them an Amazon voucher or some sort of present and recognize them, do it after, not before. Don't say, here's a $20 Amazon voucher for you. Can you please give me a review? You will end up getting maybe 2-star, 3-star reviews, right? So don't try to buy their attention, their time. Turn them into advocates and make them want to do things for you. And here we are sending them a thank you email or a thank you donation or thank you something that is personalized to them by their account manager. No mass communications. That's the trick over here and make it consistent. Don't go there one quarter, do a review campaign. Don't do it for 3 quarters, go back again. Doesn't work. Consistency, repeatable, scalable programs, as we mentioned. And that's something that's important for all of you in the room.

Tactic 9. Think about a conversation that you would like to get any information out of it. Think about any type of relationship. Without giving, you can't expect anything, right? And you are going to receive. In the level that you are going to give to this relationship or this conversation or this company. So that's why please ignore the common practice or just do it, but just have a balance around them. Ask us before giving to customers. And companies ask customers to buy more products. We have built a new feature, buy our new product. Fill in the NPS, please fill our NPS. Be speaker at one of our events, provide case studies, let's write a product review for us because we need to be at the top of the chart, whatever. We are just asking sometimes. So try to give. Try to think about the things that you are giving them. Maybe sometimes an information, maybe sometimes a nutrition, maybe sometimes the feeling of being part of their yearly strategy. It doesn't mean that you shouldn't establish a not scalable customer support success team, support team, but at least you can also treat them with your customer experience team and then you can actually make them feel like you are thinking about them, you are caring them, and you are open to giving, not just asking. Once they feel it, That magic happens. Taktik 10.

Taktik 10. Oh, this is very important. So let me open all of it for time's sake. Champion a culture of customer marketing. This is a personal pain that I have. It's actually, customer marketing teams are lonely. They are quite lonely in the organization. They have to work with sales, they have to work with customer success teams. They have to work with customers. And they need to solve those magical problems for you, getting reviews, speakers. We mentioned it multiple times. So it's very important as the C-levels of the organization, it needs to come from the top. You really need to create that culture of customer marketing in the organization and make people, educate people about understanding that this is done not for fun, This is done for retention and to reaching our outstanding NRR metrics. So if you create that culture, if you educate people about how important that event is, then your sales teams, your customer marketing team, customer success teams will feel more responsibility in bringing the right people in that room to maximize the upsell potential in the room, the upsell pipeline in the room. If they don't see this as a— if they see this as a secondary task, if they see this as One of the things they need to do, I need to get that review, I need to get that case study. If they're thinking in that mentality, your customer marketing team is set up for failure. So don't do that. If you're building a customer success or an experience team that's separate, please help them and change that culture in the organization. I think we have a bonus.

Would you like to go for a bonus? Go for a bonus.

I think you should go for a bonus.

You deserve it even more.

As a C-level, 'cause this is a C-level message. Message. Go for it.

We are servant leaders. There is no C-level anymore, but yes, okay, let me go for it. So as we all say, as we always say, happy customers actually spread the word. They become your best sales representatives. And especially while you are beyond $100 million ARR, just like us, just like Insider, We should aim to acquire at least— I know that the number is ambitious, but it's realistic, trust me. We should aim to acquire 30 to 50, exactly in that range, percent of our new customers from word of— through word of mouth. That's the key. And 77% of consumers are more likely to purchase a product or service when they hear about it from someone they trust. This is what we call externality. And you should do the same thing sometimes for your team. There's a tactic I also apply to Merve and all the people, other people. When they always hear it from me, then it becomes very regular sayings and then it doesn't, I think, pass to them or pass through them. But sometimes I ask someone else, maybe outside of organization, to tell them, you know, to tell them the realities or to tell them like, you know, what's good or bad, what looks more logical, what looks not. And that applies for our customer. If you just tell, buy my product, it will not work that much. But if someone else will tell them, okay, we used Insider and that's great, I mean, Here's the ROI, here's the numbers, here you go. Then it creates like a wow effect and customers acquired through word of mouth have a 16-25% higher lifetime value than non-referred customers, ladies and gentlemen. This is a huge number.

This is huge and if you are successful with your customer marketing strategy and if you really create that loving feeling feeling in the community. That's what's gonna turn into word of mouth, and that's also going to support your new acquisition revenue. So that's the key here. It's a vicious cycle, and you need to crack the code for customer marketing going forward. You guys don't have a choice. So thank you so much. We have the key takeaways. For the sake of time, I'm just gonna use the clicker and not go through them for you, but I want to do something maybe not many people do at Saastr, But I think it was a great crowd. You guys were so engaged with your eyes sparkling, your phones up, taking notes. Thank you so much for being such an engaged audience. And I just want to take a selfie because I want to make this moment unforgettable for all of us. And when you have a really amazing customer marketing team—

and I will never think about that, and this is why you are the marketing—

okay, if you use any one of these tactics and you find some success, please write to us. Let's share, let's learn from each each other.

So I assume you are not getting any questions because time is up.

I think we have 1 minute. Maybe we can get that one brave soul for the question, but first the photo. Hande, do you mind?

Of course not. I want—

can you guys raise your hands? Let's do it. Hande, you get in the photo. Thank you, guys. Thank you.