SaaS Strategists,

If you already don’t know who Alex & Leila Hormozi are, I strongly advise searching for their content.

They are one of the best & biggest business content creators of today.

I’m sure you’ll get pulled into the content loop after your first search though.

They have their own SaaS product called ALAN that helps you convert leads into meetings using SMS.

Today, I want to dig deep into strategies Alex & Leila talk about that will help you increase your customer retention & cut down the number of customers leaving your service.

Hope you have your coffee ready. ☕

Let’s dive in deep 👇️ 

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Alex & Leila Hormozi $3M-$10M/ARR SaaS growth strategies 🤑

It’s now safe to say that I have listened to about 50+ hours of Alex & Leila’s content.

Most of my interest was put towards the stories where they talk about how they built and scaled their SaaS product ALAN.

In today’s SaaS Strats issue, I curated the customer retention strategies they preach, so that you can try & implement them in your SaaS operations.

This might come as a surprise:

Your customer success metrics are more important than your sales process.

Customer success is a new industry.

How Leila Hormozi explains customer success is simply a partnership you have with your customer so you can get them a maximum ROI.

Once you reach $3M/ARR your sales strategy won’t matter as much as your customer success strategy.

You’ve reached a certain point where the main goal is to retain customers on the platform, which automatically decreases the churn rate.

In order to grow past $3M/ARR you should utilize the following strategies:

The most obvious way to increase your customer retention is a good product in the first place.

But what about ACTIVATION?

Activation is a proactive measure to dictate churn.

Or to translate it into plain English:

It’s a point in time when your customer receives value from your product for the FIRST TIME.

Examples of activation points:

• Onboarding a new hire & delegating hours of work off your plate

• Increase in MRR

• Freebie in the email

But when is the best to ACTIVATE a customer?

The best contact with the customer is immediately post-sale.

After that, it goes downwards.

If you want to retain you want to match the pre-sale & post-sale experience.

There are 2 main aspects when we speak about customer success:

Results & Experience.

To hit the sweet spot in retention you must focus on having both good results (platform quality) & experience (experience-led features).

Here are 5 ways to retain customers for a longer amount of time, as per Leila’s experience:

01 Consistent tracking 📊 

You should never, ever stop measuring & sharing the ROI you generated for your customer.

Example:

Every time you log in to Instacart, it shows you that you saved thousands of hours of grocery shopping.

It also shows you how much money you saved by focusing on higher-ROI tasks such as running your business.

Same can be applied to your product.

If you’re running a SaaS in the Sales sector, show your users how many hours you saved them on manual follow-ups.

If you’re running a SaaS in the E-Commerce sector, show your users how much money you saved them on coupons.

By providing your user with statistics & ROI you helped them generate, they are much more likely to continue using your product & even opt-in for a higher pricing plan with additional features.

02 Pre & post-sale experience match 🤝 

Most sales professionals think that the end of a funnel is when someone purchases the product.

In reality, the end of the funnel is when someone leaves your platform.

Because in the end, you’re left with 1 less customer.

Your funnel should be everlasting.

There should be no end in sight if they are still on your platform.

Your old customers should be treated as your new customers constantly.

No one likes to be neglected.

So try & treat your old customers like your new ones.

If you have customers that are using your SaaS over 1,2 years, give them something in return:

• First access to new features

• VIP merch sent to their address

• 50% discount on the next 3 months

Try gamifying their experience as much as possible.

Set milestones.

Congratulate them for achieving them.

Make them feel like they are your best friend and you’ll never have to worry about them leaving.

03 Time-to-value longevity ⌛️ 

Time to value is essentially the time it takes for the customer to realize the value of your product and how it can elevate their business further.

You should always aim to shorten your time to value as much as possible.

Example:

If you’re running a Cold Email SaaS, once the new user onboards on your platform, immediately recommend them a spreadsheet of relevant leads in their industry that they can contact.

You gave them instant value before they even started using the product.

Personalized customer journey’s are often pushed aside.

But they bring MASSIVE value.

04 Never stop onboarding ♻️ 

Similar to the funnel story.

So much effort is made in the onboarding process.

You motivate your customers to sign-up.

You motivate them to leave their information.

You motivate them to INVEST money into you in order to get a much higher value in return.

And after they sign up?

You’re off to the next one.

No.

Never stop motivating your customers to continue using your product.

Focus on your customer Life Time Value (LTV).

There’s a common formula in the marketing industry:

LTV > CAC

CAC being the customer acquisition cost.

There is always more money to be made in the existing customers by providing them with a high-quality product, than to constantly onboard new ones.

Host workshops.

Acquire their feedback via email.

Listen to what bothers them & solve their issues.

Never stop onboarding.

05 Always fill in the product gaps 🕳️ 

None of the above strategies make sense if your product is stalling & falling behind your competitors.

You should always be filling in the product gaps, pushing new features & listening to your customers.

After a year the product value falls.

Market shifts & changes.

Your competitors start doing similar things.

YOU should be the constant shiny object syndrome in your customer’s eyes. 🔮 

Your customers will have higher expectations as time passes by.

Make sure you follow along.

🔝 Top Tweets

Here are the 2 top tweets from this week:

This issue wouldn't be complete if I didn’t include the tweets from who other than Alex & Leila:

🔥 SaaS Fire

SaaS products so good they'll light up your week:

Howitzer is a company that specializes in building outreach tools. At the moment they have 2 working solutions: HeyReach for LinkedIn outreach automation & Howitzer for Reddit.

Hypefury is a Twitter automation tool that helps you save time & automate your Twitter content creation.

💡Idea of the Week

Here’s the SaaS idea of the week:

A project management software that is focused on developer estimation efficiency. This platform helps software developers estimate their project timelines more accurately, ultimately improving project management and delivery. The AI-powered solution uses machine learning algorithms to analyze historical data, identify patterns, and provide developers with accurate estimation suggestions, saving them time and improving their productivity. Additionally, the platform allows managers to monitor and track the progress of their development projects, ensuring they are on track to meet their goals and deadlines.

Pros

• Improved developer efficiency and productivity

• On-time deliveries

• Customizable dashboards and reports for managers

Cons

• Learning curve for developers who may be used to traditional estimation methods

• Large dataset to train the AI model in order to produce high quality & accurate estimations

I hope you enjoyed today’s issue of SaaS Strats.

I would like to hear if you plan on utilizing any of the customer retention strategies that were mentioned above.

What content would you like to see more of?

Reply to this email & send me your thoughts.

I try to read every one of them & will get back to you.

Ognjen Gatalo

Chief SaaS Strategist ☁️ 

P.S. If your friend is running a SaaS business, forward this email to them.