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Prioritizing Customers: Proven Strategies for Successful Upselling and Retention

In the rapidly evolving world of SaaS, staying ahead of the competition requires a deep understanding of your customers, product, and market. However, with unlimited data and platforms to choose from, it can be overwhelming to figure out where to start.

To help you get started, empowering product teams with the tools they need to deliver value to their users, increase conversion rates, and drive growth is of paramount importance. Leveraging the power of product-led change with enterprise sales efficacy gives every team a clear understanding of what they need to do to achieve maximum impact.

In this blog post, we’ll explore the key strategies and processes that drive successful upsells and retention. We’ll cover important topics such as defining your ideal customer, building a growth flywheel playbook, and understanding the importance of customer observability.

Whether you’re a seasoned SaaS veteran or just starting, these strategies will help you prioritize your customer base and drive growth for your business.

Product-led revenue: The importance of customer observability

Product-Led Growth (PLG) is a business model focusing on building and growing a product-driven company. It is designed to increase customer engagement and drive revenue through product usage and customer satisfaction. One of the critical components of a successful PLG strategy is customer observability, which allows you to track and understand how customers interact with your product.

Forbes understands the ever-growing importance of PLG, especially for technical products, as the world of AI, sales, and marketing are becoming blurred and combined.

Customer observability provides valuable insights into the customer journey, allowing you to identify areas of improvement and optimize the customer experience. By understanding how customers engage with your product, you can make informed decisions about product development, marketing, and sales strategies. This leads to increased customer satisfaction, higher conversion rates, and, ultimately, increased revenue.

The Benefits of Customer Observability

Improved Customer Experience: By understanding the customer journey, you can identify areas of improvement and optimize the customer experience. This leads to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Increased Conversion Rates: Learning how customers interact with your product allows you to make informed decisions about product development, marketing, and sales strategies, leading to higher conversion rates so that you can be there at the most meaningful moment.

Better Product Development: Customer observability provides valuable insights into the customer journey, which can inform product development decisions and lead to creation of products that better meet customer needs.

The importance of customer observability in driving product-led revenue cannot be understated. AI platforms combine product-led growth efficiency with enterprise sales efficacy, helping every team understand exactly what needs to be done and where their efforts need to be focused on achieving maximum impact. With proper systems and processes in place, you can gain a deeper understanding of your customers and confidently drive product-led growth.

The key to successful upsells and retention

In the competitive landscape of modern SaaS, understanding your customers and what they need is essential to success. By defining your Product Qualified Lead, you can prioritize your customer base and focus on the right customers, leading to increased revenue and customer satisfaction.

A PQL is a crucial component of product-led growth and helps businesses understand who their most valuable customers are, their needs, and how to reach them effectively. By focusing on your PQL, you can make the most of your resources and direct your efforts toward growth initiatives.

Here’s what you can expect from defining your PQL:

  1. Prioritize your customer base: By understanding your PQL, you can prioritize your customer base and focus on the right customers, driving successful upsells and retention.
  2. Drive growth and success: By focusing on your PQL, you can drive growth and success by efficiently and effectively using your resources.
  3. Improve customer satisfaction: You can improve customer satisfaction by understanding your customers and their needs, leading to increased revenue and growth.

Defining your PQL is valuable in unlocking the potential for successful upsells and retention. You can drive growth and success while improving customer satisfaction by prioritizing your customer base and focusing on the right customers.

Growth Flywheel: Build a Playbook for Success

Now that you have clearly defined your lead and sales strategy, you can start implementing your growth flywheel. 

A growth flywheel is a (mostly) autonomous system that drives growth through a series of interconnected actions. The goal of a growth flywheel is to create a virtuous cycle that continually drives development and improvement, allowing your business to scale and succeed. One of the pivotal components of a successful growth flywheel is having a playbook that outlines the strategies and processes that drive growth. 

The Importance of a Growth Flywheel Playbook 

Below are the benefits of implementing a well-put-together growth flywheel for your team. Remember that skill can be trained, with the right processes, regardless of where your staff member starts from.

  • Consistency: A growth flywheel playbook ensures that all teams follow the same processes and strategies, leading to consistent and predictable growth.
  • Alignment: By having a shared understanding of what drives growth, teams can work together more effectively and achieve better results.
  • Scalability: A well-defined growth flywheel playbook allows you to scale your growth efforts, making it easier to drive growth as your business grows.

Constructing and Scaling Your Growth Flywheel Playbook 

Building a successful growth flywheel playbook requires a deep understanding of your customers, product, and market. Start by defining your target customer and the value you offer them. Then, identify the key growth drivers, such as customer acquisition, engagement, and retention. Finally, define the strategies and processes to drive growth in these areas.

A growth flywheel playbook is a living document, constantly evolving as you learn and grow. Continuously monitor and adjust your growth flywheel to ensure it drives the desired results.

By building a growth flywheel playbook, you can drive consistent and predictable growth, align your teams, and scale your business for success.

 The Future of Product-Led Growth

Product-led growth (PLG) is a business model that prioritizes the customer experience and focuses on building and growing a product-driven company. It has proven to be a successful approach to driving revenue, increasing customer engagement and satisfaction, and driving growth. The critical components of a successful PLG strategy are customer observability, defining your ideal customer (Product Qualified Lead), and implementing a growth flywheel playbook.

In the rapidly evolving world of SaaS, staying ahead of the competition requires a deep understanding of your customers, product, and market. With the power of advanced AI technologies, companies can now clearly understand what they need to do to achieve maximum impact. Customer observability provides valuable insights into the customer journey, allowing businesses to make informed decisions about product development, marketing, and sales strategies. Defining your PQL is crucial in unlocking the potential for successful upsells and retention.

Implementing a growth flywheel playbook is also essential in driving consistent and predictable growth. A well-defined growth flywheel playbook ensures that all teams follow the same processes and strategies, leading to better results and scalability as the business grows.

In conclusion, the future of product-led growth is bright. With the right tools and strategies, businesses can prioritize the customer experience and drive growth, leading to increased revenue, customer satisfaction, and success. Companies that embrace PLG and adopt these key strategies will continue to stay ahead of the competition and drive success in the fast-paced world of SaaS.

10 Invisible customer journey

Unlocking the Secret to Product-Led Growth: The Power of Understanding the Invisible Customer Journey

When it comes to driving growth for your business, it’s easy to focus on the obvious metrics, such as website traffic and conversion rates. But have you ever stopped to consider the invisible journey that a customer travels to make their decision to convert? The hidden factors that influence a customer’s decision-making process can be just as important as the obvious ones.

From the first time a customer interacts with a brand, they go through an invisible journey that shapes their perception of a brand and the likelihood of doing business with the company again in the future. This invisible journey is the culmination of subtle cues and touchpoints that ultimately drive product-led growth. 

What is Product-Led Growth (PLG)?

Product-led growth (PLG) has become a buzzword in the business world as more companies recognize the power of letting their products speak for themselves. PLG is about creating an experience-driven product that resonates with customers and drives them through the entire customer journey. This is why a deeper understanding of customer needs and preferences is crucial for businesses looking to optimize their PLG strategy.

Think of it like a game of chess. You may have all the right pieces on the board, but if you don’t understand the subtle tactics and strategies at play, you’ll never be able to outmaneuver your opponent. Similarly, businesses may have a great product and a solid marketing strategy, but without understanding customer behavior and insights, they’ll never be able to optimize their growth potential fully.

Decoding the customer journey

So, what does the customer journey look like in practice? Let’s say you’re a SaaS company that specializes in project management software. While your website may be getting plenty of traffic, you notice that many users are dropping off at the pricing page.

By digging deeper, you discover that many of these users are small businesses that are hesitant to commit to long-term contracts. With this information, you can adjust your pricing strategy to offer more flexible options, resulting in a significant increase in conversions.

But the customer journey doesn’t end at the pricing page. To fully optimize growth, it’s crucial to analyze why small businesses are dropping off at other stages. It could be that the information or resources on the website are insufficient or that the user interface is confusing. To address these issues, you can improve the website’s design and user experience to increase conversion rates.

Consider A/B testing different pricing options and website designs to see which ones have the best impact on conversions. Additionally, reach out to small businesses that have dropped off at the pricing page through email or phone to understand their specific concerns and answer any questions they may have. This will help you enhance the customer experience and foster closer relationships with prospective clients.

Leveraging the Customer Journey for PLG Success

With a clear understanding of the customer journey, it’s time to put this information to work. Here are some ways to optimize your PLG strategy using the customer journey:

Mapping the customer journey

Identify the critical stages of the customer journey, including awareness, consideration, purchase, and post-purchase.

Identifying pain points and opportunities

Analyze each stage of the customer journey and identify areas for improvement in the user experience.

Streamlining the onboarding experience

Ensure the onboarding process is easy to understand and provide resources and support to help customers get started.

Building a feedback loop

Ask for customer feedback at key stages in the customer journey and use that information to iterate and enhance the product.

Optimizing for retention

Recognize the factors that influence customer retention and concentrate on improving them.

Analyzing customer data

Use customer data and analytics to track behavior and identify aspects of the product that are promoting growth and engagement.

Personalizing the experience

Use consumer data to personalize the experience and develop targeted marketing strategies to engage different customer segments.

Use consumer data to personalize the experience and develop targeted marketing strategies to engage different customer segments.

Continuous testing and optimization

Keep testing and refining all aspects of the customer journey, from the onboarding process to the in-app experience. Doing this will help you enhance the overall user experience and drive growth.

 

Unlock Your PLG Strategy with the Invisible Customer Journey

In conclusion, unlocking the power of the “invisible journey” is key to driving growth for businesses. By gaining a deep understanding of customers and their behavior, businesses can improve customer retention, increase acquisition, and enhance conversion rates. By utilizing consumer data to personalize the experience, businesses can develop targeted marketing strategies that effectively engage different customer segments. Continuous testing and optimization of the customer journey is critical, from the onboarding process to the in-app experience. This helps businesses enhance the overall user experience and drive growth.

The customer journey is a complex and ever-evolving process, and businesses need to stay ahead of the curve to succeed. Rather than relying on assumptions and guesses, businesses should embrace the “invisible journey” to make data-driven decisions and adopt best practices that foster growth. Embracing the power of the “invisible journey” will empower businesses to take control of their growth strategy and achieve long-term success.

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Fueling the future of product-led revenue – Announcing our $8.5M seed funding

We are thrilled to announce the securing of an $8.5M seed funding round led by Eight Roads, TechAviv, and a select group of angel investors, including company co-founder Ariel Maislos.

This funding will allow us to further develop our platform and grow the team as we work to bring you the best tools for converting your customer usage data into revenue.

Our platform allows you to have complete visibility of where your customers are in their customer journey by analyzing their engagement with your product in real-time. We believe that this technology has the potential to revolutionize the industry and make a real impact on the lives of our customers.

“SaaS companies are in a unique position where they can actually measure the value their users extract from their products. By correlating this information with data coming from CS, sales, and support, we create a customer observability platform, which is crucial to generating sustainable and proactive revenue growth. Securing our funding is a huge step toward our platform’s capability to help businesses succeed in a tough and unpredictable market. Especially when KPIs are now more focused on sales efficiency and NRR. As revenue teams need more product insights, we aim to provide an out-of-the-box solution to a problem which companies tried to solve internally until now.”  

Itamar Falcon, CEO of Coho AI. 

We would like to express our gratitude to all of the investors, customers, and employees that joined us on this journey! 

Stay tuned for more developments in the near future! 

Read the full story as it was shared by TechCrunch.

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From Good to Great: How Customer Health Scores Drive Customer Success

As a customer success professional, one of your primary goals is to ensure that your customers are successful in achieving their desired outcomes using your product or service. This requires a proactive approach to identifying and addressing potential issues or challenges that your customers may face. One effective tool for doing this is a customer health score, which is a quantitative measure of a customer’s overall health and success with your product or service.

In this blog post, we will delve into the importance of customer health scores for customer success teams and how they can be used to drive customer success. We will also discuss some best practices for creating and using customer health scores, as well as how they can be integrated into a customer success strategy.

What is a customer health score

A customer health score is a metric that measures the overall health and success of a customer with your product or service. It is typically a numerical score or rating, with a higher score indicating a healthier and more successful customer.

There are various ways to calculate a customer health score, but it typically takes into account a combination of factors such as usage and adoption of the product, customer satisfaction, and any potential risks or issues that the customer may be experiencing. Some customer success teams may also consider other factors such as the customer’s business outcomes or the value they are receiving from the product.

The purpose of a customer health score is to provide a quick and easy way to assess the overall health of a customer, which can help customer success teams prioritize their efforts and identify potential issues or risks before they become major problems.

Why are customer health scores important for Customer Success teams?

While many companies still don’t use customer health metrics, it’s a missed opportunity that could be a significant growth engine. Here are 4 reason why:

Prioritizing efforts

With a customer health score, customer success teams can quickly assess the overall health of their customers and prioritize their efforts accordingly. This allows them to focus their time and resources on the customers who are most in need of assistance or are at the greatest risk of churning.

Identifying potential issues early

A customer health score can help customer success teams identify potential issues or challenges before they become major problems. This allows the team to proactively address these issues and prevent them from escalating.

Driving customer success

By regularly monitoring and improving a customer’s health score, customer success teams can help ensure that the customer is successful in achieving their desired outcomes using the product or service. This can lead to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty, which can ultimately drive revenue and growth for the company.

Providing a common language

Customer health scores provide a common language for customer success teams to use when discussing the overall health and success of their customers. This can help teams communicate more effectively and ensure that everyone is working towards the same goals.

Best practices for creating and using customer health scores

When creating and using customer health scores, it’s important to keep the following best practices in mind:

Choose the right metrics

The metrics that you choose to include in your customer health score should be relevant to your product or service and should accurately reflect the overall health and success of your customers. Be sure to consider a variety of factors such as usage, satisfaction, and potential risks.

Regularly review and update the score

Customer health scores should be regularly reviewed and updated to ensure that they are accurate and relevant. This may involve adding or removing metrics, adjusting the weighting of different metrics, or making other changes as needed.

Involve the customer in the process

When developing and reviewing customer health scores, it’s important to involve the customer in the process. This can help ensure that the metrics chosen are relevant to the customer’s needs and goals and that the customer is aware of their overall health and success.

Use the score as a starting point for improvement

A customer health score is not a static metric – it should be used as a starting point for continuous improvement. Customer success teams should work with customers to identify areas for improvement and develop action plans to address these areas.

Leverage data and analytics

Customer health scores should be based on data and analytics, rather than subjective opinions or assumptions. This helps ensure that the score is objective and accurate and can be used to drive meaningful actions and improvements.

By following these best practices, customer success teams can effectively create and use customer health scores to drive customer success and improve the overall health and success of their customers.

Integrating Customer Health Scores into a Customer Success Strategy

Incorporating customer health scores into your customer success strategy is an important step in driving customer success and ensuring that your customers are achieving their desired outcomes. 

Set up regular check-ins with customers

Customer health scores should be regularly reviewed and discussed with customers. During these check-ins, customer success teams can review the customer’s health score and discuss any potential issues or challenges that the customer may be facing.

Use customer health scores to guide customer success plans

Customer success plans should be tailored to the specific needs and goals of each customer. Customer health scores can be used to guide the development of these plans and to identify areas where the customer may need additional support or resources.

Use customer health scores to drive cross-functional collaboration

Customer success is often a cross-functional effort, involving teams such as sales, marketing, and product development. .Having a single source of truth can be used to drive collaboration across these teams and ensure that everyone is working towards a common goal.

Leverage automation and technology

There is  a variety of technologies available that can help automate the process of tracking and managing customer health scores. These tools can help customer success teams save time and focus on more high-value activities, such as working with customers to address their needs and drive success.

Takeaways 

Customer health scores are a crucial tool for customer success teams as they help prioritize efforts, identify potential issues early, drive customer success, and provide a common language for teams to use. 

By regularly reviewing and updating customer health scores and integrating them into a customer success strategy, CS teams can build stronger, more loyal customer relationships and drive revenue and growth.

Want to know more about how you can incorporate customer health score into your daily work? Contact us!

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Maximizing B2B SaaS Revenue with NRR: Why It Matters and How to Do It

In times of recession, businesses are more likely to cut costs wherever possible, including by canceling subscriptions to non-essential services. This means that B2B SaaS companies need to focus on retaining their existing customers in order to continue generating revenue. NRR allows companies to track their success in doing so and make any necessary adjustments to their retention strategies.

Winning at revenue growth also relies on revenue retention. Revenue retention will give you the keys to unlocking all other aspects of revenue growth strategy. 

These users prop up all outreach to new customers showing that your brand has a high-level of trustworthiness for long-term relationships. 

Revenue growth can seem like a no-brainer, but when it comes to revenue retention, it can feel like a shot in the dark. So, what is net revenue retention, and why does it matter so much? 

Net revenue retention, abbreviated NRR, is a metric used to boost business growth. 

What is NRR?

Net Retention Rate (NRR) is a key metric for any B2B software as a service (SaaS) company, but it becomes particularly important in times of economic recession. NRR measures the percentage of a company’s existing customers that continue to use and pay for its services from one period to the next.

Industry leaders describe NRR as “net dollar retention.” 

Net dollar, or net revenue retention, the company considers upgrades, downgrades, and customer churn to analyze the business customer base.  

NRR breaks down into monthly segments called monthly revenue retention, or MRR. MRR is a rough estimate of the revenue that comes from your user base each month. 

Why is NRR important?

Experts believe NRR is now more important than ever before. 

With the current economic slump, it is now more important than ever before to retain customer bases. 

Estimates state that a business can deliver 20 percent growth yearly with the existing customer base. 

Growth happens without adding a single new user. Why? Because a stable customer base has expansion opportunities. We’ll talk about that in a minute. First, we’ll define the logic and the math that backs NRR. 

Know what churn looks like 

When factoring NRR, you will also want to look at churn cases. Churn is the rate at which customers end relationships with your brand. 

If a customer cancels a subscription, this may not be the same thing. They may still access your free version of the product, and yet not be paying for a subscription for whatever reason. 

Churn distinguishes between these cases and cases where a customer has broken a connection with your brand forever. 

The math of NRR 

Net Revenue Retention requires some simple math. Use the NRR equation:

 (Contraction MRR – (Churn MRR + Expansion MRR)) / Starting MRR

Alright, so math sucks. Let’s break this down. 

To find your NRR, you will add your growth to your starting MRR. Subtract downgrades and churn from this new MRR. Now divide the new MRR by your starting MRR. Last, multiply the MRR you got from the division by 100%. This final result is your NRR. 

How to use your NRR 

You might be wondering why we put you through the math. Trust us, it’s worth it.

Simmering it down, NRR is the tool we use to gauge business growth potential from our existing user base. These are more than just fancy calculations. We’re solving for where our growth potential is so we can strategize the best ways to influence that growth to happen.

Industry leaders say that a good NRR is going to show growth of over 100%. 

When the NRR passes the 100% mark, we see growth instead of a static revenue retention rate. An NRR of 100% shows that our annual revenue retention, or ARR, has either grown or remained the same.

Ideally, we want the NRR number to be 109%. This shows that we are retaining a good revenue income and also growing by roughly 9%. 

Recognize the room to grow 

While 9% is ideal, we have found that a business can grow by 20% per year by keeping a healthy net revenue retention. 

Using NRR gives us insights into how to upsell our subscription base. 

Because NRR can show us who is already engaging with a paid version of the product, we can use these metrics to estimate who will be open to an upsell. Upselling happens when your current customer base is open to the value offer for a higher-cost subscription. 

Invest time in expansion opportunities 

Remember a little while ago when we said NRR was good for expansion opportunities? We’ll bring it full circle now. Upselling is one of the expansion opportunities we can explore through NRR math. 

KPIs for the upsell 

We need a little bit from our data rather than solving for growth rates. KPIs take over here. Informed KPIs give us the data groups and tools for seeing the value our users are looking for in an upgrade. We sell from there. 

Building the upsell 

Setting data priorities straight empowers the upsell process. As we explore upselling, we work towards expansion revenue goals. Expansion revenue is any revenue that expands from initial customer contact. We call it expansion revenue because we’re exploring an expanding relationship with our customers. 

Upselling is one of two primary expansion catalysts. The second catalyst is cross-selling. Cross-selling introduces customers to new features or add-ons within their existing plans.  

Prevent churn 

Remember that data can alert you to positive growth opportunities, but it can also show you areas where improvement is key. To avoid churns and “drop off,” you need to know your data and streamline the upsell and cross-sell to work naturally with where the customer is in their relationship with you.

 Marketing leaders remind us that no one likes to be “sold to.” A customer with an issue is more likely to have a negative reaction to expansion measures if they feel that their current needs are not being met. However, addressing this is relatively simple. When in doubt, return to your user data flows.    

Know your data 

We talked about KPIs a little while ago. Here is where they get all-important. Without a clear use for data, teams fumble around product management funnels in the dark. 

This is why actionable, AI-led product growth modeling is important. Here we point a laser to the KPI and hone in on data that is essential for reaching those KPI-based goals. 

Make your data work for the customer 

Whether you upsell or cross-sell, make data work for the customer. Boost your pipeline to understand the customer user-experience flow. Then, use this information to work in natural upsell and cross-sell opportunities.  

Coho’s AI-enhanced product-led growth insight tool will notify the team when a customer reaches a milestone. 

Notification helps teams to optimize the flow of selling prompts in a way that flows with the customer journey and needs. Is a customer outgrowing their current subscription? It’s time for an upsell. Is the customer running into a few roadblocks based on the need for one additional feature? Cross-sell to them. 

Coho AI enables personalized selling based on usage insights. 

Takeaways 

Customers are people. Data helps us relate to them in ways that are as diverse as they are. With better insights into the flow of their needs and wants, we can use the NRR to optimal advantage. 

Coho AI believes that product-led revenue growth is people-led revenue growth. AI empowers human interaction in mass numbers in ways that other growth models never could. 

Bottom line: the NRR is vital to underlying our core community of users. By building on this, you will invest in the life and future of not only your product but also your brand community.  In an economy driven by uncertainty and a deep need for connection, this makes daylight to dark difference between you and your competition. 

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How to turn your company into a Product-led company

Did you know that investors have found that product-led companies are twice as likely to grow fast than other models? 

A June study published by TechCrunch discovered that product-led growth models are “2x more likely to grow quickly than sales-led” growth models. To tap into this rapid growth opportunity, you’ll want to know how to transform your current growth model to follow product-led growth. Today we’ll show you how it’s done. 

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Understand your user journeys  

First, you’ll need to understand the path your users take through your product. Data that tracks the user journey through your product is essential here. 

By tracking user data, you are observing user interaction with your product. This gives you a clear oversight into a user’s path, what went well and what may have triggered difficulty. With this oversight, you can start honing in on improvements. 

Major companies such as Tesla gather user data to hone in on the “product experience” of their brand. By collecting feedback, Tesla ensures that it engages with real users to constantly improve the product experience. Tesla has been credited with “transforming car buying” into an ongoing experience rather than a one-off purchase. 

Create product experiences that push time-to-value 

Now that you’ve got a clear idea of the customer’s path, you’ll want to cut down the obstacles a customer faces using your product. Customers essentially search for a quick problem-solving solution when shopping for products. By trimming down obstacles, you can invest in the speed at which your product solves your customer’s problem. 

This rate of problem-solving speed is called “time to value”. When you reduce the obstacles a product user faces to reach their ideal solution, you accelerate the time-to-value ratio. Creating product experiences that push this speedy solution arrival time is an essential part of driving home a PLG model.  

User Guiding blog summarized PLG as the growth model where the product is the core of the business, and customers are the core of understanding the product. Customer experience and engagement steer data gathering to build a stronger core. 

Steer users to natural conversions with value

PLG modeling focuses on honing and empowering customer-to-product relationships. Steer users to conversions by letting them understand the true value of your product on their own. A free product with many key value features entices the user to experience the product further. This leads to a natural conversion to a higher value tier within your product. 

But while many companies have adopted this model and do let their users take the product for a ride before they buy it, they still treat the conversion stage as “one size fits all”, instead of following the actual user journey their users go through and offer them to purchase a plan only once they hit an actual milestone and are ready to make the purchase. 

Introduce new features based on customer usage

As you steer natural conversions through value, you will want to gradually work in new features and experiences. Using user data to hone this usage-based feature building guarantees that you are adding features customers are eager for, based on their needs.

 UserGuiding blog explains user data led feature adding works because the data “comes up” with new features based on user behavior, and conveys to the user their needs and expectations. 

Base pricing around customer needs

In order to become a full-fledged PLG model, you need to scale into flexible pricing packages that allow customers to subscribe according to their preferences. With flexible pricing, customers don’t feel pressured into making time-based commitments, and they can choose the plan that fits their needs the most. 

 Because PLG needs to deliver value and customer experience instantly, breaking down hesitation barriers is key to unblocking the user pathway to conversion.

Strategize the upsell

PLG experts advise strategizing the upsell after the product has delivered value. Users with access to a demo product already have experience with your product. A PLG company needs to base upselling on features that stand out as added value on top of the current experience. 

By focusing on delivering experience-driven products, PLG models break down barriers to monetization. When the time comes for a paid version, the user knows the current product value and is more willing to pay for added value. 

Overview

These steps are starting places. While product-led growth is easy to implement, there are also many intricate parts that make up a successful PLG growth model. These steps can set you up with an efficient PLG growth model to build from. 

Want to learn more? Follow our team of PLG visionaries at Coho for more insights or contact us.

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Common misconceptions about Product-led growth

It’s no secret that product-led growth strategies, abbreviated PLG, are all the rage right now. As a result of PLG’s go-to-market models, B2B sales have been permanently altered, making it an essential growth leader for modern companies. However, common misconceptions about PLG encourage growth leaders to dismiss it as a fad.

PLG misconceptions cost businesses who fail to understand the marketing and sales significance of product-led strategy. We’ve narrowed down a few of these common myths so you know why they cost you, and how to avoid them.  

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Myth 1: You won’t need a sales team 

Product-led growth marketing is the strategic arm of product-led companies. “Product-led” means that the company uses its resources to hone the power and appeal of the product it offers so that it can convert sales on its own merits. 

A product-led growth model still needs a sales team because sales teams can help identify key customers, wrote Forbes Council Member Vanessa Dreifuss. 

Myth 2: Your buyers will be entirely self-sufficient 

While a solid product-led growth model will seek ways to empower the self-sufficiency of the user experience, the buyer won’t be entirely self-sufficient.

 The PLG growth go-to-market enables customers to be highly self-sufficient but does eliminate the need for customer support. Customer experience support teams measure their success in their response time to customers, and the efficient support of the customer’s voice. 

Myth 3: PLG will drive revenue by itself 

PLG is often mistaken for a revenue-driving strategy by itself. Contrary to this belief, Darrow explained that PLG streamlines the potential conversion from free demos to paid subscriptions. PLG by itself doesn’t drive revenue or target the right user. 

Targeting the best users and closing sales requires smart use of KPI data and the combined effort of team support, which we’ll get into more below. 

Myth 4: You won’t need marketing 

A PLG-led growth model still needs a marketing push. Believing that PLG can take care of itself without any push from marketing costs teams because they rely too broadly on PLG, and essentially don’t understand the outcomes PLG can generate. The basic outcomes from PLG are: 1) Acquisition and 2) Conversions.

PLG provides a pipeline to draw in customers and streamline their product-interaction process. The same rules of marketing that apply to previous growth model leaders still apply to PLG because marketing drives brand awareness and other outcomes that boost PLG’s efficiency. 

Go-to-market research finds that PLG works best when it is aligned with the revenue marketing team efforts. 

Myth 5: Self-service is the only buying experience customers want 

While it’s true that the modern buyer wants the convenience of self-service, they still need help with sales questions sometimes. The sales teams help to make products better by addressing customer needs.

 In the same way that PLG speeds up the buyer’s journey process, sales teams accelerate closing deals. Sales teams in a PLG supportive role can “supercharge” sales growth.

How To Implement PLG The Right Way 

You can take the next step towards an informed PLG implementation by dispelling common misconceptions. Here’s where Coho comes in. Our platform helps you target and optimize key KPIs and orchestrate your customer journey flow. 

With Coho’s platform, teams can apply data to their PLG growth model, generating the correct hand-in-glove use of team support for the streamlined user journey. 

Streamlined data, focusing on key customer retention paths, support the tactical implementation of PLG. By honing in on focal points in the data, a team can eliminate redundant data gathering and focus on data streamlining their revenue funnels.

Want to learn more? Contact us today.

5 Importance of KPI tracking

Why Seamless KPI Tracking Matters

Key performance indicators, or KPIs, are the metrics that businesses use to see how they are doing and where they are going. Without KPIs, teams struggle to find ways to move forward. That’s why tracking KPIs—the right ones—is mission critical. 

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Forbes points out that businesses can waste precious focus on the wrong data. In a list of 16 signs that a team may be tracking KPIs incorrectly, the Forbes Council explained what “wrong data” looks like. The wrong focus happens when the revenue impact or goal for tracking a data set is unclear. The team might start with data they already have on hand, and fail to gather new info relevant to a new direction. 

This is why seamless KPI tracking is essential to growth. With tools that comb through data and hone KPIs, teams can track data sets that make sense for goal-oriented tracking. 

What KPI Tracking Means For Product-Led Growth

Building a “product-led” growth model means building a product that sells itself over time. The Product-led Growth Collective calls “product-led growth” the future of business growth. 

Product-led models focus on the buyer, why they buy your product and the factors that make your product trustworthy and ready to solve the user’s pain points. Boiled down, a product-led growth model focuses on designing a product that is so well made its value speaks for itself in user experience scenarios such as free trials.  

With the product-led market model, seamless KPIs are essential because they give actionable insights into what makes your product relevant to your ideal buyer. 

The right KPIs put product designers on the same path as the buyer’s journey and help you understand where improvement can meet the pain points best. Product-led growth is a design-led commitment to making a product function with ease and efficiency, according to the Product-led Growth Collective. 

How Seamless KPI Tracking Helps Steer Growth Opportunities 

KPIs highlight “key performance indicators”. That information can show the things that make for a positive impact, but it can also show negative things that need improvement, according to Indeed.com. 

Sometimes key performance indicators show problem areas rather than expected outcomes. This data helps teams crack down on areas that need work. 

Seamless KPI tracking that shows the right data in real-time is an asset for steering opportunities. When a team leader sees from the mission-real KPI what areas should be highlighted, they can hone in on opportunities. 

Seamless, Timely, and Relevant KPI Tracking 

Tracking KPIs should include time frame factoring. The KPI information may be interesting, but irrelevant to the near future goal. A seamless KPI tracking system will allow for goals to adjust to their order of current relevance. This means that information that is most important now is ready for the task at hand, while information that will be important for a later target goal is queued according to its need to appear. 

Why Tracking User Behavior Is Key 

When your product is your leading point, focusing on user behavior data is the key point to kickstart customer success. This data lets you walk a mile in your user’s shoes, follow their journey, and understand their needs and wants. With this understanding, a team can orchestrate user journey paths to drive more meaningful product engagement. This self-service path translates into conversions and can reduce churn. 

User Journey Data and Targeting Ideal Customers 

Rather than taking on a bunch of new tools, teams can focus on data and use their toolkit in informed and efficient ways. This is why Coho.ai helps teams optimize their existing tech stack. The Coho system seamlessly integrates existing tools to cut down the time between product insights and Go-To-Market actions. 

Using your current tools data in a timely way, you can reduce the time-to-value of a user’s experience with your product. Analyze how consumers are engaging with and using your product. 

Watching these interactions, you can create workflows in your existing toolkit that target the roadblocks to user paths. By doing this, you are cutting down the work your users have to do to understand the user experience or UX flow. 

Earlier we talked about six steps to optimize your user’s journey. Once user journey paths are identified through data, you’ll need to target your ideal customer. Focus special attention on building client relationships by upselling services to highly engaged users. 

Want to seamlessly track your KPIs? Contact us!

6 Combining PLG with a sales motion

Combining a sales team with a PLG motion

“Product-led growth” is the latest trend in B2B SaaS, but is it the end-all solution for driving growth and success? The concept of product-led growth is based on the idea that the self-guided product experience in B2C can be applied in the B2B space. However, relying solely on the product to drive growth may have its limitations in a B2B context.

It’s questionable whether clients in a B2B setting will fully understand the value proposition without support and guidance. The pressure-free, self-directed approach may sound appealing, but it may not result in meeting business goals if clients are not fully engaged and informed.

So, what are the limitations of a product-led growth strategy in B2B SaaS? Is a dedicated sales team really necessary, or can the product truly drive growth on its own? These are the questions that need to be explored to determine the most effective approach for driving growth and success in the B2B SaaS industry.

While product-led growth may be a promising idea, it’s important to critically examine its limitations and determine the best approach for driving growth and success in this context. In this article, we will delve deeper into the limitations of a product-led growth strategy and consider the role of a dedicated sales team in B2B SaaS.

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Understanding the Value Proposition

Product-led growth is often based on the assumption that customers have a clear understanding of their needs and wants. However, this is not always the case. As demonstrated by the famous iPhone case study, customers may not know what they need until they are guided to the right solution.

Forgoing a professional sales team in favor of product-led growth can be a misstep, as the role of the sales team goes beyond selling the product. The sales team’s main function is to provide product-market fit, offering solutions that the customer may not have considered. The customer’s default journey may not be the most suitable for their needs, and without the guidance of a professional, they may miss out on the best solution for their needs.

People prefer to receive advice from experts, and a well-trained sales team can offer that expertise. However, many sales teams are viewed as less credible due to a focus on closing sales rather than guiding customers to the right solution. An effective sales team must balance both the needs of the customer and the needs of the company, and should be trained to provide expert guidance to customers, helping them make informed decisions.

Automating the Unimportant

It is true that some aspects of the customer journey can be automated, and when managed correctly, automation can even be used as a sales tactic. In the digital age, transparency is highly valued, and customers appreciate the ability to access information such as pricing and product demos without the need for human interaction.

However, it’s important to note that price and product demos are not the only factors that determine the success of a sale. We can assume that most businesses offer competitive prices that align with the level of service they provide, and that this is also true of the competition. Automated product demos, while convenient, cannot be tailored to the specific needs of each customer.

General pricing and product demos demonstrate general competency, but they are not enough to differentiate a company from its competition. This is where the sales team comes into play. Automating the less important aspects of the sales funnel allows the sales team to focus on the mid-funnel and close, which are critical to securing the sale. An effective sales team can provide personalized guidance and expertise that cannot be replicated through automation.

Overcoming Objections

While automating common objections in the sales process can be a helpful tool, it may not work for more significant clients who have specific and complex questions. In such cases, having a precisely trained and experienced sales team proves to be incredibly valuable. Your sales team should not only be able to overcome objections but also understand the unique problems that your clients might face.

A sales team equipped with industry experience is capable of navigating through the deep-level questioning of a client and finding the best product market fit. This is the stage where sales representatives are not just trying to sell but genuinely trying to understand the client’s needs and tailor their product accordingly.

It’s crucial to avoid making the mistake of giving the entire sales process to technology just because it’s a popular buzzword. While there might come a time when this is possible, we are not there yet. While there might be a handful of articles claiming that Gen Z would rather interact with a computer than a human salesman, these statements only hold true if your sales team does not have any new information to offer.

In today’s world of technological advancements, it’s crucial for both your product and sales team to provide value to clients. Your sales team must create a personal touch and provide new and relevant information to encourage long-term business relationships. As technology evolves, so should your sales team to provide both technological and personal value to your clients. To be successful in sales, it’s important to strike a balance between technology and a human touch.

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Want to learn how to leverage a sales team within a Product-led growth motion? Contact us to book a demo!

Group 5

6 steps to optimize your user and customer journey

The customer journey is the backbone of any successful business strategy. It’s the roadmap that leads a prospect from being just a potential customer to becoming a loyal and returning one. The ultimate goal of any growth or go-to-market team is to streamline this process and make it as smooth and efficient as possible for their target audience.

Optimizing the customer journey is crucial for companies of all sizes and across all industries. It involves mapping out the key touchpoints and experiences that a customer has with your brand and finding ways to improve them. In this article, we will delve into the six essential steps that every company should take to optimize their user and customer journey. These steps will help you better understand your customers’ needs and create a journey that is tailored to their unique requirements.

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Step one: Gather your user data

The key to optimizing the customer journey is understanding who your target audience is and what their needs and preferences are. This information is crucial for making informed decisions about how to optimize their journey. To do this, it is important to collect and analyze customer data, including metrics, product data, and communication data. These metrics will provide insights into your target audience and guide the optimization process. Choose the metrics wisely, as they will play a crucial role in shaping the journey for your customers.

Step two: Map your user journey

A crucial aspect of optimizing the user journey is mapping out each step from start to finish. This involves considering the timeline of the journey, identifying different user groups and their unique needs, and analyzing the behavior patterns of your target audience. By understanding these key elements, you can create a comprehensive map that effectively guides users through their experience with your brand. Utilize available data and research to gain insights into your audience’s behavior and ensure your map accurately represents their journey.

Step three: Evaluate funnel performance

Now that you know what the user journey looks like in general, work on making it as easy as possible for as many of your target groups as possible. Where are the strengths of your funnels, and where are the potential pitfalls that will cause your target to fall away or look elsewhere? Just as importantly, what are the popular parts of the journey that move your audience forward more rapidly to the next step? Getting feedback from users is essential at this stage. Make sure that you listen closely to what your target users have to say at chokepoints and acceleration points.

Step four: Know your ideal customer profile

Once you have mapped out your user journey, observed targeted group behavior within that journey, and received feedback as to why those behaviors took place, you can then identify a target group that is most aligned with your overall user journey and product offering, usually referred to as your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile). Note: Just because you have identified the most advantageous customer for your business does not mean that you neglect the other groups. However, you now know which groups to prioritize and focus on as your baseline. Your baseline group should also serve as a control group of sorts. If they do not engage with your journey at any point, then you know that you have internal issues to work out.

Step five: Engagement and personalization

Now that you have a user journey you are confident as well as a control group of baseline users to count on, you can work towards becoming more engaging to greater amounts of people. You can also work on personalizing the journey for customers who deserve an extraordinary amount of priority. What are your optimization points? Can they be replicated so as to engage more users and greater numbers of users? Can you add engagement points at more difficult times in the journey to keep less enthusiastic people on board?

Step six: Measurement and reporting

During every step in the process, you should be measuring and reporting back your results. The formation of a user journey is iterative in nature; that is, once you get to the end, you circle back and start over with the experience of the previous journey informing your future endeavor. So even though measurement and reporting is at the end of this article, it should actually take place throughout the creation of the customer journey. Take special note of the points of greatest improvement and disappointment. Now is the time that you can begin to replace all of your assumptions with hard data for better results down the line.

If you need help with this process, Coho AI can help you automate the mapping of your user journey, identify your weak spots and set up your new engagement. automations for optimization.

In short, we help you color your map inside the lines, which can greatly shorten the timeframe in which you create your user journey. And the sooner you get your journey created, the more quickly you could begin to assess your target audience and bring in the hard data that will inform your relationship with them for years to come. Contact us to learn more!

Group 4

4 ways to prioritize the right customers as a customer success manager

Your success in customer success management primarily comes down to your response to one question: How do you best organize your time with customers? This is especially important in the B2B SaaS environment. You are interacting with more people per day than most folks talk to in a week. What’s more, everyone in your client circle expects to be treated like royalty! How do you prioritize? It’s not easy, but here are some guidelines to help.

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ARR

The most obvious way to curate your customer base is by size. The customers that are bringing you the highest annual recurring revenue (ARR) certainly merit some sort of priority. If your business revenues rely on term subscription agreements, ARR is a metric to consider highly.

In most cases, your high ARR customers are the ones that are keeping the lights on. These are usually the customers with more choice about partnerships as well. The bottom line: If they are displeased with your services, it means much more to you than to them if a switch gets made. By all rights, you should be intimidated by this. This is a healthy pressure that keeps good businesses honest. However, it does not mean you should prioritize the needs of these customers to the detriment of your smaller clients.

Customers that may provide a smaller overall ARR may also require less maintenance. If you can more easily retain a group of smaller customers, this leaves your business with the manpower and technical resources it needs to grow. In most cases, a good balance between the two groups is the best solution.

Upsell Potential

If your business is like most companies, it doesn’t make the majority of its revenues from initial sales. Customers who upgrade to your premium products and cross sell opportunities are the ones that really matter to your bottom line.

If you are successfully upselling, that means you are keeping your customers happy. Happy customers, along with the ability to maintain their satisfaction, is a skill that not all companies have. If yours does, you must take full advantage of it.

Make sure you are keeping accurate statistics of important client metrics including product use, product use frequency, team size and adoption rate. From here, you can determine where your ARR is coming from more precisely and prioritize your customers based on their potential for future revenues as well as their current account size with you.

Churn Prevention

In general, it is five times more difficult to get a new customer than to retain a current one. With this in mind, churn prevention should be an important metric in the way you prioritize customers. Creating a health score for accounts may help you to prevent churn; otherwise, you may end up wasting valuable resources putting out fires that could have been prevented.

Make sure you are keeping up with the number of customers using your platform within major accounts, as well as the trends you see in use frequency and behavior. Having a snapshot of usage is one thing, but understanding behavioral and use frequency trends over time is much more telling if an account is at risk of churn.

Personal Relationships

The X factor in any business relationship is the personal outreach between client and vendor. People do business with people they like. The tiebreaker between two companies with similar value offerings is often the personal relationship with the client. If you can help it, try to only do business with clients you know will get along with for a long time.

If you spend time cultivating a good personal relationship with clients, they are more likely to receive your upsell correspondence favorably. They are also much more likely to overlook the inevitable small mistakes that your business will make. This runway is especially essential when you are trying to build relationships from the ground up with new clients.

So yes, you may want to consider prioritizing your clients by the “vibe” they give you. As a matter of fact, you should not be afraid to fire a client if that client is demanding priority that he does not deserve. Trying to make everyone happy can only result in less favor being given to the clients you should actually be prioritizing. Great relationships also improve ARR because happy clients are more likely to renew subscriptions and refer others to your business.

Prioritizing your client base can be difficult, but it is an exercise that you must undertake in order to ensure the longevity of your business. Use the tips above as a general guideline to create a short list of clients that most likely deserve priority support. From here, you can begin to evaluate each relationship from a financial and personal perspective, eventually identifying those handful of important clients that you will be moving forward with in the long term.

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Want to learn more about how you can use your product data to identify the best upsell opportunities and prevent churn? Contact us to book your demo!

9 Coho introduction

Introducing Coho AI – Helping you optimize your conversion funnels and customer journeys

The B2B SaaS world is changing

Different product-led growth strategies in the B2B SaaS world have revolutionized how businesses acquire new customers and retain existing ones. These companies now have the ability to bring thousands of users each month, and offer free plans to let users experience the product’s value before they even have to purchase.

But this also brings different challenges, as these companies often face various gaps in the user journey, especially when dealing with the user journey towards conversion along the funnel and upselling to customers. Fixing these gaps can lead to more revenue.

This is where Coho AI comes in, offering insights based on the product’s usage data analysis. This can help you convert new or free users to paid users, as well as giving the GTM teams the tools they need to know who to focus on next for upsell, expansion and cross sell opportunities.

Think of it like weaponizing your company to help you achieve more revenue growth and optimize the user journey experience.

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Scaling product-led growth strategies

The number of companies adopting product-led growth strategies has steadily increased since the early 2000s. The three main features of product-led growth strategies are:

  • Designing products for the user
  • Creating products with a go-to-market objective
  • Solving the user’s immediate problem

Scaling your product-led growth strategies requires that you have full visibility of the user journey. This will allow you to understand how your clients are using your products and how you can enhance the user experience.

Coho AI can help you scale your product-led growth strategies by giving you full visibility. We can also assist you in analyzing your user data to understand their behavior. This will enable you to get critical insights on how to:

  • Create user journeys that lead to more engagements
  • Tailor the user journey to drive up self-service conversions
  • Reduce churn and uncover key upsell potential
  • Get relevant product-qualified leads

Effectively scaling your product-led growth strategies requires identifying where gaps exist in your user journeys. For instance, you may find that users are not moving down the funnel. Such challenges are easy to solve if you have complete visibility of the user journey.

You need to understand that user needs are constantly changing. Thus, insights will change, and you will need to analyze user data continuously. This will help you understand how to appeal to users and what problems you can help them solve.

Your current product-led growth strategies may be working just fine. The Coho AI platform gives you full visibility of the user journey, which can help you grow your company’s revenue.

Identify problems that needs solving

The best way to identify problems that need solving is through data analysis. But data analysis is a lengthy and continuous process that requires a lot of resources. You have to conduct data analysis on various types of data, including:

  • Product data
  • User data
  • Communication data

Coho AI’s solution will help you save time on building an internal solution and will enable you to get a fresh analysis every time you need it. Keeping you up-to-date on the latest trends and insights within your product and getting real-time analysis on various opportunities and issues at different stages of the user journey.

Our platform can help you identify issues you didn’t know existed and suggest new ways to enhance the user journey and increase your revenue. For instance, we can:

  • Map your user journey and show you the conversion rate along it
  • Prioritize which customers are good upsell and expansion opportunities
  • Identify which accounts might be at a churn risk and need a save

Partner With Coho AI Today

Making use of the product-led growth model requires that you understand the user journey. The only way to do this is through continuous data analysis to understand all strengths and weaknesses in your user journey. Coho AI will help you shorten this process and get all the insights you need to improve your journeys and focus on the right customers. Further, whenever you identify what works, you can add automations that will help you move users down the funnel.

Contact us and we’ll help you build your product-led revenue machine and watch your ARR soar.