Empower your Sport Organisation with our Customer Success Funnel for Sport Organisations

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hello and welcome to another idea cast my name is Thomas Witek and I'll be talking about how to unlock growth in your marketing funnel specifically we'll be talking about three downstream key strategies for upstream growth impact and the downstream tactics and upstream impact will be all about retaining customers and winning more clients on the top end of the funnel and this will of course help us and be in the context of leveraging the viral growth opportunities that we have in the funnel eventually so let me start out by walking you through a case study I think this will illustrate the concepts fairly well and we're talking about let's say a service business or a software-as-a-service business so the starting point is a is a growing market fairly steady growth the company has seen so the the market is believed to go up from 100,000 customers steadily a month by month and so there's no end inside of course we know that's not true in each market and we will come to that in a minute so the company is deciding to launch a new product a new service in month six now the result is somewhat so-so so after an initial phase and you see there's a somewhat an indication of an s-shaped growth curve here the business is declining but nowhere near is the company able to capture the a hundred thousand customers that are in the market so why is that the case so let's unpeel the onion here first of all we have to take a look at the market dynamics that's of course one factor so even if a market is growing steadily it could very well be that the market is declining and this can be driven by different factors for example by demographic changed and simply people are moving out of the market and they are in a new age cohort for example which doesn't have the the preferences this market or they could be simply not interested in the product and not be in the market anymore and so the two contrast here the performance in REO while the market is making this blue movement our companies let's say showing a somewhat really blow up take so the the question is of course what can we do in such a scenario which is not too uncommon actually a lot of companies are struggling with this phenomenon and so first of all the key strategies that I would like to talk about is one is to increase the renewal rate and we'll see what the implications are second to switch from let's say an annual renewal process to an automatic renewal process again we will see what the implications and the impact is and the number three which is a little bit of a tricky topic so I have to caution you here is to reduce the trial time so this has from a dynamic perspective also a couple of side effects so when we when we talk about the sales and marketing funnel rarely do the customers the potential customers immediately become actual paying customers so there's typically something in between first they threw some marketing magic which we're not covering here in this topic today but a little bit later they become trial customers and after the trial period they may or may not decide to be customers who buy the or subscribe to the product now the interesting thing is of course the more customers and more happy customers we have in the the trial group and in the actual paying group and the more happy they are the more they influence customers upstream so that's something that we need to keep in mind these are two important feedback loops that will fuel the growth here now in reality the marketing funnel is a little bit more that a sophisticated so it has different steps but here is an end-to-end picture how it essentially looks like and it really doesn't make a big difference if you have three steps five 10 steps or ten steps in your marketing funnel the dynamic is pretty much the same so we will simplify that here by simply showing the adoption process as I explained it before and then customers eventually the contracts or subscriptions are expiring and they have to renew it again or they we're losing the customers for for any reason so the we could lose paying customers we could lose try customers or even potential customers at the top end of the funnel now the question is now what to do so we said we're going to do three tactics one is auto renewals so let's take a look at that one first so the the tactics that we could use here is of course we have to inform the customers early it's important that we're not just switching from let's say an annual renewal process to an auto renewal process and ideally we have this option right from the beginning when the customers are signing up secondly we could offer for example a bonus value for automatic renewals so if you're in a situation where you have started out with let's say an annual renewal process and you switch over to an automatic renewal process make sure that you also wrap it with some additional benefits so that customers can see the benefit but most importantly it's really important that the the product is great and that you're delivering a product which customers love because then it's easier to make these policy changes now if we if we run this through our simulation here what we find is that the automatic renewal is actually moving the growth curve up and that is not only because we keeping customers but these customers of course have a compounding impact on the customers which are just entering the conversion funnel or about to enter the conversion funnel and so that's something we need to keep in mind even though and I'm contrasting here the let's say the base case and then with the the additional effect even though it may look a little bit small here keep in mind that these are flows of custom moving in so every percentage that we increase the flow of customers moving in or the retention is actually compounding in our feedback system the second tactic we want to take a look at is the increase of the renewal rate so here's where it is actually impacting our our conversion and growth funnel and that's the flow when customers are expiring so we we have to increase this flow so that they are not leaving our value chain here so the impact of course is pretty much the same so the more customers we we keep and increasing the renewal rate the the the more customers we keep in our installed base but also the same effects apply here that the more we have in the base its compounding actually what we can do here is first of all we can it's important to know that the the retention really doesn't start at the point of retention it starts actually with the onboarding process because only customers who who bought your product who use the product we love the product are most likely to renew their subscription so that's the number one the first line of defense here secondly make sure that the customers are using the product so throughout the the Android subscription process or let's say the ongoing subscription process you need to check in if people are active using the actively using the product or becoming dormant means they're not using the product so if they become dormant you need to find out why and how to reinvigorate the usage of the product and for that we need to implement a retention retention survey needs to come fairly early in the engagement process ideally after a short time after the on go on boarding process together a feeling and a heat check what people love about the product if they continue to use it what is missing etcetera and for those customers who actually finally decide that they leave our subscription our business we have to implement lost customer service this is a great great asset while you can actually extract a lot of information and it's important not to do it in the right way so that you not only get the stated importance but what we call the derived importance but more about that later and another idea cost and of course if you if you have a customer success team make sure the customer success team is also engaging with the clients early on and not just shortly before the renewal process and if you don't have a customer success management team then probably it's about time to implement it now the third topic I want to talk about is a little bit tricky and here we talk about reducing the trial time basically what that means is it's impacting this and this flow over here so which means reducing the trial time means that people would buy sooner but also they're moving out of this court out of this box of trial customers much sooner so what does it look like when it plays out now here's the assimilation again and that's why I said it's a little bit tricky because at the beginning you can see how it's accelerating our growth so we reach the peak much sooner but that also means that our decline is coming sooner and we have less customers who are converting over time so before you implement this I can only encourage you to test test test test it in different settings with different cohorts with different demographics to get a better feel is what it's doing and by testing I mean not only doing a survey and asking customers been really doing controlled experiments so this is the actually a little bit of a tricky situation it can help drive an uptake and keep in mind the sooner the the peak sales is arriving which is here in month 30 in our case approximately the sooner you need to have your next generation product on your new market ready that you can enter with your product otherwise you will face declining customer base and that's not actually funny to deal with so what what tactics could you use here first of all you could work with conversion incentives so by that I mean not only price incentives but offering a bonus value so which means you can bundle it with some training workshops etc secondly you can offer a satisfaction guarantee so that when when people have only 30 days you can say ok you have the first month free and you can you know redeem the product or actually cancel the subscription at any point in time work with scarcity so that you have a limited number of promotions available which rules the the funnel let's say more rapidly towards the point of conversion urgency means that you can have time limited offers for the conversion during the time so that people could actually use and again here comes our success manager it's also important to assign success manager early on and I would actually encourage you to assign the success manager during the trial phase so that they can reach our work with the client especially if you're talking about b2b or larger scale solutions which require of course more learning and for that learning I also suggest that you have two tutorials ready which leads to what I call critical moments or aha moments during the first ideally the first 10 days of a conversion process the last thing that you want is let's say have a conversion so customers are trying the product and leave them alone so you have to build it into your conversion flow into your product into the user experience that's why it's so important to focus also on the user experience now here's the the combined effect so this is the red line so if you put everything together you see that you can significantly move your your customer base up and this again has two effects with keeping more customers in the customer and we have an impact on the network effects so coming back again to this chart this is actually where the impact is happening so the more customers we have in these two buckets the more are flowing actually from the potential customers to the trial phase that's important to recognize and here you see it's quite a substantial difference again keep in mind this is a rate so here we talk about the flow of customers moving from a potential customer to trial and buyer by segment month by month and day by day so that's important to know now of course this is the highly dependent on the degree of word-of-mouth or network effects and again there's another topic that I will talk about what is word-of-mouth and how does it happen how does it bring out the accelerating roles or the let's say the s-shaped curve but that's not the point here the point is that the more people are in touch with each other so if one customer is talking to to more than one other customer so the more they reach out to other customers the more it amplifies the optimization that you're also doing downstream and here I've run a little simulation experiment showing if you move for example let's say one customer is talking on average to five customers per month all things equal if you move up let's say five step by step so from five to ten to thirty you see that it has almost an accelerating impact so also make sure that you understand what are your feedback loops and what is the viral potential and the word-of-mouth potential in your customer base and make sure that customers are coming in contact with each other if you're doing a great job of course word-of-mouth and network effects also work the other way if you don't do a good job and you have a quality problem that also amplifies and that's something to keep in mind again that's topic for another idea cost so in closing we talked about three key strategies for growth actually the interesting thing is these are downstream tactics in your sales funnel but they have a significant impact also upstream so make sure you leverage these key strategies and we also talked about the dynamic impact my dynamic impact will always mean change over time so here we're not looking at just a spot improvement in one area one month but we're looking at how the improvement plays out over time and last but not least with all the ideas and all the things the best thing is to try it out and run a couple of controlled experiments in a very controlled setting and then you can see if it works for you and if you can roll that out to your complete sales final or your complete customer base now this is a more we discussed in the idea cast so you're invited to join the idea cast and if you have a question just shoot an email send a note or post-it in the related Facebook group and the idea cast is of course connected to the social property so I'm looking forward to hearing from you and yeah good luck with your growth strategies and I hope it helps you accomplish what you want to achieve good luck