Saas conversion funnel for Export

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in this video I'm going to talk through SAS sales and marketing metrics every founder must know and if you stick around till the end I'll give you two bonus metrics that can give you deep insights into the happiness of your customers I'm Rob Walling startup founder with multiple exits I've written four books on building startups and invested in more than 125 companies last year we put out a video on this channel called SAS metrics the best guide to software as a service kpis and we're I'm not going to rehash everything in that video but in the video I talked about my three High three low framework so there were six metrics to look at in addition I talked about two North Star metrics you want to look at mrr monthly recurring revenue is one and growth rate month over month growth rate or year over year are two North Star metrics but they are the lagging indicators the three that you want to keep low are cost to acquire a customer sales effort which is calls to close and days to close and churn and then the three that you want to say hi are annual contract value expansion revenue and referrals so if you want to dig into those go watch the other video in this video I'm going to dig into sales and marketing metrics as the title indicates and I'm going to start by looking at a marketing funnel a low touch marketing funnel that doesn't involve a sales process so no demos people self close as they say and when I think of a marketing funnel I'm taking it all the way from a unique visitor to your website all the way through purchase and retention and referrals so from the top of the funnel we have unique visitors per time period usually I look at unique visitors per month is it more or is it less than the prior month what is our average number of unique humans who come to the website and then the next step in your funnel if it's truly a marketing funnel is either for someone to opt into your email list that's an optional step or for them to move from a visitor to a trial user and I would phrase that as visitor to trial conversion rate in visitor to trial conversion rate is such an important number that I still remember this this percentage for hit tail and drip my last two SAS apps with hittail we were priced at 10 20 40 80 a month I think those were the four main tiers and visit to trial not including blog traffic just the marketing website was at two percent and we asked for credit card up front and with a drip for most of the time it's a higher price product it was forty nine dollars up to thousands a month depending on your list size we had just under one percent visitor to trial I believe it was about 0.75 and that also had a credit card up front if you have a credit card up front I like to see the number between 0.75 and two or three percent depending on your price point once someone is in a trial of course you're trying to get them onboarded often if you have a marketing funnel like this it's high volume and so you often have automated means inside the app emails going out live chat pop-ups even walk throughs to get folks acquainted with the app once they convert at the end of that trial that's your trial to paid or trial to purchase conversion rate and if you're asking for a credit card before the trial I like to see that trial to paid conversion rate between 40 and 60 percent and with no credit card up front usually 10 to 20 percent I know of a few apps that get above that that are in the mid 20s but I think 10 to 20 is probably pretty good range without a credit card up front before the trial the next metric I like to look at and think about is expansion Revenue we talked about this in a video where I dove deep into SAS pricing but expansion revenue is where your customers pay you more as they get more value from your product and the more expansion Revenue you have the closer you can get to one of my four SAS cheat codes which is net negative churn this is where your churn is actually negative and your mrr grows without adding any new customers that month so if you can structure your pricing using value metrics or feature gating or both to the point where you have expansion Revenue you're in a great place to grow your business the next metric is hard to measure it's referral rate and unless everyone's referring through some piece of software that you can track usually you just have to take the best guess at how many people are being referred how did you hear about us is something you can ask at the beginning of your onboarding and if they say referred by a customer you can get a general idea but this is definitely one that's difficult to attribute but extremely powerful this is that word of mouth component it implies there's a virality to your application if existing customers are going out and referring others and of course this is something great to ask for right you ask after let's say someone pays for an annual plan or let's say someone has been using you for two or three months and at that point turn drops off precipitously that's where you drop them an email and say hey as the founder of this I really appreciate you sticking around is it possible that you know someone else who might be able to use this or would you be willing to tweet about us or post about us on LinkedIn and those are ways that you can at least encourage some referrals and the last metric I'd be looking at in my funnel is churn or retention these two things are the opposite of one another but you can look at a retention graph where you see how many people are remaining customers for how long or vice versa you can look at the churn graph and get an idea of how quick people are churning out and oftentimes what you'll find is you'll have a higher churn in month one or month two as people stick around and use it as an extended paid trial and then usually churn goes way down hopefully below let's say three four percent in an ideal world after that first 60 or 90 days so those are marketing metrics that I would be monitoring in a low touch funnel now let's talk about sales metrics that you would monitor in a high touch funnel and with high touch funnels you can still have inbound traffic where you are doing content and SEO and so you could look at the same numbers the unique visitor per month to optional email opt-in and then usually it's visitor to demo conversion rate because if you're doing High touch that implies that you are doing sales calls but as we look at this High touch funnel I'm going to use the example of outbound so cold Outreach whether it's cold email cold calling cold LinkedIn whatever prospecting you're doing you need to be thinking about how many outbound attempts are we making per month how many emails are we sending how many cold calls am I making how many LinkedIn outreaches are we making so that'd be the first number that I look at and that is kind of equivalent to the unique visitors per month it's a Top Line top of funnel number for a high touch funnel the next step down in the funnel of course is the reply rate how many people respond and then it's how many people are get sales qualified so there's This Acronym SQL which is a sales qualified lead so you can look at sales qualified lead per reply or you can look at sales qualified lead per outbound attempt in a given month the next step after a lead is qualified is to get a demo so you can look at the demo to purchase rate the your calls to close sometimes it's a one call close sometimes it's a five call close but tracking how many calls and the average number of days from the initial contact until purchase is something that that I'd be looking at once they purchase you now have expansion referral rate and retention much the same way you did with the low touch funnel in this case though you probably probably have a closer relationship with these folks because you've done essentially in-person demos they're most likely over over Zoom or Google meet but you have a relationship with them you also probably have fewer customers than with a low touch funnel and so the ability to get referrals is actually increased here because you have a face-to-face relationship with folks expansion revenue is another thing if you're doing high-tech sales it's implied that you're selling these more expensive contracts and the opportunity for expansion Revenue can occur if folks are adding new seats or they are otherwise expanding their use of your product and lastly retention of course in this case retention isn't just I hope they stick around if someone's paying you fifty thousand dollars a year you're most likely going into customer success mode whether you have a customer success manager handling this or whether you're doing it yourself you're probably reaching out to these people periodically especially a few months before their hopefully annual contract renews to figure out are they happy are they using the software because if not you're going to lose them and in this case you can do a white glove High touch approach to retention in a second I'm going to give you two bonus metrics that can give you insights into the happiness of your customers but before I do that if you want to dive deeper into metrics I recorded what is one of the more popular episodes of my podcast from the past few years the podcast is startups for the rest of us and it's episode 602 explaining SAS metrics to a child and if you check out episode 602 know that startups for the rest of us is a podcast that comes out every week and has since 2010 so 13 years of episodes there's almost 650 in the feed and I talk about very similar topics to what are here on this YouTube channel I'm talking about SAS ideas talking about idea validation building your product maybe with no code maybe with code finding co-founders co-founder disputes selling your company growing your company launching your company all things that you would want to know as you bootstrap or mostly bootstrap your SAS the two bonus metrics that I want to talk about are NP es and csat these are measures of customer satisfaction and really early on in your product these are probably not the best fit because these tend to be I'll say higher level metrics and they're kind of lagging indicators when you're trying to cloth your first 10 100 few hundred customers there are the metrics in the three High three low framework and then the marketing numbers I just talked through in this video but as you grow NPS is a long-term measure of customer satisfaction so you might do an NPS survey every quarter to a portion of your customers you might do it once a year and you get a number between negative 100 which is terrible and positive 100 and if you think about companies like apple that are well loved by their customers they get scores up in the 90s I believe maybe it is around 90. but even having an NPS of 40 or 50 is actually a pretty decent sign depending on the industry you're in that's a high level how happy are your customers would they recommend it to other people how how happy are they using your product versus csat which is the customer satisfaction score this is a short-term measure usually it's measured by you having a support interaction with a company and then right after they fire you that email that says rate your support on a scale of one to five but these are two metrics you can use as a SAS founder to help determine the short term and the long-term happiness of your customers if you enjoyed this video please hit the like And subscribe to the channel and I'll see you next week [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music]