Every 28 days, a lovely Hermes delivery-person brings a crate of the world’s finest craft beer to my house.

But if it were up to me, I wouldn’t receive these beer boxes at all.

In early 2020, I tried to unsubscribe from [REDACTED] — a monthly beer subscription company — as I felt it was an unnecessary expense. I soon realized, though, that unsubscribing would be a Herculean task. There was no way to cancel digitally, and if I wanted to stop my subscription altogether, I’d need to ring them up during their (very limited) business hours.

Having to go through all that rigmarole dissuaded me from unsubscribing.

Annoyingly, I’m still receiving my delicious craft beers a year later.

These frustrating (read: unethical) tactics to stop customers from unsubscribing have been deployed by all manner of companies — from those in the food and drinks industry, all the way to those in the tech world.

And while it may seem tempting for your SaaS company to do similar, it’s nothing more than a quick win when, in reality, you should be focusing on improving the customer lifecycle. After all, it’s positive business-to-customer interactions that’ll stop people from wanting to unsubscribe in the first place.

That’s why, in this Process Street post, I’ll be discussing SaaS renewal. I’ll go over the definition of SaaS renewal, explain why customers think about unsubscribing from SaaS products, and provide you with actionable SaaS renewal best practices that’ll stop folks from hitting that unsubscribe button. (Providing you have one!)

Read through these sections to get in the know:

• What SaaS renewal means & how to figure out your SaaS renewal rate
• 5 reasons why customers unsubscribe from SaaS products
• 5 tried-and-tested SaaS renewal best practices for boosting renewals

You’re about to become a SaaS renewal pro — let’s cheers to that! 🍻
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“History tells us that “how” you sell is just as important as “what” you sell.” – Wes Bush, The Definitive Guide On Product-Led Growth.

Slack’s revenue has grown 52 x since its launch in 2014: The channel-based messaging platform reported that revenue went from $12 million in 2014 to $630 million in 2020.

Their secret? …. Product-led growth.

Product-led growth (PLG), otherwise known as the “try before you buy” approach has helped companies like Dropbox, Netflix, Hubspot, and of course Slack go from Startup to scale up in record time.

But, the product-led growth approach isn’t just about trying before buying. There’s more to it than that. In fact, to truly be product-led you’ll need to choose between a free trial or freemium model; determine if you’ll be targeting the makers or the shakers of an organization; decide which sea you wish to sail when following the Blue Ocean Strategy; and, choose whether your strategy wants to focus on the bottom-up or the top-down.

Feeling confused? Don’t worry, this post will help clear things up. I’ll go over what product-led growth actually is and help you decide if the approach is right for you. I’ll also take a look at Slack and Hubspot, the poster children of the PLG approach to show what it looks like in practice.

To jump to a specific section click on the appropriate link below.

• Product-led growth in a nutshell
• Product-led growth as a go-to-market strategy
• Is the product-led growth approach for you?
• Key metrics for measuring product-led growth
• Product-led growth in practice: Slack
• Product-led growth in practice: Hubspot
• Product-led growth: Key takeaways

Let’s get sailing…
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For organizations, updating prices is like getting plastic surgery (I imagine).

You’re painfully aware that people can see what you’ve done, but under no circumstances will you ever talk about it. It’s a forbidden topic.

“The first rule of pricing is: you do not talk about pricing” – Medium, The First Rule of Pricing is: You Do Not Talk About Pricing

Until now. I’m sticking two fingers up to the stigma surrounding pricing and I’m lifting the lid to reveal what goes on, behind the scenes, when organizations like Process Street change their SaaS price model.

😱

I know. I’m brave, right?

Over the last few weeks, I’ve coerced and cajoled the Process Street pricing team into sharing some of the biggest pricing lessons we’ve learned (sometimes the hard way), since we launched in 2013.

And, here they are…

• SaaS price model lesson #1: Pricing is a never-ending process
• SaaS price model lesson #2: Pricing is about perception
• SaaS price model lesson #3: Yearly is better than monthly
• SaaS price model lesson #4: Listen to customers, not competitors
• SaaS price model lesson #5: Involve the whole team

Curious?

Let’s hope I still have a job at the end of this… 🤞

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This is a guest post from Margo Ovsiienko, you can find her website at margoleads.com. Margo is a tech enthusiast and a growth marketing strategist. She is passionate about topics related to SaaS growth, startup strategy, and IT development.

To outsource or not to outsource? The eternal tech question, and a persistent hot topic in tech communities. How do you manage your expectations against your budget and be sure you’re finding the right team for the job? This can be especially challenging for anyone lacking experience with hiring (which is not a task to take lightly).

Building an in-house team vs outsourcing those efforts can depend heavily on the kind of product you’re trying to build; how complex is the feature set? What does your roadmap look like for the next 12 months? These kinds of questions will help you to figure out whether or not your best bet would be in-house or outsourced.

For long-term, committed projects, building a trusty in-house team is almost certainly your best bet. But working with an outsourced, remote team has its place and also comes with many advantages, such as reduced set-up or training time (in the case of outsourced design and development teams) and ability to rapidly develop and tweak early stage concepts (often for a cheaper rate) when searching for the ideal product-market fit.

So, how can you build a SaaS product that gains traction fast before you run out of limited funds?

In this Process Street article, we’ll consider how to build a SaaS product that gains traction fast on a constrained budget, and kick-start your growth.

• What you need to know before you build a SaaS product
• How to validate your product idea
• Key steps of product development
• To outsource or not to outsource?
• How to build a SaaS product: Key takeaways

Let’s get started!
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For sales professionals today, only 34% of their time is spent selling.

This begs the question, what are they doing for the remaining 66% of the time?

Sales teams struggling to keep up with data entry, quote generation, and other tasks drag sales reps away from potential leads. As such, 54% are expected to miss their quotas every year.

What you need are optimized sales processes that outline the best sale practices drawing from up-to-date research and findings.

This is where Process Street comes to save the day.

In this article, you’ll find 20 structured sales processes based on industry best practices which you can access for free. Simply click Edit Checklist to add any process to your Process Street account, so you can start supercharging your sales process today!

For a quick taster, check out our MEDDIC Sales Process Checklist Template below:

Click here to get our MEDDIC Sales Process Checklist Template!

You can click on the relevant link below to jump to your template of choice.

• The MEDDIC Sales Process Checklist Template
• Sales Training Process Checklist
• Weekly Sales Prospecting Checklist
• Cold Calling Checklist
• BANT Sales Qualification Call Process
• Sales Presentation Template
• Sales Pitch Planning Checklist
• Closing The Sale Checklist
• Order Processing Checklist
• Monthly Sales Report
• Churn Prevention Checklist
• Cold Email Checklist for Sales
• Company Research Checklist
• High Touch Client Onboarding for SaaS Companies
• Investor Pitch
• Sales Competitive Analysis Checklist
• Sales Forecasting Checklist
• Sales Onboarding Checklist
• Sales Service Handoff Process
• Upselling Process for SaaS Companies

Click on the subheader below to jump to the relevant section, alternatively scroll down to find out all we have to say and perfect your sales processes.

• Sales processes: What they are and why it is important to have established sales processes
• Our top 20 free sales processes
• A quick tour of Process Street and the benefits of using our sales processes

With that said, let’s get started!
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This is a guest post by Angelina harper, a tech writer at Really Simple Systems interested in cloud technology, digital marketing, and ephemeral content. You can find her most beloved articles on her Twitter account.

Thanks to the realization that retaining existing customers is five times less expensive than obtaining new ones, businesses began exploring ways to improve the success rate of their customer interactions. This is termed customer success. What we wanted to find out is: How do you optimize customer success?

To answer this, we turn our attention to SaaS (Software as a Service) tools, begging the question: What are the top SaaS customer success tools out there?

SaaS customer success tools are an integral component of the modern business tech stack. These tools enable a business to understand what their customers want in terms of service, so they can provide it in an automatic fashion via the tool.

Customer success tools generate positive customer experiences at scale. SaaS companies often need to scale their customer success operations, and their software solutions should reflect this.

With that being said, customer success is a relatively new concept, and many businesses are still learning how to tackle it effectively.

In this Process Street article, we will present you with our top 5 customer success SaaS tools. But before all of that, let’s find out exactly what customer success is and why it is important:

• What is customer success?
• Customer success best practices
• How to improve your customer success process?
• SaaS tools: The most efficient customer success tools

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This is a guest post by Daniel Ndukwu. Daniel has extensive experience in digital marketing and is the Founder of KyLeads. There he helps business owners and publishers increase their leads and audience engagement with smart popups, interactive quizzes, and surveys.

In 2017, I had a brilliant idea.

Many of the tools for conversion rate optimization are point solutions. They make popups, landing pages, quizzes, surveys. Very few of them – if any – combine those functions into one.

I decided I would tackle the challenge by building a tool (now called KyLeads). It would allow people to create surveys, popups, and quizzes for lead generation and customer research.

After going through two development teams, rebuilding our user interface, and learning first-hand how hard it is to make software, we launched.

There was little fanfare and only a few customers when we started. But my team and I kept going. We knew it would be a long journey to success – and it’s paying off.

This article shares the best practices, tactics, and processes we used (and are still using) to improve our SaaS onboarding and grow our business into something spectacular.

Want to turbocharge your business’ onboarding successes and conversion rates in half the time?

Just read through the sections below to uncover these insider tips and tricks yourself:

• What is SaaS onboarding?
• What’s the importance of SaaS onboarding?
• Our top 5 SaaS onboarding best practices
• Use Process Street for SaaS onboarding!

Now, let’s get stuck in.

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When your average pitch is worth $5,800 per second you can’t afford to get things wrong.

You have an average of 3 minutes and 44 seconds to convince potential investors that your business potential is worth their money.

Oh, and that you know what on Earth you’re doing.

That’s a lot of pressure for any business owner. So, we here at Process Street have taken our own experience pitching to 2,500+ investors, venture capitalists, and business owners to give you the ideal formula for creating a winning pitch deck.

We’ll be covering:

• What is a pitch deck?
• How to make a pitch deck
• Why should you believe this works?
• Pitch deck examples

Let’s get started!

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Andy Mura is an inbound Marketer, entrepreneur, speaker, and SaaS enthusiast currently working in Germany as the Head of Marketing at Userlane, the user onboarding and support automation platform that drives customer success.

The modern B2B SaaS market is reaching full maturity.

After attracting early adaptors and transforming the startup world, SaaS has conquered the enterprise world as well. Large corporations, such as Oracle, Microsoft, Adobe, and SAP, have shifted their focus from stationary, on-premise software to subscription-based cloud solutions.

And in turn, even the most conservative enterprises are rethinking their infrastructure to leverage the flexibility and reliability of modern SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS solutions.

Companies will soon run solely on SaaS applications. In fact, there are many reasons that lead firms to embrace this new model.

In this Process Street article we’ll cover:

• Why are B2B SaaS applications on the rise?
• The 9 essential elements of B2B SaaS applications
• The growing world of B2B SaaS applications

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Your average pitch gets examined by investors for about 3 minutes 44 seconds and (if successful) is worth around $1.3 million.

That’s more than $5800 per second.

With figures like that, you need to know how to pitch to land investors, customers, employees, prizes or whatever it is you’re aiming for.

That’s where we here at Process Street come in.

We pitched to over 2500 top SaaS professionals and investors at SaaStr Europa 2019, walking away with the grand prize from the pitch competition, the contact details of several venture capitalists, and collaboration opportunities for months to come.

However, I’m getting ahead of myself. In this post I’ll show you;

• How to pitch: the basics
• What the SaaStr pitch competition was
• The pitch deck we used to win it
• The results and prizes in detail
• The lessons you can learn from our experience
• The secret technique we used to get even more out of our pitch

Let’s get stuck in.

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