SaaS businesses are different from traditional ones as they don’t deal in one-time transactions but rely on recurring revenue.
The recurring monthly or annual renewal is the soul of any SaaS business.
To achieve this goal, generating leads and selling their products play a crucial role in between.
But the reality nowadays is, SaaS companies are finding it difficult to keep a sharp eye on sales and productivity at the same time. Because they know that no customer is going to pay unless you give them a reason to do so.
To give this point a priority, most SaaS companies partner with a top sales outsourcing company to focus on their core.
But next, what? Next is crucial to ensure that retaining your customer after reaching the agreement is not just a fluke but a strategy for your business.
What is customer retention?
Customer retention is engaging with the existing customers to maintain long-term relationships with them. This ensures that the customers keep renewing their purchased services or even upgrade to additional features.
How less churn rate can boost your growth?
Customer retention is much cheaper than customer acquisition. And it substantiates the expenditure as well.
For every 5% of the investment on retaining your customers, you can get at least 25% returns.
That’s enough dough for you to focus on customer retention and build a loyal customer base.
The Challenge
Customer churn is the biggest hurdle that affects direct recurring revenue. It also impacts brand loyalty and forces you to spend more on customer acquisition to compensate for the loss.
Since retention is not a seasonal activity but a constant effort, it requires
- A well-planned strategy
- Dedicated and skilled team
- Additional hours of time
- Monitoring & analytics
Unfortunately, implementing and utilizing all these resources can be a challenge irrespective of your business size.
The Solution
So, how can you ensure effective customer engagement without tiring yourself with the groundwork?
Outsource the grind.
Outsourcing gives you the flexibility to set up your customer support process in a day. You can also break down the whole customer journey into segments on which the outsourced team can work upon.
Let’s see the stages where a skilled outsourced team can benefit you with visible results and give you more time for working on the core tasks.
Pre-sales
Concern: Losing prospects who initially showed interest in your product but then got lost in the sales life cycle. The existing sales team doesn’t have enough time to reach out to these leads and hiring a new time for this brief activity will be expensive.
Solution: Re-engage with these potential prospects to understand their concerns and see if you can still resume the business discussion with them.
This will demand a significant amount of your team’s time to connect with them and then maintain a record of the discussion as well. Also, this can affect the focus and time which your team should be providing to the new leads.
To solve this problem, you can outsource a team of professionals to rekindle the lost leads. This team can be of two or twenty, depending on how many contacts you want to touch base with and how quickly.
Benefits
- Trained team who’ll talk to the prospects and understand the reason for their inaction
- You can get new business from the cold leads leading to increased revenue
- Otherwise, you’ll have data points to understand the gap in your services which can be improved for better business
- Your team will have time to manage new leads and focus on their core tasks
- Less expensive than hiring a new team
Onboarding
Concern: Gap in understanding the customer expectations and their requirements. This is a crucial process that is necessary for better customer service but becomes an additional task for your team apart from training and support.
Solution: Prompt feedback collection from customers and client profiling optimizes the customer journey. Outsource team that engages with the clients through calls, chats, or emails to evaluate their expectations. An outsourced team can also gather the elaborate data of the clients like their business type, industry, buyers, and expectations. This can help you personalize the services as per the client portfolio.
Benefits:
- Effective feedback collection to improve the product with relevant feature requests
- Client profiling that can optimize the marketing strategies and enhance customer experience
- Predict churn based on the feedback and take the relevant action on time
- Timely and accurate collection of Csat and NPS score
Adoption
Concern: Growing business with the existing clients is a challenge for which understanding of the client business and their expectations is needed. This can be done with elaborate and effective regular communication with them.
But in order to achieve this, a trained team with a proper plan needs to be engaged with clients.
Solution: An outsourced team proves to be useful in these scenarios who can conduct regular monthly or bi-monthly review calls. The call can either be in the initial phase of the client onboarding to understand whether they’re satisfied with the onboarding, or it can be at later stages too to scale up the account.
Benefits:
- Improve product stickiness and loyalty
- Sustain the recurring revenue from the client
- Recognize opportunities for increasing average revenue per client
- Update clients about new product developments
Customer Churn
Concern: Customer churn is a problem that’s impossible to eliminate completely. This affects the revenue and the growth of your business.
Solution: Try to identify churn as early as possible and then engage with those clients highlighting the benefits they can derive from the product. If clients have already churned, you can still get your team on a call with them to understand what went wrong.
Outsourcing a team for this allows you to contact the churned customers quickly and gather the right details for further improvements.
Benefits:
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- Quick response by a dedicated team of professionals
- Effective evaluation of your customers’ response to develop strategies for improvement
- Can retain a percentage of those clients with the right communication
SaaS business is not just about products but services as well. Services that are reliable and quick.
Clearly, to meet the demands of customers you’ll need a team that is proactive, readily available, and skilled to turn the situations into opportunities.
A happy customer is 50% more likely to upgrade and spend up to 31% more on upsells.
Outsourcing can help you with that. It can provide you an experienced team that can take up the responsibilities for all stages of the customer journey. It gives you the freedom to focus on your customers and business growth without worrying about hiring, training, and monitoring.
