Amarnath Vannarath | Marketing, Technology and Startups

Customer Engagement – What are the key metrics to track and why?

October 6, 2016/0 Comments/in Data Analysis, Marketing Automation, SaaS /by Amarnath Vannarath

B2B SaaS is extremely competitive especially for horizontal SaaS products. If you are in the SMB space then that makes it even more challenging for you to survive and then grow. There are a few important metrics the product needs to track assiduously –

CAC ( Customer Acquisition Cost)
LTV ( Customer Lifetime Value)
Payback Period
Churn
NPS ( Net promoter Score)
Sales Velocity

I’m sure most SaaS companies do track these numbers. The key to success is to reduce Churn, CAC and to increase LTV, NPS. One of the key factors that enable a SaaS product to achieve this is customer engagement. But how do you define and measure customer engagement?

What is Customer Engagement?

Customer engagement is the interaction/ activity of your customer on the platform. The customer engagement could be a positive or a negative one and it’s equally important to understand the nature of this engagement.

A negative engagement increases the risk of Churn, so there are immediate actions that need to be taken to ensure the customer stays.
Similarly, a happy and engaged customer provides you with an opportunity to up-sell or cross-sell.

So, how do you measure Customer Engagement?

Measuring customer engagement inside the product is the same process as lead scoring at the top of funnel. I had covered lead scoring earlier. Lead scoring is a top of the funnel score that we use to qualify leads based on their activity or interaction with various assets/ touchpoints of the product. You could measure customer engagement with either of the two options:

(1) Use 3^rd part software tools that let you define and analyse various events inside the product. Here are a few tools you could consider

(2) Setup your own system where you log various datapoints in your DB and run queries to analyse the same.

In either case, you would have define the important events of engagement and also assign points for these events which would help you calculate the all important engagement score. The events that need to be tracked would be based on the application. For eg:

Helpdesk Software: Add support email, setup forwarding rules, setup DNS, Added Agent

A/B Test SaaS App: Create Test, Start Test, End Test, Share Results

Online Billing APP: Create Invoice, Send Invoice, Receive Payment

Once you have defined the events you can log them and also assign weights to each of these events to calculate your Customer engagement score.

Customer Engagement Score = (wt1*e1) + (wt2 * e2) + … + (wt# + e#)
where wt is the weight assigned and e represents the event being tracked.

Along with the consolidated user engagement score, you could also monitor certain specific or low level metrics that again define user engagement. A few examples are:

Daily Active Users ( DAU)
Weekly Active Users ( WAU)
Monthly Active users ( MAU)
DAU/ MAU Ratio
User Retention – Day1, Day7, Day30

The core metric that you need to track varies from product to product/ app to app. It’s for you to decide what numbers matter for your product.

What next?

Capturing and understanding these metrics defined above is the first step. Setting up steps to improve on these metrics is the next step. This entire process can be automated using a comprehensive automation tool like Marketo, Autopilot, Hubspot Enterprise etc. The right set of messages at the right time goes a long way in optimizing each of the above metrics.

An example:

Pipefy is a great tool for workflow/ process management. It lets you organize all your processes in one place. On signup up with Pipefy, they send you a set of emails to increase engagement.

One of the first emails that they send is a library of pre-existing templates ( most used ones) which would enable the users to get started immediately.

They track weekly retention and send out a mailer to engage the inactive users. This is the second email they send out to inactive users –

Then they follow it up with this email within a few days:

Another example is how Groove improved customer activation using customer engagement data. Grove is a helpdesk software and one of the first things that a user should do after signing up is to setup a support email. They also measure the avg. time it takes for the user to setup the initial support email and if that doesn’t happen then they send an automated email. Here’s the template they use :

They also track user retention and sends out mailers to inactive users to re-engage them. Here’s the template they use for that.

These are proactive measures you can take to increase engagement and user engagement. You can personalize these messages/ automated communications that go out further by segmenting the data. An eg: For Horizontal SaaS products you get registrations from a bunch of industry verticals. You can further segment the user data based on industry vertical and send relevant use case for the industry/ use terminologies that the prospect could relate to. At FieldEZ, we segment prospects based on Industry and the use cases differ across Industry. FieldEZ is used as a Lead/ Sales management tool in industries such as BFSI, Pharma while it’s primarily used for Ticket Management in the Consumer Durables or Manufacturing industry segments.

Other than this customer segmentation also helps in:

Identifying what features matter most to a particular segment
Measure LTV, CAC, Payback Period, Churn, NPS etc for each segment and work on optimizing the same
Measure profitability of each segment
Test separate user onboarding techniques for each segment – Messaging and Core interactions based on what matters to the segment

Fundraising for Startups

June 28, 2016/0 Comments/in Fundraising, Startups /by Amarnath Vannarath

Fundraising is difficult and that’s me being very polite. How many times have you heard a VC tell you – “Your product is really nice and very useful as well. I love it. I just need to see a bit of traction now to convince myself to invest”? If you are a early stage company looking for someone to invest, then I will bet my house on you having heard this from one of the VCs.

A couple of years back there was no shortage of VC money, they were making bets on anything and everything they could find and in doing so many of them have burnt their hands. When I say, burnt their hand, I mean they had literally drowned all of that money down the drain for crazily stupid ideas that would have never made it big, let alone India, anywhere else in the world. That’s changed the investment scenario for the better. The heavily discounted models which a few of these startups were running were extremely difficult to sustain. These models weren’t inherently changing consumer behavior or making consumers loyal to any brand/ product. What they were doing was just delaying the inevitable, that’s running out of money and not finding a backer who will invest at a higher valuation.

With funds drying up the investment firms, including the early stage ones have changed the way they approach investing. These days, Seed stage investing is more or less like the Series-A/ B a couple of years ago. The investors look for genuine traction – Revenues and focus more on profitability rather than GMVs. Gone are the days, when all it took for a startup to raise money was to have a few thousand free users sign up on the platform.

In an ideal world, bootstrapped, cash-flow positive startups would be the rockstars. But there are times when a startup needs fund to survive and grow, the cost of running a startup is often not understood well enough by founders. From my experience, the investors look for the following in a startup:

Ability to generate revenue (an existing portfolio of a few paying customers). This is also a confirmation on product/market fit.
Ability to scale – Addressable market
Identified a Channel to Acquire customers – A process that is repeatable
The Team – A balanced set of skillset
Ability to hustle

If you feel your product or startup fits the bill and is in need for funding, then go for it. Remember, fundraising is a painfully long process that will drain you out. So ensure you have a support system in place to continue running the business while the founder focuses on raising money. If your startup does not tick off the 5 criteria listed above, then put your foot down and get cracking on these 5 items.

Pricing for Startups

January 7, 2016/0 Comments/in Pricing, SaaS, Startups /by Amarnath Vannarath

“You’ve found market price when buyers complain but still pay” – Paul Graham

Pricing is a crucial component of any successful business. Most companies, especially startups tend to under-price fearing losing out on an account resulting in leaving significant money on the table when they finally come away with a customer win. Offering free products, free trials, fremium etc are different strategies startups employ in winning customers and they all work for some and don’t work for the rest. In fact, there is no clear cut, ready-made, cut-out pricing strategies for any company to emulate or follow. Startups work in a highly dynamic environment with constantly changing market dynamics.

An Ideal Pricing is an art that results from a series of experimentation and also in knowing and understanding the true value and positioning of your product. Startups must, hence, use a framework to chalk out the best pricing scenarios and also analyse the feedback/ response from the market to tweak it. The broad framework for startups to work on their pricing should consider the following factors:

Positioning:

Brand positioning is one of the most important factors that influence pricing strategies for any product. In fact, both goes hand in hand. Pricing strategy does reflect on the brand as well. Imagine buying a Ferrari for the price of a Toyota or buying an iPhone for the price of an entry-level Android phone. Same goes for technology products as well – In the FSM (Field Service Management Software) segment, a product like Servicemax might be able to charge a premium while the SMB focussed mHelpdesk might not be able to charge that premium. Same goes for the other software categories as well. In the CRM space, a Salesforce commands a premium which a Zoho or a Nimble will not be able to get.

The message should be clear across all touchpoints – website, collateral, ads, PR, Sales pitch and every other channel the brand gets visibility. The pricing strategy reinforces the brand positioning be it Premium, Mid-market or low cost alternative.

Sales Team Structure:

Pricing defines the structure of the Sales team. Higher price points are very attractive from a revenue perspective but they also require a larger sales cycle, a much more sophisticated sales rep, increased chances of opportunities lost and volatility.

Nimble CRM for eg. has a pricing of $15/user/month and mostly sells into the SMB market. With a deal size of $3k-$5k, typically an inside sales person should be able to close 3-5 accounts a month. This is a much predictable model with a steady revenue coming in every month through these closures. However, for, a higher priced product like a Siebel CRM system, an inside Sales team will not be the right fit. They would be multi-million dollar contracts and would require specialised field sales person who would charge anywhere from $250k or above.

The Market at Large for your product:

It’s important for organizations to scope the market at large for them. The value of any organization is broadly the NPV of its earning (profits) for the next 5 years. Reducing price points might enable you to sell more, increase the closure rate, however in the longer run you need your product to be profitable as well. Any product will have churn, so the net revenue that you make out of a customer should be at bare minimum equal to the cost of acquisition. Also, the market size for your product is the price point multiplied by the number of potential customers. If the no. of potential customers is not a very big number and your product’s price point is relatively low, then the max market you can address might be very less for investors to have any interest in your company.

Pricing Model:

Pricing models can be different for different organizations. One could have a one-time license based pricing structure to subscription based pricing. Even with subscription based pricing – you could have a monthly or quarterly, bi-annual or an annual plan. For subscription based pricing model, I had in my previous post discussed the benefits of having an annual subscription model not just from a cash flow perspective, but also from a revenue predictability perspective and in reducing the overall churn numbers.

Like any function in a startup, pricing is also a constantly evolving function that changes with time. The best way for any startup is to broadly identify each of the parameters discussed above and create a framework which they can rely upon in revisiting pricing few times a year.

The SaaS Customer Acquisition Conundrum

December 4, 2014/0 Comments/in SaaS /by Amarnath Vannarath

Building a successful SaaS startup and putting it on a growth trajectory involves a great amount of effort and a thorough understanding of the market dynamics. To begin with one would need to build a product and achieve product market fit. Once you have a product market fit, you know there is a target segment that you can sell into. The question then becomes – How do I reach out to my target audience and start converting them as paying users?

An easy answer some would say with the amount of options a SaaS company has to interact with its customers in today’s digital world. But is it so? To understand SaaS customer acquisition and business viability one would first need to understand a few basic metrics that become extremely crucial to understand the health of a SaaS business:

LTV – Lifetime Value of a Customer
CAC – Cost to Acquire a Customer
Sales Velocity – Number of days required to acquire a customer from the first point of interaction
Payback – Time taken to recover the CAC
Churn(monthly) – % of customers you lose in a month

A well balanced business model will always have a LTV value greater than the CAC. If it’s not so for your SaaS business, then it might be a good option to reconsider the business model you are building.

One in a million SaaS startup would be able to depend upon the inherent virality of the product to scale up. But even in case of these startups there is an initial threshold value for the customer count that they need to hit for the virality to kick in. Rest of them, well they have to use of mix of SEO, SEM, Social Media, Direct Sales, Channel Sales, PR etc to hit their audience. Let me tell you, the CAC for majority of the SaaS companies have shot up so much that it becomes really difficult during the initial days of its incubation to rely on the Paid channels to acquire customers.

So, when does Paid Channels Work for a SaaS Startup?

Paid Acqusition works only when LTV > CAC

To elaborate, let’s assume a startup which relies on Google Adwords for eg to generate leads and works with the following numbers:

	Scenario-1	Scenario – 2
Total Traffic	8000	8000
Cost Per Click	$1	$4
Conversion to Trials	10%	10%
Conversion to Paid Customer	5%	5%
Number of Trials	800	800
Number of Paid Customers	40	40
Cost of Converted Trial	$10	$40
CAC	$200	$800
No. of Sales & Marketing Resource	7	10
Cost per Employee per Month	10000	10000
Total Cost Incurred Per Month( Without salary)	8000	32000
Total Cost Incurred Per Month( With salary)	78000	132000

As you can see the CAC is a function of CPC, Conversion % at each stage, Sales & Marketing Overheads, Churn and the Sales velocity. You would want to have a high velocity and a churn percentage close to zero to reduce the CAC. Similarly, with more human touchpoints, your CAC value goes higher. Touchpoints could be any of email followups, sales calls or demos the inside sales team does. The CAC value goes even higher with direct Sales team involved, however in such cases your Average Contract value will also be much higher. In short it’s important for any company to keep their CAC < LTV to sustain.

While you do your math and try and figure out the CAC number during the early stages of your business, another important metric to track is the payback period. Let’s assume in the above example your avg. revenue per customer is $400/ year.

Scenario 1: Payback Period = 200/400 = 0.5 years

Scenario 2: Payback Period = 800/400 = 2 Years

Implies, in Scenario 1, you would take 6 months to recover the amount of money you had invested in acquiring the customer, while in Scenario 2, you will take almost 2 years to recover the money you spend on getting your customers. For a Startup at an early stage having limited access to capital the second Scenario is a sureshot bankruptcy contender, so while you analyse your business keep in mind the payback period and the amount of capital you would need to sustain your business. A simple workaround in Scenario 2 would be to collect the payment upfront – For more, refer Pricing Strategy makes or breaks a SaaS startup.

Always be asking yourself the following questions before you decide to spend on acquiring customers through Paid Channels:

Has my product already achieved Product/ market fit?
What’s my CAC for a paid channel?
How much Capital do I have?
What’s my runway with the Capital I have?
What Pricing Strategy can enable me to sustain the business if I am relying upon my cash reserve to acquire customer.
Do I plan to raise more money or am I planning to run the business through the revenue generated? If you are planning to raise funds, burning money to show momentum might be a good idea. You may want to read this article The Incremental Customer

Find answers to these questions to have a clear understanding on why and when to use paid channels for customer acquisition. Remember you will have a sustainable business only when:

CAC < LTV (general rule of thumb is that LTV should be 3 times your CAC)
Payback period < 1 year

SaaS Pricing Strategy - Payment Collection

How Pricing Strategy Can Make or Break a SaaS Startup?

December 2, 2014/1 Comment/in Pricing, SaaS /by Amarnath Vannarath

I’m sure if you have ever been part of a startup, you would understand the importance of managing cash flow at an early stage and how it can make or break your startup. It becomes even more important for a SaaS company which depends on the recurring revenue to sustain itself.

Cash is the lifeblood of any startup. It let’s the management invest in the business not just in terms of growth but also with regards to beefing up the intellectual capacity of the team. It helps the startup take a faster trajectory to achieving its milestones – It’s virtually a no brainer that any startup should focus on improving its cash flow at an early stage.

Let’s analyse the pricing & payment collection strategies a SaaS startup could adopt to improve its cash reserves. Assume a hypothetical startup generating a MRR of $60k in the first month, growing 10% YoY and with a burn rate of $250k per month. Startup has an existing cash reserve of $3 Million from series A.

I have put down 5 pricing strategies ( payment collection) options :

1) Monthly – Customers pay at the end of each month

2) Quarterly – Customers pay at the end of each quarter

3) Bi Annual – Customers pay at the end of each 6 month period

4) Annual Pre Payment – Customers pay for one full year at the beginning of the year

5) Annual Post Payment – Customers pay at the end of one year

See how in the case of Bi Annual and Annual Post Payment systems, the startup runs out of cash and is on the verge of bankruptcy. It’s a a situation you wouldn’t want to address as a startup founder. While the Annual Pre Payment system infuses a ton of cash into your reserves which will help you pump in more money into your business to grow. Remember, this is an effectively zero interest capital that your consumers have provided you access to that you can leverage for rapid business expansion.

So how are you collecting payments from your customers? It might make complete sense for a startup to shift their pricing strategy to a annual pre-payment option provided you don’t see an increased reduction in conversion because of a change in the pricing strategy. Certain segments and markets do react differently to annual pre-payment pricing strategy especially the SMB segment where the owners of these business themselves would in all probability be in a cash crunch situation to run their businesses.

Do your math and run the experiment!