Sam Jacobs

So here's the one takeaway.

You're analyzing your business.

You're looking for profitable, efficient growth paths.

And you think that the issue is pricing and packaging.

Most of the time, it is not pricing and packaging.

So most of the time, the reason that you have the easiest thing to solve for

if you are solving for retention for your customers is failure to launch, which means your onboarding isn't designed properly.

So when we've looked at our business, the original inclination was it's a bundle.

Our membership business is a bundle.

Add more stuff to the bundle.

Maybe one of the things in the bundle will drive to, will lead to higher retention.

What that did was create a lot of confusion and uncertainty about how to use the product.

And when we looked at how many customers were actually onboarded when they signed up and completed their onboarding journey, it was a very low percentage.

So one of the things you can do for your business is just make sure, does every customer not just get assigned an implementation manager, but do they complete an onboarding experience?

The purpose of that onboarding experience should be directly tied to an activity or action that you believe drives high customer engagement leading to renewal.

So I'll give you a specific example from one of the great SaaS businesses, Salesforce.

So at first, Salesforce...

had this idea, right, that all you needed to do was load your data into Salesforce, and that would drive retention because they had all of your data.

They did a bunch of analyses, and they realized that that's not what drove retention.

And what actually drove retention, the quick time to value, was getting people to build dashboards in Salesforce that were then emailed out to key stakeholders.