The way that enterprise products are being bought and sold is changing rapidly. Customers are increasingly demanding instant access to all information about your product, including pricing and a Freemium or free trial version of your application. We call this trend the consumerization of B2B sales.
Totango recently conducted a research studying the Freemium, free trial and pricing practices of 550 Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies.
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Engagement score is an at-a-glance metric which Totango adds to each account.
Its purpose is to give you a sense of how active and engaged a particular account is with your cloud application.
An account’s Engagement Score is calculated by looking at the aggregate amount of time spent, by all users of the account, with the application in the last 14 days.
This number is then normalized across all accounts of the same life-cycle stage to produce a number between 0 – 100.
Accounts with an engagement score of 0 were the least active during this period, whereas those with a score of 100 were the most active.
Example: For a setup with three lifecycle stages:
An account in the Paying stage with an Engagement Score of 99 is the most active Paying customer (together with any other accounts with the score of 99)
An account in the Activated stage with an Engagement Score of 50 is more active than half of the current Activated accounts
A New Trial account with an Engagement Score of 0 is the least active at this stage (usually reflecting a period of 14 days of no activity)
We are super excited to introduce the new reporting module to Totango. Use it to get a highlevel view on key engagement, conversion and customer-churn data. It’s an easy way to keep track of progress and identify areas for improvement.
Some of the insights you can get from Totango Executive Reports
- Learn what activities are engaging your accounts and users
- Monitor conversion rates on a week-by-week cohort basis
- Cancellation Lifetime: How long before users typically cancel their subscription?
Any Many More!
Check them out in Totango, review the documentation and send us feedback!
Today I’ve interviewed Zack Urlocker, Chief Operating Officer at Zendesk.
Zendesk, is the leading cloud based help desk customer service software which uses a low touch sales model.
Low touch sales model companies usually keep small and focus sales teams, which saves a lot of money for their organizations, but can naturally contact fewer customers. How would these sales teams know where to focus on?
Zendesk, for example, have 10,000 customers and many new prospects are signing up for their service every day and they still very successful SaaS company as it intelligently using tools to help them figure out which users are more likely to buy. Those users are being referred to their sales team and the rest are being pushed for their self-service model which doesn’t require human resources.
Watch the full interview with Zack below to also learn what Zendesk use to keep their subscription customers using their service (hint: customer engagement)
We’ve just released a new feature to help you keep your data clean and tidy. The Account Junk List allows you to clean out any accounts that were created in Totango by error, be it an integration glitch, test data, or any other phantom accounts that do not represent real users and are skewing your data.
Once an account is added to the Junk list:
To add accounts to your junklist, click “Add To Junk” on any account profile page, or use the Junk list page.
– Enjoy
Webinar: Thursday; February 23rd 2012 10: AM PST
Over the past couple of years, a new position has been showing up in the open job listings throughout the SaaS/Cloud community.
The new role reflects the growing awareness that customer retention is a core requirement.
The signing of the first contract with a customer is a only a milestone, not a resting place. “Shelf-ware” or underutilized products are no longer an option. As a result, software vendors are now realizing that they must take a far more proactive role in ensuring the success of their customers.
But understanding that customer retention is a year-around effort, a commitment that requires a dedicated executive is only the beginning. There is much more to Customer Success Management than just establishing a new box in the overall corporate organization chart.
The work of the Customer Success Management Initiative, opened with two focused surveys. Further insight was gained through extensive interviews, ongoing online conversations in the CSM Forum and from in-depth review of a wide range of published content. The webinar presentation will include the research findings to date on the current-state of what SaaS/Cloud firms are doing in the areas of the Strategy, Process, People and Technology of Customer Success Management.
Attendees will receive a complimentary copy of the white paper when it is published in March.
Advance registration for the webinar is required, and space will be limited.
Today I’ve interviewed Steve Bartel, Head of Analytics Team at Dropbox.
Dropbox no-touch sales model is a very good example to emphasize how important it is to increase customer value using different types of user approach activities (nurturing campaigns, application, etc.)
Those activities, if done correctly, would naturally increase customer engagement rate and are easy to perform when thinking of the customer’s life-cycle stage at any given time.
The most efficient way to conduct those activities is by performing them based on the customer life-cycle stage, rather than time based (as many companies still do) as the first approach refers directly to the user’s life-cycle stage in the application while the later assumes where they’d be at this time statistically.
If we refer to our users knowing their current stage in our application (instead of assuming that), we increase the chance users will be mature enough and be able to address our call and implement our suggestions.
See the complete interview with Steve to find out which other activities Dropbox is using to increase their customer engagement:
To read the full transcription of the video, click here
Video Transcription:
My name is Steven Bartel. I am responsible for the analytics team at Dropbox. And Dropbox is just a way to have your files wherever you you are, it also makes it really easy to share them. So dropbox does a lot of different things to increase user engagement. We use some of the more standard techniques.
For example, we’ll have tip e-mails, so early on in your Dropbox life, you’ll get an e-mail, saying “Hey, you haven’t tried out this feature. It might be useful for you.” We also do things around promoting our different features on our website. For example, in the top left corner when you’re browsing your files online you might see something that prompts you to share a folder with a friend, and maybe your photos.
Lastly some of our features our viral and they help help our users promote user engagement across each other. For example, we have shared folders, so when I put something into a shared folder, I’ll invite my friend to it. And, you know, they’ll start using DropBox again. We have a sales team. And what they’re looking into is how to sell DropBox for businesses.
The consumer product is entirely driven word of mouth and automated through our website. But we find that it’s, you know, very useful to have people to help explain the use case of DropBox for businesses. It might be, you know, if that’s a thing that will put more into this product, and we have a bunch of tools around, sourcing those leads, and figuring out who exactly might be the best fit for our sales team.
Last week , I had several interesting meetings with people who don’t want to spend marketing dollars on paid advertising and prefer to put all of their investment into product offering, as they believe their products will market and sell themselves.
This got me thinking in what is the nature of these applications and the changes in the delivery models which makes this all possible. The new SaaS delivery model enables new channel and distribution models.
Viral Adoption
Some B2C applications take advantage of the network effect to go viral. A very good example is Dropbox, a file sync service, which became extremely successful by allowing people to share files with one another. Now Dropbox has no need to invest in marketing – get people to download Dropbox, they need to make sure their application continuously creates value to their users and the product will ‘sell itself’.
App Stores
Not all applications out there share the same characteristics, especially applications which are business facing. For those apps, the emerging concept of App Stores is an excellent fit.
Much like Apple changed the landscape of music industry forever with iTunes music store, the emerging app store market on Google Apps Marketplace, Salesforce.com AppExchange and new and other enterprise marketplaces are making new applications visible and accessible for end users to try them out. That and a SaaS offering model, makes the entire experience of looking for new solution and evaluating its applicability to your business need a very simple experience.
A very good example of a company which is rapidly growing without any marketing dollars spend is myERP. I’ve met with Francois Nadal built the fastest growing ERP business by focusing on building a great and easy to use product (Nadal, is a UX guy) and channeled it’s adoption through the Google Apps Marketplace.
With such powerful distribution channels available, business owners should focus their resources on creating compelling product offerings which are easy to consume and sell themselves. This emphasizes even further the need to put the right infrastructure in place to monitor and manage customer engagement within the applications.