Top Ten, Two on Cars and Dreaming of Unicorns

The Top Ten B2B best practices that reduce churn are… here and they’re pretty useful. A few that stuck out to me. Go company-wide with customer health scores. Don’t have check-ins that simply time-based, base communicates on good context (use data of course). Continue to educate your customer not just on your product or service but on the industry as well; be a resource for learning.

An Association Simplifies Its Dues and…

.. all goodness broke out. The Air Conditioning Contractors of America (ACCA) decided to get rid of its “cumbersome” dues structure and make it a simple $39 per month. It’s been only a few months, but so far new member signups are up 60 percent! Early in my software career, I was often frustrated with complex pricing schemes. Subscription pricing can help as it did for ACCA.

Another Idea To Simplify

Another benefit of subscription pricing is knowing exactly what you are paying. Auto expenses can be the opposite of that. You spend a lot of money upfront to buy car but then you have no idea when the next expense is going to come in the form of maintenance. This is not quite a subscription but it’s getting closer: prepaid maintenance. Prepaid maintenance programs average a 68 percent retention rate (two or more service visits to the dealership by a customer annually) compared to the average of 18%!

So you want to ride a unicorn?

If you are a startup, you want to be the mythical unicorn: a company that has a value of $1B or more. Well, if you believe Marc Benioff of Salesforce, then you start by focusing on customer success. “The most important thing in business is customer success,” he said. “If you have customer success, you’re going to have growth.” Cannot disagree.

Another thing about automobiles…

Can “hard goods” companies use software updates to (1) keep customers more loyal and (2) spread out revenue over their lifecycle. Tesla just released a major software upgrade with features where the car can drive itself (so cool)!  All existing customers get it! Yeah! It costs $2,500 to activate the software so it gets can be used. Interesting…