Life Review & Journaling for more clarity in 2023 + 3 ways to increase your SaaS revenue.

Hey - it’s Alex!

Happy new year to everyone! Hope you had a powerful start in 2023!

Today, I will share with you:

1️⃣ 3 actionable SaaS growth tips

👉 Life review & journaling for more clarity in 2023

👉 3 ways to increase your SaaS revenue

👉 How to get your prospects to confirm their pain points

2️⃣ ‘Best tip, failure, & learning’ by Hector Forwood (CEO & Founder of Comtura & Investor in early-stage startups)

3️⃣1 software tool recommendation (taplio)

… that will help you quickly grow your SaaS product 🚀.

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👉 Before you begin:

✅  Get your FREE copy of the SaaS Growth Strategy Worksheet

✅  Get your FREE SaaS Go-to-market strategy - Notion Template

✅ Unlock your growth potential with 82+ proven SaaS growth tactics

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1. Life Review & Journaling for more clarity (in 2023)

The annual life review was a game-changer for me.

Reviewing the past year and planning the year ahead are part of my life since 2019. Always between Christmas and the first week of January, I take some days off and create my life review.

It empowers me to:

• reflect on the high and low lights of the year.

• set clear directions for the upcoming year

• set priorities for the year.

• decide on things I want to get rid of

• create new habits.

At the end of the day, it makes it easier for me to reflect on my life.

Together with the daily 6-minutes journaling book (3 minutes every morning + 3 minutes every evening), it's a very powerful tool for me.

Here's the template I use for it. 👇

👉 Get the annual life review template and plan your success for 2023

👉 6-minute journaling book

P.S. Thanks Jakob Riegger for sharing this life review article with me 3 years ago 🙏

The template is by Howard Gray, inspired by Matt Schlafman.

2. 3 ways to increase your SaaS revenue👇

As a SaaS startup, you always want to increase your revenue. But increasing revenue is not only limited to adding new customers.

Growing revenue ≠ Winning new customers

Increasing the ARPA (average revenue per account) is another very effective method. Especially once you are adding consistently new customers and want to scale your business, working on your ARPA can be very effective.

𝟭. 𝗣𝗿𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗻𝗴

Work on your pricing to increase the ARPA.

This includes:

• increasing prices,

• Nudging customers to higher tiers

• switching to a scalable value metric (instead of a flat fee or feature-based pricing)

• restructuring your pricing plans (e.g. different packaging of included features)

𝟮. 𝗨𝗽𝘀𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴 & 𝗖𝗿𝗼𝘀𝘀-𝗦𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴

Focus on upselling and cross-selling activities to increase the ARPA of your existing customers.

This includes:

• Working on an upselling strategy (Who, when, how & what messaging to upsell)

• increase product engagement in combination with a usage-based value metric (so you charge the customers more as they use the product more heavily)

• cross-selling of complimentary services (knowing which customers need what kind of additional services)

𝟯. 𝗥𝗲𝘁𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝗖𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗿𝘀

Reducing your churn rate and keeping customers longer will positively affect your LTV (customer lifetime value). So you make more revenue with your customers over time.

With a higher LTV, you can also invest more money in acquisition without hurting your LTV to CAC ratio

This includes:

• Identify early churn candidates with churn alerts (and proactively offer solutions to keep them engaged)

• Reminding paying customers about the value of your product (powerful product marketing with messaging around value proposition)

• Account/Customer Success Manager (to work with top tier accounts)

👉 Here’s a deep dive into each of the 3 ways to increase your ARPA

3. How to get your prospects to confirm their pain points

If you follow a sales-led motion sales demos are the center of your sales process.

And every sales product demo should start with a discovery.

The goal of the discovery is to unfold the pain points of your prospect.

(Here are 10 great sales discovery questions that you can use to find the pain points of your customers).

But it’s not enough that you discover them. You need to get your prospects to confirm that they have the pain. Because only if they are also aware of the problem and the negative implications for them (if they don’t solve the problem), they are ready to change something (buy your product).

And getting them to confirm is sometimes really painful.

𝗛𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝟯 𝗲𝘅𝗮𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗲𝘀 on 𝗵𝗼𝘄 to get prospects confirming their pain.

1️⃣

You: "Did I understand correctly, that you are having XYZ problem, which leads to (negative result 1) and (negative result 2)?"

Prospect: "Yes, exactly"

2️⃣

You: "So what you said is that you already tried (alternative solution 1) and (alternative solution 2), but it didn't solve the problem because of XYZ. Is that correct?"

Prospect: "Yes, that's right"

3️⃣

You: "So, what I've noted down, is that it's the top priority for you to solve problem X, because if you can't solve it, it will have (negative implication 1) and (negative implication 2). Correct?"

Prospect: "Yes, unfortunately, that's true"

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💡 Best tip, failure, and learning by Hector Forwood (CEO & Founder of Comtura & Investor in early-stage startups)

Growth is about a mindset, it is being able to be consistent, process driven, and optimizing your time.

You’re an SDR, you are not a founder. Book meetings, speak to your audience, and grow through grit.

Here are the 4 key areas for early founder-led sales:

1️⃣ Network - Speak to anyone and everyone.

2️⃣ BAFAM - Book a meeting from a meeting - End your calls with “Thanks for your time, I was wondering if you could introduce me to 3 other people that you think this could help?”

3️⃣ E-mail campaigns - It’s not a dead channel, you’re doing it wrong. E-Mail warm up your domains and limit sends to 50 emails per day. Instantly.ai is a great tool for all of this.

4️⃣ Communities - chances are there are people talking about your problem in forums or slack channels. Find them, speak to them and add value. Only commercialize when it’s appropriate.

Check out Hector’s LinkedIn post for much more in-depth detail.

P.S. Hector is a true PLG expert. Stay tuned - we are working on an ultimate guide for product-led growth for early-stage SaaS companies.

🧠 Do you want to be next and share your best tip with 500+ SaaS professionals? Reach out to me via Linkedin.

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💪 1 software tool recommendation

I can highly recommend taplio to grow your personal brand on Linkedin.

It’s the best tool I’ve used so far to create and schedule your Linkedin posts, but also to engage with other’s people posts.

They have pretty awesome features like post analytics, 1-comment automation, and auto likes.

👉 They offer a 7 day free trial + 30 days money back guarantee.

P.S. Check out my list of best software tools for SaaS startups for more inspiration.

Happy growth 🚀.

Alex Estner

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TL;DR

• Life review & 6 minutes of journaling for more clarity in 2023

• 3 ways to increase your ARPA (pricing, upselling/cross-selling, reducing churn)

• Get prospects to confirm their pain points

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🚀 Whenever you’re ready, 3 ways I can help you:

1. Follow me on Linkedin for more actionable tips to grow your B2B SaaS business

2. Download your FREE copy of the SaaS Growth Strategy Worksheet and get access to a list of 82+ hand-picked, proven SaaS growth strategies.

3. Work with me 1:1 to grow your B2B SaaS business - send me a DM on Linkedin or book a free 15min virtual coffee with me to learn more about my offering.

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