When customer churn numbers start haunting, you know it’s time to start thinking more about growth. Most organizations resort to modifying product in the hope that the changes will convince customers to stay. At VWO, we thought differently. Instead of product optimization, we followed a process optimization approach. Our growth team executed a cross-functional optimization strategy involving people from our customer success team. We identified critical customer accounts and ran optimization programs that reduced churn by 33%! In this session, VWO’s Head of Growth, Ashwin Gupta, will share the complete action plan.

1. Reducing Revenue Churn Through
Cross-Functional Optimization
Ashwin Gupta
Head of Growth

2. About Me
Ashwin is a product and growth expert
with vast experience in creating successful
products from the ground up and solving
tough cross-functional business problems.
At VWO, Ashwin started his journey
building new products for the business
and is currently working cross-functionally
to optimize the post-sales process and
have a strong impact on revenue churn.

3. ● Your customers have lost interest in solving the problem
● They think you’re not good enough
● Not meeting their use-cases
● Not able to justify costs internally
● Lack of resources to get the job done
Why reducing churn is tough

4. ● Engagement
● Activation
● Resurrection
There are three parts to reducing
churn

5. ● At VWO, we focused on testing as the key activity
● What’s your key activity? Usually a feature that gives 10x the
value of the price they’ve paid for your product
● Combine this with login and plan usage
● You’ve a metric that gives you insight into who’s in trouble
Here’s how to get started. Start
with an engagement metric

6. ● We had five. High, Medium, Low, Critical, Disengaged
● We further segmented based on type of customers we had
● Have a specific action plan for each of the buckets
● Align your marketing, product, services and support teams to play
a role in the action plan
Divide your customers into
buckets

7. ● Please do NOT make this mistake. It’s not a stat problem. You need indicators
instead.
Here’s one place where we spent
Data Science resources on it

8. Distill this data further. For your
top accounts, do you have a
connect that you’re still talking to?

9. ● Work a 60-day plan to revive them. Usually the answer was
divided into three buckets: education, implementation, resources,
strategy
● Do whatever it takes to make them successful. You’ve no other
choice
Our game plan for our high
potential accounts

11. ● Not working on dedicated campaigns for accounts
with high usage
Where we failed
● Decreased revenue churn by 50% for our enterprise
accounts
Where we succeeded

12. Our biggest learning: Churn
happens in the first 60 days. Not
the last 60.

13. We introduced success for everyone
to understand why businesses hired
us.
And give them a personalized 1:1 plan to achieve success
with the VWO Platform

14. It’s about implementing the following
feedback loop:
Success Learnings >> Marketing >>
Product >> Success Learnings
Secret sauce: Repeating this loop as quickly as possible and keeping the
velocity high

15. Role of product and marketing?
To automate as many learnings as possible..as quickly as
possible

16. Outcome: Improvement of
activation rates by 2x

17. ● 8% of automatic renewals revenue recovered
specifically by upgrading cards before they expire
● 9% of new acquisitions revenue recovered through
follow-ups on unfinished payments, representing 3%
overall revenue uplift
Resurrecting accounts with
payment issues

18. ● Resurrection strategies will give you immediate results but you
need scale to have impact. The impact is short-term and plateaus
quickly
● Focus on activation and engagement to have any long term
impact
Increasing retention is a much
longer game than new sales..

19. Structure your teams around
customer lifecycle. Give them the
right goals. Optimize for delivering
value as quickly as possible.

20. QnA

21. Next Master
Shanelle Mullin
(Conversion Optimization
Manager, Shopify)
Register - https://vwo.com/webcast/optimize-saas-
retention/
Title - How to Optimize for SaaS Retention
Date & Time - 1 April 2020 | 11 AM ET