How I moved retention from 74% to 107%

please welcome Erica Olson to the stage [Applause] hi everybody oh it's so fun to be here I have learned so much so big shout out to the founder pass team I know we all feel the same way Erica Olson from on strategy I am going to share how we started our SAS Journey blew it up and started all over again so I've been at this for a little while

um before I go too far though just what we do my company's names on strategy we build strategic plans we translate those strap plans into okrs and then we manage the quarterly Performance Cycle against those okrs so that's what we do um it's always really interesting to explain that the world of okrs has just blown up Sky High since we've been in business so it's nice that there's enough fluency around that now our competitive landscape is massive uh so

we'll talk a little bit about that as well our ICP is fundamentally organizations that have to have a strategic plan people that have funders non-profit boards or government institutions so that's what we do in the next 20 minutes I'm going to talk a little bit about how we blew up our model and why we did what our SAS Plus game is all about and how we keep our customers and some warning signs as I was thinking about our presentation and kind of re-structuring it a little bit as I was listening to

all of the good uh talks earlier today and yesterday um a lot of what I'm going to share is unconventional it's working for us I don't know if it'll work for you but take what you can and leave what leave what doesn't work so here we go so here's the here's the magic slide um it looks like that all of our slides look like that what's not on this slide is the bar chart before 2017. so we grew

a SAS DIY model up to about 1.2 1.5 million and we had churn or we had a retention of about 70 percent uh pretty high churn we couldn't change it we couldn't uh fix it we couldn't retain any more customers we through everything we knew at it and I finally looked at my team and I said enough with the crazy this isn't working let's stop doing this

DIY model and let's configure our organization and our business and our offering around what our ICP needs for the value that we're delivering and we started all over again and we turned out all on a million 0.2 1.5 in in Zombie Revenue over the past we have a little bit left and we rebuilt the whole business so that revenue on the slide right there is all contracted annually contracted business

um and it's all ARR so we're on the right path thank God but uh that was a that was uh that was a hard thing to do so how do we burn the bridges um let's talk about that so this is not supposed to be animated sorry about that here we go um so this is our workflow this is what we do we as I said before we build strategic plans we translate those plans into okrs and then we and we manage a

quarterly Performance Cycle so um we were running a DIY process and people did a great job building their strap plans and we had massive churn on the implementation and execution side um and so we basically realized that it wasn't working I mean the product wasn't working the service wasn't working the people that we were selling to could not find the value and so that's why we we flipped the model here's our retention what it was and we

were stuck at those low numbers and you can see as we change the model we built an embedded SAS our our software model and our services model we Blended them together and I was talking to some folks yesterday about that we no longer do this thing in our organization where we say software and services we say software and services so we have a completely 100 Blended model and I'll talk about that in just a little bit just this year we changed it even more

and that's how we got the expansion Revenue that got us to the 107 percent so I'm excited to see that we are fully bootstrapped we have no debt Nathan um

we are working too hard um we have no debt we are profitable we pray play pay profit sharing um and we're still here so uh it was not an easy transition I have to say so anyways we brought the Two Worlds together and I have to say the reason that we did that is we finally took a big step back and the gentleman who just spoke before me um just put a really fine point on that we got very very tight about our ICP and what the value prop is that that

specific group of individuals needed from us and we bundle together the software and services to deliver that so again we'll talk about that a little bit more in just a second um I I want to say just a little bit about this though is we matched our products and services and our pricing model against the specific job to be done so we we are not doing it the same way that everybody else is doing it

again it's working for us we are winning business against our OK our competitors because we are the only offering out there that has a blended model and people come to us and we fix their okr messes because what they are doing with their SAS only providers in a lot of cases isn't working so again we'll take everybody's you know lost customers all day long so so the big problem of course that everybody says is the labor side of services is too expensive you're not

going to hit your 80 margins okay that's probably true we're still working on that I'm not gonna lie um but we're clocking in about 200k per FTE and that's pretty good that's above average I'm very happy with that there are 13 people on our team um 14 when I think of myself as doing two jobs which all of most of us are probably doing um I don't have that work-life balance but that's okay so there's 13 of us and

that's pretty good I'm okay with that every single client is assigned to a senior strategist they know the work they know how to deliver strategic plans they know how to write okrs they know how to manage a quarterly Performance Cycle we do not have low lower um trained customer service reps so we also have a few bench Consultants that help us deliver this work as well um and um and yes we've standardized the engagement and of course we have process

kpis so that has what that is what has changed our retention we bring in the right customers because our sales force of one knows how to do the work as well um and we retain those customers because we align them with people that understand the specifics of what we're doing we are selling business strategy and organizational performance so it matters that we can speak to Executive teams and that's what it's that's what's made the difference for us um so how do we sell SAS plus

um this has been again uh quite a journey for us maybe like all of you I could pepper the walls with all my different pricing Pages um we stopped doing that uh we do not have a pricing page anymore so I'll talk about that in just a minute um but here's how we land our ICP we are vicious with our inbound we um we only do inbounds Andre maybe I'll talk to you about that we don't do any outbound because selling strategy in

okrs is like selling a root canal so we stopped doing that doesn't work for us at least not yet so we built a really really robust inbound predictable inbound engine so those are monthly numbers for us that might not look very big but our annual contract value is about 30k so we're pretty happy with that um our specific metric that we drive towards is our 20 mqls that means a call held I have to say shout out to chili

Piper we just converted to them and we doubled last week our number of calls held so we're still working on dialing in the qualification on that but that's okay it's pretty awesome so I'm super excited about that anyways and that's our conversion path there so you can see uh pretty good pretty predictable pretty healthy no paid we don't do any paid and I guess maybe the the hack and the takeaway for those of you that are driving an inbound content strategy is producing contents

easy we are producing content all of us all of the time producing low in the funnel content that converts is something that we shifted to and that was a big unlock for us it might be obvious it wasn't obvious to us so anyhow and we have brutal qualification because we have one sales person so uh yeah all-in-one pricing this also is um yeah this is also one of the uh unconventional things that we did we got rid of the pricing page we're selling

strategy so selling like 399 499 599 was not in alignment with the value of what we're selling um so we got rid of it and we said great if you want to buy from us you're going to talk to us and we're going to solution sell to you so that's what we do that's why we really focused on calls held with our ICP um we uh it's all unlimited users we don't sell per seat and the reason that we did that is because when we deploy

okrs the more people that have okrs the better off we are why would we put a pricing barrier up in front of our customers so unlimited users yes we did the analytics on that so that the pricing covers like 80 percent of what the value price would have been anyways if we were doing per seat selling and quite frankly it makes the administrative side a lot easier and then we embedded the services there's no question we don't ask you if you want Services we don't ask if you want an add-on if you want to buy from us it's software and services that's how we sell

it so here is our uh here's our pricing this is our model um we just landed on this we just changed to this we do quarterly automatically automatically renewed offerings most of our customers start at the expert lab but they want to get to DIY because everybody wants DIY but they never want they know they can't start there so that's kind of like our little bit of our hook we got to our 107

percent in our expansion is because we just converted some customers that were going to bail because of this pricing model because they were paying us at the expert LED level or the coach level and we offered them sort of a different way to go about it the DIY and that kept them because they knew how to run the process themselves and they didn't need us anymore so so they'll love our application but they don't need our services we understand that so that's what the DIY piece is on there as well but at any rate I just want to say that this was a bit of an unlock for us

because we increased our prices about 30 percent we shifted to a quarterly pricing model match that up with our like our job to be done which is managing a quarterly process and got paid more for that so that's um that's really working for us and um and that's how we got to more than 100 retention so how do we keep our customers again a little bit more unconventional maybe some of you are doing this I don't know

we don't have to tango we don't have gain Insight our gain side I wish we did and wish we could afford it but we can't so we built our own metrics based on not utilization because we don't really care about app utilization we care about the fact that our clients are delivering organizational performance so if they're not hitting their kpis and their okrs We are failing as an organization so we built our retention metrics around the

effectiveness of the process their actual organizational performance and then the strength of our relationship we are selling ourselves as experts in this work and so we of course are their strategy partner so if we're not seen as that then the value proposition fails so those are our metrics those are our retention metrics and we're really really focused on those on a weekly basis as most of us probably are this is our own dashboard so we matched our kpis

to our clients expected value we don't actually I mean we do have utilization metrics but we don't look at them that often and then this is our homegrown client scorecard it worked for us it was easy to build and it was the right price point so here we are and again as I mentioned we match that data up with a team of people who know how to do the work and can take action against those specific early warning signs those early turn signs

um yep and not just csrs so so that was kind of quick that was more than 20 minutes but that's okay so I talked a little bit about burning the bridges it was really hard to burn the bridges I have to say um I work with both of my parents we're a family business um and my dad's awesome he's my CFO and he's a CPA and he's great and he was just like we can't do this we can't add all this labor in was like great dad but I can't retain customers this is like not a sustainable business it's not

working so bless his heart we still have that debate but uh when I say that too like we really had to burn the bridges we had to say we're not doing this anymore we do not sell software only um so SAS plus is working for us where we're going with it is we do have to get the cost of service down so we of course are automating of course we're standardizing of course we're trying to make every you know hour matter um we're heading in that direction the other thing we're doing is we launched a

community yesterday which I was so excited about to really get focused and do wrap around forever every customer of ours that's leading strategy and organizational performance so I guess my Takeaway on all that is we learned the hard way we stopped doing stuff that is supposed to work but didn't work for us and we really really doubled down on the stuff that works and what works for us is SAS plus inbound and really really talented people that

understand how to deliver the work that drives our product that drives our service and that drives our value to our customers so thanks so much [Applause] [Music] [Applause]