EP25: Top 5 Areas for Growth

In Demand: How to Grow Your SaaS to $1M ARR and Beyond

Are you investing in marketing, but not seeing the growth you were aiming for? It might be because you’re overlooking another key growth area.

In this episode of In Demand, Asia Orangio, CEO of DemandMaven, breaks down the top five areas to look at first when it comes to growth.

You’ll learn why marketing might not be the best lever to pull in your business right now and how focusing on operations, retention, and activation can drive your growth.

TL;DR

• 0:45 - Putting more dollars into marketing won't be the best growth investment if you haven't taken care of the core areas of the business yet.
• 1:50 - Area #1 is the activation and onboarding part of the customer experience. The benchmarks to look at depending on your model are below and if you're not reaching these benchmarks it's likely there is a lot of space for you to improve activation.
  • Demo to paying customer, aim for 30%
  • Free trial to paying customer, aim for 30 to 50%
  • Freemium free account to paying customer, aim for 2 to 3%
• 7:45 - Area # 2 is retention. If you don't have any or don't have an efficient process for retaining customers who would otherwise churn it is likely a big opportunity for growth.
• 11:02 - Area # 3 is expansion. Upselling or cross-selling into existing plans you have or creating add ons. To do expansion well you need to have a strong product innovation process and good customer marketing to sell the value of expanded plans or add ons.
• 13:40 - Area # 4 is looking at your L.T.V./Average Revenue per User. If these aren't increasing over time it points to an issue with customer retention or a lack of expansion revenue. LTV will also vary between markets and you might be able to target a higher LTV market.
• 16:35 - Area # 5 is operations. If you are stuck on growth, but don't have good systems and processes in place for operations, then plans and strategies for marketing aren't going to create results. If you recognize this as an issue in your business it likely makes sense to invest in operations first by making a hire or improving processes.