One of the most important fundamentals of being a Pipelinerpreneur is to reduce your churn rate. “Churn rate” is the annual percentage rate at which customers stop subscribing to a service. To put it more simply, you need to hang onto your customers! Keeping customers is the foundation of your business, along with building confidence in the product, your team, and our company.
Build Strategically
I encourage Pipelinerpreneurs to not try and grow their companies too quickly but to think strategically. As an example, if you have 10 customers, and they have 20 licenses each, that means you would have 200 licenses. At the former price (just to make it simple) of $1,000 per license, you would earn $100,000 in the first year because you keep 50% of license revenue for first-time licenses. In the 2nd year, you would earn $60,000 because you keep 30 percent of renewals.
If you then add 4 more customers, you are building strategically, like you would play chess. It’s not how fast you start, it’s how you build up your business. Building slowly allows you to concentrate on servicing and keeping those customers.
The great thing about being a Pipelinerpreneur is that you can build up your Pipeliner business in parallel to having another job. Maybe in the first year, you win only 2 customers. Then you keep them, expand them, and maybe the following year because you’re more confident, you add 3 more. In a SaaS business, it’s all about keeping a steady stream of revenue.
By building relationships—servicing and supporting your customers well—you can have a very good life with just a handful of customers.
The 5 Ways of Keeping a Customer
Here are 5 ways of greatly reducing your churn rate and keeping your Pipeliner customers:
1. Build that relationship! If a customer has a great relationship with a company, it’s much more difficult for that customer to just walk away.
In many cases today, people are using cloud services without ever talking to a person. They end up using that service for maybe a couple of months, then leaving. Nobody at the vendor company seems to care. But when they have a real relationship, the tendency to just walk away is much less.
Building relationships is a way to automatically reduce churn rate.
2. Find ways to continuously bring value to customers. Doing so several times a year contributes to keeping them.
3. In regard to the product itself, you as a Pipelinerpreneur need to do nothing to continuously bring value, because we are constantly improving the system. You get that as a bonus for working with us—but you do have to let your customers know about it! We’re constantly improving Pipeliner, so make sure you inform your customers whenever we make an improvement.
4. Make sure to inform your customers about our online multimedia platform SalesPOP. This is an enormous amount of free content you can offer your customers, and it’s an incredible additional value that Pipeliner brings to the table. SalesPOP has tens of thousands of articles and videos on sales, sales management, entrepreneurship, and much more. It grows every year, and in fact last year we added 500 new contributors.
5. Additional value is also created through powerful Pipeliner features such as Automatizer. Use them, and make sure you educate your customers on the value they bring to their businesses, too.
Keeping these 5 fundamentals in place will greatly help you retain many more customers for life.
Begin With Your Vision
As I said in the second article in this series, being a Pipelinerpreneur begins with your own vision of what you want to achieve—what you want to bring to the table, what you’re willing to invest, what kind of goals you set for yourself. You cannot move ahead and create a life for yourself by simply sitting on the couch and dreaming about it.
My own vision is to have perhaps 100,000 Pipelinerpreneurs. If each of them only had 2, 3, 4, or 5 customers per year, we would create a tremendous movement, and by reputation alone, all of these small businesses could feed off of each other.
I’m not saying you should try and start a million-dollar company right out of the gate. But you could easily earn an additional $50,000 or $60,000 with perhaps a combined month of work throughout a whole year. That’s a nice income for many—and you can easily build it to be more.
We’re here to support your vision and your achievement, to nurture you and equip you. I hope the information I’ve provided in this series will help!
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