3 Hard & Fast Rules for SaaS and Online Business

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In this podcast, Dean, the founder of Owendenny Digital, discusses the importance of staying focused on growth metrics for SaaS companies and online brands. He emphasizes three hard and fast rules for success: setting clear goals and tracking progress, continuously testing and optimizing marketing strategies, and investing in customer success. Dean shares personal experiences and advises listeners to never lose sight of their growth metrics to achieve business growth and success.

Here, you will learn:

1) Setting clear goals and tracking progress is crucial for measuring growth and success.

2) Regularly monitoring key performance metrics helps establish baselines and track progress towards targets.

3) Testing and optimizing marketing strategies and tactics is essential to discover effective approaches and improve results.

4) Implementing an A/B testing protocol allows for continuous improvement and stacking wins on top of each other.

5) Collecting and storing learnings from tests and initiatives enables informed decision-making and better future performance.

6) Investing in customer success by providing top-notch support and a positive experience leads to higher customer retention.

Timestamps

[00:01:17] – “Business success requires focus.”

[00:03:28] – “Confused by Revenue Metrics?”

[00:03:57] – “Grow with metrics: SaaS startups”

[00:05:13] – Track metrics to grow business.

[00:05:50] – Weekly CPA/CPL tracking for success.

[00:07:39] – “AB Testing: Strategy Matters Most”

[00:07:56] – Test, Track, Compound, Succeed.

[00:08:38] – Stacking wins for business scaling.

[00:10:08] – Improve customer experience

[00:10:44] – Grow business with accountability.

Hey everyone. How you going? This is Dean here, founder and director of Owendenny digital, and welcome to open source growth. The leading destination for SaaS direct response advertising, customer acquisition, and anything that involves a credit card. Ad platform and getting your business to blow up online.

Now. Thank you for tuning in today. I really appreciate it. Every time we get to see a view or someone subscribed to the podcast. So if you are hell bent on enabling your SaaS company or your online brand or help whoever you’re helping online to succeed. Feel free to subscribe, share this podcast. If you get some value from it.

And yeah, joining on the conversation. So let’s get straight into it today. Guys, this is actually a cautionary tale. Believe it or not. I, as you would maybe aware, I run a boutique marketing agency called Owendenny Digital and we support SaaS companies, cybersecurity companies, online brands.

And a whole suite of businesses grow online through compelling, direct response advertising solutions, paid media services, uhh, marketing strategy, fractional CMO engagements. Et cetera, et cetera. Like we do a lot of amazing things for a lot of amazing businesses and we’ve got some amazing case studies, but you know what.

Sometimes running your own business can be tough. And I’m wanting to really ensure that you know that as a founder or a director or chief marketing officer because. It doesn’t matter how good you are marketing. If you take your eyes off the wheel with your numbers and your marketing strategy and your…y our growth targets and your ad costs and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You can be in a whole world of pain and hurt. In fact, we experienced a little bit of this morning. In our monthly management meeting to kick off the month, we were looking at our profit and loss, and we noticed a huge discrepancy between our growth targets and where we are currently at. And it wasn’t positive.

Full disclaimer. I had a bit of a panic attack, but now we’re okay. We’re on the podcast and we’re talking to you. Why does this happen? Like why can you be plodding along doing the actions, taking things off, launching campaigns, generating leads, closing deals, watching your pipeline, grow, seeing your SaaS company blow up or your agency or whatever. And then you get to the long and heart of it. And your so far between.

Where you want to be and where you are right now. Like how does that happen? See, it’s not so much a case of that. You’re not working hard. It’s a matter of the fact that what you’re doing right now, isn’t currently working. But how can you tell when a lot of the time you just feel like you’re creating content publishing, running ads, spending a whole heap of money with Google, Facebook, Linkedin and TikTok.

You’re..You’re just launching campaigns, your marketing people tell you it’s good. Your sales people complaining about the lead quality. You spending all this money, but then you look at your monthly recurring revenue or your forecasted ARR your annual recurring revenue. And you’re thinking.

What about my CPAs? What about my CPMs? What about my CPCs WTF? You’re just completely, panic-stricken in oh, why isn’t this all working out? You know what. There are three hard and fast rules you can live by in your startup. And these are three hard and fast rules, which we. Nine times out of Tam lived by it Owens any digital. In fact, these are the three hard and fast rules you should live by.

So you never keep your eye off your growth metrics within your SaaS startup. So let’s just get to it today because I think this will be super valuable for anyone. And it goes without saying. Anyone who has a SaaS company? An online brand coaching program, whatever e-commerce. It will help for all of you.

Here’s for number one. You must set clear goals and track progress. So you only know if you’re progressing. If you can measure one of the secrets to success is by being able to measure where you are progressing, believe it or not. It’s really interesting. I guarantee you, if you just go to the gym and you get uninspired, I can understand why.

But as soon as you implement an app or some form of tracking program, whenever you go to the gym and lift weights, you’re going to be more motivated to get out there and succeed purely because of the fact that. You’re actually tracking your progress. You tracking your volume, you’re tracking how much your weight gains are happening, how much you can lift, et cetera, et cetera. So that’s the step number one. So what do you need to go about measuring? First things first, you need to develop some KPIs or.

Key performance indexes to determine where you want to grow. Identify those key metrics that matter most to you? What are they? Is it your monthly recurring revenue? Is it your customer acquisition costs? What do you need to keep them between and be successful? Do you need to mitigate your churn rate? Is it sitting at a 23%?

And you want to get it down to an 8%. And how do you want to go about maximizing your customer lifetime value? You need to go about tracking these things every single month, so you can establish a baseline. Then once you establish that baseline, you then must set yourself some specific targets for each metric.

And regularly track your progress. In fact, this is what we do at Owendenny Digital with all our advertising solutions, for all our customers, we are checking the CPAs and the CPLs for both SQLs and MQLs every single week. It is super crucial in order for our clients to succeed. And again, if you need to develop a dashboard, if you need some form of analytics tool, do you need to create a spreadsheet? Make sure you’re doing this and visit these spreadsheets and have them working within your business on a weekly basis. In fact, any customer that has a dashboard.

We generally visited every week with our media buying team or a direct response advertising team. So you can be successful. And I need you to do that for your business, for the KPIs that do matter. So you can enable that T2D3 growth that you’ve always dreamed about. So that’s step one. That’s the hard and fast rule. Number one.

Set clear goals and track your progress. Hard and fast rule number two, test and optimize your marketing strategies and tactics. Duh. I know I have so many, so many podcasts on this, but I cannot emphasize enough that you must be testing and optimizing your marketing strategies on platforms and all the tactics every single week, because you never know through testing what you may stumble upon and you may strike the equivalent of black gold.

i.e oil in your game. So what acquisition channels are you using is a social media advertising. Are you running content marketing? Is it your inbound strategy? Which part of your inbound strategy is working your email marketing? Are you running SMS marketing? Are you doing trade show stance or do you use paper ads? Are you doing some offline? Have you got a really good.

AB testing protocol in place. These things all really matter. But again, most of these things. Our tactics. Within a broader marketing strategy. So as long as you’ve set up a great marketing strategy with clear goals, at the beginning of starting your financial years worth of marketing, you’re going to be in a really good place here because then you can go about effectively nesting in these tactical efforts and initiatives every single month. So then you can compound and see what works. Now, this is probably a bit of a bonus and I’m going to say, this is super paramount here is that you must not only have an AB testing protocol, but also a means of being able to collate and store your learnings. So month in and month out. You are able to then use your learnings and then roll them into the next test. So you are continuously improving upon your KPIs. So for instance, you do a split test and you drop your customer. Yeah, your cost per lead by say 20%. Okay, cool. We’re going to implement this again in the next split test, but then we will test another element and then you keep on.

Stacking those wins on top of each other. All of a sudden you’ve doubled your click through rate. All of a sudden you’ve doubled your you’ve halved your or even Dropped your cost per marketing qualified lead by 75%, then all of a sudden you’ve dropped your cost per acquisition by say 30%.

Then your business starts to scale for less money. So again, make sure you’ve got a means of doing the AB tests, but also a means of being able to collate and have all that information there at your fingertips. Super, super crucial. Now here is hard and fast rule. Number three, you must invest in your customer success. So it’s crucial, especially if you want to maintain those high growth KPIs that you’re investing in your customer success. Now, this totally means that your customers must receive top notch support through the entire journey with your product or your service or your business. So if you’re a marketing agency, what do you need to invest in? You need to invest in high quality account managers, great systems feedback. How do you get. How do you improve your marketing services? How do you improve your copy delivery? How do you improve your creative.

Your creative feedback process. If you’re a SaaS company, like what do you need to do to the product? What features do you need to implement? What benefits are being drawn from the product? Again here, the whole focus of what you need to be doing here. Is on increasing your customer attention by offering loyalty programs, incentives.

And other retention strategies. Here, can go about checking out that net promoter score and your customer satisfaction. Scores to ensure that you’re delivering a positive customer experience. So guys. They’re the three hard and fast rules that you need to live by. So you can enable your business to grow at the rate you wish to grow, because believe me, I’ve learned it’s costing me hundreds of thousands of dollars along the way that if you lose sight of your growth metrics, your business starts to dive get on top of this and you will succeed because if you can hold yourself accountable to the growth metrics and the KPIs.

There’s no reason that your business won’t get to where it needs to go. If you found this valuable, please share it with a friend. I love you all. God bless. Stay safe and get your business growing for me. I’ll talk to y’all soon. Cheers for now.