If your business is a bucket, you can keep pouring as much water (customers) as you want into it, but if you have a lot of leaks, you’ll never fill the bucket. Without filling the bucket, you’ll never achieve growth.

<ul><li>Customer churn refers to how many individual customers have deleted their accounts, cancelled their subscriptions, or not logged in for X amount of time.</li></ul> <ul><li>Revenue churn focuses on the value of these customers, and measures the monetary loss of the future transactions rather than the loss of relationship.</li></ul>

Customer Churn vs Revenue Churn

<ul><li>Competitors. If a new competitor has appeared in your industry and is making some serious waves, it’s natural to expect a peak in your churn rate as customers shift.</li><li>False advertising/disingenuous marketing. This is why marketing teams deserve a lot of credit for customer retention. Bad marketing leads to churned customers, who may arrive at your product with the wrong expectations.</li><li>Usability/accessibility issues. An interface that isn’t easy to use, appealing to look at, or adaptable for those with special needs, will be dropped like a hot potato.</li></ul>

Identifying The Source of the Churn 1/2

<ul><li>Bloated price point. If the price isn’t justified by the value the product provides, customers will likely search for an alternative.</li><li>Reduced functionality. Did you scrap a feature that you thought no one liked? If you then see floods of users abandoning your product, it’s probably missed!</li><li>Unmet needs. Quite simply, your product doesn’t meet the need or solve the problem the way the customer thought it would.</li><li>Poor customer service. Word of mouth is a powerful thing, and a bad customer service experience can ruin a customer relationship for life.</li></ul>

Identifying The Source of the Churn 2/2

<h3>Damage control</h3>Recovering from a loss of trust is hard, but not impossible. The key is not to shy away from the conflict, but to lean into it. Pretending that the controversy doesn’t exist will only deepen the distrust between you and your customers. <h3>Rewarding loyalty</h3>While many companies focus heavily on providing discounts and freebies to new customers, it’s a grave mistake to ignore your existing customers. They should be rewarded for their loyalty just as much as you reward new customers for taking a chance on you.

How to Reduce Churn 1/2

<h3>Re-brand</h3>While not a step that should be taken lightly, if your product/service is one of the older ones on the market, it could have fallen out of fashion. <a href="https://productschool.com/blog/product-management-2/branding-builders-netflix-vp-product/?utm_source=blog&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=WeeklyArticles">Branding is a very powerful thing</a>, and customers are paying attention to design now more than ever! <h3>Talk to your customers</h3>If you’ve ever cancelled a subscription before, you’ve most likely been on the receiving end of a ‘we’re sorry to see you go’ message, along with a short survey about why you’ve decided to cancel.

The first step in getting your churn rates under control is to understand them. Here's everything a Product Manager needs to know...

Customer Success 

What To Do With a High Churn Rate

Selling is a delicate science. Instead of pages of elaborate descriptions, you only need the right words—even if it’s two sentences long.Goldstein came up with a two-line pitch that effectively summarized Hipmunk’s value proposition: Lowering distribution costs. Eventually, Goldstein's company went on to secure over $55 million from investors.

Adam Goldstein’s Two-Line Pitch & Shultz Photo School’s One-Liner

Think about the following questions when creating a short and concise B2B pitch deck:<ul><li>What does your product or service do? What are its benefits?</li><li>What is the unique selling proposition (USP) of your product or service? How is it different from your competitors?</li><li>What is the ultimate goal of a product or service? Think about the pain points that it can solve.</li></ul>

Takeaway

Your pitch should provide a perspective based on your audience, so they know how your product or service can benefit them and why they should buy it from you.Make sure your sales pitch is relevant to your target audience and interesting enough to pique their attention

Make it All About the Customer

Here are a few tips to make your live pitches fun and engaging:<ul><li>Explain the advantages of your product quickly.</li><li>Add humor to your demonstrations.</li><li>Add additional visual aids, such as graphs, statistics, and charts, to make your story more interesting.</li><li>Practice how you’d approach the audience with the product beforehand.</li></ul>

What do door-to-door salesmen, magicians, and late-night infomercials have in common?They try to create a “wow” moment by demonstrating the product or service’s most unique feature.Although giving a demo of your product in your sales pitch costs time and resources, it’s a worthy investment.An Eg Video: <a href="https://youtu.be/ggi3yfUv0Mo">Aaron Krause’s Scrubbing Tool Pitch</a>

Show What Your Product or Service Can Do

Apple’s keynote videos are a masterclass for those wanting to create the perfect sales pitch.It begins with the company’s rich history and moves the specifications of its products in a relatable and easy language. There is absolutely no use of jargon—only features that appeal to Apple’s audience.

Use Your Brand Story to Create Hype

Here’s how to create hype through your brand story:<ul><li>Explain your brand history briefly.</li><li>Create a backstory that’s interesting enough to attract prospects’ attention.</li><li>Avoid using metaphors.</li><li>Back your claims with facts.</li><li>Avoid jargon and instead, use a relatable and easy language.</li></ul>

Mark Cuban, the owner of Dallas Mavericks, had his work cut out for him when his team was struggling to win matches back in the early 2000s, which resulted in low ticket sales.He knew that low ticket sales would translate to heavy losses, which could really shake his company’s future. So he decided to take charge of the situation.Cuban got on the phone with former season ticket holders and asked them to come back to the game, reminding them of their experiences of going to the games as kids. He also emphasized how winning or losing of a team didn’t matter—the feeling did.

Build an Emotional Connection

Here are a few tips to create more emotionally-appealing sales pitches:<ul><li>Adopt a more compassionate and understanding approach when writing your pitch.</li><li>Create a phone sales pitch script that has nostalgic or emotional value.</li><li>Avoid making false claims while pitching.</li><li>Include commonalities between you and your customers.</li><li>Try to add shock value to your pitch.</li></ul>

Want to improve your B2B sales pitch? Get 10 proven B2B sales pitch examples and learn why they work well.

Stashed ideas

10 Proven B2B Sales Pitch Examples to Inspire Your Own

<ul><li>Personalization means that you’ve thought about who this person is, how they see the world, what interests them, and what they want — you’ve developed a <a href="http://www.iep.utm.edu/theomind/">“theory of mind”</a> about the recipient. This shows them you have put work into understanding them.</li><li>You also make it clear why you are emailing them as opposed to anyone else. Research shows that <a href="http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=buy.optionToBuy&uid=1994-33384-001">people are far more motivated to help others when they feel uniquely qualified to do so</a>. </li></ul>

Tailor the message to the recipient

Knowing someone in common is the strongest form of social proof you can offer. If you have any direct connections, mention them. A mutual friend means you are no longer a stranger.Lacking that, if you have any authority, credibility, or social status that is relevant to this person and your request, mention it quickly — a line or two should do it. The more “important” you are, the more likely you are to get a response.

Validate yourself

Remember that people will go much further to <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/09/your-money/overcoming-an-aversion-to-loss.html?_r=0&pagewanted=all">avoid pain than to acquire pleasure</a>. If you’ve done your research and found a major pain point for the recipient, and you can offer relief, highlight that.If you can’t solve a problem, give people something they want. Offer to connect them with someone they’d like to meet — that stands out, since almost no one gives before they ask. But your gift needs to feel appropriate, from one stranger to another.

Alleviate your audience’s pain or give them something they want.

S<a href="http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1709943">hort emails are more likely to be read</a> than long ones. And emails that request clear, specific action <a href="https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/Web/People/kiesler/publications/2005pdfs/2005-Dabbish-CHI.pdf">get a much higher response rate</a>. Long-winded, rambling cold emails suck.One of the best ways to keep things short and direct is to <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/talk.html">write the way you’d talk</a>. I would recommend reading your email out loud before you send it.

Keep it short, easy, and actionable.

By expressing gratitude and some vulnerability, you give them the feeling that they are a good person if they choose to help. You also give them a little rush of power and status, because you’re approaching them.

Be appreciative — and a little vulnerable

An effective cold email does five things.

A Guide to Cold Emailing

Companies often have difficulty talking with customers about prices and have a legitimate need to reduce “friction” in the transaction. They accomplish this by using tricks such as tweaking price endings to distort perceptions or to signal a bargain. For example, $9.99 is perceived as a whole dollar cheaper than $10. The challenge for purpose-oriented organizations is to be transparent and truthful.

Price challenges

A helpful starting point to improve how organizations present their prices is to accept that price is an integral part of its dialogue with customers. The next step is how to explain it. The field of linguistics gives us four rules to have meaningful dialogue:<ol><li>The rule of quality: Participants ay only what they believe to be accurate.</li><li>The rule of manner: They avoid overly vague, complex, or simplistic expressions.</li><li>The rule of relevance: They only contribute information that is related to the topic.</li><li>The rule of quantity: They give the right amount of information.</li></ol>

How organizations present their prices

Position the price as a component of the company's responsible and ethical intentions. For example, Southwest Airlines price fairness in the name of its approach to service: On its website, the airline describes "Transfarency" as a "philosophy in which customers are treated honestly and fairly, and low fares actually stay low — no unexpected bag fees, change fees, or hidden fees." From a linguistics standpoint, this applies to the rule of relevance:<ul><li>Communicating about the company's ethics.</li><li>Connecting price to that message.</li><li>Hoping the customer makes the connection between the two.</li></ul>

Make price a reflection of your values

Customers often wonder how a price was set or why it has recently changed. This suggestion applies to the linguistic rule of manner by being very clear. Demystifying how prices are set or changed can help establish a trusting relationship with customers. For example, the furniture company Neptune provides extensive detail of its underlying logic for pricing.

Explain the price

Any of the four linguistic rules for dialogue can be broken if done in a lucid way.For example:<ul><li>To show customers just how affordable its furniture is, Saudi Arabia IKEA replaced monetary values printed on price tags with images of coffee cups, pizzas, bananas, and other relatively inexpensive everyday items.</li><li>The Japanese ice cream brand Akagi recently apologised following a 12-cent price hike on some of its products after 25 years without change.</li></ul>

Violate a rule, but do it blatantly

Even if inflation means you have to charge more, don’t try to hide it from your customers.

Talking to Your Customers About Prices

"You can’t begin to tell a story without understanding why that story should matter to the people you want to serve. You can’t build a great business just by being different"

Set out to be the best at whatever it is you’re going to be. Don’t set out to be okay, or an alternate service that is slightly cheaper or just alright.Figure out who you want to help, and what you can do to ease their pain. Be the one everyone who cares about your particular thing must-have.

Be the best

"Because people don’t want to do; they want to be. They want to be less busy and more productive, less alone and more connected, less fearful and more safe"

So much time has been spent explaining to people the features of services and products but that is speaking to a rational buyer's mind. People really want to know what is underneath the product or service, and what could potentially change for them by using it. Spend more time thinking about what promises you can make, and less about what the obvious features are. You need to “stand in a potential user’s shoes and understand the impact that an innovation and its design might have on that person’s life (and thus in the market).

Promises, not features

"Today the shortcut to more is to matter – not to be different, but to do something that creates difference. It isn’t the person with the best ideas who wins; it’s the person who has the greatest understanding of what really matters to people."

"If in creating new products and services for people our biggest concern is understanding and improving things for other people – what a gorgeous world we could have."

A modern marketing strategy involves not screaming at potential customers but instead telling stories they can relate to or identify with. Airbnb, for example, offers great stories about the company. It is aware of the high cost of hotels and their impersonal service. Therefore, Airbnb offers more than just cheap hotel rooms. They encourage customers to experience the world in a whole new way.How can you create a story that people can relate to? A different model should be followed, which involves the six P’s: principles, purpose, people, personal, perceptions, and product.

Tell a story that customers can relate to

<ul><li>The first step is to focus on your truths. Where do you excel and where do you struggle? Are there ways to incorporate these into your goal-setting?</li><li>Your industry also has its own truths, which you must recognize. How does your industry function exactly? Is it possible to use or change these truths to your advantage?</li><li>You must analyze the principles of your customers. Put yourself in the shoes of the people you want to influence. Are there truths driving their behavior? Do they feel restricted or unhappy due to those truths? How do they wish to live?</li></ul>

Understand your business, market, and customers in terms of their fundamental truths

Getting to know your customers’ needs and wants is important, but that alone won’t make your business successful. It’s also important to make sure your business matters.In order to ensure that people perceive the difference in the quality of services or products you provide, the next step is to develop a personal connection with them.The life that your potential customers are leading should resonate with your product or service. Using your product or service should make people feel good.

Make it easy for people to connect and perceive in the right way

"Difference lifts the lid on how brands like Airbnb, Uber, and Apple have succeeded by creating difference and gives you a new one page method for reimaging your business and reinventing your marketing, It helps you to recognize opporunities that create value, to develop products and services that people want, and to matter to your customers" -- Provided by publisher.

What To Do With a High Churn Rate

10 Proven B2B Sales Pitch Examples to Inspire Your Own

A Guide to Cold Emailing

Talking to Your Customers About Prices

Difference: The method for reimagining your business and reinventing your marketing

It's time to

READ

LIKE

A PRO!