Why our customers renew

As an 18 month old startup we’ve recently entered customer renewal season. With all SaaS companies, but especially early stage companies, your first clients are your most precious. They were brave enough to take a punt, with no fancy customer logos on our website, case studies or testimonials, they bought our product on the promise of the founders that we could deliver them value. Sure, there would be bumps along the road that would result in some casualties and ultimately our first churn (and only so far), but having now re-signed more clients than we’ve lost, I thought it was an opportunity to reflect on why the majority of our customers have chosen to continue the journey with Mentorloop.

Founders: The Founder Factor

We always knew and still know that at the start of any business journey, the founders are front and centre when it comes to customer acquisition.

Many hours are spent understanding our customers’ pain points and framing our sales pitch around how we can help. We are transparent — there will be bumps along the road — with any early product the user experience won’t be perfect and bugs may pop up from time to time — but we want our clients to be our partners in this journey. The flip-side being that clients will not only provide us with feedback, but also have a key role in setting the tone and direction for our product road map so that inevitably it is something highly relevant to them and their users.

Team: 2 Key Hires

No man is an island and no two person founding team is a complete SaaS company. The importance of building a team was one of the key take-aways from our journey through Australia’s best accelerator program: Startmate.

While Startmate transformed both our belief and our capabilities, it’s impact on acceleration was significantly augmented by the impact of our first key hires. Having a better understanding of our business made us more confident in recognising the talent we needed on board to not only acquire new customers but retain them. Our Marketing Manager has been instrumental in improving the quality of inbound leads, increasing general brand awareness and just making Mentorloop look a bit sexier! But he’s also done a lot to improve the education of our users in the platform through implementing targeted content tracks and just getting ‘chattier’ with them through Intercom.

Up until this point, we always thought the next hire would be a sales person to help us… well accelerate sales of course!

However, after receiving a job application from a customer success manager, (with no job advertised) it made us stop and reflect on what the business really needed at this point in time. With over 20 clients in the platform, it was becoming a full time job in managing these accounts, so our time was inevitably being taken away from new business. Going back to the first point above, we realised that again at this crucial early stage of our business, our time as founders was still best spent on closing leads, however, this shouldn’t be at the expense of our existing loyal customers. Therefore it made sense that we invest in a Customer Success Manager who could spend time on automating processes, while also further elevating the level of proactive account management to help drive referrals and ensure our clients championed our product.

We now have a very clear picture of our customer journey and a dialogue to match critical times in their mentor program.

Product: Continuous small improvements

While there is A LOT we want to do to our product that aligns with the true vision for Mentorloop, we still need to make sure our current customers continue to have a good time. So here lies the challenge in prioritising feature requests, bugs, UX issues as well as money and time.

We take pride in maintaining a consultative and proactive approach with our customers and while we are responsive to customer feedback, there is still a balancing act in maintaining customer expectations and what and when you are actually able to deliver. Based-off our near 100% renewal rate and strong growth in existing accounts, I’d dare say we’ve been pretty good at doing this and I think the churn article Lucy previously wrote specifically talks to this point in more detail.

Customers: The customer is always right…only some of the time

Having come from a small family business, it was ingrained in me from an early age that the customer is always right. I still believe this but I also think for an early stage business it’s about knowing who is the right customer for you.

Start ups lack two key resources: money and time, and it simply doesn’t make sense to push a square peg into a round hole to blindly hold on to every customer. It’s important that your early customers have an understanding and appreciation for the stage of business you are at and that product market fit probably hasn’t been achieved yet. So avoid customers who have unrealistic expectations, are high maintenance or screw you on price — these are the early warning signs they will take up most of your time, with a low likelihood of forming a successful partnership.

Mentorloop: So where we at?

We are a well funded, growing startup on a mission to make mentoring mainstream. Our unique vision to have an inclusive approach to mentoring is inspiring our customers to think differently about how they deploy mentoring within their business.

We’d love the opportunity to talk to any business who believes in a holistic approach to learning and development and that the right connection can change a life.