Ep 165: The ONLY 3 Ways To Scale Any Saas Or Membership Business with Jaryd Krause

Jaryd Krause

Imagine being able to completely, wholeheartedly, and with ultimate confidence know how to grow your business without doing any courses, training, watching YouTube videos, listening to podcasts, or even just learning to scale your business the right way internally!

Hi, I am Jaryd Krause, host of the Buying Online Businesses podcast, and in this episode, I am doing a solo podcast on the only three ways used to scale any SaaS or membership business. In this podcast episode, we specifically talk about why you don’t need to market on all the channels, or maybe you don’t need to market on any channels at all, as I realized with one of my clients, that we were able to double his business within twelve months. We also talk about how the focus on instead of just marketing in acquiring customers, how you can keep your members for longer and how to provide a better product or a service rather than relying on throwing more dollars into the business just through marketing working on retention and what’s involved with retention.

We also talk about what you can do to throw fuel on the fire once you have sorted out your retention issues, and only throw fuel on the fire when you have complete confidence that you are going to get results. We also talk about how to automate your business, how you can do that, and why you should be doing that to allow your business to grow? This is such a valuable episode if you own a SaaS business or membership business, are about to own one, or own any business. All these philosophies and strategies that I teach you are really good ways to grow any business, but when specifically plugged into a SaaS business or membership business, they will help these businesses really thrive. Let’s start then!

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Cool! Let’s dive into how to scale a SaaS or membership business. Firstly, I must let you know that I am actually qualified to talk about this, I am not just talking about this because I want to throw some content out there just for the sake of it. I have actually got some experience helping people scale their businesses—SaaS and membership businesses to the five figures into six figures and even the seven figure range. It’s going to have value based on what I have learned and how I have helped other people scale their SaaS and membership businesses. The first thing is a classic, and you have probably heard it all before,but knowing your numbers, I am drumming this it into you, because you have heard other people talk about it but not too many people tell you which numbers you need to know. So with SaaS and membership business, there’s a few key metrics that you really should be following.

First up, you should be looking at how long your members are actually staying in your membership, well this as your retention rate which is absolutely critical. You also want to be knowing how much they paid, how long they stayed for and how much they paid so you can work out their CLTV which stands for customer lifetime value, some other people have different acronyism its CLT for other people but just knowing that how much they spend in a lifecycle there with you and how long they are actually with you is very very valuable because to know customer lifetime value and then next metric which I am going to tell you need to know is CPA the cost per acquisition, how much it cost you to acquire a customer.

When you work out what your CPA is, how much it cost you to acquire a customer and then you also know your customer lifetime value you can work out what your profit margin is there, before you take up all your other expenses that you may have in your SaaS and membership business. It’s really important to know those metrics and if you are not following those metrics, make sure you start tracking them.

It’s also important to track other metrics as well with our SaaS and membership businesses, I am talking about the conversions you may be getting on your ads, your email marketing conversions, tracking your content productions, tracking your assets such as your social assets in your channels and how large they are growing and what you actually can pull from those and you know the correlation of how much followers or views and then how much revenue you are actually making from that as well, which are important things depending on the business and it’s all very very different depending on how you are marketing your business but tracking your marketing is quite important.

To scale your SaaS and membership business, people are usually thinking about let’s just dive into marketing, let’s get into marketing and start crushing and buying a bunch of customers or putting out content but that’s not the first place to start when we want to scale a SaaS or membership business, the first place we should start other than knowing your numbers, is to work on your retention first meaning retaining your customers or your clients, now there is a few ways that we can do this. The reason why we want to retain your client is the longer they are in there, the more money you can make and better service you can provide them. The first thing that you can do to do this is to have a really really exceptional onboarding sequence. So, what is an onboarding sequence, what does it look like?

An onboarding sequence is when someone decides to join your software, your SaaS product or membership, make them feel extra special, by welcoming them into your service and also letting them know that what they can get from your service, from your membership, and where they can go and find all the things that are our value. You don’t just wanna spend all this time, effort and energy acquiring customers through content marketing and using your own money with paid ads to get somebody in and just let them work it out on their own, that’s not a very good experience, just like with content websites and all these different types of businesses where you need to be thinking about the experience that people have when they are inside our service, in our SaaS product or using our SaaS product or our membership. So make sure that you put your best foot forward as soon as they come in, on board them very very well, show them where everything is, show them how much support you are providing them, how they can get in contact with you in terms of support which is really really important.

I will come back to support very very shortly. So make sure you have got a very good onboarding sequence, and they know how to actually use your tool, how to use your membership to get result. And if you don’t do this well enough then they are going to leave and not get the result they want and they are going to blame it on you and sometimes I should say rightly so if you don’t have a good onboarding sequence. If you don’t know and you spent all this time and effort building this business and you can’t show people how to get results then it’s a real shame , so you have that onboarding sequence. and it doesn’t need to be a sequence, it can be a system and depending on what type of business you are running, make sure you are updating them what they can do and how they can get results and where they can find all the trainings and all the tools, what they need to do to get those results.

Secondly on retention is asking for feedback, feedback is the most valuable thing in business and in life and I love feedback and some people are actually scared to ask for negative feedback. In fact, I think negative feedback is positive feedback as it equips you with knowing what you need to do to propel your business reward or propel yourself forward. And it’s not just negative feedback, maybe I shouldn’t call it negative, its constructive feedback. So how do we get feedback? We ask people for feedback, ask our members. So what I think you can do and in some ways we can do that, you can just reach out to them via email and you can ask them hey, how do you like this? What’s better? Do you like this part of the SaaS tool versus this part? Which part is easier to use? And you can start dialogue and communication and you can do it through email. Another cool way to get feedback is to ask people to fill out survey or a form.

Surveys are a, nobody wants to fill out a survey usually, so you can reframe it, use different wordings and give them a feedback form and put under the light that it is going to be very valuable for them which it is to give you feedback to make the product better so that they can get better results with less work or easier or less time whatever it is, ask for feedback. Now, if you are finding people will not fill out a feedback form then you can dangle a carrot and offer them a free product or offer them an upgrade or give them some extra coaching or an extra service or an extra training, whatever it is. So this is super super valuable and if you own a SaaS business or membership business, I believe it is worth doing once a year depending on what your turn rate is, your retention rate is which we talked about before.

You want to be ensuring that every year or constantly you’re updating and upping your business and your service and your product, ensure people do want to stay. So every single year, you are just working on retention and keeping people in. right, if people tell you want they want and what they need to get results and you give it to them, why would they leave? This is what retention is all about so let’s just ask for feedback to be able to retain customers. It’s going to help us make more money, it’s going to help them get better results as well. So feedback forms for the win!

Another way to get feedback, is to ask people once they have decided to leave your SaaS product or membership, ask them why did you leave? Is it just due to timing? You no longer need the service? But the main thing you be looking for really is value like what were they missing? What were they looking for that they didn’t get? You are looking for that from their feedback when people leave and just reaching out to them saying, “oh I am sorry to see you go, what could we have done better to give you a better product or service?” and that is a one really good way to ensure and understand why people are leaving and if it is a hole in plumbing you can plug that up and resolve that leak so people will not start leaking out and you are doing them a disservice and they are going to your competitors. So ask people, don’t be afraid to ask. If you don’t ask, you don’t know. So retention, that is after working out our numbers.

So working our numbers, then we move onto retention and before we move onto the big one, the big one that everyone likes to talk about and everyone likes to focus on and that is acquiring clients, is marketing. The reason I put these in order this way is because if you go ahead and you start doing marketing, you can spend a lot of money, pushing people into your SaaS and membership business and you don’t know what your numbers are and you don’t know how to increase, retain more people in your membership then people you spend all this money, time, effort on putting everything into marketing and people will be leaking out and you don’t know why, so fix up these holes, fix up the plumbing to make sure that everything is water tight and you are putting your best foot forward with these onboarding sequences and all that stuff to ensure that people are getting the best results and so yes that’s what marketing is essentially, its an experiment on how you can acquire customers, the cheapest way possible while still getting qualified and quality leads.

So, moving into marketing, first things first, don’t try a heap of different places to go away and do marketing on all these different channels, this is what people do, they go away and hear a podcast and hear a YouTube video or some expert talking about they have made fifty gazillion dollars in 3 and a half minutes on Tiktok or YouTube or whatever it is, and then as a business owner people go Oh my God, this opportunity is untapped; I need to start doing marketing there, I need to start doing content marketing and paid ads and all that sort of stuff on that channel, on all these channels, this is where people are getting the best results. NO NO NO! This is a huge fault that so many businesses make that they preoccupy their time, energy, effort and money into these areas and different marketing platforms and marketing strategies may not get those results. So, what should you do instead? Similar to what I was saying before about having good client retention, is asking for feedback.

So when people come and join your SaaS product , your service or when you are talking to them and working with them at some stage in your membership ask them for feedback and ask them where they found out about your tool, you product or your service or your membership and that’s when you are starting to collect data and take that feedback and that’s a bunch of data that you can use to understand that where are people coming from, how they are discovering this business and moving into becoming a member or client. That’s a very important thing to do, I will give you an example why this is critical and how this worked for one of my client. Kyle owned a membership business, we built it up and doubled it within twelve years and sold it, now with Kyle’s membership business, when he bought it he was like I am just going to, the person who owned this business Jayred ,has no blog and is not getting any search engine traffic so what I am going to do is I am going to make a bunch of content and a blog to get search engine traffic and build the business.

Now, this is a lot of what I teach is, building content site but it’s not right for every single person and every single business, and I said to Kyle, “hang on a second we can’t just do that, we are starting something and that’s basically like starting something from scratch and what we need to do is we need to do something else. We need to work out where all the clients are and the members that you have, where they came from? You can do this by way of getting feedback. You just bought the business, you can ask the previous seller that how did you get all these people and where did they come from and what sort of things did you do to get marketing and get them to become a client?” so we found out that the traffic and all the members had come from affiliates who had sold his membership as an affiliate and earn commission so that’s what we did, we went all in and we build a system around how to reach out to more affiliates, get more affiliates, he didn’t run that system, we hired somebody else to run that system and we build the business based off of what was already working and if we had gone to down the route of getting traffic from content, it would have taken a lot longer than a year to double business which we did through the method that we chose based on feedback.

It would have taken so much longer and we still wouldn’t have been guaranteed results knowing how much traffic we needed to get to take them from traffic to also a lead as well and then to sales. Don’t just go away and have this thing of I need to go and do what everybody else is doing, this has worked for their business and it’s a similar business model or it’s a membership business and this will work for my business, this is not necessarily true. You need that feedback to work out that where is people coming from, how did they get there? Then you can use that to scale your business through your , that’s the first form of marketing you should be doing, is what’s already working and lean into that more so than anything.

Next up is content marketing, how you can do this is Kyle could have done some content marketing to get affiliates but we did it in a different way, we did some outreach and found them but if you have worked out that people are finding your software, your product, your tool, your membership through content marketing then work out what is the best content you are putting out there and what channel and lean into and do that. Put out excellent content and the goal of this content isn’t to make sales, you don’t want to make sales just through your content alone, its excellent and it’s a bonus and a massive win and if you can make sales from your content. But the goal really is from each piece of content is to get people onto your email list and then once they are in your email list, you can start to build a relationship with them and sell to them. Opposite to this is what most people do is sell to people straight away, usually typically off an ad through direct advertising and typically if you own a SaaS business or a membership business, people once if they have just found about you, and they made a quick impulse decision to purchase and become a member, usually they are not going to stay as long because they don’t have a relationship with your tool, with your brand, with your membership yet or your business I should say.

So, usually once you have built a relationship through marketing through your content and through your content via email then usually decision for people to make to join your membership, or start using your tool is a logical decision and they have put some thought into it overtime and haven’t impulse purchased just because of it being a sale and they have joined because it’s the next logical step in their progression after discovering you and wanted to get a result with what they are trying to do in their life. That’s really important to understand don’t just direct sale to people as soon as possible, you want to make sure that you are building a relationship and that’s what content marketing is all about and getting people onto your email list.

Once you have worked out how that actually works and you have worked out what piece of content’s the best then you can do some real marketing to people who have consumed some of your content and put more content in front of them or ads in front of them if you want to, now that’s getting a bit more very direct asking for sales right away, you have to test and experiment this but I am not discluding marketing in itself but you really do want to work with what you have already got because that’s the best way to grow a business in my opinion. You have to be able to work where you can listen to the business because the business is telling you what you need to do to be able to get the results you want to grow it. Listen to your business, tune into it, the more you can do that, the better business owner you are going to be, the better service you are going to have and the more you are going to be able to grow your business.

Next up, it’s sort of like marketing but it’s like adding tiers, adding additional products to your business. What I mean by this is, some people may join your SaaS tool as a beginner and they need to move through the ranks to open up more tools as they grow their business so you want to have different tiers in your SaaS product or your membership, you can have additional products where they can buy one time product that they can build on or you can have one time training as well. Now, you only want to be putting out these products not to just make a bunch of money and sell more things to increase your average order value, which is the goal but you only want to be putting out products that are going to be valuable to get people results because you don’t want people to purchase those products and not have results and not like it and have to refund them and that’s just going to cost you more admin task and work then you essentially want. So make sure that each product and tier is relevant to where people are at in their journey and relevant to what they need in order to get result in their life as well.

So there you go, that’s three ways you can sale BUT don’t leave yet, don’t leave the podcast, because I have a bonus those top three are very very very important but once you have got those things in place, the bonus is that you automate. Automating your business is I have found one of the best ways to be able to grow your business and you are going to found out why very very shortly. So how do you automate? First take tasks off your plate by creating a SOP and once you create an SOP you can hire somebody to run it or you can hire somebody who is an expert at that particular task and they can bring their own SOP and run it and take it completely off your hands.

The goal here is to take work off your plate, so you have more time and I will tell you what you need to do with your time very very shortly. Also people are not the only way to automate your business, you can use AI and different software and tools that can help automate parts of your business or a big chunk of your business. Sometimes these tools are not all the way there yet, for example people want you to create content with AI content creation services, you are still going to need people to make sure the content is good. So, you know weigh up your cost versus results ratio, see what RoI you are going to get from that, may be its worth having those tools, may be its not but test that out if its s thing for you. Because managing people is not always the funnest thing in business. Once you know how to automate things whether it’s through AI or through people or whatever it is. What’s the real goal of automating? It’s to get time on your side and this is the best way to grow any business is to have time to think about more strategic ways that you can make that can have a far bigger impact and increase on RoI in your business.

Now, I am not telling you to go away and have more time to go through more courses and listen to more things, get confused about how you can grow your business through all these other channels, other means and other routes. This thinking time can really allow you to sink into your business, lean into, listen to it more, learn from it more to help you then make the decisions based on the data you are getting from your business. Use your business as a tool, not just a tool for you to make money, and to serve clients, your business can be a tool to grow your business as well, that’s one really important take away. So the more you can get off your plate, the more you can listen to your business, lean into it and use it as a tool to grow your business.

Thank you so much for listening. I hope you got a lot of value from this episode, the people that are thinking that I want to grow my business, then may be some of these philosophies that I have shared have put you ease up a little bit and it doesn’t matter whether you own a SaaS business, a membership business or content or e commerce, I have owned all these multiple type of businesses and have helped scaled many of these businesses as well and you are thinking you want some help from me in looking at your business, may be working with me, if you are open to a discussion or having a chat about it, reach out to me via email or you can check out www.buyingonlinebusinesses.co/inacircle which is how I helped people through some mastermind and one on one coaching as well. So if you are interested, check that out. All the best and I hope you got a lot from it and I will speak to you very soon. Bye.