75+ Actionable Insights and Resources To Customer Success For SaaS Startups

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by Lincoln Murphy
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These lists dont tell you is that the value
chain for a customer to successfully use your
product is long and keeping them engaged is a
process filled with a combination of
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The SaaS Customer Success Lifecycle
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Customer Development
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Ray Wus 3 step guide on how to do Customer
Development right.
13 Quora answers on How to design an effective
Survey for Customer Development
This list by KISSmetrics has over 26 awesome
resources to help you start interviewing your
customers and building your product.
Ash Maurya On how we need to rethink Customer
Development for startups and web apps.
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Helprace lets you design customer surveys to
reach out to potential customers and understand
their needs. Pricing All plans come with
Ticketing support knowledge base. Free Forever
3 Agents Targeted 9 agent/mo All-In 18
Everything
Survey.io lets you create surveys and send them
by email to your prospects. Pricing Gated.
Appears once you provide details of your campaign.
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Customer Acquisition
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A very in-depth look at the customer acquisition
process
Consult the Ultimate SaaS Pricing Guide to
improve an important part of your product
marketing
The core metrics you need to track to acquire
customers
Rafi Choudhury explains the difference between
hiring a growth hacker and a digital marketer
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Videoscribe Helps you create simple white board
explainer videos to talk about your product.
Discounts for registered charities. Pricing
Monthly 12 Billed annually at 144 or Monthly
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Quickmail.io Lets you follow up on your email
outreach. You can also track open and reply
rates, automate mails and follow ups and stop
follow ups on reply, A/B test mails Pricing
Free Trial 14 days. No credit card
required. Monthly 49 (mail 200 prospects/day)
69 (mail 500 prospects/day)
KickoffLabs A useful tool to create landing page
campaigns, lead capture forms, social referrals
and viral campaigns. Pricing All plans offer
unlimited landing pages, a/b testing and launch
templates. Business 104/mo Premium 48/mo
Starter 27/mo.
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Sales Process Engagement
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Every customer starts out as a prospect that is
costing your company money
A great visual representation of the Sales Process
Choices, choices. Your prospect usually has
plenty. How do you help them choose you?
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Close.io is an alternative to Salesforce that has
a beautiful sales workflow and promises to help
you close more deals and get more
sales. Pricing Free 14 day trial / no credit
card required Basic 65 (Unlimited
Opportunities) Professional 110 Basic
Clearbit helps you narrow down your research on
customers, verify leads and gain insights to
build a strong customer base. Saves a ton of time
for small growth teams. Pricing Plans start at
99 a month.
Pipedrive A sales CRM for small teams with big
ambitions Made by salespeople. I love their
simple pricing. Pricing Simple pricing for busy
people. 12 / user / month No contracts No
account limits No hidden fees No charge for
support, API key. No credit card required for
30-day trial
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Billing and Payment
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A list of tips to keep in mind when planning a
billing page. This can help you offer customers
an improved and enjoyable recurring billing
experience
Neil Patel shares strategies on creating
recurring billing
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Hiveage is a simple, powerful online billing tool
for freelancers and small businesses. Their Free
Plan is flexible and useful. Pricing Free
Unlimited Clients Invoices Paid plans from
6.95/mo
Billing Orchard is a great tool to create and
manage recurring billing and quickbooks. Pricing
Try their Free 15 Day Trial (No credit card
required) Their charged plans are OAK
19.95/month and ORCHARD 29.95/month.
Chargebee promises to handle your Billing and
Invoicing, Payments and Subscriptions by
automating processes that slow you down like
dunning and tax compliance checks. They also have
a great free plan for small startups for upto
50K revenue. Pricing Starts at 99/mo, upto
399/mo.
Chargify is a great recurring billing tool for
small, growing businesses. They offer credit card
as well as Paypal billing (flexible!) and their
Small Business plan starts at 129 (500 active
users) Their Small Business plan (169/mo) also
offers Mailchimp integrations.
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Customer and User Onboarding
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Beautifully broken down onboarding flows by
Samuel Hulick of useronboard.com. Samuel writes
in a way that are sure to make you crack up while
learning how important every step of onboarding is
Case Study from Ghost.org on the onboarding
metrics they tracked to increase website
conversions
Intercom explains why user onboarding is harder
than you think it is, and how to master it
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Autosend can be used to reach customers inside
and outside your app. There is no free plan. All
plans offer Unlimited email and In-App Messages /
Email Support. Pricing Starter 50 / 500 active
users / 500 SMS Growth 250 10KUsers / 10K SMS.
Pro 600 30K users / 30K SMS
Elev.io helps you create in-app guided website
experiences. All paid plans offer unlimited
modules, with limited page loads. Pricing Free
1 Users / 1 Active Modules 49 LITE 49 / mo 1
User. GROWTH 79 / mo 5 Team Users 199 BIG TIME
199 / mo 10 Team Users
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Initial Engagement (Activation)
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The crucial nature of the first 30 days your
customer uses your website or app
Ott Nigulis detailed guide to understanding data
and customer activation
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Airbrake helps you track your applications for
any errors or roadblocks your customers may hit
along the way. Pricing Small 39, 5 Applications
Monitored, 10 team members Pro 89, 15 Apps
Monitored, 20 members. Enterprise 199, 40 Apps
Monitored, 30 members
User Testing helps you get insights directly from
your customers mouths. Pricing Basic 49/video
99/video after first 10 videos Test across
devices. 15 min max video length.
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Functional Support
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Lincoln Murphy writes about why Customer Success
needs to be about making your product functional
and useful.
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Freshdesk An easy to use knowledge bank, billing
and invoice tool. Pricing Free Trial, No Credit
Card Sprout ?0/Month 3 Agents. Blossom
?999/Agent/Month Garden ?1499/Agent/Month Estate
?2499/Agent/Month (Most Popular) Forest
?4499/Agent/Month. Billed Annually
Groove HQ Easy-to-use ticket management,
knowledge base and more. Pricing Free Plan at
0/user/month. Two Users, 1 Mailbox, Customer
Histories. Groove Plus at 15/user/month
Unlimited Mailboxes, Automated Workflows and
Email tracking. No credit card required/ Cancel
anytime.
If you are a small business owner, here are 26
webinar tools you could use as part of your
marketing and content offerings.
Freshdesk An easy to use knowledge bank, billing
and invoice tool. Pricing Free Trial, No Credit
Card Sprout ?0/Month 3 Agents. Blossom
?999/Agent/Month Garden ?1499/Agent/Month Estate
?2499/Agent/Month (Most Popular) Forest
?4499/Agent/Month. Billed Annually
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Technical Support
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Find out why the folks at OnePlus feel the need
to have great Support. (Unlike Uber)
Read about what makes customer support effort
proactive?
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Intercom To acquire, engage and support
customers. (Two thumbs up for their unique
pricing, but good luck figuring out what exactly
you need.) Pricing Acquire, Engage, Learn and
Support Start at 49, add-ons at 4
Olark Live Chat solution to support customers.
Visitor Profiles, Canned responses and more. Tip
bill annually or bi-annually. Pricing Bronze 17
Gold 49 Platinum 129 and Ultimate 243 / Month
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Customer Feedback Loop
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A great piece on customer feedback that
highlights the various avenues you can get
customer feedback from
Harvard Business Reviews long piece on closing
the customer feedback loop
How to use forums and surveys to create a
customer feedback loop
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Promoter.io can help you with all your NPS
needs. Pricing Free Plan (No credit card
required) 1000 surveys/month 1 campaign. NPS
LITE 97 /mo 2,500 surveys /mo / 2 campaigns NPS
COMPLETE 369 /mo 25,000 surveys ENTERPRISE
Unlimited Everything.
Qualaroo gives you customer insights for smarter
A/B testing. You can try the Small Business and
Professional plan for free (no credit card, but
must submit but other details) Pricing Small
Business 63/mo Professional 199/mo Enterprise
(Demo Available) 499/mo. (all billed annually)
Delighted lets you send out single questions to
get customer feedback and analyse the
results. Pricing Free Plan Send question to 250
customers 100 sends per month 25 (plans go upto
50,000 sends per month at 999)
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Ongoing Engagement
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Nudgespots guide to using in-app messaging and
business messengers for Customer Success will
help you keep your customers engaged and active
What not to do when you are trying to engage
customers
Crazy Egg share 27 customer retention strategies
that you should be using
This amazingly written article on customer
engagement by David Skok is something to keep
coming back to at every step of your growth
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A customer success platform that helps you stay
on top of your customer connections and drive
recurring value to them. Get in touch for pricing
A customer success platform that helps you track
churn risk, NPS score and upsell opportunities.
Available on iOS and Android. Pricing Plans
begin at 8/user and go upto 40/user
Nudgespot is a great tool to onboard, support and
engage customers. Pricing Acquire Support 0
100k Users Unlimited Team Members. Onboard
Engage 49/mo Free Plan Triggered
In-App Retain 199/mo with Behavioural
Targeting. Prime 399/mo Team Reporting
Evergage helps you achieve web personalisation
for your audiences by segmenting, marketing
automation, a/b testing and more. See pricing here
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Customer Driven Growth
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Kristi Hines breaks down the steps to creating a
detailed case study for your website and how to
position it effectively.
The good folks at Unbounce tell you How to use
online marketing to perfect your customer
testimonials
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Mention is a social monitoring app that lets you
track what your competitors are doing, as well as
what your customers are saying about you on
social media. Pricing Tip Opt for a Yearly
Plan, save 2 months. No credit card required.
Solo 29/Mo 2 alerts / 3k mentions Starter
99/Mo 5k mentions. Custom Unlimited users,
mentions.
Amity is a Customer Success Software that can be
used for SaaS customer success. It helps you
track and monitor customers on their visual
dashboard as well as measure portfolio health and
automate messages to customers. Pricing Get in
touch for a demo/free trial.
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Customer intelligence
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On how to use an analytics tool like KISSmetrics
to learn about how your customers use your product
Understand How Expedia focused on Customer
Intelligence to turn Clicks into Dollars
See How Hubstaff uses Mixpanel for Customer
Intelligence
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Kissmetrics is the place to go if you want to
start tracking and analyzing the key metrics that
you can base changes on to improve conversions
and reduce churn. Pricing STARTER / 200 / 500k
events. BASIC / 700 / 5 million events. PRO
2,000 / 20 mil events more
Piwik is a free and open source data analytics
platform that guarantees data privacy. Features
include user-centric insights, user privacy
protection and customisability
Mixpanel believes in abolishing what they call
bullshit metrics and using funnels to track
real, relevant customer engagement
metrics. Pricing Free 25,000 Data Points / 0 /
Month Startup 500,000 Data Points / 150 /
Month (Five more plans. Most expensive is 2000
for 50,000,000 data points)
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Customer Expansion
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A quick read to help you understand why expansion
revenue is so essential to a SaaS business
The Land and expand Strategy Chris Yeh (VP
Marketing at PBworks) discusses Customer
engagement for the SaaS world.
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Inspectlet allows you to record user and visitor
sessions. All plans come with Playback sessions,
heatmaps, mobile support, Seamless AJAX and HTTPS
support. Pricing Free 0 per month 100 Recorded
Sessions 1 Website Plans from 39 per month
(5,000 Recorded Sessions / 1 Website) to 299
per month 125,000 Recorded Sessions 20 Websites
Sprout Social Monitoring lets you track mentions,
monitor content and outreach. Because in an era
where Twitter is used for support, you cant
monitor your social feeds enough. Pricing Deluxe
59 PER USER/MONTH. Plans go upto Team Plan
at 500 / month (3 users) with Advanced reports
and team features
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Customer Renewal
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Marketo explains How to take a weak renewal email
and turn it into a powerful renewal campaign
What to Measure to monitor customer renewal rates
for your SaaS / cloud-based business
WP Rocket discuss How they increased renewal
rates by 154
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Planhat is a Customer Success Platform built for
small and mid-sized SaaS companies. Key features
include churn up-sell alerts, advanced Success
Playbooks and Customizable Health Score. It
integrates with SaaS products like Slack,
Salesforce, and Zendesk. There is also an open
REST API. Pricing Get in touch for a free trial.
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Customer Retention
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Evergages tips on how to calculate customer
retention using Customer Retention Rate (CRR) and
Dollar Retention Rate (DRR)
Sweet tooth rewards offers the ultimate guide to
customer retention
Groove HQ shared their strategies to retain
customers
Learn how Symantec created a digital experience
that reduced churn from Marketing Sherpa
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Heap Analytics provides instant, retroactive
analytics and lets you track customer actions on
your website to better understand their needs and
roadblocks. Pricing All plans come with a 14
day free trial. Free 5K Sessions / Month Startup
249 / 50K sessions. Premium 599 150K sessions.
Enterprise offers Support / SQL Data
Framed.io uses machine learning and predictive
analytics to figure out which of your customers
are more likely to churn and take precautionary
mesaures. You can also use their analytics tool
to understand which of your marketing efforts are
bringing in customers that stay and become
loyal. Pricing Plans start at 99 (Monitor) and
go upto 1000.
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Post-Churn Follow Up
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Before you fix churn, you need to find out why
are you facing churn. Read Conversion XL 9 case
studies to help you understand why your users
churn
See how Baremetrics reduced churn with a clever
drip email campaign
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Pushcrew helps you send push notifications on
Mobile/Desktop to get feedback from
customers. Pricing Free Unlimited Notification
500 subscribers Premium 25 per month for 2k
subscribers (prices increase depending on
subscriber)
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Lets make this list bigger. Comment and let us
know your secret weapons, tools, tips and
strategies and well add it to our list to create
a resource for anyone in the SaaS Customer
Success world
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