New Growth Strategy for B2B SaaS Companies to Grow Faster: Lifecycle Revenue Marketing

While SaaS businesses across nearly every industry have achieved steady revenue growth in recent years, the complexity of their products has increased at a similar rate.

As more features and capabilities are added to a product over time, it becomes harder to use, resulting in plummeting adoption and retention rates.

Additionally, selling these products has become even more challenging. No longer can a salesperson sell to one buyer- typically, many people comprise a buying group with different needs and see value differently.

Even if you manage to keep a steady flow of new customers and revenue coming in, you must adequately train and onboard these customers to avoid experiencing revenue churn that eats away at your bottom line. Lost customers equal lost revenue. Additionally, rising customer acquisition costs will quickly erode your profits and wipe out any growth you hoped to achieve.

Research by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company (the inventor of the net promoter score, NPS) found that increasing retention by just 5% can increase your profits by more than 25%.

The most successful B2B SaaS companies have found that a renewed focus on the customer journey- from the point they become aware of the product, through the sales process, into onboarding, product adoption, and ongoing training related to new feature functionality- is the key to healthy growth and long-term profitability. This goes beyond just beefing up your customer success team or improving your customer success strategy- marketing dollars must be spent on customer retention and expansion to promote business growth across all stages of the customer journey to promote business growth- this process is called Lifecycle Revenue Marketing.

What is Lifecycle Revenue Marketing?

Lifecycle Revenue Marketing (LRM) is a term coined by Forrester in January of 2023 to describe a new paradigm that B2B marketing teams need to shift toward to help B2B companies grow. Regardless of whether that company is a startup or an old mainstay, the focus needs to move away from pure ABM and demand generation activities focused on bringing in new customers and shift toward putting much more effort and resources toward customer retention and growth through upsells and cross-sells. It aligns with an overall organizational strategy to be far more customer-centric.

LRM can be implemented in numerous ways. The backbone of a customer-centric approach for B2B SaaS is customer and prospect training via public digital academies to reduce churn, gain a faster time to value, and increase customer lifetime value.

Why is Lifecycle Revenue Marketing Necessary?

Chargify says, “People pay for technology because they want it to solve a problem, whether speeding up their invoicing or generating more leads. If you’re too slow in helping them reach their first success, you will see a high churn rate as they look for more immediate ways to reach their goals.”

To remain competitive going forward, technology companies must realize that their job is not over when a trial user signs up for a paid subscription or a new feature is released. Customer acquisition and product development are no longer end goals.

That’s where your job begins.

For technology companies, 70% to 90% of profits are generated through renewals and upsells, according to Userlane.

You will only see those profits if you continue building long-term relationships with your customers by helping them continuously achieve their goals.

It’s no wonder why customer experience initiatives are predicted to soon overtake all other product and marketing activities, according to a study by Walker. This is where Lifecycle Revenue Marketing comes in. Marketing must push away from lead gen alone and start marketing to the customer base in the overall customer lifecycle.

How Digital Public Academies and LRM Maximize Adoption, Retention, and Profitability

You don’t just want your customers to become knowledgeable, long-term users of your product.

Ideally, you want to make the entire customer experience so easy and enjoyable that those customers become loyal to your brand and can’t help but tell all of their friends and colleagues about you. Your customer’s health is your business’s health.

In other words...

Your ultimate objective as a fast-growing technology company is to turn your customers into passionate evangelists for your product.

Customer loyalty is critical. Can you imagine thousands of loyal, enthusiastic volunteer salespeople talking about your product non-stop, in-person and online?

That’s the power of converting customers into product evangelists.

This kind of customer engagement not only solves your retention and churn problems but will also drastically decrease your marketing costs, leading to unprecedented monthly reoccurring revenue (MRR) growth.

If creating passionate evangelists for your product is the end goal, then training customers to quickly and continuously extract value from your product is how you get there.

How to Use Digital Academies to Implement Lifecycle Revenue Marketing

1. Maximize Adoption Through Successful Onboarding Experiences

Implementing a customer training program is the perfect way to walk users through the crucial first steps of getting started so they don’t get lost, confused, frustrated, and give up. The faster your customers can dive into your product and extract value from it, the more likely they are to keep coming back to use it repeatedly. This initial onboarding process is where most churn happens, so it is critical to get it right. The faster you get customers to a “quick win,” the more likely you will see continued product usage. Additionally, if you automate your training systems, a customer success manager can spend more touchpoints on customer relationships.

2. Eliminate Confusion and Increase Customer Satisfaction

Customers without clear guidance on product use typically have to contact support to get help. Often, they get frustrated and move on. A customer training program eliminates confusion, hassle, and frustration, inevitably leading to improved user experience and increased customer success.

3. Reduce Customer Support Costs

Because a customer training program reduces the need for customers to contact customer support for assistance, you won’t have to hire as much support staff, which adds to enormous, long-term cost savings.

4. Hit Customer Success Milestones and Maximize Retention

Even if you successfully get your existing customers to their initial “quick wins,” you must still be there to assist them in continually progressing toward their long-term goals. By providing training and guidance to help customers become successful every step of the way, account managers reduce churn and maximize customer retention. Use customer data and customer behavior metrics to ensure your training hits the mark. When customers aren’t learning new features, you know they are at-risk customers. Reduce the risk of churn by reaching out and proving the value of your product.

5. Create Product Evangelists and Maximize Profits

This is where things get exciting for Lifecycle Revenue Marketing and demand generation. Using your public academy also to train your prospects allows for more robust SEO, branding, and thought leadership. When content is driven for the customer, it can be repurposed to qualify prospective buyers before they even talk to a salesperson. It’s not just about messaging and ads anymore- marketing teams need to think bigger.

Lifecycle Revenue Marketing Requires the Right Customer Training Tool

While one-on-one customer training has proven highly effective, it is also challenging and expensive to scale. It is no longer feasible to keep hiring employees at a certain point.

You will need to find a way to automate the process and provide training to your customers in a way that’s easily accessible 24/7 from any device in real time. This is where not just any LMS or customer success platform will work. You need a flexible learning platform that allows for customer segmentation along the buying group and the ability to push content to multiple academies at once (if you have, for instance, a public-facing academy for prospects and a private academy for partners and customers).

The Benefits of Using a Learning Management System (LMS) to Jumpstart LRM

• Enterprise LMSs are specifically built to help organizations quickly implement training programs that are accessible, scalable, and engaging.
• For the organization, adding course content is fast and easy, you can control who has access to the information, and progress can be tracked and reviewed.
• For the user, access to course content is convenient, courses are engaging, and they can progress through the training at their own pace.

Unfortunately, most corporate LMSs lack the flexibility to place the customers’ needs at the center truly.

On the other hand, a customer training platform like Raven360 allows you to help your customers with a flexible learning path that fills in all of the gaps in their knowledge and delivers data-driven insights to the company.