How to cement trust with new customers in times of a crisis and uncertainty

Robbie Kellman Baxter

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Author of The Membership Economy and The Forever Transaction

of

Peninsula Strategies
EP
61
Robbie Kellman Baxter
Robbie Kellman Baxter

Episode Summary

Today on the show we have Robbie Kellman Baxter, author of the best-selling book “The Membership Economy” and the newly launched “The Forever Transaction”

In this episode, we talked about what a Forever Transaction is and how to implement it in your business, what influenced Robbie to write her books, and how SaaS businesses’ have changed their view on retention over time.

We also discussed why Robbie thinks providing real value is key to cementing trust with your customers during a crisis and if you’re one of the few seeing an influx of new customers how to make sure they’re here to stay.

As usual, I'm excited to hear what you think of this episode, and if you have any feedback, I would love to hear from you. You can email me directly on Andrew@churn.fm. Don't forget to follow us on Twitter.


Mentioned Resources

Highlights

Time

What is the concept of a Forever Transaction and what are the signs you have it. 00:02:04
How Netflix’s business model intrigued Robbie to write her books. 00:04:10
How SaaS businesses’ have changed their view on retention over time. 00:07:08
How to implement a Forever Transaction framework in your business. 00:10:45
How to cement trust with your customers during a crisis and uncertainty. 00:14:52
Dealing with an iflux of new customers: How to make sure they’re here to stay. 00:19:20

Transcription

Andrew Michael  0:00  
Hey Robbie, welcome to the show.

Robbie Kellman Baxter  0:02  
Thanks so much for having me, Andrew.

Andrew Michael  0:04  
It's a pleasure. It's it's amazing to have you on the show today for the guests. Robbie is a best selling author of the forever transaction and the membership economy, of which the membership economy which was named one of the top 10 marketing books of all time by pay by book authority. And in the past 10 years for company peninsula strategy has advised over 100 organisations on subscription and growth strategy. I think it's also an exciting week for you as well rob you this week with the launch of your new book. And I guess my first question for you then is what is a forever transaction?

Robbie Kellman Baxter  0:37
revenue transaction is that moment when the customer decides that they're going to make your product or service a habit, and they're not going to look for alternatives. It's when they decide in their kind of in their gut, that they're going to keep paying the subscription.

Andrew Michael  0:54  
I guess there's gonna be a very, very broad question, but like, how do you know when you've got to that point, how Do you know when your customer has created that habits, and they're going to continue paying?

Robbie Kellman Baxter  1:04  
Yeah, so from the business side if you're tracking I mean, there's there's different ways of course to answer that on the customer side, you can, you can start to see their behaviour change. So, you know, you see them onboard in a way that looks like they're taking your product seriously. They're, you know, they're struggling to learn how to use it, or maybe hopefully not struggling. They're starting to engage with with predictable recency, frequency, and depth is sort of three core metrics. They verbally will tell you, this is how I'm getting that job done. Those are some of the signs that you have it. But ultimately, this is more you know, when I think about the concept of a forever transaction, it's really about the company, thinking about how to build a forever transaction as a guiding principle as opposed to you just focusing on their pricing, which I think of as a tactic. subscription pricing is just a tactic, but having a forever transaction with a person you serve. That requires a different kind of mindset.

Andrew Michael  2:15
Absolutely, I think, for me personally is on a subscription business, having that subscription, retaining forever transaction, like you say is like really true indication if you have a subscription business or not. If you don't have that for every transaction, or that really strong retention, you're in for some trouble, I think further down the line. Yes, so the one thing, Robbie that I'm interested about is what drove you as well to write these books? What was it about the the membership economy and the forever transaction that intrigued you and interests you?

Robbie Kellman Baxter  2:47
Yeah, so you know, when I started consulting about 20 years ago, as an independent consultant and starting to build my firm, I knew that I needed to have an area of focus and I'd been a generalist strategy consultant. And then I'd worked in product marketing for SaaS companies. And I took a couple of different projects. And then I started to work for Netflix. And I fell in love with their business model, I saw how they were using retention and engagement as the most important metrics, and how confident they were about their revenue. And how well they understood what drove success in their business and how different that was from any other company that I was aware of. And I actually started digging into it, and trying to learn as much as I could about it, and I couldn't find any experts or any research that had been done on subscriptions on recurring revenue, and particularly on recurring revenue in the software world. So I just started doing it myself and starting to build out my own model. As I was falling in love with the Netflix model, everybody else was too. And I started getting company calls from different kinds of companies in in b2b software and consumer software in entertainment in, you know, really weird things like dental pain management and bicycle manufacturing, all saying, Hey, we want to be the Netflix of our space. We want to do what they're doing. And, you know, it's immediate as you know, Andrew, it is a meaty and interesting and complicated subject. So it's really kind of attracted and retained my interest over all these years.

Andrew Michael  4:40  
It's funny, you said that actually, this past week, I was watching on YouTube, the story about Netflix's data team. And I think definitely like you say that that focus on retention engagement is really really strong as an organisation. It's funny that actually the show itself that it's on YouTube, but they take it almost comes across as like a Netflix production, which I love. But they talked through all the different data elements. And I think for me as well like working in subscription and SAS businesses, the thing that I love the most and that intrigues me the most is that like predictability of it, at some point you can understand, okay, to some level of certainty how the business is going to perform is definitely for me is also new that it sparked my interest and with the topic of generate attention as being one of the biggest drivers of being able to predict that. So, like going into it, then you caught the spark and was at Netflix, you sort of fell in love with the space. What is something you mentioned as well, like, at the same time, like a lot of other businesses wanted to be the Netflix at the time? What is one thing that you sort of seen change over time from that point in time till today, since you've been writing the books and the understanding in the market? Like, is there any big shift that you've noticed amongst these companies when it comes to their understanding or their focus around retention?

Robbie Kellman Baxter  5:59  
Oh, yeah, there's so many So much has changed. So So first of all, you know, I started working with Netflix, then I was working with, you know, I was working with a bunch of other companies. And, you know, Survey Monkey and into it and LinkedIn and all these other and I was really, really interested in the similarities and what made some companies successful and what made others not successful, I started to develop this framework, and I'd go to SaaS companies. And I'd say, look, it's about more than just your pricing, you have to think about the implications on your support on how you design the product on how you sell it, who you sell it to, because if you sell it to the wrong people, you don't set the expectations properly, or you don't onboard them properly. You're not going to retain them, and then the business is going to fail. You've got to look at it as a holistic system. And people didn't seem to get it. And that's actually why I wrote the membership economy. It was like one pound business card to explain that I had this point of view, I saw the world this way. The principles were, you know, the same across lots of different industries. And they resulted in that holy grail for businesses, which is predictable recurring revenue, which is what we all want, right? It allows us to manage cash flow, it allows us to invest more thoughtfully in future products. It allows us to get you know, as you pointed out, it allows you to get a better valuation in the in the public markets, right, somewhere between five x and seven x, what more traditional business models get lots of reasons that companies want it. And I wanted to show how, how they could do it better. And then, you know, so that was, you know, that book came out five years ago, five years later, everybody's doing it, right. Everybody's doing subscription. There are lots of subscription, you know, quote experts out there. There's lots of subscription tools and vendors who provide supporting, you know, platforms for these businesses. And virtually Every company not just in software, but every company from you know, Caterpillar heavy equipment. You know, consumer products, financial services. Everybody is thinking this way they're thinking about subscriptions. They're thinking about churn. Some of them are more sophisticated than others. But they're trying they're they've kind of moved from Hmm, like, what is this? To? How How do I actually do this? How do I get into the weeds and optimise my model for recurring revenue?

Andrew Michael  8:35  
Yeah, I definitely agree that that shift has happened. I think the one thing that still is we haven't broken through that shift with the understanding is the how, like you say, so it's one of the main frustrations I had when I started the show was like these blog posts had really focused on one specific point in time or a number that was discovered or, and very misleading and you mentioned something in terms of like, a whole holistic programme and holistic model which doesn't only cover your product, but looks at things like your pricing support, and different aspects of the business because I think channel retention is such a nuanced problem and it really needs to be covered from different angles. So I think the next question then I have for you as well is like thinking about the model that you've got around the forever transaction for your customers. How would you go about building one?

Robbie Kellman Baxter  9:26  
Well, it depends if you're starting from scratch, or if you have a going concern and you're trying to optimise so i divided my this book, which is very how two into three parts. The first part is for organisations that are just getting started, or organisations, let's say that have more of a, you know, more of a licencing kind of site licencing enterprise model, as opposed to a SaaS model that are moving to SAS. That's the first section second section talks about how to scale once you've figured it out. Once you have a little kernel have proof and evidence that this works. And then the last section is for longtime businesses SAS businesses that are natives that have grown How do you what are the areas that can go wrong? With your with your forever transaction? How can you get off the rails? And you know, at each stage, it sort of starts with the promise you're making to your customer? What is it that justifies their engagement with you? Why would they trust you forever to solve their problem or help them achieve their goal. And so you have to demonstrate as an organisation, that everything you do across all of your functional areas, is aligned toward that customer's goal and their achievement of that goal. So it goes you know, we've all had experiences where we bought software or subscribed to software, and then had this feeling like I'm not really using this the way it's supposed to be used. I'm sure other people are using it better and getting more value out of it. But I just use these two features. When people aren't getting the value, they're paying For, they're likely to cancel when people are getting some of the value, but there's other problems that have nothing to do with the software that are holding them back from being successful, they cancel. So the onus is really on the company to say, what else can we do? How can we layer in value so that our customers never leave. And so, you know, some of the examples I've seen that I think are really good one is, of course, Salesforce, not only do they have the great software, and they have, you know, the kind of community for their, their, their apps, but they also have a lot, you know, human community. You know, they have their dreamforce event, they have a lot of smaller events. They bring people together under their umbrella to help those people be successful in their careers, not just to get their job done, but also to look good, get promoted, be more successful build their brand, which is much broader definition of helping your customers be successful. Then just I have this product. And if they use the product, then my job is done.

Andrew Michael  12:06  
Yeah, absolutely. I think that concept of really focusing on what value your product delivers, and then seeing what you can do over and above that to really deliver extra additional value is what's going to win like your customers hearts and minds, I think at the end of the day is that you mentioned a couple of things as well, like a lot of people come to a specific tool to solve a problem. And in some cases, you mentioned like, you might only be using a percentage of the features in a tool that can also be a reason. And no matter how much value you're getting out of that if you're not using the full extent of the tool, you could end up turning it as a result. And some companies do it really, really well as well when they have this whole holistic approach to understanding what value means for companies and being able to measure and track that and then being able to then go ahead and sort of make sure that they're delivering above and beyond. So, one thing like I'm interested as well now and this concept of For every transaction, obviously, today's climate and environment is a little bit different and a little bit uncertain. And I think a lot of companies now are facing these challenging conversations with their customers where churn becomes a big issue. So my, what I'm interested in is like what could companies do at this point in time to foster and maybe cements trust with their customers during a crisis?

Robbie Kellman Baxter  13:24  
Yeah, so we're, we're talking in spring of 2020. When, you know, this, this global pandemic is, is really throwing a lot of businesses for a loop. The first thing I'll say is I saw some kind of heartening data today from Zora that only 11% of subscription businesses, you know, they have that their, you know, regular reporting that they do. Only 11% of their clients have subscription businesses reporting in our reporting a decline in members in customer So the net is either positive or neutral. So subscription businesses in general are holding their own much better than transactionally oriented businesses. And then to answer your question about what else could they do right now to deepen the relationship and further cement them? I would say, you know, first of all, hopefully they were focusing on the customer well being all along because if you have been, then you have a lot of goodwill already saved up. If you haven't, now is the time I think, to loosen your paywalls or to explore loosening your paywalls. thinking more about what can be free, whether whether you're a business that uses a free trial, which I always think of as a taste of the most delicious thing you have, so that they either, you know, either because the prospect doesn't understand what it tastes like, or doesn't believe it's as good as you said. So you say here's a taste to now you can understand and believe, or if you're using a freemium model Which is basically you know, something hamburger free forever, not the most delicious thing. But it's good enough to get the job done on an ongoing basis. This is a time to maybe extend that a little bit. And also to maybe extend or pivot on the way you're packaging your value for your customers. So, so as an example, if some of your content is delivered in person, and you can't do that, what can you do now? Or if you know that all the customers in your space are dealing with certain challenges, maybe that don't even have to do with your particular product? Can you let's say bring in speakers are expertise or share information with them in some way that that shows that you understand what they're going through and can help them in whatever way in whatever way you have to help them so it's really about extending and repackaging the value that you provide to your members extending and repackaging. It's about communicating to them what you can do, and And how you can help and being more flexible about what that might mean. And it's about being a little more generous in how you serve, you know, prospective customers and the broader community as a whole. So one example of that, of course, although they're they're getting pummelling a little bit right now zoom that has, you know, really unlocked their, their software to university to educators. Not necessarily maybe part of it is about acquisition eventually, but but really, it does seem to be genuinely about using what they have to help the community. And I think, first of all, that's good karma. But second of all, that builds goodwill among their existing subscribers that are paying and kind of gives them a brand glow as well.

Andrew Michael  16:50  
Yeah, I'm glad you gave an example and resume obviously being one of those ones. I think because one of the things I think that's been for me like likely interesting And also maybe a little bit comes across to some genuine is were a number of people now that have all of a sudden become remote experts and trying to produce content for others to understand how they should be remote business when pretty much I think at this point in time nobody's really experiencing what remote work is like this is work in isolation. So first of all, like the tips and advice that people like flowing on and putting out to people, like trying to add value, I think, are not really helping. But really, when you focus in check internally, as a company, what do we have that we can deliver to our customers at this time, that is actually valuable? I think that's a really good conversation to have and understand, okay, like, let's not just do the generic thing that every company out there is trying to do and tackle on to trend up but rather what is it that we do that can really add value to our customers at this point in this time of crisis and

Robbie Kellman Baxter  17:48  
one exam I mean, there's there's so many examples now one other one I want to just highlight is intrepid learning systems. So it's a you know, software platform for training programmes. they're offering their both their platform and their professional services teams to design and implement trainings for frontline health care workers. And that's the kind of thing that is both, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's certainly good for the community. And it's also good for the, you know, existing paying members to see the company kind of opening up and doing what they can to help right now. The other thing that's kind of an unseen or unnoticed benefit I haven't seen anybody really writing about this is that we're in a moment right now where people have to change their behaviours. People who didn't like using software now have to use software people who didn't like doing things digitally or remotely. Now have to so this is a moment where there's in in many spaces. There's an unprecedented trial right now, where people are like, Well, you know, I never wanted to do it this way before, but I have no choice. So whatever I'm going to do online learning, I'm gonna figure out how to use the software, I'm gonna, you know, figure out how to join this digital community and participate because I'm so darn lonely. And so you know, for a lot of organisations that may be listening to this right now you may be experiencing a spike in, in trial or in in new users or customers. And the big question is, what are you going to do with them? How are you going to engage and retain them so that they stay after this crisis is over at your you have this moment where people are willing to try new behaviours, and maybe they're experimenting with your offerings? And the question is, how do you onboard them for success?

Andrew Michael  19:47  
Absolutely, I think this I heard a question that was phrased in a really good webinar put together by reforge team. And the question was like for a lot of companies, I think there is opportunity in this if you just asked you yourself. The question is obviously, things are not great for majority of businesses. But asking yourself one question like, what does this change now accelerate for your your business or your customers? And I think like, slack was a good example in terms of like, they felt that this accelerated the remote environments like 10 X, and they were seeing numbers now that they're only predicting in seven or eight years time from now. And there's a lot of different cases like you say now where this has changed user's behaviour and accelerating parts of maybe your business plan of what you thought was only going to be a future viewpoints. We're getting like a different vantage point now having this in this really disruptive environment for us.

Robbie Kellman Baxter  20:43  
Yeah, like for example, if you have if your clients are I was just thinking about this because I talked to a retailer yesterday a big a big a big retailer that has multiple chains, and they said, you know all of our you know, customers tend to be people who like to go into the store and touch the produce or they own home they don't like The Home Improvement chain in a supermarket chain and a quick serve chain. And they said, you know, most of our stuffs been in person. But suddenly, we have, you know, 10 x, the number of orders that we had even two weeks ago. So if you're providing the software, if you're providing the support for that company's e commerce initiatives, that company can really use help right now and they have budget, right there. They're growing. So I think your point about you know, figure out what this what this can do for you is really important. And, and looking for where behaviour is changing and how your business can help. And then, you know, I think, you know, this is a show about about managing churn. I think, you know, easy come easy go. So if you have a lot of new new customers coming in new subscribers, new users, whatever kind of level of usage you're getting. You have to be Thinking not just about managing inflow, but also putting them to actually get them to stick.

Andrew Michael  22:07  
Yeah. And I think maybe what people are experiencing now as well is a really rapid movement through the user cycle. So like a lot of companies might have still been dealing with early adopters, early majority. And now this has like really caused an influx of maybe like the late majority coming in and like, as you say, like, easy come easy go. So this is also a different audience. They have different expectations of what how products should work and feel and managing through this. I think we've discussed this a couple of times on the show where companies have gone through this transition from like early to late majority and had this mess, growth and rapid growth and really seeing that impacting channel retention because the requirements are different and what people expect from your product are different at times. So I'm glad you mentioned that as well. So I think definitely, like one thing now is well that's interesting. With this whole situation is that like we talked about this opportunity in it. And there's a crisis now where people are really trying to figure out what's next. Can you maybe point to another example of a company that you think's doing really well, when it comes to this? So we talked about introvert and you highlighted potentially maybe delivery groceries, but any other industries, you think, at this point in time are doing a great job with handling the crisis?

Robbie Kellman Baxter  23:29  
Yeah, well, another company. I actually just talked to mark gagne yesterday, who's the CEO, CEO and chairman of Strava. And the dino Strava. The company for endurance athletes. Yep. So they have this awesome app that helps you track your own workouts but also train for events and also compete, compete in quotes with your friends sort of setup challenges.

And they've been around for a while. They've been quite successful.

But what's happening Is our behaviour around fitness has completely changed almost overnight, right? We can't go to gyms anymore. We can't do group fitness, we can't go, you know, workout with our soccer teams. So we're looking for a way to stay in shape. And so a lot of plus that plus the fact that for many of us, depending on where we are in the world, you know, getting outside for exercise is one of the very few sanctioned reasons to be outside. So people are running and cycling more than ever. So they're seeing a real spike in both engagement among existing members, trial among new members and returns among lapsed members. And as an organisation, they're really thinking about how do we onboard these people and how do we engage them in a way that makes it easy for them to continue to maintain these good habits around fitness?

Andrew Michael  24:58  
Very, very interesting. You mentioned that as well. Like I was surprised my wife goes to gym locally. And I think one of the ways that just the local gym is trying to deal with retention is they've now gone online. So they do a Facebook Live, daily exercise routine. And I thought that was just like a really great way to think about your customers at this point in time because obviously, gyms have been closed now locally, it could have been very easy for them just to say okay, gyms are close, they're paying subscriptions, and we're done. But really going above and above and making sure that they still have their continuation still keeping the community going and finding a way to do it online, I think was a really, really smart play.

Robbie Kellman Baxter  25:37  
Interesting, you know, it's interesting fitness, you know, both Netflix and which we talked about earlier in the entertainment world and fitness. Those are two areas that also have membership mindsets. And I think that SAS companies can take a page from that book, in terms of the kind of real authentic, deep relations IPS that are built there. You gave a great example about your your your wife's fitness programme. Another example is CrossFit. You know, the global franchise organisation. I've been talking to a lot of different CrossFit studio owners, and many of them are reporting that over 90% of their members are continuing to voluntarily pay their subscription, their membership fees, even though the box the gym is closed. Sometimes there's an online you know, they do online workouts on on, you know, zoom or Microsoft Teams or what have you. Sometimes they're just doing it because they say this is important to me, and I don't want it to go out of business because this is part of who I am and how I achieve my goals. So imagine what it would take to have that kind of relationship with your who's your customers, so that they depend on you so much and that you So core to their success.


Andrew Michael  27:03  
Yeah, I think like you're talking to like a couple of like basic human needs and like the one is entertainment. The other one is health and wellness. And I think trying to figure out like with your business, like what is one of the best comedians you can meet and hit with your customers, and you talked a little bit about going above and beyond and how you can make your customers superstars and like your product, sort of giving them superpowers into their, like, wherever you can go out of your way to meet one of the basic human needs. And maybe that's recognition in the work environment or in a case like strive or a thing is meeting like a health or wellness and is really, really critical. I think maybe that mindset of Okay, this is something I want to be using for life because it really is solving one of my basic needs as a human being as well. The one question I wanted to ask you, and it's something I ask every guest that joins the show is, let's imagine a hypothetical scenario now that you've joined a new company and you're probably You've done this many times as a consultant, but you've joined in your company and churn and retention is not doing great at this company. And you've been asked by this year to try and turn things around for them. They're trying to get results fast. And they've given you 90 days to try and turn things around and at least show some progress. What would you want to be doing those first 90 days within that business to try and make an impact?

Robbie Kellman Baxter  28:23  
So the first thing I would want to do is to understand what the biggest culprit is in the churn problem. And I often look at it as you know, kind of look at three parts. There's an awareness that there's, I look at it in three parts. So the first problem is an awareness problem that is the wrong people are aware of, of what it is. So they're coming in and then they're leaving because it's not what they had hoped for. second issue is that they misunderstood the value and the third issue is You have a product problem. And so depending on which issue it is and where it is in the cycle and why they're cancelling, you want it you can go and focus in on the very specific area to fix it. So I guess the first thing that I would do is I would want to do a diagnostic and understand the entire process and all of the reasons for cancelling I always remove the reason of we don't have budget anymore as a reason for cancelling that's not an acceptable reason. I would look at you know, passive churn versus active churn. So passive churn is, you know, if the payment systems changed in some way or leadership changed, and somebody kind of broke that broke the connection, not intentionally, but just by lack of lack of engagement, versus active churn, which is if somebody said, Hey, we want to cancel right now. And then I'd look at what are the reasons They left where they the wrong people in the first place. Like I had an example where, you know, the salespeople were making sales to customers that weren't likely to get great value from the product. So they were, they were selling a bill of goods that they weren't really delivering on.

So that's a selling problem. That's not a product problem.

There's other cases where the salespeople are selling exactly what the products supposed to do, but the product isn't working as promised. So that might be a product problem. So it's really important I can tell you a funny story. I worked with an entertainment company. And they they brought me in they said, We have a churn problem, can you help us? And they were about they had a team that was kind of retention, customer success, and they were about to fire that team because they said, you know, our retention is so bad. We must have a terrible retention team. And we brought in I wanted to bring it let's bring in the product people. It's bringing the sales people bring the mock marketing people, it's bringing the support people. Let's figure this out. out. And what we learned are a couple things we learned. One of them was that their marketing campaigns all focused on a single live event that they did once a year, it was a national championship sports event. And they had a two week free trial. So. So when this event happened, right, everybody signed up for the two week free trial, and then they cancelled in the first month. All right, so that's not a retention problem. That's a marketing problem. Like they were marketing the wrong thing. They weren't marketing, the long term value of being a member, they were marketing, do this, do that one transaction. And then, of course, they shouldn't have been surprised that people left. And the other thing was that the supporting infrastructure for the streaming didn't work very well. So when you were watching these live events, you know, it would conk out on you and you would have these big breaks where you miss important, you know, important content. So that's not a retention problem either. That's a product problem. So you know, one of the things we realised was the the issues weren't what the company the company had jumped to the conclusion that because they have a team called retention, and they were having a problem called retention, that it must be the retention team's fault. And it's rarely the retention team's fault. More often, you know, you want to look at how it's being sold, how it's being marketed, how people are being on boarded for engagement, and whether you know, the product does what it's supposed to do for the people that it's supposed to do it for product market fit.

Andrew Michael  32:32  
Exactly. That's why I think like the concept of a retention team as well is not a good idea in general, because of all the different influences you mentioned, that are outside of their control. And if the end of the day you keeping one team like a lot of times it might be customer success and saying that you're responsible for attention. There's just so many other areas, like you mentioned sales, I think that's something we chatted with Steli efti on the show about as well. But if you're not in incentivizing your sales team to be focused on long term retention goals as well then you always Get into short term results. So like a good way as well to combat that is having like maybe the compensation aligned with 50%, upfront and 50% when the customer retains for longer than three months, but I think what you're saying as well, like, it's really important to understand that there's just so many influences and really starting from the very beginning, is that awareness like, are you selling the wrong thing? Does your product not deliver? just going through the motions and really trying to figure out what it is this thing like, Hey, stop really started really at the top of the funnel and say, okay, like, Is it that initial awareness? are we bringing in the wrong type of customers? are we selling the wrong thing? Is the miscommunication in what we selling and what the product delivers? And then, is there something we can do to fix a product I think is definitely the right way to be thinking about it and studying top down.

Robbie Kellman Baxter  33:47  
Yeah, yeah. It's really everybody's I mean, as you brought up at the beginning of the of the conversation, it's really churn is everybody's problem. It's a very complicated and you know, process. problem. The good news is that by focusing bit by bit on each step of the process and each functional area, you can kind of move the lever on retention in a really visible and meaningful way, which makes it a really fun, fun problem to solve.

Andrew Michael  34:17  
Absolutely, I think the best teams out there, they understand what the various inputs are. And then they have the individual teams within the organisation own an input instead of owning the output which is shown. And really by focusing on the inputs and making improvements to the input, at the end of the day, you see that reflected in in the numbers and an increase? Well, it's been it's been a pleasure having you today, Robbie. I think, for the guests for the listeners is any last sort of input that you want to give? How can they keep up to speed with your work obviously your book being launched this week? Any special news that you want to share with us before we end today?

Robbie Kellman Baxter  34:54  
Yeah, they can reach me at Robbie Kalman Baxter calm I'm pretty easy to find on LinkedIn. On Facebook, on Twitter on Instagram. And I'm happy to have some goodies that I'm happy to share that we can put in the show notes of some some special goodies for your listeners.

Andrew Michael  35:13  
Awesome. Well, it's been a pleasure having you today. And thank you very much for joining us. I wish you best of luck now with the book launch and good luck in the future.

Robbie Kellman Baxter  35:22  
Yeah, thanks so much, Andrew. It's been really fun talking to you.

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Robbie Kellman Baxter
Robbie Kellman Baxter
About

The show

My name is Andrew Michael and I started CHURN.FM, as I was tired of hearing stories about some magical silver bullet that solved churn for company X.

In this podcast, you will hear from founders and subscription economy pros working in product, marketing, customer success, support, and operations roles across different stages of company growth, who are taking a systematic approach to increase retention and engagement within their organizations.

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