EP25: Top 5 Areas for Growth

Are you investing in marketing, but not seeing the growth you were aiming for? It might be because you’re overlooking another key growth area. In this episode of In Demand, Asia Orangio, CEO of DemandMaven, breaks down the top five areas to look at first when it comes to growth.  You’ll learn why marketing might not be the best lever to pull in your business right now and how focusing on operations, retention, and activation can drive your growth.  TL;DR 0:45 - Putting more dollars into marketing won't be the best growth investment if you haven't taken care of the core areas of the business yet. 1:50 - Area #1 is the activation and onboarding part of the customer experience. The benchmarks to look at depending on your model are below and if you're not reaching these benchmarks it's likely there is a lot of space for you to improve activation. Demo to paying customer, aim for 30% Free trial to paying customer, aim for 30 to 50% Freemium free account to paying customer, aim for 2 to 3% 7:45 - Area # 2 is retention. If you don't have any or don't have an efficient process for retaining customers who would otherwise churn it is likely a big opportunity for growth. 11:02 - Area # 3 is expansion. Upselling or cross-selling into existing plans you have or creating add ons. To do expansion well you need to have a strong product innovation process and good customer marketing to sell the value of expanded plans or add ons. 13:40 - Area # 4 is looking at your L.T.V./Average Revenue per User. If these aren't increasing over time it points to an issue with customer retention or a lack of expansion revenue. LTV will also vary between markets and you might be able to target a higher LTV market. 16:35 - Area # 5 is operations. If you are stuck on growth, but don't have good systems and processes in place for operations, then plans and strategies for marketing aren't going to create results. If you recognize this as an issue in your business it likely makes sense to invest in operations first by making a hire or improving processes. 

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Growing a SaaS? Yeah, that's hard. Growing a SaaS without a clue what you're doing from a marketing and growth perspective? Pretty much impossible — especially if you want to break the $1M and $10M ARR marks. Kim Talarczyk sits down with Asia Orangio to extract and unpack all the strategic insights she holds in her brain from working with hundreds of SaaS companies and interviewing thousands of their customers. Together, they break down how to diagnose and troubleshoot growth challenges across every part of a B2B SaaS business. About your hosts: Asia Orangio is the CEO & Founder of DemandMaven. Asia helps founders of PLG SaaS companies troubleshoot their growth across GTM, acquisition, activation, retention, and expansion and get unstuck. In early 2018, Asia founded DemandMaven — a consulting firm dedicated to helping bootstrapped and funded SaaS companies build revenue-generating growth engines. Previously, Asia served in a number of marketing roles, but most notably as head of marketing at Hull where she helped the team 10.5x in growth, and #FlipMyFunnel / Terminus as demand generation manager. Asia also served on the board of Moz before its successful acquisition in 2021. Kim Talarczyk is the Client Services and Operations Manager at DemandMaven, where she ensures all client engagements are executed to the highest standard. With a strong background in client-facing roles and professional service firms, Kim has played a key role in scaling operations and delivering exceptional experiences for both B2C and B2B brands.