Turning Product Strategy Into Action
There are many different ways for B2B subscription companies to build products – but there is often a big gap between the high-level strategy and real-life practice. A product strategy might look good on paper, but how do you turn it into action? This was an ideal topic for SubsLab #3, the third in our…
Part Four: The four building blocks for a successful b2b subscription service
In the final part of our series, we investigate the importance of ensuring your customer gains value from their subscription early on in their relationship with your product. Building block 4: Time-to-value (TTV) On-boarding subscribers is critical. Time-to- Value (TTV) is the amount of time it takesa new customer to realise value from your product,…
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Part Three: The four building blocks for a successful b2b subscription service
In the third part of our series, we delve into subscription pricing and how understanding customer perception of the value, is vital. Building block 3: Value-based pricing Value-based pricing is finding out what customers are willing to pay for, based on their perception of value. This approach can identify groups of customers who are poised…
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Part Two: The four building blocks for a successful b2b subscription service
In the second part of our series, we take a look at how successful b2b subscription businesses place the customer at the heart of all operations, in order to win big. Building block 2: Customer Obsession Excellent subscription companies obsess about their customers. Teams across the organisation need to know, and agree, who the customer…
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Part One: The four building blocks for a successful b2b subscription service
The following checklist is useful to assess where you are now and what to do next. Use the questions as a basic diagnostic to help figure out your gaps. The more you answer ‘Yes’, the better your position. Think about your next step to take to close the gap on subscription excellence. Building block 1:…
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Revolutionising Retention
What if I told you everything you thought you knew about retention was wrong? What if I told you, you need to rip up the renewal rule book and start again? WARNING – that’s exactly what you need to do, and our latest masterclass “Unlocking Recurring Revenues with Net Revenue Retention” outlines every step to…
Optimising your subscription business for customer success and value
Subscriptions are nothing new. Traditional subscription companies kept customers at arm’s length. Subscriptions were an efficient financial model of recurring contracts. Now, high-performing subscription companies obsess over customers. Examples of this include the movement to memberships and community. But looking further afield to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), it is about putting the success of the customer first…
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Beyond RFV – A New Dimension in Engagement Measurement
According to renowned management thinker Peter Drucker: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t change it.” So how can we improve engagement levels without first having a complete and comprehensive way of measuring them? Is it finally time to look beyond the regular metrics of recency, frequency and volume? This was a point clearly understood…
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How to Justify Renewal Uplift In B2B Subscriptions
Renewal time is like a birthday. It comes round at the same time every year and, if you’ve been good, people give you nice things. The difference with b2b subscription renewals is that you’ve got to work for it – and justify it. Karen Prevezer, Head of Pricing at LexisNexis, recently gave us some insight…
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Tony Jaros, former chief product officer, SiriusDecisions joins Substribe
Exciting news for anyone pursuing b2b subscription excellence! Tony Jaros (former President and Chief Product Officer at SiriusDecisions), is joining Substribe as our Strategic Advisor. He will be helping with the growth and scalability of Substribe. Tony was one of the founding team at SiriusDecisions, and instrumental in the successful sale to Forrester. Subscriptions is…
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How to measure customer value, successfully
Subscription leaders face many challenges, requiring lots of decision making. Acquiring and integrating businesses, launching new products, executing go to market plans, to list a few. So it is important to get to the heart of what matters, what moves the needle, what investments to make. Mike Phillips chaired the Substribe working group on customer…
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the only onboarding metric that matters?
Time to value (TTV). Subscription companies spend time and effort thinking about keeping and growing recurring revenues. We hear about subscription problems including churn in first and second year renewals. Beyond the metrics, the kind of problems we hear include: “We want to be a partner for our customers but we’re only speaking with junior…
how to build product around price to boost subscription success
Ever since we started Substribe we’ve been on a mission to find ways to cut the time to win with subscriptions. Previous experience told us that ideas and opinions alone does not equal success – you need tried and tested frameworks and a deep understanding of your customer to accelerate progress. So here’s a framework…
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Account Based Strategy: faster revenue growth and higher profitability
The latest Substribe breakfast club explored account based go-to-market (GTM) strategy. Meaning, take a considered view of strategic accounts and creating appropriate one to one, one to few, and one to many approaches to convert them. About high performing subscriptions High performing b2b subscription teams focus on their ideal customers. They obsess about the outcomes…
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can event brands deliver recurring value?
9 out of 10 b2b leaders believe events can make the transition to recurring value or income (but it’s hard). Thanks to Covid, event companies have tested ways to create value beyond the day(s) of their events. “I’m not big on resilience, because when you’re resilient you go back to where you were before. We’re…
getting started with personalisation
Personalisation was the focus of our latest conversation with b2b subscription leaders at our regular breakfast club. Here’s an output of the key discussion points First let’s define what personalisation is… The best personalisation is when the customer experience is enhanced and feels effortless without customers thinking about how and why it is happening. It is about making…
7 of the best subscription metrics to track
The subscription model isn’t new. I spent my early career (err 20 years ago) administrating traditional subscriptions. Then, subscriptions were used purely as a way of getting money from your customer. Communication would be limited to renewal notices…letter upon letter, email upon email, with the aim of getting customers signed up for another year. And…
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five tips to unlock customer lifetime value
Unlocking customer lifetime value is a critical success factor for B2B subscription businesses. And, it is getting harder. Demand for subscription services is rocketing, with the ‘anything as a service’ market set to reach $344.3 billion by 2024. This means B2B customers are experiencing new varieties of solutions all the time, and their expectations are…
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using creative pricing to unlock a 10X opportunity
The majority of CEOs in b2b media, data and information companies are planning moderate to robust pricing increases (source: Substribe CEO think tank July 2021). Challenges include creating certainty and belief in their teams to carry out the price rises. At the same time, the post pandemic landscape is creating complexity for b2b customers. This…
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product innovation: time for a rethink
Psst! Want to improve your chances of success in your product development, and make products that customers stick around for? Let’s take a step back and review the facts and stats about the challenge — facts and stats Is it such a problem? ‘Only 40% of new products in development make it to market, with only…
building workflow products: lessons from start up CEO Neil Bradford
Mamta Patel chaired the latest Substribe CEO think tank. Fifteen CEOs joined her, including Neil Bradford, CEO, General Index, who shared his story about creating a must-have data service. Neil also explored product development lessons learned during his career. Lesson 1, the founder myth “This is where the founder has a brilliant idea, hitting a…
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Wise up to Substech: five big talking points
Subscription technology is growing apace and is becoming more critical to enable business impact and deliver valuable and differentiated customer outcomes. However, the space is complex – what’s required…when, who should you choose, how do you use it? There’s little insight available to support b2b buyers of subscription technology and we want to change that.…
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why is a must-have score crucial for measuring customer sentiment?
We recently revealed a new customer sentiment measure we use with our client customer research projects. We’re getting some great insights that we don’t get from other customer sentiment questions such as NPS or CSAT. With our growing excitement we’ve set-up a working group to expand the use of this measure and analyse the findings.…
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how to build a must-have b2b community (9 big insights)
40 b2b leaders attended our Breakfast Club about building a must-have b2b community. We had 3 awesome speakers, Adam Smallman of PEI who shared a case study about launching a community, and Nancy Kinder of Connect and Share, and Darren Gough of Island23 who presented their expert guides to building a community. Community is fast…
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Mamta Patel joins Substribe
Substribe are delighted to announce that Mamta Patel, former co-founder and CEO of Chemical Watch, is joining Substribe as Strategic Advisor to help with the next stages of growth. We’re really excited Mamta is joining Substribe because we are taking the next step – launching a membership and expanding our advisory offering. Mamta has been…
building must-have products: expert guide
We talk about measuring a must-have product, but it’s also important to know how to build one. Ashley Friedlein is experienced in building products for both b2b subscriptions and SaaS. This experience puts Ashley in a useful position to provide a framework for building, and maintaining, a must-have product. Ashley shares his guide here: Embed a…
five proven insights to grow subscriptions
Subscriptions should create predictable revenues. To make it work, you need to find – and keep – customers who get value from the service. You need customers to stick around and pay you more. But customers expect a value exchange. See Forever Transaction. The challenge Small changes make a big difference in performance across a…
a better way to measure subscription customer value
A priority strategy for many subscription businesses is to get as close to the customer’s workflow as possible. In doing so, achieving a must-have product that sticks and creating premium enterprise subscriptions. To understand value, many b2b subscription organisations rely on renewal rates, others on page hits, NPS or word of mouth appraisals from commercial…
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membership is for life, not just renewal
In early March 2020, Substribe spoke with Victoria Mellor, Co-founder of Kademy about her focus on the customer within a newly launched membership offering. Then Covid happened. Having revisited this piece, we believe this article is more important than ever as businesses look to the membership phenomenon within the subscription economy. So here it is,…
disruption in professional services using recurring revenues
SeedLegals is the world’s first platform that lets founders and investors easily create, negotiate and sign all the legal agreements they need to manage a funding round. In just three years since it was founded, it is now the largest closer of funding rounds in the UK. Co-founder Anthony Rose tells Substribe (ahead of his…
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