3 Key Benefits of FastSpring’s Trial Hopping Prevention Feature

1. It Prevents Abuse

Repeated exploitation of free trials can lead to revenue loss and skewed metrics, making it harder to gauge genuine interest in your product. FastSpring’s Trial Hopping Prevention feature helps prevent users from repeatedly accessing free trials, protecting the integrity of your trial strategy and supporting healthier subscription performance.

2. It Delivers a Fair Trial Experience

Providing a free trial should be about allowing genuine users to explore your product and determine if it’s right for them. Trial hopping can undermine this experience by filling your trial funnel with non-serious users. Trial hopping prevention helps maintain a fair experience for customers sincerely exploring your product.

3. It Encourages Conversions

When free trials are limited to genuine first-time use, users who see value in your product are more likely to upgrade to a paid subscription to maintain access. By restricting repeated free trials, this feature can help support better trial-to-paid conversion outcomes.

How Does the Trial Hopping Prevention Feature Work?

FastSpring’s Trial Hopping Prevention feature helps reduce repeated free-trial abuse by preventing the same email from being used for unlimited retrials, helping guide repeat trial attempts toward a paid plan instead. Businesses can enable the setting within their store’s subscription configuration as part of their broader subscription strategy.

Best Practices for Leveraging the Trial Hopping Prevention Feature

Communicate Clear Policies

Transparency is key to maintaining trust with your users. Clearly outline your trial policies, including any restrictions, in your terms of service and marketing materials. This helps set expectations and reduces the likelihood of misunderstandings.

Use Incentives to Encourage Upgrades

To complement the Trial Hopping Prevention feature, consider offering incentives such as discounts or bonuses for users who transition from a free trial to a paid subscription. Highlight the value of your paid plans, and demonstrate how they can enhance the user’s experience.

Monitor Trial Metrics

Track trial-to-paid conversion rates and analyze user behavior during trials. FastSpring’s Trials dashboard can help you monitor signup volume, conversion performance, and lifecycle trends so you can refine your trial strategy over time.

Combine With Other Retention Strategies

Pair the Trial Hopping Prevention feature with other retention-focused tools, such as Pause a Subscription or a cancellation survey, to maximize customer satisfaction and reduce churn.

Protect Your Business and Enhance Customer Experience

FastSpring’s Trial Hopping Prevention feature empowers businesses to maintain the integrity of their free trial offerings while supporting stronger conversion outcomes. By preventing abuse, ensuring fairness, and encouraging upgrades, this feature helps you deliver value to genuine users and protect your subscription revenue.

FAQs

Partner With FastSpring

FastSpring provides an all-in-one payment and subscription platform for thousands of SaaS, software, video games, and digital products businesses, including VAT, GST, and sales tax management, payment localization, and consumer support. 

Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

The post Maximizing Subscription Value With FastSpring’s Trial Hopping Prevention Feature appeared first on FastSpring.

Example: You want to create a subscription. You can ask:

“How do I create a subscription?”

The AI responds with step-by-step guidance:

“To create a subscription, go to Catalog > Subscription Plans and click Create Subscription. You will need to define the price and interval.”

From there, you can follow up:

“Can you explain the interval options in more detail?”

The AI keeps context and replies:

“Certainly. The interval determines how often the customer is billed. You can choose Adhoc, Day, Week, Month, or Year.”

This conversational approach helps you explore features in depth without having to repeat questions or scroll through multiple pages.

Key features of the new AI search:

• Context-Aware Follow-Ups: Keep the AI “in the loop” so follow-ups build on previous answers.
  
• Use Your Own AI Tools: On any doc page, you can use your own ChatGPT or Claude with that page’s content as context and even copy Markdown for internal use.
  
• Faster Navigation: Quickly find the right docs and related topics without guesswork.
  

Note: The AI works from documented content only. If a topic isn’t covered yet, it may not have an answer. Documentation remains the source of truth.

The new AI search turns documentation into a conversation — making answers faster, exploration easier, and learning more intuitive.

Explore the Ask AI documentation to discover features, tips, and best practices.

The post AI-Powered Answers, Right in the Docs appeared first on FastSpring.

Here’s an in-depth look at how this feature works and why it’s beneficial.

6 Key Benefits of FastSpring’s Subscription Pause Feature

1. Flexibility for Customers

Life can be unpredictable, and sometimes, customers temporarily may not need or be able to afford a service. The subscription pause feature allows them to disable billing and services temporarily without canceling their subscription. This flexibility builds trust and shows that your business values customer needs.

2. Retention Strategy

Rather than losing customers permanently due to cancellations, the pause feature provides an alternative. By allowing customers to pause their subscriptions, businesses can retain them over the long term, improving customer lifetime value and reducing churn rates.

3. Automatic Resumption

Once a pause is initiated, subscriptions automatically resume on the configured date. This eliminates the need for customers to take additional action, making the process seamless and ensuring service continuity when they’re ready to return.

4. Customization Options

FastSpring’s subscription pause feature is highly customizable, allowing businesses to:

• Define the maximum pause duration.
• Determine whether customers can initiate pauses themselves or require assistance.
• Tailor the experience to match their subscription model and customer needs.

5. Reduced Churn

By providing an alternative to cancellations, businesses can significantly reduce churn rates. Customers facing temporary financial constraints or changes in service needs are more likely to return after a pause than if they had canceled altogether.

6. Improved Customer Experience

Offering a pause option demonstrates empathy and understanding of your customers’ challenges, or of even just their usage habits and expectations. Offering a pause feature enhances their overall experience and strengthens their loyalty to your brand. 

For example, a November 2024 Wall Street Journal article cites an Antenna report showing that the rate of streaming service subscribers who canceled one year and rejoined the next increased from a median of 29.8% in 2022 to 34.2% in 2023. Since more and more people may be regularly stopping subscriptions and then rejoining later, making the process easier for your customers can foster goodwill and loyalty, ultimately improving retention.

How to Implement FastSpring’s Subscription Pause Feature

Step 1: Configure Pause Settings

• Within your FastSpring account, configure the subscription pause settings to align with your business strategy. 
• Decide on the maximum allowable pause duration and whether customers can initiate pauses themselves. (This configuration setting allows you to choose the number of bill periods the customer can pause for.)

Step 2: Customer Communication

• Clearly communicate the pause option to your customers. Highlight the benefits, such as avoiding cancellation fees or preserving their subscription benefits upon resumption. The number of billing cycles for which a subscription can be paused is configurable, but it must be set in advance.
• If the pause feature is not enabled for customers, only sellers can pause subscriptions.
• The pause applies only to the configured number of billing cycles, and this setting must be saved in the subscription’s configuration.

Step 3: Monitor Paused Subscriptions

FastSpring provides webhooks to monitor and manage paused subscriptions. Use these to identify trends or common accounts, such as common pause durations or reasons for pauses, and refine your strategies accordingly. (FastSpring sends webhooks when a subscription is paused or updated to resume, such as subscription.paused and subscription.updated.)

Step 4: Leverage Automated Notifications

Set up automated email notifications to:

• Confirm the pause request.
• Remind customers when their subscription is about to resume.
• Offer incentives, such as discounts or bonuses, to encourage early resumption.

A Win-Win for Businesses and Customers

The subscription pause feature is a powerful tool that benefits both businesses and customers. By reducing churn, improving customer retention, and enhancing the overall experience, it positions your business for long-term success. Customers, in turn, appreciate the flexibility and understanding, fostering loyalty and trust. A “Pause” option reduces churn by catching these “non-permanent” cancellations.

Buyers feel less pressure and more positive about the brand, leading to higher lifetime value (LTV).

Start leveraging FastSpring’s subscription pause feature today and give your customers the flexibility they need while ensuring your business thrives in the subscription economy.

Are you looking for a merchant of record that will partner with you to grow your business internationally? FastSpring provides an all-in-one payment platform for SaaS, software, gaming, and other digital goods businesses, including VAT and sales tax management, payment localization, and consumer support. Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

The post Enhance Customer Experience With FastSpring’s Subscription Pause Feature appeared first on FastSpring.

Or, you can simplify the system with one global merchant of record. 

When Excire became a popular enough product line that it was being sold in both Europe and the U.S., Managing Director Mathias Martinetz and CTO Thomas Käster knew their current online checkout setup — having one solution for Europe and one for the U.S. — was not efficient. 

“And we had a lot of manual work,” Mathias says. “Basically, each and every sale had to be manually organized and given to our tax advisor.”

And if they wanted to continue scaling their business and expanding into more countries, they needed a better system. 

That’s when they discovered the merchant of record model and, subsequently, FastSpring.

Completely switching online commerce systems can be daunting, especially when switching from one type (such as a very basic online checkout or web shop system) to another (such as a comprehensive merchant of record). But Mathias and Thomas did their due diligence, and they’re glad they found FastSpring.

Here’s what they did to ensure they’d find the right merchant of record (MoR) and have a successful transition.

Are you looking for a merchant of record that will partner with you to grow your business internationally? FastSpring provides an all-in-one payment platform for SaaS, software, video game, and other digital goods businesses, including VAT and sales tax management, payment localization, and consumer support. Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

Excire Needed a Simpler Payments and Taxes System

Excire is an award-winning line of photo and video management software products that help photographers organize, find, and cull their photos at lightning speed. With Excire Foto as a standalone product or with Excire Search as an Adobe Lightroom plugin, photographers can leverage meta data and AI for keyword search, facial recognition, grouping shots, image analysis, and more.

As the product line grew in popularity and the team was able to move from only selling Excire in Europe to selling it in the U.S., they found themselves with two separate shop systems. 

“As we were growing and wanted to grow more, we were looking for a solution that would allow us to have only one shop, but that could also be used around the world,” Mathias recalls. 

Thomas adds, “We encountered some technical challenges, which is to be expected when managing an ecommerce system independently. Additionally, we faced issues with our tax workflows, which were no longer sufficient to support the level of growth and scaling we had already achieved.”

They appreciated the value of offering localized currencies and payments to buyers, but as it was already unwieldy to have two online shops for two regions, they didn’t want to add more shops as they moved into new regions. They also knew they didn’t like managing all the sales taxes the way they had been, and that more growth would only make that even more difficult.

There had to be a better way, so they started looking around to see what other companies were using. 

Similar Software Companies Recommended FastSpring

Mathias and Thomas reached out to some contacts of theirs at another software company, and that company referred them to FastSpring. 

“The interesting thing for us is,” Thomas says, “if I see similar companies using FastSpring in the same way as we’d like to use it, that’s a good sign that FastSpring was the right decision for us.”

Without having to think for very long about it, they can easily list a handful of software companies in their industry who also use FastSpring, which makes them even more confident about their decision. 

Talk to Similar Businesses About THEIR Experiences

Besides just noting that many businesses like theirs were already using FastSpring, Mathias and Thomas recommend asking them for more information about what it’s actually like to use a particular payments platform or merchant of record. “Get their experience,” Mathias advises. 

Thomas adds, “In the end, you never know, right? When you decide to switch off an existing technical system completely and onto a completely new system, you never know if it will be the right decision.” So besides just observing what your own competitors are using, reach out to businesses you’re friendly with and “Talk a lot to the people.”

Pay Attention to the Responsiveness of Each MoR’s Team as You Begin Reaching Out

Excire was fortunate to have a very short list of possible ecommerce solutions, as FastSpring seemed like the clear winner just based on how many other companies were already using it. 

But if you have a few options on your list — or if you want to validate that the one you’re leaning toward is eager to meet your needs – you can learn a lot from how a possible vendor’s team responds to your initial inquiry. 

This may seem counterintuitive, as most people and organizations will be eager to ensure the first experience you have with them is excellent. And Thomas says that it’s not always easy to make a decision based on those first impressions. 

But he clarifies, “Even from a first impression, the FastSpring team does a better job than the competitors.” The Excire team had also approached an MoR company that had a team based in Germany, so Thomas and Mathias could speak with that team in their native language. 

“But the first contact with them was not as good as the first contact with FastSpring,” he continues. Besides the technical requirements he wanted to ensure were met, “The way the team took care was very important for the final decision to go with FastSpring.”

Define Your Needs Clearly and Communicate Them to Potential Vendors

Observing competitors, talking to similar businesses, and initiating contact with various vendors are all important parts of the external planning phase when evaluating a new ecommerce system, but there’s an important internal planning phase too. 

As Chief Technical Officer, Thomas is very hands on with the technical aspects of their various systems, so he knows how important it is to know what you need and communicate that to potential payments platforms. 

He explains it this way: “Summarize and describe your own necessities, or the aspects that are most important to you. Especially, what are the requirements of such an ecommerce system? When you explain it in the best way you can, then you’ll get the best, most concrete answer from the FastSpring team.”

There were several sessions back and forth between the Excire team and FastSpring as they worked through the technical details of what their team needed and how FastSpring could meet those needs. Thomas said those sessions helped them “come to the point where we were really sure about our decision to go with FastSpring.”

He continues, “I guess this is something every company needs to do on its own first: to check all the aspects that are important to them, and to communicate those aspects in a clear manner.” 

Besides wanting to combine their international payment systems into one simpler system that could continue expanding their global sales, Thomas and Mathias were also looking closely at competitive pricing, payment failure systems, ease of international pricing management, newsletter systems, subscription capabilities, and integrations. 

The Excire team also found FastSpring’s pricing better than the other merchants of record they evaluated.

Upgrade to a Merchant of Record Like FastSpring

It was looking at and talking to companies similar to Excire that tipped off Mathias and Thomas to the merchant of record model as the answer to their global payments and taxes question.

“That’s how we found out that the solution could be a merchant of record,” Mathias says. “So that’s how we got more into it and found out that there is an advantage: that all tax and currency related activities can be handled much, much easier than if we would do it on our own.”

Switching from separate systems for different regions to one global solution would be an upgrade, but finding an ecommerce model that also managed sales taxes and VAT for Excire sales would provide an even greater improvement to their operations.

FastSpring has also made many of the smaller, day-to-day management tasks easier. For example, Mathias says that “We can easily define prices worldwide; that’s quite smooth. And it was helpful to implement a subscription model, right, Thomas?” 

“Yeah, that’s for sure,” Thomas adds.

When Excire initially launched on FastSpring in 2023, they ran into some challenges with email and analytics integrations. The FastSpring team worked hard to meet Mathias’ and Thomas’ needs, prioritizing additional help for the Excire store integrations and finding ways to meet their needs.

Thomas says of their more recent subscription launch, “This kind of integration was very easy.” He says that their integration requirements may be more complicated to fulfill than some companies’, but that the communication between FastSpring and their licensing vendor has been “really easy and robust.”

Partner With FastSpring to Simplify Your International Software Sales

Are you looking for a merchant of record that will partner with you to grow your business internationally? 

FastSpring provides an all-in-one payment platform for SaaS, software, gaming, and other digital goods businesses, including VAT and sales tax management, payment localization, and consumer support. 

Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

The post How Excire Simplified Their International Software Sales (and Taxes) With FastSpring appeared first on FastSpring.

As FastSpring continues growing rapidly as a business throughout the next few years, the company also aims to set the standard in its industry for Customer Success and Support. This will require FastSpring to continue to expand its global presence, continue to strengthen and deepen customer relationships, establish new methods of interacting with leading customers, and enhance its ability to act as a highly consultative partner to customers to help fuel their growth and success.

“I am pleased to welcome Lindsay into the company to lead the Global Customer Operations team through our next chapter of growth,” said FastSpring CEO David Nachman. “Lindsay brings a wealth of experience leading global customer teams in high growth environments, as well as incredible depth of knowledge and experience in payments and ecommerce.” 

Said Walker, “FastSpring’s global customer organization and partnership approach extends beyond our best-in-class technology. We actively collaborate with our customers to share valuable insights, foster innovation, and unlock customers’ full potential in a dynamic and shifting global economic environment. As Chief Customer Officer, I know that by working together, we can create a thriving ecosystem where businesses can transcend borders and achieve lasting success in a competitive digital landscape.”

Most recently, Walker spent 4.5 years as the SVP of Customer Success at Checkout.com, where she built the customer success organization during a period of rapid expansion with a focus on a diverse enterprise customer base. Prior to that, Walker commercialized and scaled the customer success function at Adyen as VP of Account Management. She brings knowledge of the MoR model from her 4.5 years at Digital River’s World Payments subsidiary, and served in customer-facing and partnership leadership roles at other payments companies, including WorldPay and GlobalCollect (now part of Worldline). She has extensive relationships throughout the industry and has played a leadership role in critical industry associations such as the Merchant Risk Council.

About FastSpring

FastSpring powers global payments for SaaS and software companies, video game publishers, and other digital goods businesses. As a merchant of record, FastSpring provides a fully managed payment solution including checkout, fraud mitigation, comprehensive sales tax and VAT compliance, and more. Founded in 2005, FastSpring is a privately owned company headquartered in California with offices in the UK, the Netherlands, and Canada.

Click here to read the post on PR Newswire.

The post Press Release: FastSpring Announces Payments Veteran Lindsay Walker as New Chief Customer Officer appeared first on FastSpring.

FastSpring Customer Success Team Gets Exceptional Results

Our customer success team was honored with this award thanks to three key achievements: 

1. Exceptional Results

We consistently surpass targets and achieve unprecedented growth, exceeding customer expectations and showcasing our dedication to excellence.

2. Strategic Agility

We take a proactive approach to identifying opportunities, implementing innovative solutions, and adapting to market changes — all of which reflect our strategic vision, keeping us ahead in the industry.

3. Customer-Centric Culture

We prioritize customer satisfaction, nurture a collaborative culture, and ensure seamless teamwork across departments, demonstrating our commitment to exceptional service and successful project execution. 

What Our Customers Say

These accomplishments are echoed by FastSpring customer feedback responses about their customer success managers (CSMs), including: 

• “The customer success manager collaborated with us on revamping our customer journey and redesigning the checkout experience by implementing an embedded checkout, resulting in a notable boost in conversion rates.”
• “Our customer success manager played a pivotal role in enhancing our average order value (AOV) by facilitating FastSpring’s integration of a shopping cart in the fourth quarter of the previous year. This integration empowered our customers to make multiple product selections within a single order instead of being limited to a single product choice without the convenience of a cart.”
• “Our dedicated CSM has consistently demonstrated exceptional responsiveness and proactivity in her role. We are truly delighted to have her as a dedicated CSM for us, and her contributions have been instrumental in our success.”

SocialBee’s Co-Founder and Chief Executive Bee Ovi Negrean is continually impressed by FastSpring’s support and customer success. Read more about his experience here.

The Globee® Awards

The Globee® Awards, named with a portmanteau of the words “global” and “business,” were created to recognize various types of organizations around the world, specifically in business and technology categories. They present awards in nine categories, including Customer Excellence, American Business, Business, Cybersecurity, Disruptor, and Women In Business.

From the Globee® Awards for Customer Excellence Gold Winner page:

“To be recognized as a Gold Globee® Winner, an entrant needs to attain an impressive average score of 9.0 or above, or have the highest score in their category, according to the judgment of the evaluators. This distinction marks the recipient’s superior performance, innovation, and leadership in their field, distinguishing them as leaders of excellence. The Gold Globee® Winner accolade celebrates not only the individual or organization’s notable achievements but also encourages the broader industry community to aim for and achieve high standards of excellence. It is an acknowledgment of the winner’s hard work, talent, and commitment to their area of expertise.”

We know how hard our customer success team works to ensure our customers and their businesses succeed, so we’re not surprised they’ve been honored with this award! 

If you want your SaaS, software, video game, or digital goods business to benefit from FastSpring’s continued commitment to customer success, set up a demo or sign up to check out the platform yourself.

The post FastSpring Customer Success Team Wins Gold Globee® Award appeared first on FastSpring.

As the VP and General Manager of the Stardock Software division, Brad led his team through this process and has learned some valuable lessons about doing it as strategically and easily as possible. 

FastSpring is proud to have been a big part of supporting that process for Stardock, and Brad had some great things to say about how easy we made it for them. We asked him to share his process tips for anyone who might be considering or actively planning the same transition themselves.

Here are Brad’s top recommendations: 

• Have a committed partner like FastSpring to handle the subscription infrastructure so you don’t have to, including:
  • Choosing a partner that’s making the same investments in subscription management that you are.
  • Letting FastSpring handle the subscription infrastructure.
  • Integrating customer-facing subscription management tools on your own site.
• Start small with an incremental approach.
• Communicate frequently and clearly with customers about the transition.
• Prepare for renewals with value adds to reduce churn.
• Design the transition plan that’s right for your company.

Are you looking for a merchant of record that will partner with you to grow your SaaS business? FastSpring provides an all-in-one payment platform for SaaS, software, video game, and other digital goods businesses, including subscription management, payment localization, VAT and sales tax management, consumer support, and more. Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

5 Tips for Making the SaaS Transition Easier

1. Choose FastSpring for Subscription Infrastructure and Long-Term Partnership

Stardock Software first started using FastSpring in 2018 to help them sell their software products, and they’d always had a relatively good experience with how FastSpring handles sales of one-time software purchases. 

Luckily, FastSpring was able to make the transition to subscriptions very positive, too — about as simple as replacing a few SKUs on their site (more on that below).

This was a relief, since the technology behind subscription management for software purchases can get very complex very quickly, with many scenarios that need to be accounted for and multiple technological components that need to be covered. 

“Most people would not think about all the intricacies that have to happen” when switching from a single transaction to a subscription, Brad explains. “As an example, you have a product that was previously purchased once, and it worked forever. Now you suddenly purchase a product, and it has a time box on it that is tied to a subscription — which means that product now has to stop working if a user stops paying for it. So that gets complex. And then, what do you do if they’re offline? What do you do in all these different scenarios? There’s a real dividing line here, which is where FastSpring came in.” 

When Brad and his team started planning to test the SaaS business model in spring of 2023, knowing that FastSpring already had the infrastructure to support subscription sales meant that Stardock Software didn’t need to build their own, search for a specialty tool or service, or worry about that part at all, really. 

“The worst thing that can happen is, you make the switch to subscription, and then your technology fails to make the switch effectively. And we were only able to do this because we had confidence that FastSpring’s subscription model would support our endeavors.”

“We were only able to do this because we had confidence that FastSpring’s subscription model would support our endeavors.”

FastSpring is proud to have been a key part of Stardock’s business ecosystem as they tackled an initiative that’s driving major growth for their business. 

Choose a Partner Making the Same Investments In Subscription Management

Brad admits that Stardock will always be in a position that keeps them from being “married to any single vendor,” and they know FastSpring isn’t the only merchant of record or subscription management tool on the market. 

“But at the same time,” he explains, “we knew that with moving to a subscription model, we had to bet on a partner who was making the same level of investments that we were making. And the conclusion was that FastSpring was on that path of continued investment and wasn’t just collecting the paycheck every month and doing nothing.” 

“We had to bet on a partner who was making the same level of investments that we were making.”

Brad was able to see where FastSpring was making those investments, as product updates rolled out and as future timelines and roadmaps were shared with Stardock by their Customer Success Manager, Danica. He says that helps, because “it’s like, ‘Okay, if we’re going to go subscription (which again, ratchets up the stickiness factor for FastSpring), then we’ve got to make sure FastSpring is going to be here for the long run, too.’” 

Brad went on to describe Stardock’s relationship with FastSpring as “symbiotic.” “Because the better we do, the better FastSpring is going to do. We’ve got to make sure that everybody’s winning, and things with FastSpring just felt aligned.”

Let FastSpring Handle the Subscription Infrastructure

“You have two technical components to this,” Brad clarifies. “You have the subscription side (the actual financial transaction that must occur), and the mechanism that keeps that information updated. And then you also have the actual app itself. So this is where we really started getting deep into FastSpring, because FastSpring already had the subscription components.” 

Because Stardock and FastSpring were growing together through this subscription technology journey, Brad saw FastSpring’s earlier iterations of the subscription management tools. That was already enough to make switching on subscriptions a much simpler process than it would have been without FastSpring. 

“At the time, it was a little more bare bones, but it had the infrastructure in place to actually allow us to do this. Because at the end of the day, you can’t just turn on a subscription — the whole plumbing pipeline has to be there,” he reiterates. “And so we connected with FastSpring, explained our scenario, they helped us with the documentation and helped us work through some edge cases, and then we were able to wire it up through already deployed FastSpring infrastructure on our end.” 

This turned out to be about as simple as setting up a new product SKU on their site that was marked as a subscription, outlining the attributes of the subscription (in their case, annual as opposed to monthly), and setting the price on the product. “There are a few other options in there,” Brad says, “like, ‘How do you want to communicate to the customer that things are about to renew?,’” but it was overall a simple process.

“Nothing in life at this magnitude is painless, but it was able to be done relatively quickly to pivot our business from a modeling perspective,” he assures us. “And that was the biggest value unlock: that we didn’t have to go through and reinvent the wheel on subscriptions for our flexible storefront at the end of the day.”

“That was the biggest value unlock: that we didn’t have to go through and reinvent the wheel on subscriptions for our flexible storefront at the end of the day.”

FastSpring’s subscription management features include:

• Trial management (with or without payment method, and free or paid trials).
• Recurring payment processing.
• Plan management tools for businesses or their customers to manage the details of their subscriptions.
• A subscription overview dashboard with insightful metrics.
• Correspondence automation.
• Churn reduction and dunning management (automatic retrying of failed renewal payments and related email communications). 

All of this was in addition to the standard features and tools FastSpring already provides, including:

• Global payments for easily transacting across borders.
• Tax compliance, include calculation, collection, and remittance of VAT and sales taxes.
• Customizable checkouts that are localized to customers and branded with your company branding, plus they’re available as embedded, popup, or a hosted FastSpring web storefront to accommodate your business needs.
• Fraud prevention with intelligent alerts and fewer chargebacks.
• Reporting and analytics, including subscription, revenue, and chargeback dashboards to help you track recurring revenue from your new subs.
• Developer tools like a JavaScript library; FastSpring’s REST API; webhooks; and integrations and connections with third-party systems including marketing analytics tools, CRMs, DRMs, BI tools, and more.
• And much more.

Are you looking for a merchant of record that will partner with you to grow your SaaS business? FastSpring provides an all-in-one payment platform for SaaS, software, video game, and other digital goods businesses, including subscription management, payment localization, VAT and sales tax management, consumer support, and more. Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

Integrate Customer-Facing Subscription Management on Your Own Site

Besides handling subscription sales and management on the back end, FastSpring also provides account management tools for Stardock’s customers to manage their own subscriptions on the front end. 

Brad recommends taking advantage of an embedded subscription management portal to provide a totally seamless experience to your users. 

FastSpring’s Embedded Payment Management Components are an embedded same-page subscription payment management experience (including adding, updating, and deleting payment methods) that enables your customers to manage their subscription payment methods without leaving your account management portal. 

You can create, customize (and brand), embed, and test the payment management component on your own site to give your customers the best experience possible while managing payments for their new subscriptions. 

FastSpring can act as an end-to-end subscription solution via our subscription API, ranging from getting subscription data, updating account information, and showing proration previews of estimated proposed plan changes to customers — all within your portal.

2. Start Small With an Incremental Approach

FastSpring having the subscription management technology handled meant that — besides being able to focus on software development instead of on the tech needed to sell their software — Brad and his team were able to focus on other nuanced facets of making the switch beyond the technical specs, such as which products they wanted to switch over to the subscription model first.

He recommends that you start small and cascade any learnings to additional products as you add to your subscription offerings. 

“Our model was ‘Start small, risk small,’ and then ‘Move big, risk big.’ And by that time, it was no longer ‘Risk big,’ it was ‘Manage big.’”

“Our model was ‘Start small, risk small,’ and then ‘Move big, risk big.’ And by that time, it was no longer ‘Risk big,’ it was ‘Manage big.’”

While Stardock had multiple products with multiple support add-ons already, Brad outlined that they started the subscription experiment with one support add-on for one product, and for one specific subtype of their customer base. “What we started with was actually support and maintenance of a specific product. As an example, we sell Fences®. Fences® sells a lot to enterprise customers. Where we started trialing it was, Fences® the product remained a single point of transaction, but we introduced an option that would allow you to purchase annualized subscription maintenance and support for a reduced cost.” 

Essentially, you can apply a few filters to your products, add-ons, and user types to get a relatively small experimental group. “We just started on one particular product that we knew sold in volume with one particular scenario, which was only business, and then one particular type of customer who’s like, ‘I’ll take the discount for the renewal.’”

Once you start to see those first subscriptions begin to flow in, you can gauge whether it’s flowing as expected and make adjustments as needed, Brad says. “You compare and contrast, like, ‘How many people are choosing the subscription?’ And then you just amplify things up. You go to another product, and go to another product. And then you try a primary product. And then you try the big suite,” which for Stardock is Object Desktop™, containing all of their apps. “That was the big switchover once we had confidence.”

Starting small helped Stardock avoid any large upfront risks as they began testing the benefits of SaaS. 

3. Communicate Frequently and Clearly With Customers

Communicating business model and/or delivery model changes to your customers can be a real struggle, and they can greatly affect the user’s experience and relationship with your company and your product. Brad recommends you put a lot of strategy and care into how and when you announce upcoming changes.

“It distills down into reducing risk, not from a technology perspective, but from a communication issues perspective. There’s no way to mitigate all possible communication issues, and marketing is always the last thing you put out,” he says. 

“It distills down into reducing risk, not from a technology perspective, but from a communication issues perspective.”

“There are a lot of challenges from the perspective of marketing, communication, educating the end user, unlocking value, and creating expectations that what you’re doing is better for everybody involved,” Brad outlined. “Because it’s really easy for people to hear ‘subscriptions’ and think, ‘Oh, the business just wants to suck more money out of us.’ And that’s not the path we tried to take, but that’s always the narrative that’s going to be pushed, from a client perspective, onto you.” 

Brad further explains that “Anytime you move anybody’s cheese, they get really upset. People will say, ‘I’ve been a customer for 20 years, and suddenly you’re changing your business model! Why are you doing that? Is it because you hate money?,’” he quotes, implying that customers may threaten to stop using the product.

He says challenges like those are evergreen and will continue to come up, so being proactive about communicating changes is key to working through the change with your customers, especially long-term ones. 

Stardock’s “Start small, risk small; move big, manage big” rollout model really applied to customer communications. 

“If you try to go out the gate with a really high value, then the marketing messaging must really be on point to the dollar value you’re trying to charge for your SaaS service or product.”

But since Stardock had started their SaaS transition with a small subset of products, they were able to test communications and evaluate customer feedback in a very manageable pipeline before transitioning to their larger core products. “Because once you put your core product out there in that model, the amount of inbound communications you get is a lot,” Brad tells us. “And to try to manage that, we needed to be prepared.”

Those inbounds from customers can come from anywhere, he says. “From every possible direction — you get it from your forums, you get it through email, you get it through social media, you get it through phone calls, you get it everywhere, because people are trying to figure out what you’re doing. And you learn real quick — and I mean real quick — where your communication wasn’t clear or effective.” 

But thanks to the small-to-big transition plan, those learnings get applied to the next larger product you roll out on subscription, and the communication bumps you may experience at first are only with a relatively small subset of customers. For the next round, now you know where, when, and how additional communications need to be posted. 

4. Prepare for Renewals With Value-Adds to Help Reduce Churn

Because Stardock opted to offer their subscription software on an annual pricing model instead of monthly — and because they launched subscriptions a little under a year ago, not just to new customers but also to all existing customers at the same time — Stardock’s first big renewal period is yet to happen. But it’s quickly approaching.

“For us, the big question for 2024 can be summed up in a single word: churn,” Brad explains. “We have expectations and some modeling that suggest where things should land. But this will be the year for us to determine how we approach subscriptions going for year two and effectively beyond.”

Despite the possibility for churn, he says they feel they’ve added a lot of value to their SaaS products. Besides having FastSpring’s retention-supporting features such as churn reducing dunning management as part of their tech stack, Stardock is releasing new apps and services for their subscription products to add to the real and perceived value of their products to customers. “We’ve tried to increase the value from our perspective, and we’re going to learn real quick whether or not we’ve increased the value from the user perspective.”

5. Design the Transition Plan That’s Right for Your Company

Back when Stardock had begun planning a SaaS transition for their products, Brad says they heard a few different things within the industry about the absolutely best way to do it. One particularly common piece of advice was to “go cold turkey” and launch everything as SaaS all at once. 

“The best way I can describe my job is trying to decide what advice is bad advice,” he told us. “And I would say that was bad advice.” 

That hard-won sense of discernment is how Brad and Stardock landed on the small-to-big rollout plan, which really worked well for them.

But he recommends that any software company evaluating if and how to make the switch to SaaS should decide what’s best for their own company, without just listening to the loudest chatter in the industry. 

“Every company is unique in what their clientele will expect and/or tolerate.”

“There was no company that we talked to who had gone through similar things, that had the same experience as us, and nobody after us will, either,” Brad assures us. “Every company is unique in what their clientele will expect and/or tolerate.”

Partner With FastSpring

Ready to explore how your SaaS or software business can benefit from FastSpring’s continued commitment to subscription management product development?

FastSpring is a merchant of record that provides an all-in-one payment platform for SaaS, software, video game, and other digital products businesses, including subscription management, global payments, fraud prevention, VAT and sales tax management, consumer support, and so much more. 

Set up a demo or sign up to check out the platform yourself.

Related Reading

• Visit our Subscription Management product page for more info and links to our documentation.
• Read more about how FastSpring helps SaaS businesses move subscriptions on our SaaS solutions page.
• Hear from many more satisfied FastSpring customers on our Case Study page. 
• Check out our Dashboards documentation page for detailed info on our subscription, revenue, and chargeback dashboards. 
• Wondering about how SaaS renewals might go? Read SaaS Churn: Myths, Benchmarks, and Strategies to Retain More Revenue for benchmarking data and five tips for reducing SaaS churn.
• Still not sure you fully understand dunning management? Read more about what our dunning management features do to help reduce failed payments and involuntary churn.
• Wanting to sell subscriptions with a sales team? Check out FastSpring’s Digital Invoicing and Interactive Quotes. 
• Running a startup that’s focused on getting a great valuation? Listen to our podcast episode on What Brands Look for When Considering Acquiring Software Companies.

The post Navigating Your Transition to SaaS Subscriptions: 5 Insights From Stardock’s Experience With FastSpring appeared first on FastSpring.

FastSpring Support Rises to the Challenge

It was clear to award judges that FastSpring’s team had moved strategically to make the voice of the customer the center of improvement efforts, with results showing in customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores, net promoter scores (NPS), and first response target times in 96% of cases. 

These efforts were described as particularly impressive given how much our company is growing, which can present challenges for any customer support team — but our team stepped up to address challenges by better understanding and meeting customers’ needs.

Steps taken by our support team to accomplish these goals included customer journey mapping, engaging with customers one on one, integrating artificial intelligence in our support processes, and even implementing interdepartmental service level agreements (SLAs). These steps helped our team move back to a more customer-centric culture, which has further empowered and engaged our team members, too.

We’ve also integrated artificial intelligence with our documentation search tool! Read our blog post to learn how it works, or go to our documentation to try it out for yourself. 

The Stevie® Awards

The Stevie® awards were created in 2002 and have become the world’s premier business awards, with Sales & Customer Service, American, International, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East & North Africa, Women in Business, and many other sections of awards having been established to recognize excellence in business all over the world. 

This award is the product of a lot of hard work by our support team, and we’re not surprised they’ve earned this distinction!

Need FastSpring assistance? Experience our team’s excellent service firsthand by submitting a service request from inside the FastSpring app or via our service portal.

The post FastSpring Customer Service Team Wins Silver Stevie® Award appeared first on FastSpring.

Say goodbye to the traditional method of sifting through pages of documents using keywords. With Owlbot AI seamlessly integrated into our search, you now have the power to ask questions in natural language and receive precise, relevant responses in real time. Whether you’re seeking product information, troubleshooting guidance, or code snippets for API calls, Owlbot AI has got you covered.

What sets AI search apart from basic document searches? It’s all about the way you interact with it. Instead of rigidly typing keywords, you can now frame your queries as questions, allowing for a more intuitive and conversational search experience. No more guesswork or trial and error with specific keywords — simply ask, and Owlbot AI will deliver.

We know achieving perfection requires continual refinement. Although our goal is to provide accurate and thorough information, it’s worth acknowledging that, similar to other AI search tools, Owlbot may occasionally produce inaccurate or partial responses. Your feedback is invaluable in pinpointing areas for improvement within our documentation to minimize such occurrences, so please feel free to share what works and what doesn’t. Together, we’ll enhance the AI search experience to better cater to your requirements.

Here’s how it works:

1. Type your question or phrase into the search bar.
2. Relevant documentation related to your query will populate.
3. Press Enter to generate the AI response, or click on the relevant document (if you want to bypass the AI response).
4. Provide feedback on the response you received by clicking on either the Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down icon.

We’re committed to continuous improvement, and your feedback plays a crucial role in shaping the future of our AI search feature. By sharing your feedback, you’re helping us deliver a more efficient and accurate search experience tailored to your needs. To help you navigate this new tool, refer to the Owlbot AI Documentation Search page on FastSpring Docs.

Of course, we understand that there are times when manual searching is still necessary. That’s why we’ve made it easy to toggle between AI-powered search and traditional keyword-based searches. Simply click the ⌘K FOR MORE or Ctrl+K FOR MORE Button located in the search bar, or utilize the keyboard shortcuts (Mac: ⌘+K or Windows: Ctrl+K) as you start typing in the search bar to transition modes and reach the basic search engine. This feature enables you to locate documents you wish to review by using the familiar search filters you’re accustomed to.

We’re thrilled to usher in this new era of intelligent search at FastSpring. With Owlbot AI by your side, finding the information you need has never been easier or more intuitive. So go ahead: Ask away, and let’s embark on this journey of innovation together!

The post Introducing FastSpring Docs With Owlbot: AI-Powered Search for Documentation appeared first on FastSpring.

Co-Founder and Chief Executive Bee Ovi Negrean has used the word “flawlessly” to describe how FastSpring’s merchant of record use case has worked for SocialBee (more on that below!).

After adopting FastSpring as their merchant of record, SocialBee even saw 2x year-over-year growth in monthly recurring revenue (MRR) after their first year with FastSpring.

However, as SocialBee utilizes many different ways to package and monetize their software as a service subscriptions, they began discovering new ways to test the FastSpring platform’s capabilities.

Here’s how FastSpring not only rose to the challenge but continues to impress Ovi and the SocialBee team, especially with:

• A dedication to listening to customers’ needs and providing communicative customer support.
• An actively involved leadership team that gets to know customers personally.
• Our continued focus on developing and improving a great product, especially features and tools for subscription management to support SaaS businesses.

Are you looking for a merchant of record that will partner with you to grow your business internationally? FastSpring provides an all-in-one payment platform for SaaS, software, and digital goods businesses, including VAT and sales tax management, payment localization, and consumer support. Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

Why SocialBee Chose FastSpring as a Merchant of Record

FastSpring’s function as a merchant of record has always been very important to SocialBee. When they wanted to expand their business to new global marketplaces, knowing that FastSpring handles VAT and taxes made FastSpring an easy choice.

“FastSpring, for us, has always solved the problem of not having to worry about VAT and taxes, as well as the core of simply getting money from our customers,” Ovi explained. “And that use case always worked flawlessly; there wasn’t any problem.”

It worked so well that SocialBee was able to double their MRR year over year.

But it takes a lot more than facilitating payments and managing taxes to make a merchant of record function within a business’ online environment, and SocialBee was going to ask FastSpring just how much it could do.

SocialBee’s Specific Business Needs

SocialBee was selling their SaaS product as a subscription with many different options and add-ons when they switched to FastSpring in 2018. Any one of those options and add-ons might not be that complicated on its own, but when stacked in many possible combinations, it created complex product and subscription needs.

“Our setup may have been a bit more complex, or stranger, than most of FastSpring’s other customers,” Ovi said.

Plus, SocialBee needed many subscription-specific features such as pricing proration for customers who change their subscription mid-payment period.

Because of that setup, SocialBee helped FastSpring discover a lot of edge cases and bugs that, while completely normal for any software company like FastSpring to work through with their users, were still annoying for SocialBee to work through. “For most customers and most use cases, things just worked. But the things that didn’t work were irritating and kept us from being 100% happy.”

So they reached out to FastSpring.

FastSpring’s Support and Product Development

Ovi said that the way FastSpring has handled SocialBee’s needs has made obvious FastSpring’s dedication to great support and to providing a great product.

Support From Customer Success Managers

The first thing that impressed Ovi was how communicative and attentive SocialBee’s customer success manager (CSM) Gareth has been.

“Since our new manager [Gareth] came in, he has been very on point, creating a list of all the issues we had and following up weekly to find out what was being done on the FastSpring side to solve those issues,” Ovi said about FastSpring’s support. “But we’re also being told expected delivery dates and what progress has been made. We’re also able to let them know which issues are a priority for us and which are less important.”

In particular, there was one incident in which an issue SocialBee was experiencing was time-sensitive thanks to a pricing increase they implemented.

“Gareth was there to very quickly support us, and something that could have been a blocker — or that could have delayed our related marketing campaign — wasn’t a blocker anymore, because they knew how important it was for us to have it solved.”

Support From FastSpring Leadership

The FastSpring leadership team has also been very active in SocialBee’s success, making it clear to SocialBee that FastSpring is really committed to their partnership.

Before Gareth was assigned as their CSM, SocialBee was reached out to by Chief Customer Officer Mansoor Bajowala. Ovi appreciates how some of the newer executives at FastSpring have really made it clear how dedicated FastSpring is to their customers’ success.

“We’ve had very good communication with [CSM] Garreth, but also with the leadership team at FastSpring,” Ovi said. “We saw not just lip service that you would do things, but that you actually did them.” 

Product Development and a Subscription Focus

Because FastSpring’s support and leadership teams have been so active with SocialBee, it’s been easy to have their needs communicated to the teams at FastSpring who can fulfill those needs.

Plus, they’ve seen how dedicated FastSpring has been to developing out new features and focusing on where the market is going, such as more and more subscription tools and analytics.

“People don’t like to hear about software platform issues, even though all of them have them,” Ovi explained. But he has seen FastSpring’s commitment toward ironing out the inevitable issues that come with any software product. “We saw how many early bugs we reported one by one went away,” he continued. “Those issues were solved, and the platform keeps getting better and better.”

Now, as FastSpring has added more and more features geared toward subscriptions, including a subscription analytics dashboard, SocialBee is happier than ever.

“I think we were about 80-20 happy with FastSpring in the past. Now, I’d say we’re 95%-98% happy.”

Partner With FastSpring

Are you ready to explore how your SaaS, software, video game, or digital goods business can benefit from FastSpring’s continued commitment to customer satisfaction?

FastSpring provides an all-in-one payment platform for SaaS, software, and digital products businesses, including VAT and sales tax management, payment localization, and consumer support. Set up a demo or sign up to check out the platform yourself.

The post FastSpring Support and Subscription Management Continue to Impress SocialBee appeared first on FastSpring.

And at a company like Sideways 6 — whose product is an idea management software to help organizations engage people and foster innovation — that emphasis on collaboration gets even louder. 

Jake, Head of Customer Success for Sideways 6, explains that the current trend is to measure their success through the customer’s success, with CS being an integral part of impacting the entire business.

In this episode of Growth Stage, host and CMO of FastSpring David Vogelpohl interviews Jake about his thoughts on:

• What Customer Success is at a high level.
• How CS impacts your ARR, product value, and marketing.
• And much more!  

Jump to highlights.

Full Interview

Customer Success Insights From Jake Dipple

What Customer Success Really Is

Jake acknowledges that customer support is a very important part of the relationship a business has with its customers, but it’s often focused on responding to issues after they arise.

Customer success shifts collaboration from plotting where the customer needs to get to, to collaborating on the front side of utilization. 

“Support is an important part of that,” he says. “But the support team are responsible for first response times, for things like NPS, whereas what we’re responsible for is, ultimately, outcomes.”

Jake says that since the current trend is to measure their success through the customer’s success, they use three key value drivers: employee engagement, engagement in a transformation (within a period of change), and continuous improvement. 

Listen to the episode to hear more details.

Why Customer Success Is a Great Investment

Customer success is more than just an arm of or partner to customer support — it can have a huge positive impact on ARR, product value, and marketing.

As customer success representatives interface so much with customers and begin to uncover their needs and how they use the product, they become the voice of the customer to other internal departments, gathering and reporting pain points, key gains customers need to achieve, and the key technological capabilities they need to adopt. 

This all gets driven with three Vs: value identification, value realization, and value delivered. 

Product teams can better improve and develop products when customer success has helped identify what customers need. The realization of value in the product by meeting customer’s goals will endear the product and the company to customers, increasing retention and therefore ARR. And as happy customers are vocal customers, an emerging trend Jake is seeing is customer success-driven SQLs, or pre-qualified leads handed to the sales team by the customer success team. 

“We really do touch every organization in the business, which consists of product and engineering, services, sales, marketing, product, and people,” he explains. “So that’s [just] within Sideways 6; I’m sure there are [even] better examples in other companies.”

Listen to the episode to hear more details.

Interested in learning more about how your SaaS, software, video game, or other digital goods business can partner with FastSpring and let us worry about the taxes? FastSpring provides an all-in-one payment platform for SaaS, software, and digital goods businesses, including VAT and sales tax management, payment localization, and consumer support. Sign up for a free trial or schedule a demo today.

Transcript:

Jake Dipple  0:00  

One of the things that we’re trying to get better at is exposing Product Engineering to our customers. That helps build empathy for, for their pain, to help build their knowledge, helps get them better accustomed to hearing sort of what our customers are trying to do. And that can only be a good thing. 

Producer  0:17  

This is the Growth Stage podcast powered by FastSpring. And here’s your host, David Vogelpohl.

David Vogelpohl  0:24  

All right. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Growth Stage podcast by FastSpring, where we focus on SAS and digital product companies and how they grow revenue, build meaningful products and increase the value of their business. I’m David Vogelpohl. I support the digital product community through my role at FastSpring. And I love to bring the best of the community to you here on the Growth Stage podcast. In this episode, we’re going to talk really talk about building value in your business. And to do that we’re going to forget support, and instead we’re going to optimize for full funnel customer success. And joining us for that conversation. As someone who knows quite a bit about that, I’d like to welcome to Growth Stage from Sideways 6, Mr. Jake dibble. Jake, welcome to Growth Stage.

Jake Dipple  1:11  

Thank you very much delighted to be looking forward to this. Excellent,

David Vogelpohl  1:14  

well, so glad to have you here. And I’m really looking forward to hearing your thoughts on what customer success is, at a high level is at a high level. I know that’s kind of a squishy term sometimes. But even more importantly, how a customer successful impact folks ARR also the product value marketing, and really much more that whole full funnel side. I’m also really looking forward to talking about some of your maybe more unconventional tips, I know it’s Sideways 6, you’ll have some things you do as some of your customers that might be good examples for others. But really around that, that idea of getting customers that love your brand and love your product. So really looking forward to the conversation. So Jake, I’m gonna kick it off by asking you the same question I asked every guest here on Growth Stage. What was the first thing you bought online?

Jake Dipple  2:06  

There are two answers to this question depending on how I want to appear to the audience. But the the, I suppose the proper answer would be that this was probably back in 2010. And I remember going to university in Manchester, which is in the north of the UK, Hill, North of England. And for the first time ever, you’re independent, you have to buy stuff for yourself. And I got to the first day of my course. And I was given a list of books that I had to buy for study materials throughout that year. And I believe that a number of those books I purchase on Amazon that I think was the first thing that I bought, but as back in the days of no prime delivery. Amazon didn’t have a number of the things that it had today. So it feels quite a long time ago. The other answer was that I think it was I think it was a Domino’s Pizza. I’m fairly I’m fairly certain the first thing that I bought live was the Domino’s Pizza, but I think you

David Vogelpohl  3:12  

should own the pizza and like that’s a pretty good first thing you bought online.

Jake Dipple  3:15  

It was probably the last thing I bought online as well. I think that was

David Vogelpohl  3:19  

maybe even the first purchase online was a pizza but maybe I’m wrong about that. I’ll have to research that that’d be an interest. It

Jake Dipple  3:25  

was the first it was the first trading of Bitcoin. I believe. I believe someone offered someone a Bitcoin to go and buy the pizza.

David Vogelpohl  3:34  

Oh, that’s yeah, the first Bitcoin offering I did see a contest once a sign it was like a, I don’t know, a raffle. And they were giving away. I forgot what it was it was like a PSP was first prize and then something else was second prize and 10 Bitcoin was third prize. And when that raffle

Jake Dipple  3:53  

would have been quite good yet,

David Vogelpohl  3:54  

yeah. Awesome. Well, that’s cool. Yeah, I know when you’re buying your books for university that can be very expensive. I could imagine going online, see if you could get a deal and make a lot of sets.

Jake Dipple  4:06  

You bought, just out of interest.

David Vogelpohl  4:08  

First thing I bought. I believe it was a cure for poison ivy. I had poison ivy really bad. And I just went on the internet and search for it. And I found something called Zan fell that ended up working really well for me. And I think that was the first thing I bought online. Nice. So cool. So anyways, what we’re here today to talk about, though, primarily is around customer success. And I was wondering if you could start though by telling me a little bit about what Sideways 6 does and what you do there?

Jake Dipple  4:40  

Of course, so, Sideways 6 we’re ID management platform, and we exist to bring good ideas to life every day. From everywhere from everything from anyone. That’s a that is our mission. Think of us as like a idea management CRM tool. So CRM for ideas like HubSpot for ideas, you getting out and getting ideas and the top of the funnel, nurturing them, and ultimately sort of bringing them to life. Now we do that through two ways predominantly, that’s through collecting ideas from where people are. So a native approach to the tools that people are using today, typically, Microsoft Teams, we work with enterprise organizations. So it sits within Microsoft Teams that have to leave their experience to submit an idea. And that brings more ideas into the top of the funnel. But secondly, we have a very powerful back end platform that provides things like automations, communication, collaboration, to be able to nurture those ideas and bring them through to the eventual stage, which is when they get implemented, and impacting these organizations. And we support organizations like Marks and Spencers, which has enormous retail here, Balfour Beatty, which is a big construction company, which operate across the globe, Nestle, and others as well then in my role at Sideways 6 is Head of Customer Success, which essentially means that we provide our, our customers with IDEA expertise, to help them drive towards their desired outcomes, or their success metrics that they need to impact. And that’s primarily done through the ongoing optimization of what we call their ideas program, by providing them with opportunities to optimize their people, their process, and the application of their Sideways 6 technology in order to drive that success. You

David Vogelpohl  6:24  

know, it’s interesting to hear you frame both the platform and your in your team’s role there. And so it sounds like fundamentally Sideways 6, as you pointed out, is an idea management platform that helps you kind of originate and collect the ideas and then I guess see them through to fruition. And you kind of framed customer success is like well, we’re we’re trying to help our customers achieve that outcome and find success and using the platform. You didn’t talk a lot at all about support is support in your sphere. Is that a separate word within Sideways 6?

Jake Dipple  7:02  

It’s a separate word within Sideways 6. So support is is how we would typically define our reactionary. Teams are sort of, there’s a, I can’t do this. How to, for example, why can’t I see this, whereas success is very much on the proactive, outcome driven consultative side, where we are much more proactive with our customers needs, we plot where they need to get to. Support is an important part of that. But the support team are responsible for first response times for things like NPS, whereas what we’re responsible for is ultimately outcomes. And Sideways 6 renewal so IRR. So

David Vogelpohl  7:50  

what would be like a typical outcome, I’m just trying to get for the conversation, get a good understanding of like for others, especially those watching or listening? It’s like, how are you identifying? What is that? What are the KPI that matter? For?

Jake Dipple  8:07  

Great question. So the current trend is is is ultimately to measure our success through the customer success. So what are the key metrics that the customers are looking to impact or improve? What are the key outcomes that they’re looking to impact to improve, and we’ve got key three, three key value drivers that we typically sell against, and then deliver against post sales. And those are employee engagement. So big, very important thing in today’s world is through COVID, a loads of employees have felt disengaged, disempowered, and that has resulted in quite quitting, you know, huge amount of job losses, lack of productivity, etc. So some customers may be looking to improve their employee engagement scores. And as a result, increased productivity, increase staff retention, etc. That’s, that’s one value driver, which we support. The other one is sort of engagement in a transformation. So typically, customers have gone through a period of change, and then are looking to embed a transformation in their workforce. When I was at sprinkler, our old president, a guy called Carlos Dominguez, who has access go, used to come into a room and just do this thing where he goes, put your hands up here who likes change, and everyone would throw their hands up and go change is awesome changes great. You know, I love change, I should be seen as being adaptable to change. And he goes, that’s really interesting, because I like change when it’s my idea. And the premise being that if you can give employees a voice in that transformation in that change, they’re mostly they’re much more likely to be engaged in it. And then that transformation is much more likely to be successful. But that’s that’s the second one and then the final One is really what we call business improvement or continuous improvement. So what are the small quick wins that can happen across our organization? What are the new products and services that we want to come maybe deliver? What is this cost cutting initiative, which we need to implement, and those things as well, so that the impact from from ideas. So we would, depending on the value driver, that our customer has been sold against, and has been identified as the real pain, success will measure the outcome against one of those three things.

David Vogelpohl  10:30  

So your customers have an objective, they’re trying to achieve something by using your platform. And in your case, you’re focusing on employee engagement, engagement and transformation and business improvement. And I think, you know, especially for a lot of companies that might be earlier in and haven’t built up, you know, extensive practices here, it sounds like you’re, you’re investing in their use and success in the product that in so in other words, if they had, if you had very little support tickets, that wouldn’t be enough, because even though they might be able to use it, they might not be finding success with it. So then you start to ask like, Well, why does it matter to invest in this? Like, what does it help in terms of like, in general, or Sideways 6 specific like ARR? For both, you know, your ability to retain and grow customers, and then also maybe even your ability to acquire new customers, why does it matter, to invest in customer success? So

Jake Dipple  11:32  

I, I love this question. And if you look on LinkedIn, and the sort of thing influencing that you typically see across ces these days, there’s a belief that customer success department is absolutely integral to increasing ARR and having a positive net retention rate. There’s a guy that I follow who actually believe a lot of what he says I could Dave Jackson, he talks about the concept of customer led growth. And anyone in the business can contribute to customer growth. But the idea around customer success being an integral part of that is that we can be the voice of the customer, we can understand the key buying personas of our technology, the key pains that they experienced, and the key gains that they need to achieve, and the key technological capabilities that they need to adopt in order to to positively impact what it is that they’re trying to do to overcome the pain and to see, and to see the gain. So investing in success can be investing in your customer success, which can be one thing, and getting your teams to collaborate together, or investing in a customer success team, which acts as the focal point for that activity to be the voice of the customer insight. Now, customer success is typically held accountable for retention rates, and for they are now one of the things that we one of the things that is absolutely paramount, in order to achieve that is to understand what I call the three V’s. So there’s create key three key values that are typical, and critical to customer success, which is value identification. So what is the key value or gain that needs to be delivered? And what why have they bought your technology? That’s the first V the second V is value realization. So how do we get them from A to B to C to ultimately X? What does the journey look like? What are the skills that they need to acquire along the way, what technology of yours that they need to leverage to achieve this, and then value education, which is the final V, which is who in their business, who in our customers business, need to stay informed regularly of the value that this, this platform is delivering. And so when it comes to renewal, you’ve identified you’ve realized and you’ve educated on the value they’ve delivered. And that means that the outcome that you’re driving is ultimately is hopefully a successful renewal. But also the, the potential for growth, if you’re driving through adoption, barriers, and proving value against that. Now, if your customers are happy and achieving, they’re likely to also be vocal about us, they’re likely to speak to peers, they’re likely to, you know, be very vocal on other forums and channels about the work that you’re doing with them, which can lead to what we’re starting to call Customer Success qualified leads. So if you’re delivering value if you’re delighting your customers or they’re satisfied with your offering, there’s a huge opportunity to track and monitor the customer success quality At least now we’ve got SQL. So we’ve got MQLs. But I think there is an emerging trend for C SQL S, which helps customer success be more, you know, rewarded accountable responsible for the new revenue. Yeah.

David Vogelpohl  15:16  

And we see customer success being a huge driver for the most successful companies like we touched on in our, in our our earlier, net revenue retention, the outcome of your cancels downgrades upgrades and new customers. And, you know, it’s interesting to hear you talk about how you think about customer success, because I often think people don’t buy products, they buy outcomes. Yes. And if they can use your product, but don’t get their outcome, your product didn’t work. And so it sounds like your philosophy is a lot around focusing around what is that outcome they bought? And how can we help them deliver, you know, deliver on it. And then using that as a driver? One thing I didn’t hear you talk about was upgrades. And I’m sure that’s part of your story. But is it? Is it more than just retention? I know, you talked about customer success, qualified leads in terms of like customer referrals, I think that’s a great way to think about it. Yeah. Is customer success also about, you know, helping folks find upgraded products that could also find them additional success? 

Jake Dipple  16:24  

Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think from from my perspective, the key is to, is to go back to that customer centricity. So customer success. We know our customers, we should be understanding what it is they’re trying to achieve a surface level, but you know, who they are? What are their threat? What are the competitive threats? What are the trends that they’re seeing in their industry? What are some of the things that are impacting them? What are they trying to achieve? If you’ve got an understanding of of their goals, you can also then map additional functionality and additional capabilities to help support that. And that’s where the upgrade or the upsell becomes much more consultative and much more based on an address need than further realization of value than it has if it’s just a feature versus function. So it goes

David Vogelpohl  17:19  

oh, sorry, to interrupt, I was just gonna say. So that makes sense on the upgrade path. And I’m gonna kind of switch gears a little bit though, in that in that same vein, so when there’s capabilities that aren’t available in your product stack? I’m just curious what role Customer Success plays in product innovation and value. And we all have experienced, I think like the the support product asks where like, you need to fix this. People complain about it too much. But how does Customer Success play? Maybe a more kind of an eighth say higher level? Because those are really important tickets. And that’s people’s roadmaps. But how does it drive product innovation and value? Do you think?

Jake Dipple  17:59  

Right, I love that question, actually. And I does go back to and I hope I don’t sound like a broken record. But it does go back to the importance of customer centricity. And see is playing an integral role in being able to educate internal teams, on the customers pains and gains. So if we know their pains, if we know their requirements, their use cases, their product utilization, how they’re using it, their ticket volume, their MPs, we can channel this information properly back into our company, and act as the sort of owner of that information flow, which helps us build a better product. So we’re addressing the needs of the customers, we can design to design better services. So support is one angle product is the other. But there’s also a services element here, which how do we maybe plug either technology or people or process gaps with services, which can then help us help our customers deliver. But if we can also share the learnings of a subset of customers that other customers are experiencing versus another subset of customers, we can also help the maturity of of us that are less mature customers by sharing best case examples by sharing how people are using it. And sort of by building that network of customers, I think that also helps as well. Not a great articulation of the end there. I’ll do a bit of a wave but but I do think that having the finger on the customer success having the finger on the pulse of the industry, the trends that we’re seeing what our competitors are doing or what our customers competitors doing, maybe what they’re selling into customers, then we’re at that critical intersection and we can be vital, a vital cog in sharing that insight back into the business to help us innovate our products, innovate our offering, and helping our customers reach their desired outcomes.

David Vogelpohl  19:52  

Yeah, it’s such an interesting position to be in because as I mentioned before, support knows what’s broken and what needs to get fixed. product will often go forth and research and interview. And I feel like you only learned so much. And there’s exercises that when you’re, you know, I don’t know, like just like, shoulder against the grindstone helping someone achieve an outcome and having that relationship and an ongoing business relationship relative to how they’re using their product to achieve outcomes. That seems like a really interesting perspective that I could see a lot of product and engineering teams getting a lot of value out of seeing. And I know that that’s a voice that, you know, there’s these tug of war voices and the product innovation and direction. But I could see where that CS position is incredibly valuable, in that that conversation. Is that what you’ve experienced, I’m assuming being head of CES, you must think that but — 

Jake Dipple  20:58  

I totally agree. And, and one of the things that we’re trying to get better at you mentioned products and engineering, one of the things that we’re trying to get better at is exposing product engineering to our customers, it helps build empathy for, for their pain to help build their knowledge, it helps get them better accustomed to hearing sort of what our customers are trying to do. And that can only be a good thing. And I think getting our getting our, our product engineering teams, in front of customers more is definitely something that can help bridge that gap as well.

David Vogelpohl  21:32  

Yeah, I worked at a WordPress company. And we would ask some people at different candidates when they started, had you ever built a WordPress site? Many people would say yes. And then I would say, Have you ever built a WordPress site for money? In other words, something was really on the line. And I think CES has such a great point of view on that, you know, sitting next to customers and helping them achieve those, you know, higher level objectives. So that’s pretty cool. Okay, so let’s talk about marketing. Now. I think everybody on their website says we have great support, and we have a maybe I haven’t seen actually a lot of references to a customer success team. Maybe that’s an opportunity for folks. But how do you feel like customer success can help drive marketing, to both drive obviously, new ARR, but also better customer experiences, when they get on board you talked about like the promise and the delivery, how does CS interact with all that on the marketing side?

Jake Dipple  22:29  

So the simplest way is through is through better storytelling. So we work really closely with the marketing team here at Sideways 6. And what we’re trying to do is educate externally on some of the great things that are happening across across our customers, across their journeys across their successes. And we’ve got some wildly successful customers that have been doing some brilliant things within idea management. I mentioned Marks and Spencers I mentioned Balfour Beatty, I mentioned Nestle, there’s a whole host of others, Taylor and Francis that are starting on their journey. Virgin Media, oh two, which have had a lot of success with the initial rollout of their, of their employee ideas program. So a lot of it is about working with Martin to help share the success stories of what these customers are achieving and how they’re doing it. And that, of course, can lead to, you know, MQLs, opportunities for sales, etc. In a more complex way, if the simple way is storytelling, that’s not simply the way because a lot of works got into by our customers to achieve what they’ve achieved. But in a more complex way, in terms of how we work with marketing, we’re constantly assessing our, our ICPs, you know, our ideal customer profiles, who they are, what their characteristics, you know, where they sit in their organization, what are their key, you know, key goals, what are their key pains, and this constant reassessment of what our customers are achieving. And hype and validating against a hypothesis really helps us get really clear on those value drivers, and who those value drivers would resonate with. So we’re targeting the right people with the right message and the right solution. So that’s really what we’re doing. But that clear focus on on ideal customer profiles, that clear focus on value drivers. It also helps bring in then great fit customers. So great, their customers are much more likely to have a great customer experience because what you’re offering meets their needs. So we’re constantly refining that and find that back to marketing, which is finding that back to sales, we get much better customers that are much more right size for our product, which means that we’ll be able to deliver those outcomes that they need, which means that we will then be much more successful as a partnership. So those two key ways I’d say,

David Vogelpohl  24:52  

how do you manage it if there’s a new vein of effort marketing is going after that put was in a new set of customers that you discover aren’t that great. But he’ll excuse me greatly aligned to your ICP or how you help customers find success. How do you communicate that back? And how do you adjust? I mean, without going too deep, of course? 

Jake Dipple  25:15  

No, of course. So I think that constant feedback loop is, is critical. We do your team retros, we do churn retros. So if we start to see a customer segment or a particular set of customers, leave us it’s really important that we understand through the funnel, what’s happened, what we can learn and how we can incorporate. And it can be ICP definition, it can be the wrong customer, it can be, you know, the wrong onboarding process, it can be other things. But that constant learning through retrospectives, and through feedback loops is really important, but critically as well sharing vulnerability. I think one of the good things that Sideways 6 is great at is there’s no blame culture here. Everyone’s trying to support the growth of this company. And if there’s something that we’ve experimented with, and it hasn’t worked great, we hold our hands up and we say, we tried, what did we learn? How do we move forward? Which I really liked? I think that’s the right spirit.

David Vogelpohl  26:18  

Excellent. Well, that’s great to hear. Okay, so we’ve talked about customer success kind of writ large. We’ve talked about its influence and role and product and engineering and in marketing. Are there any other areas of the business you feel customer success has a big impact on?

Jake Dipple  26:38  

I would I we touched on services. But I think that interrelationship between the services offering support, and products are probably where we spend a lot of our time post sales, with those teams understanding how we all work together to offer a great customer experience. But we’re also to the point just now trying to get better at sharing that knowledge back in with sales. So can they we can help them sell better against pain points and gain opportunities, we can help them identify customers that are great fit. We really do touch every organization in the business, which consists of product and engineering, services, sales, marketing, product, and people and sort of interacting with with the different people across the organization as well. So that’s within Sideways 6. I’m sure there are better examples in, in in other companies, but yeah, excellent.

David Vogelpohl  27:38  

Excellent. Now, of course, I’d like to know we talked earlier, we’re kind of intro the episode around some of the unconventional ways you go about getting customers to love the company and love the platform. And it reminds me a little bit of marketing quote by a gentleman named Mark McCormack and it says all things being equal, people will do business with a friend, all things being unequal people will still do business with a friend. And it sounds like you’re taking some approaches that help you earn some friends along the way, not that you would give them an equal product, I guess. But what are some of the unconventional ways you’ve gotten customers to find success like success was Sideways 6 and love the brand?

Jake Dipple  28:24  

So that’s an excellent question. I really like that quote as well. I think we we recognize that that customer happiness is really important that every tech company that I’ve worked at, there has been a measure on customer happiness or customer satisfaction, which is critical, but that, that playing on that sort of emotion of getting our customers to love us is really important. There’s one way that’s done which is through helping them conventionally deliver on the outcomes they need to from leveraging our technology. But unconventionally, some of the stuff that we’ve done in the past has been you know, hosting hosting customer get together so roundtables so getting our customers to speak to each other and build a build a network of, of a network of champions of Sideways 6 that understand what we do that are thought leaders within the idea and innovation space. We also talk a lot about like, we talk a lot about helping our customers achieve their desired outcomes. That’s typically a customer level. That’s getting them to, you know, cut costs, increase revenue, protect brand, which are in very important but quite impersonal Gods so I think we all take joy as a customer success as customer success individuals when we see our champions and end users progress or achieve or get recognition for the work that we’re helping them do. So help thing our customers get new jobs, helping our customers get promoted, helping our customers self promote, on LinkedIn through case studies through webinars, that’s really, really rewarding for a customer success manager to see the people that believe in your software that achieve what they are, you know, personally trying to achieve. And we’ve helped in the past, we’ve helped customers that may have fallen on on hard times, they may have, you know, been impacted by a restructuring, but because of the network of, of champions that we’ve built up, and then the network of alumni that are associated with Sideways 6, we’ve been able to sort of, you know, recommend them into somewhere or help them help them get another job. But one of the more personally rewarding examples of supporting our customers and going above and beyond, which I think is really where that, that you know, that love or that that and interaction with a customer can come from is one of our one of our big customers, we’re always hosting a two day workshop off site for 7080 people to educate them and to upskill them on the next year’s plans for their idea program. And we actually, they asked if we could help. So we did a presentation we supported with some, some merchandise, some sort of tailor merchandise we gave, we hosted an award, we contributed towards that. Or to support our customer to deliver a great event. And again, making them successful and seeing them be successful. But helping them was probably one of the highlights that I’ve had this year, and doing things like that, that have really helped build the connection between two different companies.

David Vogelpohl  31:47  

So it’s an empowering thing, helping others, it really puts a fire in your gut, if you will. But it sounds like you know, a big part of what you’re focused on. And I, in my view, and the orgs that I’ve seen very successful have followed similar suits, which is focusing on those outcomes. I mean, at the end of the day, we don’t sell products, we sell outcomes. And if you lose sight of that, then you building the wrong type of company. So that’s really interesting to hear. Okay, so we’ve cut or covered a lot of topics today, if the audience remembered only one thing you said today, what would it be?

Jake Dipple  32:28  

Well, not at the first thing that I ordered was, I bought in line with Apple. I think for me, it goes back to and I hope I did it justice. But Dave Jackson, sort of, you know, belief in customer led growth, like success teams. These days, you’re either on one side or the other when it comes to responsibility with regards to our but I don’t think success departments can get complacent or arrogant with their role within an organization. And it’s sort of essential that we need to be responsible for driving positive net retention rates, and growing our customers and showcasing that we can do that. And that we can be that growth engine for our for our businesses. And I think without that focus and accountability, I think customer success could quickly become seen as a nice to have. And it’s absolutely essential that we’re not we are very much a need to have because we can drive net retention rate because we can drive outcomes for our customers because we can shape the product and the innovation that we need in our business to win against the competition. So that would probably be my overarching takeaway. I hope that that. Yeah,

David Vogelpohl  33:44  

that’s a great point to end on. And I think those are such massive drivers in business when you have over 100% Net Revenue retention, which customer success plays a huge role and you can spend more money to acquire customers, you instantly get higher valuations. And if you know, the KPI that aren’t observed, don’t move. And so if you don’t have someone focusing on the objectives that your customers are trying to achieve, I don’t think he can build a super scalable business. But that’s super, that’s an awesome point to end on. Thank you so much for joining us today, Jake.

Jake Dipple  34:21  

It’s been a pleasure. Thanks so much for having me. 

David Vogelpohl  34:24  

Excellent. Well, if you’d like to learn more about what Jake is up to, you can visit Sideways 6. That’s the number six dot com. Thanks, everyone for joining us today for Growth Stage. If you’d like to learn more about FastSpring and how we can help you sell your digital products globally while staying automatically tax compliant, and keep your focus on your products visit fastspring.com. Thanks, everyone for joining.

Producer  34:48  

Thank you for listening to this episode of Growth Stage. To learn more about FastSpring and the services we offer, visit fastspring.com.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

The post EP16: Forget Support — Optimize for Full Funnel Customer Success appeared first on FastSpring.

We are thrilled to announce that Danica Larsen is the recipient of the Q3 2023 Springie Award! Danica is a Customer Success Manager who has consistently demonstrated the embodiment of FastSpring’s core values – Make a Difference, Seek to Understand, and Act with Urgency – through her dedication to her work and her unwavering support for her colleagues.

Danica’s impact on FastSpring is evident in her numerous contributions. She consistently goes above and beyond to support her team, always willing to lend a helping hand and share her expertise. Her willingness to Seek to Understand has fostered strong relationships with her colleagues, creating a collaborative and supportive work environment. And when faced with challenges, Danica has a drive to Act with Urgency, taking initiative and finding solutions to ensure the success of her projects. Our Vice President of People & Culture, Louise Cherry Barber,  sat down (virtually) to chat with Danica about her recognition and time at FastSpring.

Danica’s dedication to her work and her commitment to FastSpring’s values have made her an invaluable asset to our team. Her positive attitude, willingness to help, and problem-solving skills have made a significant difference in the lives of her colleagues and the overall success of FastSpring.

We are incredibly proud to have Danica as part of our team and congratulate her on this well-deserved recognition. Her commitment to excellence and her embodiment of our core values serve as an inspiration to us all.

Keep reading for an abridged version of the interview with Danica:

Louise Cherry Barber:  Danica, you are our Springie Award Winner for our Q3 of 2023! So please tell me what does it mean for you to win this Springie Award here at FastSpring?

Danica Larsen: It was really nice to, like, genuinely heartwarming to know that I tried to put a lot of myself — my interesting personality — into my work every day. And it was nice to see that other people had seen it, and that it was welcomed and recognized in a positive way, you know; not just not only because of achieving a set number, which is previously how I might have been recognized and other workplaces that I’ve had, but also because of the person that I am and the things that I’ve achieved outside of just one dedicated number. It was really nice to be recognized as a person. I found that really heartwarming. 

Louise Cherry Barber: That’s awesome and well deserved. And one thing I am curious about, I’d love for you to talk about some of the highlights, you know, from when you heard, but even specifically, the work that you did on the benchmarking initiative was highlighted by a couple people. Can you tell us a little bit about that? 

Danica Larsen: Yes, I put in so much work, like I’m so excited to see that recognized. I think I was a little bit surprised to see the benchmarking initiative has been one of the things that was called out, I think, because we’re in the early stages, you know; there’s a lot more work to be done. And I’m super jazzed that everybody’s excited about it. Because it’s going to provide so much value, I really hope it’s going to provide so much value, not just for us as a company, but for our, customers, our sellers, as well. And we’ll help in an ideal world give us some insights into how we can grow long term, what we’re seeing works well as a success. So seeing that called out already at the first sort of, you know, like beta stages was really cool, because that means other people see the value too.

Louise Cherry Barber: We recently updated our company values to: Make a Difference, Seek to Understand and Act with Urgency. I’m curious about your thoughts on the updated values.

Danica Larsen: What they encompass is doing the right thing, and understanding what the right thing means. So actually investigating, digging into that, and acting quickly and making a decision. And I genuinely can stand by that every day… And looking at the other people, the Support Team as well, I mean, that they live the values with our customers, and with the buyers every day. They’re on the front, the front field, seeking understanding and acting quickly, because that’s part of if they cannot do those things. We fall apart as a company, nobody will continue to work with us.

Louise Cherry Barber: What advice do you have for those across FastSpring? Who would like to live the values? What advice do you have on how to make those come to life?

Danica Larsen:  I can only — you know, I can only speak from my perspective. But I think the key thing is to listen as much as possible. When you’re working with the various accounts, the companies, the sellers, everybody that we’re working with, understanding their needs, and what’s driving the true reason behind their need, it drives what we should do and how we should act. And that’s the “seeking understanding”; you can’t you can’t do it without listening. So that would be my pro tip number one: just to listen to people. 

Congratulations again to Danica, and if you’d like to join our team, you can find our open roles here. 

The post Celebrating Excellence: Danica Larsen Receives the Q3 2023 Springie Award appeared first on FastSpring.