[LRUG] To be paid or not to be paid, that is the question (sort of)

[Graham Ashton]

On 7 Jan 2013, at 14:56, Andrew Stewart <boss at airbladesoftware.com> wrote:

> Here's my question: should I press Customer B for Customer A's unpaid invoices on the grounds that they are using an account which has unpaid invoices?  After all Customer B may not have taken on Customer A's liabilities but they have taken on A's data.  Or should I let it go?

I see this as a marketing opportunity, and would be aiming to leave them thinking that they're dealing with an awesome company that cares about them, and their custom. Do anything you can to ease their transition, with a smile, and don't charge for it.

Your goal with a SaaS app is to maximise lifetime value, and in this case that means you need to do whatever will keep them as a customer for as long as possible.

I wouldn't ask them to do anything that might not go down too well with them. I'd make them feel valued in any way I could, moving/updating any data they wanted me to.

Don't waste all that effort you put into converting them in the first place by getting somebody's back up.

> (Either way I'll be stricter about unpaid invoices in future ;)

Why? It won't move the lifetime value lever in the right direction.

I've heard that (rather than block your private repos) GitHub send you an email saying "your credit card has expired; have this month on us, but please update the details for next time...". It's ingenious.

When my company credit card expired last month I purposefully avoided updating it in the SaaS apps I use to see how everybody handled it.

Only one of them (Mite - a great time tracking app) did it without winding me up. They took the same approach as GitHub and sent me a very personal "have a free month" email. I feel somewhat less positively about several more well known companies whose automated systems spammed me daily while they continued to try charging my old credit card, even though I fully understood that my card had expired and I needed to give them some new details.

Note the indirect marketing benefits of this approach - this isn't the first time I've wheeled out GitHub and Mite as examples of companies that do this...

-- 
Graham Ashton
Founder, The Agile Planner
http://theagileplanner.com | @agileplanner | @grahamashton

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