by When I was 3 years old, my parents had a grocery store selling almost anything. I spent my days observing customers and finally I came up with the idea to sell onions in front of the store, directly on the sidewalk to attract more customers. My mum told me that I need to address everyone to offer what I had to sell. Finally, I sat there waiting for my first customer to do business. I took all my courage I had as toddler and did what I was told: I asked everyone passing my kiosk if they needed onions. Surprisingly an old lady wanted to buy a kilo of onions when I suddenly realized that I was not able to weigh them – I couldn’t even read numbers at this time.
At the end of that day my conversion rate was zero – I sold not a single onion but I learnt a very important lession: You’ll only have the chance to sell if you get in touch with your customers and if you can deliver exactly what they need.
My parents are still running their 1887-founded business. In the 125 years of its existence, some major pivots were made (they made pivots before it was cool) ranging from selling leather propulsions followed by a grocery store which transformed to a successful niche player: today Betten Leimer produces and sells feather beds.
The Badgasse where our parents’ shop was back in 1887 – and still is. It’s the building on the right. Today, the Usersnap office is situated on the roof of this building. Obviously a sustainable place to run a business.
Recently I had a chat with my parents about what we’re doing at Usersnap. I told them the main concepts of a SaaS company and that we use metrics to determine what works. I introduced the concept of conversion rates and tried to build a bridge to their very own retail-perspective.
When I told them our conversion rate they were shocked:
You have so many visitors on your site and only a fraction of them buy your software? Our conversion rate is 95%.
95%. That is: 19 from 20 visitors leave their shop as paying customers. Although this number is not directly comparable to a web-startup, they immediately came up with 5 principles they maintain for the last 30+ years. Although my parents haven’t read a single startup blog in their entire life, it’s amazing that their findings match well with what you can learn in various startup blogs:
Customer satisfaction
Nothing beats customer satisfaction – it’s the most important thing. Never let a customer leave your shop unsatisfied – even if it means that you have to recommend your competitor because you can not provide a solution for the customers’ need.
It is difficult to learn your customers’ need if you’re running a SaaS business – that is: you really should embrace every single opportunity a customer gets in contact with you.
Respond to every enquiry as fast as you can. Leo Widrich from Buffer told me, that one of their key concepts is to reply to every email very quickly which gets them in turn even public customer love on twitter.