How many of you are looking to hire vs cut vs hold on staffing this year? If you are looking to hire, please note the ONE role you’d like to hire for in 2023 and why.

Read a really good piece yesterday that talks about the 'churn snowball'. I know we'd all like to think that really good marketing can offset churn, but that just doesn't work long term. Plus, it's embarrassing to market a turd. Below are some of the most significant impacts of churn: 1) FOREVER Lost ARR I added emphasis to the “forever” part because churned ARR isn’t something companies can magically make up for by selling more next year. A lot of people talk about churned ARR as if they can make up for it with more sales. Yes, companies can add more ARR, but sales reps would have theoretically closed those deals regardless of the churn because they only have so much capacity. A sales rep isn’t going to say “Hey, we churned a lot last quarter so I am going to work a little bit harder and close an extra deal this quarter to make up for the churn!”. ARR is a double-edged sword. It is recurring so the revenue can repeat for many years, but if companies churn a customer then that is multiple years of lost revenue that is lost forever. 2) Lost Expansion Opportunities When a customer churns, companies lose the opportunity to expand that customer. Expanding existing customers is significantly easier and cheaper than selling to a new customer so churn means companies don’t get that efficient revenue growth. For example, if a company’s annual expansion target is 30% then that revenue is also lost FOREVER. 3) Lost Second Order Revenue Second-order revenue consists of: - Sales that come from existing customer referrals - Sales from customers changing employers and buying the product again at their new employer - It’s hard to quantify this but in the tech world, these costs are very real and likely more significant than most people realize. As an example, if Bob buys SaaS widget from Company ABC and doesn’t have a good experience (deployment is bad, features were oversold/lacking, etc) then when Bob changes jobs there is a high chance he doesn’t purchase from Company ABC at his new company. Not only that, but Bob likely will tell his friends about his bad experience and that Company XYZ is much better.

The majority of you noted that the reason that you're not growing has to do with client acquisition in some way, shape, or form. Let's use this post to describe what's actually working so everyone can benefit. Our top channels are: - SEO - Email - Referral We get a few hundred leads a month from SEO and we send a weekly e-mail with a summary of our content (which also includes a CTA to get a free marketing plan from us). If you really want to compound for the long term though, you should focus on getting referrals from your current customers. If you do a really good job, everything compounds. Your customers want to spend more with you, they'll refer other people, plus your main POC that moves to another company will want to work with you again. People ultimately just want to work with people that they trust. I know people that have 8-9 figure agencies that get 50%+ of their business just from referrals. Focus on doing damn good work and do it for a long time and you'll never have an issue with client acquisition again. What's working for you?

Personally, it's finally switching our podcasts over to Spotify since they give us a suite of tools like Chartable and Podsights so we now have A LOT more options to grow the pod faster. Goal this year is to get it to 5M views/mo. On the agency side, leadflow is looking good and we're looking hard for client service/customer success managers right now if you know anyone.

I’ll go first: - 2bobs podcast - AMI podcast - Win without pitching manifesto book - Pricing creativity book (how to price on value) - I enjoy chris do’s stuff as well (youtube) - YPO/EO agencies group What resources have helped you grow faster?