Pardon the pun in the title, but I am a founder who always steers away from doing special promotions or sales with my HR SaaS. After all, why would SMB (Small Business) or Enterprise customers with big budgets be interested in a discount?
Wow was I wrong. My co-founder wanted to do a Black Friday and Cyber Monday 50% discount promotion last week, and while I was reluctant, I gave the go ahead to do so.
The results were amazing. We pretty much got more paying subscribers over that weekend than we have in the past 5 months. Our Stripe and ProfitWell charts are showing over a 100% increase in revenue month on month.
One added bonus was that our promotion was picked up by several other sites out there, including Nathan Latka's blog, so we automatically got a wider reach than our normal marketing channels.
And even with the discount in place, average revenue per customer has gone up from around $500 to around $600 as the new users are signing up for higher value plans.
Long story short - Don't dismiss having a promotional sale if you are in the medium to large business space. Even people holding corporate credit cards like to feel they are getting better value by seeing a discount amount on their invoice.