That’s what we call legacy customers. Everyone has some that hang around. Once you’re more established with more customer paying market, you can tell this customer that prices are going up at a renewal when you’re not as afraid of pissing the off.
Incoming only? Grasshopper for your size. Outbound, too? Open phone if the rates are good where you’re calling.
No one wants to do monthly really, you just have high churn and tire kickers. You price high to encourage them to just go to do annaul which also proves some ability to command a budget. This way you also only have to earn a renewal once every twelve months and not 12 times a year. You also deal with credit card bounces and cancellation, or worse-yet, 12 cheques a year.
You put way more work into an monthly customer compared to an annual if all other aspects of the accounts are equal, so they cost more to deliver service as well. If companies offer both someone has done the math on where it makes sense balancing churn, conversion, upsell/expansion, cost to acquire, and cost to serve/COGS.
This reads like someone asking for help running a Kickstarter. If you’re doing well enough to IPO you usually hire folks into exec roles who have done it before, and work with an investment banker to do the road show, and it doesn’t happen a month before the IPO?
If you want no touch you can do a popup in app and then ask for a written one in a typeform or a video one using video ask.
Personally, running an advocacy program, I reach out as the founder to our healthiest customers via email, then follow up a few days later if they don’t reply. I ask if they want to join our advocacy program, tell them what’s in it for them (swag, gift card, etc).
If they say yes I set up a 15 min intro call and record it. My main question is “what is the benefit you’ve seen from the platform and how do you quantify that?”. Sometimes they’ll say something great, and usually I’ll paraphrase after the call and email them back asking if I could use their quote where they said “X”. Almost everyone says yes right away unless their company is so large they need approval from others.
Unethical and also illegal.
Honestly, it just makes the lows lower and the highs higher because you don’t feel the wins to the core, unless you’re totally money motivated. I look for the pieces I like about the company beyond the product, as well as having the control that I do. The payoff is just in the exit in these cases and you have to focus on that destination as the journey won’t feel as rewarding.