56. What can a startup do to get their customers to pay on time? We found it pretty easy once we worked out a good process. Treat your customers with respect, be understanding and then respect the value of your service. Here’s what we worked out: • Notify customer 60 days prior to renewal that they have 60 days to pay in a proper, corporate invoice. Most small businesses will ignore this, but most larger companies will then get it over to finance/accounting, who will need > 30 days to pay. It will kick off the right processes in the latter case. 30 days is not enough in the enterprise. • Remind them again 30 days prior to renewal they need to pay now to avoid a service interruption. This is when you really get the attention of the smaller businesses. • Alert them 7 days prior to renewal, if still haven’t paid, a service interruption is coming on Date X, both in email -- and a phone call. • Provide a 7 day grace period after expiration, and allow an extension if they call and ask for one and promise the “check is in the mail” but add a big red banner on the website they’ll see every time they log in that counts down until the service shuts down for nonpayment. So there are no surprises • At the low end, shut it down after that and allow instant resumption upon payment. At the higher-end, do not allow any feature changes, seat adds, etc. until payment received. This resulted in a very high level of payment. SAASTR.COM 52