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  • Part 2: Segments are nice but each user journey is unique

    Part 2: Segments are nice but each user journey is unique

    In the Part 1, we covered the importance of establishing goals around your engagement experiments and flows. 

    We could call this Part 2: “Segments are nice, Segments are dumb”. 

    Segmentation will eventually be “individualization” – we cover the steps needed to get there. Thinking in “Goals” are an important step.

    Since Contextual’s inception, we provide default segments useful for tracking and grouping users. Names like Newbies, Light Users, Power Users, Churning, Zombies have filters for capturing generic “buckets” of users.

    In addition, you can choose a combination of filters based on your own Custom Segments. This example below is creating a segment of “Recently active Project Managers”.Contextual


    Custom Segment Creation
    Once having defined and saved the “Active Project Managers” segment, your Product Team can then:

    • target tips, tours, flows, popups at this group (in conjunction with other triggers)
    • track the size and membership of that segment.

    Custom Segment Statistics

    This is a very good granular way at looking at your user base and targeting flows and content that is customized for their job role.

    But…

    User’s don’t care about your segments.

    Ask a user what segment they are in. You’ll get a blank look.

    Segments ignore the needs hopes and wishes of each individual  user. A segment aggregates and abstracts them into a “label”.

    But each user is on their own unique journey and within a segment you should be seeking to personalise and respond to individual needs at scale. How do you scale for each unique snowflake?


    We are all individuals (Life of Brian - Monty Python)
    Credit: Monty Python, Life of Bryan.

    Scaling Individualization

    If you have 25K Monthly Active Users, then having 6 segments is easy for you to manage but mediocre for users. 

    One solution would be to create more segments – the  ultimate solution would be to create as many segments as there are Users (25,000 segments!). That would be:

    1. ridiculous!
    2. a huge amount of work for the product team
    3. always out of date.
    4. Still not what a user wants from your product.

    Artificial Intelligence will eventually make this possible: what Netflix does for movie recommendations or  Facebook does in your feed. More on this later.

    Goals – a user’s needs

    • Better than structuring your users into segments – goals align the Product Team’s interests with the user’s interests.

    Its not very different but an important way of thinking about your user’s needs.

    Example:

    Already you can see a business GOAL or event looks like a customer progression in their own journey, there are some mandatory steps in the business process that each user must be aware of and complete:

    1. DETAILS_FILED = YES, NO

    2. TERMS_AGREED = YES, NO

    3. QUOTE_CREATED = YES, NO

    4. SALE = YES, NO

    Then joining these journey goals with Contextual’s seamless tracking of the user’s behaviour, e.g:

    1. Install date and time
    2. Usage dates and times
    3. Screen Visits, Session count, length etc
    4. Touch events

    Delivers a rich pool of rule-based or training data that can tell you more about the user that enriches data-driven segment toward goals and “individualisation”.

    Today, by manually working backwards from the population who have achieved goals you can determine the “Next Best” segments you should be targeting. Contextual allows you to “what-if” audience size my testing goal-completers with other data. You could export or dump this data to a datalake (redshift, bigquery/bigtable, snowflake, Azure DW) or data-mining system for better tools for PCA and to seperate causality from correlation. Then you can compare goal-completer’s rows vs not.

    You should end up with some observations like:

    • “80% of users who completed the introduction tour” resulted in  DETAILS_FILED=YES”
    • “90% of users who completed the introduction tour” within 24 hours of registration resulted in  DETAILS_FILED=YES”

    User Journey

    The goal at scale

    The interesting thing about goals is that unlike the 25,000 potential segments, there is a small number of goals that matter in the sequence of a user journey – so scaling with the above method is naturally a more manageable.

    But…let’s face it, you don’t want to click through all your users to uncover nuances submerged in the data that lead to greater personalisation and individual needs.

    DETAILS_FILED = YES is an important business goal in this app – the business relationship is established. The Product Team can learn a lot from what attributes distinguish these users from the DETAILS_FILED = NO users. There are also other filters that are pre-cursors, for example, users who have churned will automatically DOCUMENT_UPLOADED = NO.

    From the Contextual data we can learn that these 2 goal based segments can be broken into (we chose) approximately 10 interesting segments.

    For example, we know that users who viewed the “Completing the Document” tip tour have a higher success rate of DOCUMENT_UPLOADED = YES.

    So one logical conclusion would be to keep re-showing this tour to users until they complete it. Another action could be to trigger a feedback question to these users.

    Some other attributes are surprising – for example Android uploads from newer devices is a predictor of success. How the hell could the Product Team manually discovered that? The action is the Product Manager can schedule an investigation by developers to find a root cause.

    Individualization with Machine Learning

    Each of the 25,000 user’s  journeys is describable by the data (behavioural, segmentation, goal, external enrichment).

    Instead of the manual iterations above, you will see AI in platforms like Contextual by training on the “goal data”  (supervised) to learn the models, then automate interaction with new users as they move through the journey.

    The challenge is that both platforms and Product Teams outside silicon valley are not quite up to the task at the moment. So, purchasing decisions for on-boarding/engagement products are made without this as even a consideration, so we need to user the rule method and engines like Contextual to get results today.

    Keep an eye out for companies like https://www.clearbrain.com/ who are early but pitching causal based analytics to convert customers.

  • User Goals, Segments, User Activation – Part 1

    User Goals, Segments, User Activation – Part 1

    This multipart series covers best practice for activating user’s on their journey. “Activation” has a specific meaning, the way it was defined in McClure’s Pirate Metrics – if you are not familiar with this, take a scan of this post.

    In this post, we cover UX goals you want YOUR user’s to achieve. The next post will compare with segments. Contextual allows you to add segments from the beginning which is great, but segments also have problems that we’ll dive into. 

    Setting meaningful user goals

    All app owners want to get their users to the “AHA” moment as quickly as possible – this increases engagement and “AHA” is an ACTIVATION event.

    The problem is that many App owners don’t know what that means in their App:

    1. There is not enough granularity of data to know.
    2. New Apps have little or scarce data.
    3. The bigger problem is that the goals are too big (not granular enough) – “convert triallers to subscribers” is not a goal, its a wish!

    Work Backwards from goals to design

    Steven Covey (of 7 habits fame) says “Begin with the end in mind”.

    Often Product Teams visualize how they want to guide the user in the App. Implicitly the goal is embedded in the design discussions but quickly gets buried with the design’s colours, shapes, wording, validation logic. Its just human nature.

    Instead we suggest to always keep goals at the center of design.

    The Atlassian Team Playbook has a whole “play” (Team Goals, Signals and Measures) as an antidote to getting lost in the detail.

    user goals

    At Contextual we use Atlassian’s Confluence for writing the requirements docs and in the sample templates they have “Goal” and “Metric”.

    They are encouraging a Product Manager to not just define User Stories but also “what does success look like”. 

    user goals contextual
    Above is an example from a Contextual Requirements doc. In this Confluence template the Metric column is encouraging a QUANTITATIVE measure for a GOAL.
    This is awesome because the whole team can focus on what is the important business result. A better “Metric” for

    "Customers can integrate with reduced support ticket load"

    could be

    "Reduce Integration related support tickets by 20%".

    Note that it has nothing to do with how the product looks and all about the cost to the business and happiness of customers.

    Make goals granular

    In FULL SCALE***, Richardson says:

    “Determine goals, milestones and priorities. These three tasks make people more productive. Productivity makes better use of your time. Time is directly related to growth. Growth is why we’re here. Therefore, growth is goals, milestones and priorities.”

    Your goals might be too big and too abstract. For example:

    "Reduce Integration related support tickets by 20%".

    or

    Increase conversion to paid by 30%

    are desirable business goals but don’t map to a user in their journey.

    So you need to map and align the user goals. Break the business goals into multiple user behaviours in your App. This might simply be a “BUY” or “PAY” button in the App but the following Pandora example breaks “activation” into 3 user behaviours that you would define as goals.

     

    Example User Goals

    The first step is to understand what your successful user journeys are. A famous example from Facebook was “if a user gets 7 friends in 10 days they will be a lifetime user”.

    Three other examples are:

    1. Pandora: I recall a speaker from Pandora explaining that an “activated” user was someone who had:

    • Played songs
    • Invited a friend
    • Saved a playlist

    You can think of these as more granular goals.

    2. Checklists and gamification. LinkedIn mission needs great profile data. They did an incredible job of getting people to update.

    user goals - example linkedin

    3. Spotify – the lead data scientist at Spotify told me: their top-tier users, the most engaged people, actually treated the application like an operating system. The data science team would analyse their behaviour and then map journeys for other users that made it easier to become top-tier. 

    In Summary: you need to create goals that you are able to measure that are meaningful to each user’s journey.

    About now, you might be looking liking like this.

    User Goals, Segments & User Activation
    This is where your personal knowledge of your App is essential.
    With your team:

    1. break down your big (business) goals into smaller events you’ve seen. For example user behaviours like:
      1. a user bookmarks an item that shows they have commitment.
      2. If they hit the payment page but didn’t complete thats significant.
    2. In the next post, we will discuss data-mining as a possible method of surfacing goals. If your team or tools have that, this is ideal.
    3.  your analytics platform. You may not have a team of engineers, data scientists and PH.D’s that LinkedIn and Spotify have but it’s likely you are already using analytics tools. It may not have a magical answer but you can do some “what-ifs” around user behaviour.
    user goals contextual metric
    User Click activity can be a quantitative goal

    On some Contextual plans you get click/touch tracking**. So  looking back 30 days for a question like “did a user touch/click BUY button?” could become a very useful goal.
    There is a very good chance that a “click buy button” is exactly the behaviour you want to measure and 30 days history can be measured before and after you run a goal-based experiment.
    Outcome
    You want define a “happy user journey” with granularity like Pandora. Here is some examples:

    1. “We know 60% of users who don’t churn and Visit X page and Search for Y getting a successful result and Save an item become subscribers.
    2. Users with Saved items are 60% more likely to make a purchase.

    NOW you have a list of more granular goals.

    In Contextual you can select goals based on:

    1. Business Goals (the Custom Tag option above). In the Pandora example this could be the “Invite a Friend” process or the “Save Playlist” event. In other App is could be a purchase, getting an anonymous user to register an account etc.

    2. Behavioural (Button Clicks, Page Views, or other InApp metrics in “Contextual Tags” like Session Counts, Upgrading to the latest App etc)

    touch-goal-selection

    In this example from Wikipedia, to set a goal to measure people who registered – you simply mouse over the “JOIN WIKIPEDIA” button and clicks/touches on that will be selected as your goal.

    Iterate your process

    Because this post focusses on goals and segments, I won’t revisit creating user onboarding activities. Sometimes this is code design and sometimes its using a tool like Contextual to create walkthroughs.
    To see some examples of what Contextual can do to help onboard users or help guide them to discover and use new features, check these posts.

    • Create flows/walkthroughs/tips etc to test your hypothesis
    • Measure the results. For example did the “BUY” button clicks relatively increase? Go back to the Contextual “Metric History” analytics chart (an example above). Can you quantitatively measure uplift on user interaction with your “BUY” button?
    • Refine or discard your hypothesis.
    • Repeat

    In addition to analytics of Metric History, Contextual’s experiment analytics allow A/B splits against goal to prove/disprove hypothesis. Two detailed posts cover this topic.

    Next Post: Segmentation

    Now that we have Goals defined in a granular and quantitative way, the next post will cover the pros and cons of segmentation and individual user journeys. Where is personalisation practical? If you want to be notified signup on the side-bar 🙂

    Notes

    ** Contextual doesn’t try to replace dedicated analytics products but touch/click behavioural analytics are designed for Product, Customer Success and Growth teams to see the impact of tips and tours.

    *** FULL-SCALE: How to Grow Any Startup Without a Plan or a Clue

  • Google continuous onboarding in 2019

    In earlier posts we’ve looked at what Google has done to introduce new features and deepen engagement – we call this continuous onboarding. This post is an update that shows the following key characteristics:

    • Google consistently use tips, popups and feature tours.
    • Tips are ALWAYS simple.
    • Tips are ALWAYS contextual
    • Popups and Tips seem to target the user who hasn’t yet used a specific product feature.

    Lets dive in…..

    Advanced Gmail Features

    Gmail is a mature product and after the closure of Google Inbox some of the top features are being imported into the new cleaner Gmail UI. 

    1. “Schedule when to send” – this simple contextual tip explains to the user in one-shot the new functionality. Easy and Done!
    2. Dynamic email – this is more complex and a pretty new feature. The “Learn more” button takes me to a deeper explanation. The “Got it” is what users expect from a popup tip to dismiss it.
    3. Google’s choice of a simple style indicates that they know that the vast majority of the population will understand these little visual elements. They don’t try to be too sexy or clever, this would just distract from the education mission. Google’s tips are consistently in this blue colour.

    The calendar tip is not exactly from Gmail but its closely coupled with the gmail UI. In this case the:

    • Again, its simple and contextual to point at the new button that I’d not previously used.
    • The blue colour is in the button but it still echoes the recognition common across their tip UI.
    • The tip has a dimmed background to standout.

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    Youtube Channel Membership

    Wow, this is an interesting new feature in Youtube!

    It looks like Youtube are taking on Patreon but I’d have never know unless this tip popped up because generally I just click “SUBSCRIBE” and don’t really notice what else is needed.

    Again, despite Youtube being fairly autonomous to Google, the style of tip, placement follows the same style elements:

    • Google tip blue.
    • Title (bold)/Description.
    • Use of “Got it”
    • No use of dismiss or “X” buttons.
    • The blue appears brighter to compete with the intense red of the SUBSCRIBE button.

    Google Docs – Word editing.

    Google wants to take Microsoft Office’s (once) safe userbase. The new feature introduction of co-existence with Office’s documents is a powerful feature that they want to promote. 

    So this popup is not shy about their message – very different to Google’s other low-key feature announcements tips – the popup is a significant announcement. Two things to note:

    1. The blue button will launch the tour below. The text explains what will happen.
    2. The “X” dismiss button is clear.
    3. The user only has 2 possible responses and Google’s analytics will know exactly how each user responded to the prompt. This is how Contextual works – allowing Product Teams to infer different conclusions and behaviours from what buttons the end-user clicks.

    Clicking the (yes, you guessed it – blue) button above leads to explain a few key features.

    NOTE: they don’t attempt to explain Google Docs. They only explain the NEW Microsoft Office integration features such as Managing Versions, what format and Conversion.



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    If the top popup was too subtle, sometimes Google also uses their bug splash coachmark to announce the new feature.

    The Best Practices

    You can guarantee that Google knows that this type of contextual education is a key step in continuous onboarding. The simple takeaways (with complex data backed reasons) are observable in these recent Tips, Tours and Popups in Gmail, Calendar, Youtube and Google Docs.

    The Google Best Practices for tips are:

    • targeted at users
    • has a predictable design and colour that won’t confuse users.
    • doesn’t have any flashy colour schemes buttons or widgets that distracts from the education mission
    • doesn’t use more buttons necessary than is needed for the job
    • buttons look like links (presumably to simplify render on a broad range of devices)
    • allow the user to engage with the tip or to easily dismiss
    • their response is captured and measured.

    There is also examples in Google Photos, Google Assistant and several other products that also use the blue contextual tip – look out for them the next time you are using their products!

  • 5G Will Benefit the Logistics Industry

    Fundamentally different from previous generations, 5G, the next generation wireless network technology, is engineered to greatly increase the speed and responsiveness of wireless networks. It promises data rates 100x those of 4G, with network latency around 1 millisecond, support for 1 million devices/sq. km., and 99.999 percent availability of the network. A connected world enabled by 5G is expected to generate data at unprecedented velocity and volume. This “fast data” will fuel a wide range of data-driven services and digital business models.

    5G will drastically affect many industries, but the sector that stands to benefit most from the increased connectivity and speed is the logistics industry. With the lower frequency band providing wider coverage in suburban and rural areas, and the higher frequency band providing better coverage in high density urban areas, the logistics and supply chain industry will finally be able to provide end-to-end continuous coverage for monitoring, tracking and theft detection. Historically, a plethora of challenges around lost signals and insufficient coverage in rural areas have plagued the industry, leading to revenue leakage and bottlenecks for re-establishing inventory checks. 5G will solve many of these problems, positively impacting logistics and supply chain management for freight solutions buyers, cargo owners, and others in various ways, including:

    5G will enable organizations to track their valuable cargo across all regions by optimizing coverage in areas that were previously far reaching and considered “dead-zones.” Improved geo-location technology will allow for better visibility into delays and unforeseen travel circumstances, ultimately enhancing location intelligence and mitigating resulting problems. 5G will allow organizations to optimize their routes through improved visibility, and avoid unnecessary trips and inefficiencies. In addition to better tracking in large rural areas, highly trafficked areas will also see benefits from the implementation of 5G networks. As shipments traverse through highly populated metropolitan areas, tracking abilities won’t be slowed down by a strained network. Ultimately, 5G facilitates the ability for logistics managers to account for cargo from end-to-end, during all points of its trip.

    According to a survey from Moor Insights & Strategy, 90% of logistics and shipping providers believe the lack of supply chain visibility is one of the biggest challenges in the industry today. With 5G, the implementation of cheaper sensors will allow better single item tagging and tracking, and near edge computing on small footprint infrastructure will allow faster inventory checking. 5G will help provide end-to-end visibility, not just at an aggregate level, but into every product, helping avoid revenue leakage via theft and loss. 5G will improve traceability by providing the ability to track and gather data at every step of the way, including if a truck changes weight (indicating a potential problem). This advancement will allow cargo owners to have high amounts of visibility into the shipping process that were previously difficult to access or nonexistent.

  • User Acquisition Tips for B2B App (Podcast)

    I was excited to see a former Podcast interview Glenn Coates’ mobile sales order entry company was acquired. Glenn is an Aussie living in New York and the acquisition offer came from Shopify. This is a likely a terrific result for both companies and their customers bringing more native mobile offerings and competence into the Shopify juggernaut.

    So I’m reposting the espisode here as there are some great learnings to be had that contributed to the Handshake success.

    app onboarding

    In this episode of the Mobile Engagement Podcast: Glen Coates, CEO of Handshake. Handshake is an App and a platform for sales order entry – typically for Wholesalers dealing with retailers instore or at tradeshows.

    Glen shares how their App onboards users “bottom-up” allowing instant experience of the power of the platform in stark contrast to what a Salesforce deployment may look like. Glen also has some great tips for anyone writing B2B Apps, if you can get a B2B user feeling innovative just by using the App in their “day-job”, they will be very loyal and drive revenues – there is much to learn about acquiring new customers here.

    In this episode of the Mobile Engagement Podcast: Glen Coates, CEO of Handshake. Handshake is an App and a platform for sales order entry – typically for Wholesalers dealing with retailers instore or at tradeshows.

    Glen shares how their App onboards users “bottom-up” allowing instant experience of the power of the platform in stark contrast to what a Salesforce deployment may look like. Glen also has some great tips for anyone writing B2B Apps, if you can get a B2B user feeling innovative just by using the App in their “day-job”, they will be very loyal and drive revenues – there is much to learn about acquiring new customers here.

    Transcript

    TL;DR

    If you step back and think about it, you’ll realize that the size of the opportunity to re-invent paper order forms to mobile-based is massive. In fact its “massively massive” and Glen Coates was an engineer acting as a sales-guy who spotted the opportunity from the Tradeshow floor. In this episode, Glen talks about some key points in user acquisition of B2B customers and the role of his App making sales people feel good about what they do.

    Full transcript

    DAVID: Gidday, it’s David from Contextual here. I’m here with Glen Coates of Handshake.com. Today’s a B2B day. These guys, I heard about, were really ripping it up in the sales order entry world. This is where wholesalers meet retailers and fill out sales orders in a beautiful iPad-driven type app. So this is Glen. Glen, let’s have a quick introduction from you about what Handshake is about from your perspective.

    GLEN: Great. Thanks for having me, David. Handshake’s mission is to transform the way brands serve retailers through standout user experiences, and as you mentioned, a lot of that is about giving the salespeople with the brands and the purchasing managers at the retailers really amazing mobile and web user experiences for getting those orders placed, of “Hey, we’re a shoe company, you’re a shoe store, we need to pick out what shoes you’re going to stock and we need to get them into your store somehow? We’ve been doing this for years on paper, with paper catalogues and faxes and emails and all that kind of nonsense. Could we be doing this job of getting our shoes to your shoe store through mobile and web and have it be the kind of user experiences that we’re used to and even expect as consumers when we go to Zappos or anything like that? Why doesn’t that happen in the B2B world?” Handshake is the answer to that question.

    DAVID: Great, excellent. Also, I think you’ve got kind of a capability in things like trade shows as well too, which are effectively pop-up stores.

    GLEN: Yeah, that’s right. I mean, a lot of the industries that we work with, they kind of have their seasons, moving ebbs and flows, and there’ll be that launch period at the beginning of the year when they go to the shows and they have the product out and the retailers can come and see what’s available and they place those early season orders. That’s the trade show kind of scenario but there’s also this whole world of business that happens outside of the shows, which is salespeople going around to their accounts and visiting them in store.

    Sometimes the salesperson’s not involved at all. Sometimes it’s a guy who runs a music store and he sells his last keyboard and he needs to re-order that keyboard from, say, Roland, or something like that, and the salesperson’s not around. So there’s all of those ways that a product might get from a brand down to a retailer. Sometimes it’s driven by sales, sometimes it’s driven by the guy who owns the retail store, and it’s all of that stuff put together.

    DAVID: So how does a sale get started for you guys? Is it that the salesperson hears about it from a mate and tries it out and then tries to sort of champion it internally inside his organization?

    GLEN: Yeah, it can happen both ways. What you just described is, I guess, what we would call like a bottom-up sale. That’s definitely happened. It could be a salesperson who’s out there on the road or going to the shows and just frustrated with the fact that they’re still doing their job on paper in the year 2015. Or maybe they’re not doing it on paper, maybe their company’s given them a laptop and they’re “futzing” around, trying to type things into Excel while they’re sort of face-to-face with a customer.

    DAVID: Yeah. They look over the booth, to the next booth over, and these guys have got these cool iPad things and they’re hammering out orders, and you’re sitting there with a laptop and you look pretty silly.

    GLEN: Exactly, right. To be frank, there’s a productivity thing to Handshake, it genuinely does help people be more productive, but you also have to remember that a lot of our users are salespeople. Being a good salesperson is not just about being highly efficient and productive; it’s also about presenting well and being a brand ambassador. The element you just mentioned, which is looking like a forward-thinking brand ambassador, is actually important.

    DAVID: Yeah, it’s like “aspirational” for professional reasons.

    GLEN: Yeah.

    DAVID: So where are “you at” as a business at the moment? I see you raised an 8 million Series A in March 2014.

    GLEN: Yup.

    DAVID: You must be a fair way along. You must have been operating for a while and got product market fit before you took the Series A, I guess.

    GLEN: Yeah, that’s right. We’ve raised two rounds of venture capital. One was at the end of 2012; one was at the start of 2014. We’re a team of about 40 people, all based in New York. Yeah, we’ve been lucky to have had, I guess what you would call basic product market fit from pretty early on because I was…

    DAVID: You knew the problem.

    GLEN: Since I am the user, right, like I had the job that our users now have in my previous role.

    DAVID: Yeah. You totally knew what was required.

    GLEN: Exactly. Like the user research of the first two years of us building Handshake was just drawn from my experiences, so that helped us work a lot more quickly than we would have been able to otherwise.

    DAVID: Right. Okay. So getting down to the core of the podcast, which is we try and ask you just to give an example or an experience or an “aha moment” around the three axes of acquisition, user experience or retention. I think you were talking that you might have some thoughts on user acquisition, and particularly the onboarding process.

    GLEN: Early on, Handshake actually really had a decent mobile user experience. It had more or less a nonexistent web user experience. Just to give everyone listening an idea what I mean, in our world, there are basically two users: there is the – I guess you could call them the administrator who’s usually like an IT person. That’s the person who needs to log into Handshake’s website to do the setup, like uploading customers, uploading products, uploading images and pricing and all that kind of stuff.

    Then the other persona is the salesperson who doesn’t really care about any of that and just wants to pick up their mobile phone or iPad and log in and have all that stuff streamed down so they can go and sell to their customers.

    So in the early days of Handshake, when it was basically just me doing the development, I’ve spent most of my time building up the mobile user experience and there was actually no web user experience. So early on, there was actually no way for me to have a “sign up here” and then give them a login to a website where they could do their own setup because that website didn’t really exist. All I had was a bunch of really terrible backend tools that could load up spreadsheets. So what I would do is I would say, “If you want an account, send me an email,” and then I would get into an email conversation with them and they would send me spreadsheets back and forth and I would use them to load their data into their account and then they would be able to use the mobile user experience.

    But what that forced me to do was I said, “Well, no one’s going to take time to apply for an account and send me their spreadsheets if they don’t have some sense of what this thing can do.” So from the very first version of Handshake, there was always an option to log in if you had an account, or there was an option to log in to the demo. The demo was this environment which was a fake company for fake customers and fake products with fake orders already placed. That really helped people understand, as a sales rep, “What is this thing going to look like once I’ve managed to populate it with data?”

    Since then, we’ve actually gone and built out like a trial that people can sign up for and they can do that setup and all that stuff, but we’ve kept that around. The reason we’ve kept that around is that unlike something like a to-do list App or something like that, Handshake’s zero-data first user experience is pretty bare, right?

    DAVID: Yeah. “What will I do next?”

    GLEN: Yeah. You’ve got no customers, you’ve got no products, and you actually have to do, I guess, a relatively significant amount of work to populate your account with enough data to make the app useful. So that’s like asking a lot of someone to say, “Hey, sign up for a free trial,” and then they get this thing that has no data in it and they’re like, “I still don’t know what I’m looking at here.”

    So I think the lesson I would take away from that is if you’ve got an app that has a nontrivial amount of work to get to a user experience, then that kind of here’s-one-that-I-cooked-earlier pre-prepared demo account experience is something worth thinking about, because otherwise you’re just asking a lot of your users to put in the work to discover whether or not what you’ve got actually works for them.

    DAVID: Right. So as opposed to something like a consumer onboarding experience, whether it’s Instagram or Path, where they actually kind of like take you through an initial experience, you’re saying that quite often in a B2B context, it’s about having some contextual data that reflects their business process is something that you have to because throwing out to them straightaway.

    GLEN: Yeah. And look, I mean, there’s some stuff that’s even… so, for example, like conceivably a Handshake user, like a potential Handshake user, might be a really savvy IT person who logs in and does a free trial and they say, “Oh, great, cool, I just have to upload a customer list and they go out to their ERP, they grab the customer list, they bring it back in, they go and grab their price list which they’re able to pull really quickly.” That person may be able to get some of that data into Handshake very quickly if they were savvy.

    But the thing they’re not going to be able to do is like a lot of the value of Handshake comes out of having built up the sales order history through actually working in the app for a while. That’s where you get the insights. That’s where you get the “Here’s what this customer ordered last time and here’s what you might want to suggest.” So that’s a whole big branch of our value that will be lost on someone unless we gave them an account that kind of already had that value built up in it and on display.

    DAVID: This is really interesting. What you’re doing there is you give the user an instant gratification experience. Straight from the App Store, they download the thing and, bang, they’re straight into it, whereas some Salesforce really actually has to do like a top-down type thing. But you, you’re a bit scrappy, you being able to go bottom-up, give a salesperson out in the field, or even the IT person, that first experience that gives them a feel of what it would be like with their end data eventually.

    GLEN: Yeah, that’s right. At the time, I said it was borne out of necessity because originally we just had no real web backend but we’ve stuck with it over time because I think it does help people get that understanding very quickly.

    DAVID: Right. So you’re free to download, by the looks of it?

    GLEN: That’s right, yup.

    DAVID: And from there, I see that you’ve got on the App Store today a $189.99 in-app purchase for six months. Is that a per-user-type thing?

    GLEN: It is. Although frankly not a huge amount of our revenue actually comes through that channel, I would say that the majority of our user base kind of finds us and pays for us through our website. We do have some revenue through the in-app purchase stuff but it’s probably not the hugest component of our revenue.

    DAVID: Yeah. So, the App Store is lead gen and distribution for you, and your sales process is operating through the – that the people have the experience, they love what they see and then they actually want to engage with you deeply, and then it goes into a more traditional enterprise-type sale approach. Does it?

    GLEN: Yeah. I mean, it’s almost like any enterprise SaaS company out there that has a mobile app is, I would guess, at this point more or less adopting the same model.

    DAVID: Actually that’s a good point. What’s your thought in terms of having your own Salesforce when you’re a SaaS business? It looks to me like your lifetime value is huge. It looks like you could be easily in the $30-100,000 for a mid-size retailer.

    GLEN: I think it’s very important to have an intelligent, articulate sales team, because more than anything else, you got to remember, at this stage in the market, we’re really doing more educating than anything else.

    DAVID: Right.

    GLEN: There are certainly customers that we’ve had who’ve come to us and have said, “Guys, I get it. You don’t have to explain to me why it makes sense for my sales team to be, you know, transitioning to iPads and iPhones. Just show me the tool and convince me that it works.”

    That happens, but there’s often a bigger education process of explaining to people how this can help, allaying fears and concerns and really trying to understand the difference in their business and how Handshake can tie to that. Because Handshake’s got so many different ways in which it can offer value: It can speed up your order entry process, it can speed up your order transmission process, it can reduce the amount of data entry errors – there’s all these ways in which we could maybe help you.

    But articulating for an individual business, the most effective way that our product can help them is something that requires like a sophisticated educational sales approach that is, as I said, more about education than about kind of forcing something on someone, like there’s so much education that still has to be done.

    DAVID: Yeah. I mean, that’s a great insight. So I think it’s very fashionable to say that self-service SaaS is the way things should be, but that may only be true where you’ve actually got a highly technical-type customer. You know, early SaaS companies that did really well were basically doing products for developers, so you know, whether its “Highrise” or “Jira” or any of those sorts of things, things that have started off in that, of course. The anomaly to that is Salesforce, but I think the reality is known these days that Salesforce does have a very large human sales element and is a very high-touch sales process.

    GLEN: Oh yes, its massive.

    DAVID: Yeah.

    GLEN: Yeah. I mean the sales culture at Salesforce is something to behold. I mean, I don’t think it’s any secret that they more or less always had a high-touch sales model. And that’s just like that’s a cost you have to bear. Like when you’re starting, when you’re trying to build out into a new space that is really a new space, you just have to accept that there’s going to be a substantial period of time where you’re going to be talking to a market that is, in many cases, not aware that they’ve got a problem.

    You have to break down a lot of walls and that’s the cross that you have to bear if you want to kind of develop a whole new field of software. The advantage is if you’re successful, then you get to be the market leader and you get to kind of have a big say in the way that space develops. But it takes a lot of work, and that is the work of sales when you’re in the early stages of a new field.

    DAVID: Great insight. Glen, I know you got to go, so we’ll wrap up there. Is there anything that we should be looking at from you guys in the near future?

    GLEN: Nothing I can talk about now. You’ll read it in the newspaper.

    DAVID: Newspaper? Huh – I’ve heard of those!

    GLEN: Yeah. You’ll see it on the New York Times.

    DAVID: Oh, very good. Okay. All right, mate, thank you. I really appreciate your time and wish you a very good evening.

    GLEN: Okay. Thanks so much, David. See you, mate.