Category: Customer Success

Context Marketing – Everyone MUST Be Part of Customer Success
Naval just tweeted: “You’re doing sales because you failed at marketing.You’re doing marketing because you failed at product.”**

News Flash: Most Product team members don’t actually use their own App. As an App user, we’ve all thought “wtf were these developers thinking” (I’m looking at you Microsoft Teams ????).

These teams are Product-centric but not Customer-centric – it’s a lack of empathy and you need people in your team that are champions for the customer. I’ve written elsewhere about why Customer Support/Care is a key input to Product. But can we develop cultures of Customer Success?

Customer-Centric

Customer centricity is essential for a 21st-century product company and should be a focus for the product team. In this series, “Context Marketing” is the focus/lens that Product Teams can use to view the User’s Journey.

“Marketing” may be a dirty word for Product Managers, Developers and Customer Success – if they wanted a career in Sales or Marketing, they would have chosen it – maybe they see it as “the dark-side”. But, but, but…great Marketing and Sales seeks (with empathy) to speak to the customer’s needs.

Product Teams with customer-centric cultures make products that:
- Do the “Job-to-be-done”
- Surprise and delight customers.
So “Context Marketing” isn’t a dirty word but making an App infused with the very same “user” curiosity and empathy that Sales and Marketing folks have.

Context marketing is, by nature, user-oriented, individually analysing and displaying content that would be of interest to the client in question – in this moment. Product-led growth and customer success are inevitable.

Credit: superoffice.com

3 Benefits of a Customer-Centric Mindset
- Understanding the User Journey
- Increasing Customer Satisfaction
- Reducing User Churn
The bottom of this post details each of these goals. Context Marketing puts features, offers and help that a customer needs at each point during the User Journey – context matters when it comes to inApp messaging, help, feature releases, and so on.

At Contextual, even a simple tooltip for the right-person at the right time aims to meet these 3 goals.

Can Product Teams afford Customer-centricity?

One (unamed) Company developed a successful B2B app, they have a good customer base and product-market fit. What a dream! Or is it?

While things look perfect on paper, what can’t be seen from the outside is that they are overloaded. Their engineering led culture codes everything in-house – the founders were super-coders so all engineering copy-cats that hairy chested style. The App is loaded with features (developers build whatever customers ask). So the App has grown to be complex….customers need to be onboarded, features need to be explained and guides need to be released.

The Customer Success and Customer Care teams are overwhelmed with a backlog of customer tasks/followups that need to be done and consider giving extra responsibilities to the developers. While hard coding was once the main option in these situations, now it feels outdated, and it only adds to the problem. Designers could fix these issues, but it would be costly, and it would only add to the development backlog.

This scenario is a vicious circle: by letting the developers handle it, the company loses money and time.

Customer related costs

Poor App customer-centricity results in these top-line problem:
- Increased load on Customer Care
- Lags in resolving Customer problems
- User Churn
- Poor revenue
- Poor reviews and referrals (the engine of low cost marketing and acquisition)
Opportunity cost

By hard-coding every aspect of a product, there is less time to develop new features, more effort goes into contextual customisations, if each user (cohort) is manually analyzed, and there is no analytics that proves the success of any of these aspects.

Another lost opportunity is the lack of performance/usability data flowing back into Customer Success systems. Lack of this data means the organisation can’t adapt and learn from lessons.

Engineering Costs

Keeping super-coders employed is expensive, there are many job opportunities for coders and it’s unlikely that coding tips, guides, marketing will lead to employee retention.

In addition, recruiters now demand fees of 18-20% of salary. Every dissatisfied departing engineer has a devastating impact on corporate memory.

Customer Care and Customer Success Costs

With Increased load on Customer Care, this results in unhappiness and churn in your staffing.

Recruitment and retraining may not be as expensive as engineering churn but every green, newbie, clueless customer support rep will be a bad experience for the customer.

This is a huge risk!

Solution

Few product teams have enough development resources to write features AND have a framework of inApp messaging and help. Hard coding is costly, slow and precious.
The solution is to:
1. 1. Have developers focus on improving the product itself – the “feature layer”.
2. 2. Use “engagement layer” tools like Contextual to help the User Journey.
No-Code inApp tips, guides, walkthroughs, announcements and feedback can be delivered on the Engagement Layer without consuming developer resources – much more affordable.

By choosing to let go of the “NIH”*** mindset, any product-led company would do themselves a favour. Precious time is saved, and less effort goes into satisfying your customers.

No-code engagement layer tools like Contextual are not a silver bullet but can help significantly to reduce costs and risk discussed above.

Why Context Marketing ⇒ Customer Success

The JTBD (jobs-to-be-done) framework helps product companies achieve product-market fit, as well as the level of satisfaction their users have while using the product.

Context Marketing is a similar framework
By recognizing the need for context marketing (and platforms that deliver contextual help), the workload could be lighter and stress more manageable in Customer Care and Customer Success teams. Also, by using this method, Product Management can be more empathetic towards the customers as well.

Context Marketing can be even just a simple tooltip. Users can self-serve help, and they will feel closer to the product if right-place-right-time content is shown throughout their user journey.

We now have mutually beneficial ROI (return on investment) between the company/product and its clients.

The key is the customer – not the product.

The product is in service to the customer. The drip emails are in service to the customer. The chat widget or support button are in service to the customer. The help desk is in service to the customer. No touch point should lack customer-centric empathy.

More importantly: product management, developers, designers, scrum-masters are thinking customer-centric.

By using this framework, customer success is increased.

What’s Next?

Consider the Contextual ROI Toolkit.

We take care of your announcements, guides, and feedback, so you won’t have to think about ‘Build or Buy?’ ever again. By choosing us, you can have access to the above-mentioned analytics to see if we help your users in their workflow, as well as lighten the workload of the design and development team. This way, you can focus only on coming up with new and exciting features for your product!

** Lots of Tweeps got grumpy and argued with Naval. Of course. Its rare to find a product today that doesn’t have competitors, so S&M play a function even for the most loved products.

*** “NIH” is Not invented here – it is very common in large silicon valley companies like google because of the massive profitability and the huge scale. But nowadays we find even larger companies consider using SaaS platforms to solve problems that arn’t their core competency. E.g Analytics or Product Adoption.

Appendix – 3 Goals in Detail

Understanding the User Journey

Product-led companies can be tempted to focus more on their product rather than their users. As they put a lot of effort into the creation of an app, they tend to forget about their audience’s happiness – “growth” gets bolted-on as a tactic without customer empathy.

By allowing the users to be the centre of attention, instead of the product itself, product companies are more likely to understand the user journey and the exact steps a customer might go through in a session.

This is important for future user journey mapping too, as it reveals possible weak points, parts of the product that need to be improved, as well as its strengths. By taking time to understand the before, during, and after parts of the user journey, context marketing can also be better targeted, uncovering the exact needs a user has while using an app.

Increasing Customer Satisfaction

Users make or break a product and the developing company as well. Their opinions are essential for product-led growth, and so is their happiness.

Customer satisfaction is not a new term in the marketing world. Context marketing especially focuses on this concept, as it plays a great role in what type of content users are shown while working with a product. The right place and the right time are crucial elements of customer success.

Customer centricity helps product-led companies to recognize and adjust their practices that increase user satisfaction and offer a positive user experience.

Reducing User Churn

By placing the user in the centre of the product development, product-led companies can observe the patterns and behaviours of their clients. This not only helps in the user journey mapping task, but it can be a great starting point in reducing user churn.

Analysing the possible reasons why users may or may not like different features, conducting A/B testing on them, displaying different tips to guide them in their user journey are all beneficial in determining reasons why churn might occur. With these and a problem-solving attitude, solutions can be found to reduce user churn.

The key is the customer. Their satisfaction matters in the success of a product. By looking at their journey and adopting a customer-centric mindset, it’s obvious how much context matters when it comes to marketing, feature releases, and so on. Here, at Contextual, we understand the need for context the best!
March 22, 2022
Customer Support is a Product Managers untapped design resource.
Call it: Customer Success, Customer Care, Customer Support, Tech Support, HelpDesk – these teams and people are the first line of feedback from customer and the reality is they carry a lot of data from the intimacy and volume of interactions.

In this Fireside Rachael Neumann (former director of Customer Experience Strategy at EventBrite and now Head of Startups AWS ANZ) talks about the psychological or emotional user experience.

After an anecdote about how she discovered a different way to implement a product feature, I challenged Rachael about whether she was actually doing the Product Manager’s job.

Rachael made an important point:

“But it’s very powerful when you have someone who sits between customer and product because two things happen. If you just have a customer team:
- they tend to be seen as a cost center instead of a strategic center.
- They tend to be the first function that is off-shored and
- they tend to be kind of pushed off to the side and
- BUT they are basically speaking to hundreds or thousands of customers a day creating rich rich datasets that are never captured mined or used.
And on the other side you have product managers who all think that they’re Steve Jobs and that they can create products from the vision of their mind…..and never shall the two meet.”

Rachael’s comment is fairly incendiary but rings true – as teams get larger the Product Management function gets busy with backlog, internal meetings, analytics and lots of other inward-facing actions.

The original methodology of Customer Development interviews is largely abandoned as its one of the least pleasant thing to do AND its not usually incented with KPIs.

What Lens do you use to view your Product? Design or Emotion?

Careful, this is a trick question – your customer is only going to view THEIR experience of your product through their EMOTION.

Rachael’s comment “speaking to hundreds or thousands of customers a day creating rich rich datasets that are never captured mined or used” has 3 ramifications:
1. devaluing this data is a lost opportunity.
2. your analytics platform never communicates heat or anger of the customer.
3. qualitative human input from your CS team is a valuable dimension that you’re tools simply cannot capture.
In the next post we’ll dive deeper into this statement about customer anger.

But for now, consider whether you are interacting with customers enough and feeling their heat. Is it possible that Product people are introverts and will naturally arrange their day with tasks that avoid hand-to-hand contact/combat with customers.
March 1, 2022
Onboarding only the users you want
Two extremely exciting companies in B2B SaaS Video are Loom and Bonjoro – they both let users reach out to prospects and customers with short-form videos that may help with sales, onboarding or customer support.

In this podcast video interview I talk with Matt Barnett from Bonjoro – their onboarding deliberately self-selects for SaaS companies and excludes consumers and other long-tail applications.

To illustrate what Bonjoro do, take a look at this simple email I received after signing up.

Tools like Intercom, Hubspot, Marketo, Autopilot, Sendgrid all blast pseudo personalized email templates at you when you sign up. Bonjoro solves SaaS personalization at scale.

Frickin’ genius.

Everything about this rings true as an authentic personalized email and nothing is more authentic than ME talking to YOU.

“This video contains important information recorded personally for you by Grant Dewar”.

“Hey David, saw you signed up and wanted to say hi from sunny Sydney! Check out your video & let me know how you want to use Bonjoro – I’ve helped a bunch of our SaaS users get going.”

Using these subtle clues, email recipients feel this is a legit, personal communication.

It works.

Open rates are off-the-charts and the relevance for SaaS is the differentiation of personalization – but also at scale.

Here is some discussion snippets on the onboarding flow.

Matt says “they suffer from having such a broad range of users at signup”. So they have to be brutal about the target users they want to focus on – otherwise they would dilute their focus and not be valuable to any one sector.

Also – you will notice that Bonjoro solves this via “Jobs to be done” for the user – get them to name the problem they want to solve:
- onboarding someone
- try to get more demos
- increase retention
- stop churn
To view or listen to the whole interview – Matt shares his whole journey and other valuable topics such as:
- importance of adding team members during onboarding. Not for the usual viral reasons but so people get familiar with video and the human response it invokes.
- people are not confident with video – they are still educating the market.
- remote/distributed teams
- cookbooks of examples for specific “Jobs to be done”
- design-led as a key part of even B2B SaaS products.
- why they integrate with tools like Intercom, Mailchimp, Convertkit etc.
- Which integrations convert better
- Team size, MAUs, break-even-or-not?
Its a great ride and you can see on video or subscribe on Soundcloud or iTunes.

https://vimeo.com/395116750

Conversation Transcript

David Jones 0:00
I guess it looks like you are trying to target enterprise. So business customers and possibly even enterprise customers because they are a higher LTV (lifetime value) type customer for you. And you can support $1,000 LTV customer just as well as you can a zero dollar customer and so you’ve got a major focus in that space. So you know, you never got to go for sort of a massive land grab approach.

Matthew from Bonjoro 0:34
So we don’t we don’t do enterprise. I think there’s a cultural shift to happen there. I think trusting your thousand employees to get on video and, and hop on board with clients – there are a lot of enterprises who arn’t willing to make that jump – just yet. It’s going to happen.

Matthew from Bonjoro 0:48
We tend to focus on SaaS and then SMEs. And SMEs in the sense of up to 200 person teams. That’s where we work, we’re mostly used by Customer Success teams. So posts sign up in that lead conversion activation funnel. And then and then post payment like customer care. So really, teams like who will have a customer success team, and those now probably in e-Commerce and they probably in non-SaaS SMEs as well. That tells you where we. At the end of the day, it’s how you message your client. If its going to convert more and it takes 30 seconds. And you have, juniors on your onboarding team. And that client is worth $50. Maybe that 30 seconds is worth the LTV.

Matthew from Bonjoro 1:36
It is (the value of the effort) to work it out for the company, but we do have customers using it with pretty substantial funnels, but they they’ll either filter and then they’ll and then they’ll spread the load across a group of team members.

Matthew from Bonjoro 1:58
Yeah, like I’m actually a Product Designer as well, its more than graphic design so actually its UX for the real world, its kind of the the ultimate goal so yes look good engineering work and then come able to use. I mean, I’m not the guy who now who does the the end design work like we have we have also UX person. I work pretty heavily with them then engineering. But yeah, design first. I’m hugely biased, but I think it’s the way to go.

David Jones 2:30
It makes a lot of sense to me after being in this space for a while, you know, my two previous startups are in security and the design requirements are completely different.

Matthew from Bonjoro 2:41
I think anyone enjoys, like enjoy the experience. Yeah, like again, like yeah, journey versus the end. Yes. You enjoy the journey. Yeah, given numbers, a high percentage of people will stick with it and see it through. And then like little things, if it hit bugs, they hit issues and they hit UX flaws, which are gonna have, they are more likely to keep going. So the way I see it is it just, it just makes. Yep. Like it removes barriers. And our onboarding is, is pretty heavy in terms of my setup, I’d say. So, hopefully people enjoy it more.

David Jones 3:15
Yeah. So let’s, let’s have a look at that. So what I’ve got what I’ve got on the screen here is the first step after putting in username and password. So I should have taken a screenshot of that, but it was super easy. You didn’t ask me any questions. You know, the thing I did a fireside with deputy last week, and they talked a lot about product lead growth and talked a lot about, you know, the drop off rates with adding additional fields, so you were pretty clean about that. Have you had debates about that? Whether you I think you asked the question, either here. You know, you just sort of pushed it pushed it off to the registration page. Did you ever have questions up front that were causing drop-offs?

Matthew from Bonjoro 3:59
Not up Front. Interestingly we actually found like so one we implemented was GDPR Terms of Service, which actually made zero impact so everyone’s completely cool with that. But our form start here, this is classed as early onboarding, most of this is for the user. Like this screen is interesting. So we asked people to basically create a campaign for why they’re doing these messages and we’re trying to there’s a few things going on here. What is we’re trying to get people to start to think in our way so you know,

David Jones 4:33
My first impression was: “these guys are serious about business”. It wasn’t kind of like the casual the casual signup you know, oh, I’m gonna do a video. I’m gonna do a video for somebody It was like, your first campaign it’s like, “oh, wow, this is this is really tied into a process” and but I didn’t actually understand at this stage why I was so sort of important.

Matthew from Bonjoro 4:56
Yes, as they start thinking, Okay, campaigns, this is not just a one off thing. Nothing is this is great data for us. So, we’ve always struggled with having such a broad range of users that sign up – and the only way we can bucket them is by “Jobs to be done” so campaigns an awesome way. People just tell us what job they want to do: are they onboarding someone, or they do retention, or are they trying to get more demos – like they “name the thing”. And we look at that report every week and we’re like: “this is our primary use cases here”.

David Jones 5:30
That’s interesting. I did a tear down of Monday, the productivity tool too, and they actually give you those use cases right up front. So you got this menu to pick from and like it lets you actually get to that “aha” experience around my specific needs – this feels similar in that sense.

Matthew from Bonjoro 5:56
This is our latest onboarding. This is kind of a failsafe for us. So it’ll be more explained on the next screen. But this is this is kind of like so we make sure that everyone always has somebody else to send messages to

David Jones 6:09
Ah, yes.

Matthew from Bonjoro 6:10
The point to understand is that, we looked into what our product qualified lead is. So what are the leading indicators that someone’s going to become a customer. And there’s two things, basically, one is the software integration, which I mentioned that in a minute. The second one is what actually gets sent to the customer is they get a response to a video where someone (the potential customer) goes “this is amazing”. Like, “thank you so much”, and that person to put the credit card in and then they’re on the train. Now to get to that you work backwards. People need to send somewhere between five to about 12 videos. So one of the things we do is we have integrations to help drive this but we also try to add in team members because we found that pretty much anyone who comes back and says “this is great”, “this was unexpected”, is a huge plus in terms of getting that user to ultimately convert over.

David Jones 7:03
Right? Yeah, there’s a real there’s a real kind of like safety, use nothing to fall back on. But it was a real safety net for me to be able to try it out with a colleague.

Matthew from Bonjoro 7:15
Yeah. Because videos, you know, not not everyone’s done videos before. So people are nervous when they first start.

David Jones 7:24
That makes sense. Yeah. You’re kind of educating the market at the same time as getting getting them to use your product. What do think about ugly old blokes like me? Do you find that it actually a skews demographically, the younger people or….

Matthew from Bonjoro 7:38
Nope – say our biggest user base is 32 to 48. (laughter) That’s where we sit, we drop off over 60 and we drop off below 25. So I think, probably there’s a couple of things that was one of the reasons this is it’s not the age as-such. It’s the fact that at that age you are in a more senior position, probably, you’re in CS (Customer Success) or you’re in support, you know what you’re doing, or in sales. Secondly, you’re a lot more confident by that point. So I think confidence comes with age, and people don’t care as much about getting on video if it gets the job done.

David Jones 8:25
Do you think the bottom end of the range? So below 25 has just to do that they they’re not in the job yet.

Matthew from Bonjoro 8:33
I think that is part of it, I think a lot of video messaging been done by youth is between close friends. There maybe this again, maybe this is just because of the age thing. Yeah. It’s hard to know, whether that’s all the same age. I do think confidence comes into it, I think. At the end-of-the-day when you’ve been doing sales or you’ve been doing meetings have you met loads of customers before? This is a less intimidating job than in your first job when you like: “oh, I’ve got to talk to people I’ve never met who are customers”, you know?

David Jones 9:11
And I don’t think we’re going to see Tick Tock for enterprise. (small chuckle)

David Jones 9:18
Alright, so this was interesting to like boom, straight into integrations, which was really, really interesting. So you’ve got a bunch of integrations, you’ve got a bunch of integrations via Zapier, but certainly things like MailChimp and stuff like that. At this particular stage, I’m still a little bit confused that if I was a CS person, why I need to connect my MailChimp. So I was a bit confused about that. I could certainly, probably make sense out of the intercom connection in that situation. I put in a request for Autopilot. It was interesting, too. I sort of thought I should I put in one for Pipedrive, you know, so I didn’t know what was the best platform am I trying to integrate here, you know: is it the support system?, is it the marketing system?, is it the CRM? I wasn’t quite sure where we were going on that.

Matthew from Bonjoro 10:15
yeah we do we do bias towards our better users, so like with my campaigns: Intercom uses “campaigns”, ActiveCampaign (the platform) uses the words “campaigns” within CS. So it’s just “Yes, teams that use that”. And then when you come in here, we again <…>

Matthew from Bonjoro 10:33
So, Mailchimp is interesting. We get a lot of Mailchimp signups. They’re not the best customer because they tend to be more marketing side and kind of small business. However, however, like numbers are pretty significant. So take a bit of an internal decision now – who do we double down on because we keep building integrations every day like, we have Pipedrive is #2 requested; Kajabi is another really high one. But I haven’t used. You start to get these (integration requests) coming through.

Matthew from Bonjoro 11:08
So I guess the question for us as a company is do we keep going broad and broad and broad? Or do we really start to double-down on the ones we know are extremely active and best users and provide a lot more value to those users and make them a lot stickier.

David Jones 11:24
Yeah, you’ve got a menu of options or directions that you could go, you could go really hard down, say the Zendesk intercom route or you could stick in some other some other area.

Matthew from Bonjoro 11:34
It’s tough. It’s tough to know which way to go. Because there’s big benefits either side, you kind of have to make call. And it comes down to benefit. Yeah, the strategy of where you’re going as a company.

David Jones 11:42
Yeah. That’s a great position to be in. I’ll check in with you in six months. And we’ll we’ll find out what how you iterated to a particular direction. It would be great to see that journey…..All right. So here I was a bit confused about just here on the left hand side, why it was saying “choose your software” but people were being shown to me so I was a bit confused about that.

Matthew from Bonjoro 12:12
Good one – it’s good pick up (laughs). I have no idea why

David Jones 12:17
I didn’t even I must admit I should have tried clicking on them to see I missed a bit about uploading my profile so I missed one screenshot and I couldn’t get back. This is a bit of a shame. So I was uploading icons I didn’t know whether it was icon profile.

Matthew from Bonjoro 12:30
It actually shows the video and shows the message that it sends and how it how it looks when you send someone a video message. Which is more around we found that again, having some input on the kind of final look and feel like colors and stuff. These are ideas that are a small thing. People love having ownership over the product. Like Gmail, “I need customized background”. Sounds stupid, but the people love this stuff.

David Jones 13:01
Yeah, make sense to me. I really love this over here as well to that I could actually see how far I did a survey for somebody this morning and they provided me no “Step one, two, three”. I had no clue there could have been 4800 steps. I had no clue. So this is this is a lovely onboarding device to manage patience. Have you found that you’ve got a drop-off at a particular stage. Got any data on that?

Matthew from Bonjoro 13:30
Turns out, we are at a more high level, so we can’t we tend to see who gets the first message. I don’t think we’ve quite split out individual jobs on onboarding. It just “did we complete” or not. So we actually have a we have more people who don’t complete now than before we did this. We also increased our conversion rate by 35%. Since doing this, so we’ve kind of got <…> our Onboarding used to be a lot less than this people get in there with actually like, getting things quicker. But again, this idea of focusing down to users that we know….

Matthew from Bonjoro 14:11
Their intent is already high 50 to 60% of our traffic is through word of mouth for people who’ve received messages. So I think there’s quite a lot of buyer or signup intent and knowledge already. So we don’t tend to get people coming in cold <…> we tend to get a lot of referral stuff, so I think to that extent if people have quite good intent they will come through this and then way more likely to convert to a customer because they are set up correctly. But at the expenses that we do bounce out people because I think we do have a few….

Matthew from Bonjoro 14:48
I would like to do less steps. We may try and drop one or two of these or trying to combine some. It’s kind of hard. Yeah. Like it’s tough.

David Jones 14:57
Yeah, it’s really interesting to make a brutal decision to exclude people or to show or basically show something that actually invites the ones that you really want – I think it’s a great design. If you’ve got enough if you’ve got enough volume coming through there. Is there a sense of what channels are really being those are the power channels for you?
March 1, 2020
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

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.
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?

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”
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.
September 2, 2019
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.

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.

June 5, 2019