But before you build and grow a product-led business, you need to first take a step back to understand your users. Because ultimately, knowing and understanding your users' motivations and anxieties is the foundation of delivering value to your end users.
In this course, you will:
Ramli John:
Second thing I want to share and talk about. So we've talked about the desired outcome, I want to talk a little bit about motivation. There's just other concept with jobs to be done for progress making forces.When you have a sales team, it's easy to go on the fly. What are the motivations? What is stopping this person? But when I see move towards product led growth, whether you have a freemium, or a free trial, or you're really opening up that your product. You want to make sure that this is on a piece of paper once again, so that you can share it with your team and you're improving this.
Ramli John:
The core question to this is what are some reasons that would prevent or help small Mario from becoming Superman? So the four progress making forces, there are actually two forces that might prevent small Mario from becoming super Mario. The first one is the habits of the present. These are things, that you might've heard of it before, but quotes like, "If it's not broken, don't fix it." Or, "It's the ease of continuing the status quo versus of adopting something new." That second force is really anxiety with change. Is the risk of investing time and money into the unknown and that uncertainty around something new. If you're a good salesperson and you have frameworks like spin selling or anything that would really address this two things. Now to two forces that's really also critical is, driving small Mario to becoming super Mario, or driving your prospects to becoming active regular users of your product.
Ramli John:
First one is the push of the situation. These are the frustrations with the current solution or service. And this could be the functional, social, or emotional jobs that we just talked about. And the fourth thing is the pull of the new solution. This could be macro things. It could be attractiveness of your solution compared to the competitors. It could just be a fear of missing out. Whatever it is, there is that pull to the new solution. So out of this four forces, the two that is more powerful is actually the two that pulls him away. There's this article in Harvard Business Review written by John Gourville, that he said that there's a nine X effect... That he called, I just said the nine X effect, but he said that, "Happy customers overvalue existing products by nine times."
Ramli John:
There could be many different reasons for that, whether that's the endowment, in fact, where they really overvalue what they have right now, regardless of the market. It's the status quo bias, that even if we're presented with something better, they found studies with that, they stick with a subpar product, just because it's easier for them. And the gain loss theory, which is any losses in performance or feature is grossly overestimated. So if they say, "Hey, your product doesn't have X feature." This feature X, "Well, that's too bad because that's really important for me." So they're really overvaluing or overestimating the value of features that they might be losing.
Ramli John:
So what you want to do is actually address this forces and make sure that you have a 10 X effect into really helping users experience that value through product led growth. So let me share with you what you should be doing, and you should be thinking about. And I call this may the force be with you, just because I thought it was funny. So in terms of habits of the past, what you want to do is make sure you overcome those habits in a few easy ways, as we go forward with the rest of this program, is you want to make sure you... Whether that's onboarding or really experiencing that value, you want to make sure that that is as frictionless and as easy as possible. In terms of all the anxiety with a pass. You want to make sure you set clear expectations with your copier creatives. And really, we want to also make sure you skip or delay high stress or public tasks later in the onboarding flow or the experience.
Ramli John:
In terms of amplifying the pain. You want to describe the user frustration and pain with the current solution, as you build out this product led growth that you have. And the fourth thing is really strengthen the pull. Explain each step in the flow in terms of users desired outcome and tailor the experience for each customer job. So with that, I've added this actually in the middle of that. I called it internal and external motivations. So for Intercom, we already have this filled out. In terms of habits of the past, some of the habits that a revenue team might... that Intercom might have to overcome with revenue teams is, waiting one hour to reply to prospects.
Ramli John:
Sometimes that is a status quo. Why would I reply a prospect faster? They might start expecting me to reply faster for everything, so this is a habit that Intercom had to overcome for the revenue teams. In terms of anxiety, one question anxiety, people might have is, will my team have enough people to answer questions? Especially if they're messaging, people want that instantaneous response. So, do I have enough human resources or enough people to cover or to cover the slots for any questions that I might have on my side. In terms of push to the situation, one situation or frustration that you want to amplify is, prospects are angry because we're taking so long to reply to the increase, and we're losing contracts. And pull through the new solution is what attracted them to new solution. It could be waiting one hour to apply to prospect is not good enough anymore. We're losing it. So we have to do something new with this.
Ramli John:
So with that, my ask for you, like I said, is fill this out for one user segment and feel free to share it. You share it with Wes, myself, we'd love to get feedback. This is really critical in assigning your end user success. Like I said, with a sales team, you probably already have all of this in battle cards or sell scripts. They're a good resource to validate this because you do have that information. But having this on a piece of paper that you could share with the product, with the marketing, with other teams, customer success teams. As you move towards product led format or a strategy is really, really going to be critical.
