In this bonus section, you'll get access to previously recorded live expert workshops and Q&A from PLG experts such as Todd Olson (CEO of Pendo), Tara Robertson (CMO at Teamwork), Nelson Joyce (Co-founder of Tettra), and more.
Tara:
So as mentioned, my name is Tara Robertson. I'm the head of Customer Marketing at Sprout Social. If you do have questions or want to connect afterwards, my Twitter handle and LinkedIn is @taraerobertson. Would love to connect with anyone on the line and to continue the conversation. All right. So just quick check on slides. You can see my slides still, right?
Ramli:
Yes, I can.
Tara:
Okay, cool. So for those of you that aren't familiar, Sprout Social is a social media management platform. We offer deep social media, listening, analytics, social management, customer care, and advocacy solutions. And we offer that to more than 20,000 customers worldwide.
Tara:
So as I talk about customer marketing, part of what I want to explain is that our customer base is a unique challenge in the sense that we support every segment; meaning SMB, agency, mid-market and enterprise and we do that across the entire world. So as we've solved for building our team, thinking about the infrastructure, we've also thought about how to do that for a very different set of customers across the board.
Tara:
Kicking off into our journey, I wanted to tell a little bit of a story about Alex Honnold. So if we were in a live session, I would ask for a show of hands who's heard of Alex before. But Alex, if you aren't familiar with who he is, is an American rock climber known for his free solo ascents to big mountains, best known for his documentary free solo. Really it's incredible, if you haven't checked it out.
Tara:
And so you might be thinking, "Okay, Tara, why are you talking to me about Alex?" And part of it is because as we think about our own marketing, especially within SaaS, we can often sometimes feel like we're on the climb of our lives: we're training, we're pushing boulders up mountains, we're dodging roadblocks, we're falling down a lot. And while it's really thrilling sometimes, it's also incredibly difficult.
Tara:
And so much like Alex in his documentary, we had to start from the beginning and think about everything that we do and every step that we take. Research a ton, have a lot of tenacity, but also bring in a ton of humility to learn everything that we've been building and what will structurally set us up to succeed. And I'm hoping to share some of this with you all today, so that as you think about your own customer marketing team or journey you can fast track to accelerate some of your growth.
Tara:
So starting from ground zero is really hard, because no matter where you look; if you are in customer marketing or if you're just starting to think about it, there truly is no roadmap. I spend a ton of time talking to other customer marketing leaders or people that work in retention marketing or monetization and the thing that's glaringly obvious is that most people and most roles within this team, is still yet to be defined.
Tara:
If you Google customer marketing, you won't find a lot of information and what you do find doesn't truly have strong KPIs or information behind it. And really, at the end of the day, most people that are doing this aren't tracking revenue, they don't have defined KPIs and it's a black hole with no Playbook.
Tara:
Why that's important is because as you think about your own business, where you're growing and your own marketing strategies, acquiring a customer is actually five times more expensive than retaining an existing customer. So your key to truly unlocking growth is by figuring out what your marketing set side can do on the customer component. And so when I thought about this and thinking about how to do this on our team, what we really wanted to start with is by defining what customer marketing and marketing is not.
Tara:
And so Stepping back for a second. A few years ago, a trusted colleague of mine and I got in a debate and that debate was all around what marketing solved. And he believed that marketing was just about generating demand. If you're an acquisition marketer or a marketer you often will think this: generating demand is important, we need revenue, we need to make sure we drive it back to KPIs, we need to make sure that we're getting more people to understand and know what it is that we're doing so that we can get to the bottom line.
Tara:
But at the end of the day, it is your customer's choice to buy from you. It's your customer's choice and you need to reearn that choice every single month or every single year, based on what your MRR looks like or how you're essentially building your business. And that's why, you aren't just trying to generate demand. I'd actually take that picture and that word off of the spectrum.
Tara:
What we're doing as marketers is generating value. This is further emphasized when you're thinking about executing marketing to activate, engage, and expand your customer base. A healthy SaaS business, sees actually 70 to 95% of revenue coming from upsells and growth, where in five to 30% comes from acquisition. And so you need to think about how to generate value, in order to actually generate that demand.
Tara:
And so what I'm hoping to walk you through over the next 30 or so minutes, is the five strategies that have become truly our foundation on our team when it comes to how we can go about generating demand that does help build that framework that generates revenue across the board.
Tara:
First and foremost, we're going to dive into number one, it's knowing your customers. So the first strategy that we think is critical that is truly the common denominator against all of the success that we run, is knowing our customers and bringing rich voice of customer insights into everything that we do. And so why is that important?
Tara:
When you think about the impact of customer research, there are some incredible numbers out there that you can see. What is that 10X growth that you can see in order to increase annual company revenue? How do you increase customer satisfaction NPS or how do you think about your most successful campaigns? And the scary part is that when you look at all of the greatness that comes out of customer research, 65% of marketers are not conducting this as an ongoing thing.
Tara:
And so for us, what we truly understood is the best way that we can continue to layer in voice of customer insights into everything we do and tie back to value, is the thing that's actually become our common denominator for growth for the way that we're driving strong experience. And so how do you get those results? When you think about, "Yes, that sounds great. I would love to 10X my business. Tell me how to get to customer insights and what this looks like."
Tara:
So first off, customer research, really starts with and ends with building your customer journey and optimizing from there. And so without a true understanding of your customers and what their journey looks like broken down by different milestones, your journey will look like something that you're seeing on this slide.
Tara:
It's tangled. It's cluttered. And it's a bit unclear, which makes it really impossible for your team to prioritize how to increase growth and how to decrease churn. So you want to go from something like what's on this slide, to something that looks a little bit more like this.
Tara:
And so this is a great example of a customer journey that walks through what this customer is thinking, what they're feeling, what they're doing at every different stage of the way that they're engaging with your product. There's many different kinds of customer journeys you can build, this is an example of an emotion map. But you can also look at department or communication maps based on what you're looking to solve for.
Tara:
Understanding that this is a process, what you're actually trying to get into is knowing what opportunities do you have that you can actually bring into prioritizing some of those low hanging fruit or long-term gains and how to focus your team.
Tara:
And so hopefully, you got a chance to write down. If not, we'll send the slides afterwards, that link where it digs a lot more into customer journeys and the importance of them. But I would say that for here, this is really the foundation that you start when it comes to understanding the importance of qualitative insights.
Tara:
So how do you get there? First step, by doing your customer research, is to not necessarily just understand the what they're doing but the why they're doing that. This can be a really long and cumbersome process. And so the one thing I would say is, you don't have to do this all at once. As you start to break up your customer research strategy and think about what you need to stand up, you can chunk out where to go.
Tara:
And so if you have a lot of customers, I would start on the interview or the survey side running some target market surveys or starting to think through an annual survey that you can stand up or even something as simple as an NPS that you can start to parse through that data.
Tara:
If you're on the more newer side or you're still at seed stage or don't necessarily have customers yet, there are still a lot of places you can go to capture rich customer insights; whether that's through mining data, going to online source sites like G2 or TrustRadius or even going to social listening. And start to look at what competitors are doing, how customers are responding to that, what is their sentiment? And this starts to give you a clear picture of the different things that your customers are doing, what pains they have and the areas that you can start to for.
Tara:
So if you were to start in one place, the place I would say that is really what our starting point was but what we continue to optimize off of, is some of these top questions. And so the idea here is write these down, keep them simple and open-ended and get them out. So the goal is to focus, again, on value and understanding your customer's differentiators and truly what their aha moment is.
Tara:
when you start to understand what was going on in their life that caused them to start looking for a solution, that gives you insight into, "Okay, great. How do I think about the things we want to talk about during onboarding?" When they say, "Once you realized you had a problem, what did you do next?" Then you can start to think about those milestones that you can add in, to how to solve them through your product differentiators and your positioning. So there's so much that you can get out of these, that will really drive towards some rich insights to help you build your roadmap.
Tara:
And so the key takeaway for this section, is really to look through the lens of your customer with everything that you do. We believe that great customer knowledge is just as important as great product knowledge, because it truly does take months to win a customer but only seconds to lose one. And customer feedback is the backbone of learning how to scale, but also learning how to continuously improve.
Tara:
A lot of people will say feedback is a gift and I couldn't agree more with that, in making sure that you've got a feedback mechanism in place for everything that you're rolling out. And that has truly been that thing that gives us that 10X time and time again.
Tara:
Jumping in to number two. And this is probably one of the areas that I get the most questions when talking to people about, how to build your customer marketing team and then how do you measure the success of them? And the first thing that we would say is, you have to scale intentionally and you have to make trade-offs.
Tara:
There is no playbook and because there's no playbook for this kind of a team, there's no direction or really insights into who to hire or where to start. And this is why I would start with number one being building your customer journey, because that also helps you understand where the biggest drop-offs are with your customers and the areas that you need to solve for as you start to think about growing your teams.
Tara:
One thing I've learned is that most companies have a team of about one to two customer marketers and their job is usually doing everything, which actually means that they're not really doing anything because they're just trying to keep up. They also have very limited insights into their KPIs and find that a lot of the time because of that, you're executing low impact tests or in some cases becoming the customer swag management department, which you don't want to be. And so as you dig in to knowing what those drop-off points look like, you can't be afraid to deprioritize and build focus.
Tara:
Focus is something that as a team we're constantly coming back to, because there's truly a hundred things you could be working on at any given day and one or two that really matter. So as you build your team, you also need be ruthless at identifying what those things are when removing obstacles.
Tara:
And so when you have people coming in and saying, "I've got this great idea," or, "What if we did this thing," stay on track. Stay focused on those number one areas that you know are critical and execute them brilliantly. Then based off of that, you can start to scale out your team to then grow specifically in the areas that are your biggest bets. And because we'll say internally; if you chase two rabbits, they both end up escaping.
Tara:
So how we did this in our team. When you think about building your customer marketing team, the first thing that we'll generally look at is the data. And so I think InsightSquared was the company that had a ton of great research into how big your workforce should be on the marketing side based on the size of your business. And so on average if you're less than 50 employees, marketing is typically around five to 6%. And I think if you're over 50 employees, your marketing team is roughly around seven to 8% of your team.
Tara:
And so what you'll need to start with is to considering the importance of retention and growth marketing, and how much effort you want to put into that side of the business versus acquisition. For us, it's actually about half, our team is now roughly around the same size as our new business and acquisition team. But when we started, we only really had one person in customer marketing. And so for us, building our customer journey map and understanding those drop-off points was truly where we started, which really started with onboarding.
Tara:
[Ramly 00:13:22] also mentioned this in speaking with [Shral 00:13:25], one of our team members that work specifically in activation. We saw that there was a huge opportunity for us to scale up our onboarding program and create more marketing initiatives so that we can get more customers to onboard at a faster velocity, as we started to build that out and prove that out. We were then able to start layering in the other areas that we saw opportunity within our journey. And so starting with growth and upsells and cross-sells, and then starting to layer in some of the experience that we'll talk about in a few slides.
Tara:
Fast forward to where we are today, this is a glimpse into how our team is structured. And so the way that we think about how we work is really breaking down; one, how we've scaled our team, but two, what are the KPIs that we need to drive across the board? And so as I mentioned, with onboarding being the first one, we knew that we onboarded over 1,000 new users a month across all of these different segments and industries and various levels of MRR.
Tara:
So we focused there and put our KPI together to then say, how do we move this number to getting more customers onboarded and more customers to that early stage of stickiness? And then based off of that, we then continue to find our partnerships across success, across product, and across scale, to then grow our team in different various ways. And so we've truly scaled based on customer and business need, where we're seeing the most impact and that's where we continue to focus our scale today.
Tara:
What this looks like from a team measurement and KPI perspective is one, as a team our North star is NDR. And so often in SaaS we talk a lot about churn, which is the; how we're losing our customers, what does the churn rate look like? For us, we focus a lot more on net dollar retention, how our customers are growing with us. And then from there, we'll work backwards to build inputs and how you get there within our KPIs. So for activation that's very focused on daily active users or weekly active users, product adoption and logo retention.
Tara:
On the experience side, we've got an entire team focused on customer satisfaction, our net promoter scores, but also customer engagement and advocacy. And then on the growth side, we focus on what we call hand-raisers, which is essentially our leads on the customer marketing side expansion. So looking at revenue, our revenue numbers are the same goals that our sales team and that the business has. And then renewals, and how renewals kind of play into those different areas.
Tara:
And so what we've learned also is that for us, growth isn't linear and customer expansion also isn't linear, they can kind of come in and out of any of these stages based on where they're at in their journey. But having teams focused on singular goals has, helped us achieve the numbers that we're looking to drive when it comes to higher level revenue and our overall NDR.
Tara:
And so finally, when you think about your own team; I'd say the first and most important thing is to think about your journey, where you see those drop-off points, and then prioritize ruthlessly. If you start with one person, you're really looking for somebody that has experience in SaaS, they're obsessed with customer feedback, know a bit about customer journey mapping and can build a roadmap based off of those biggest opportunities for growth.
Tara:
Then once you start to test and learn what those opportunities look like, you can invest more in where you specialize. And remember, it's much easier to scale a team that's showing impact and revenue and ROI, then to go off of gut. And so for us, it's been really focused on figuring out what those KPIs are and what's important to the business, how we measure them, and then how we consistently look at them and build the data to get smarter and knowing where we need to focus.
Tara:
Okay. Next area that we want to dig into is segmentation. So hopefully there are a lot of people on the call right now and listening to this, that understand the importance of segmentation. I think at this stage; in marketing, in SaaS, we all know that segmentation is critical, but it's something that we're all always working on getting stronger with.
Tara:
And so taking a step back, I think the area that I'd like to focus on here is that as a consumer, our expectations truly have changed. So if you think for a second and truly think, one is the most recent email or what is the most recent email that you loved from a SaaS product that you used? Pause for a second, think about that. Did you get an email recently that stood out to you as a, "Wow. That was a really great example," forwarded it to your team or thought about, "I want to respond to that."
Tara:
Now ask yourself, why did you love it? What stood out that made that email or communication more enticing to you, or other ones, or that you most recently received, or really made it something that you wanted to respond, or you felt that need or that urge to forward it along. And chances are it stood out because it was talking to you directly in some way.
Tara:
One of the emails I constantly come back to, and my team will laugh at me for this because I'm always forwarding examples, is Bombora's. And while they are a B2C company, they truly have nailed contextual and pulling in company values and finding ways to drive forward in their marketing communications. That feels so much more personalized.
Tara:
And I think for us, as we think about that with our own products, we have to keep in mind that it is way too easy these days to send a mass email. And as people, as humans on the other side because we're all getting them as well, we are inundated with messages and we end up mass deleting them. Furthermore, on the customer side of the house, that becomes even harder. And I'll show this in this graph because I think this is really stands out as something that we're consistently looking at, that I would highly recommend everybody take a moment to think about.
Tara:
Communication is not just a lever for marketing, when it comes to the customer. We use email across every individual department for various different reasons; whether it's billing from the finance team, whether it's talking about security with our engineering team. If you're thinking about onboarding with success or marketing or sales reaching out for growth, you've got your product team or your product marketing team thinking about usage.
Tara:
And then any campaigns that we're driving on any given day, our customers could just get overwhelmed with the amount of comms that we're sending and the things that we're asking them to do. And so if you strip all of that away and think about the customer's experience, it's just information overload. And so the role of your entire business, and you specifically as a customer marketer, is to stop this from happening. Be the example that your customers think about on how to do this right, and that starts with segmentation and context.
Tara:
And so to do this, there's a ton of ways that you can build segmentation into your strategy. Some of the most popular I've listed on this slide here and honestly, we use all of them for various different reasons. But I'm going to focus specifically today on example for jobs to be done that we leverage, because that's a lot of our different product comms and the ways that we think about getting customers to stickiness and how we think about getting customers to essentially grow with our product and with themselves.
Tara:
Now, the idea behind jobs is that people don't buy products or products don't match people, they match problems. And as a product, people hire you to solve that problem that exists. So you're looking for what their struggle is, what their motivation is to solve that struggle and then their desired outcome to get there. Oops, sorry.
Tara:
And so when you look at this from the customer stages, here's an example. And this is a very basic example of our own journey, and the stages our customers go through. I'll focus a little bit more on the below the line, and how we use that in practice.
Tara:
And so just looking at the above the line, that's a healthy customer when they go through activation, to thinking through value realization, to then when we get them to have it and start introducing new products; there's various levels of stages that they go through.
Tara:
And based on their job, because there are many different jobs to be done that happen especially when you're working with so many different segments, that first value can be very, very different. And so below the line, segmentation becomes really important. And so we'll focus on that, where we're seeing decreased value in that first stage, before they get to first value.
Tara:
And the reason why, and this kind of gets back to where onboarding became so important for us, across every SaaS business, it's something like 40-60% of your trial users will log into your product once and never come back. And 75% of users are lost within their first week. Those are really scary statistics, when it comes to managing churn and making sure that you get customers to their unique aha and value-driven moments.
Tara:
So something really simple that we did when we think about context and re-engagement for our customers, is start to run a re-engagement campaign focused on different jobs to be done. And so the example on this slide is very focused on social strategy and a customer that was coming to us wanting to level up their social acumen. And then we'll have variants for this, email focused on what these customers said was their initial job when they first signed up with Sprout.
Tara:
And what we've been seeing by adding in these re-engagement campaign emails is that customers that are receiving them where we're speaking to their unique struggle and the reason that they signed up for Sprout in the first place, we're getting them to log back in. And so it's really about measuring user logins and speaking to the fact that we recognize that they weren't doing that, and then helping them understand why they came to us in the first place. And so the messaging is very product heavy and very aligned to that initial job to be done and really hoping to get that customer back to that aha moment. So segmentation context and content that you put together are really important and it truly does make a difference.
Tara:
And so finally, as you think about your own segmentation, I would say the most important thing is to keep in mind that segmentation is critical. And it's not just about that means to understanding who your customers are, but how you prioritize the communications across your entire business and what you're sending and why you're sending it.
Tara:
Based on that segmentation, you're not only looking at those customer attributes, but also the value that they're seeing in your product and helping them remind what that value is. So again, getting back to marketing generating value, which then helps generate demand and helps generate growth. Which leads really well into the next strategy.
Tara:
And so I know that the first three that I just kind of threw at you was a lot of information and heavy, and I'm sure there's questions. So remind you to please throw those into the chat panel, and we can dig into any more insights within those. But I want to spend some time in these next two, in talking more about some of the experiential things that have become really important for us.
Tara:
So let's shift gear and talk about tactics that you can and should start running, to take your customers to that next level and ready to grow. One of the most frustrating things that we hear often and I'm sure most of you probably do as well, is when a customer leaves you because they didn't think your product could do something that it can in fact do. And this happens more often than you think. In fact, on average as you see on this slide, 61% of martech users across products, don't utilize the features available. And sometimes that number actually feels generous.
Tara:
The more we've learned in how to scale our customer marketing team, our opportunity actually isn't necessarily just in how do you generate pipeline and demand, it's actually how do we unlock the ability for our customers to understand the value that our product brings and know everything that we essentially could do for them as they start to grow in their social sophistication. So speaking to the themes from the talks so far today, it's really about meeting customers where they're at and then educating them on what they're missing.
Tara:
And now, as we talk about building an education program, I always like to come back to the term of get scrappy or at Sprout we use the value, seek simplicity. Building this does not mean it has to be a huge undertaking. In fact, when we first started to solve for this gap, it was uncovering through that voice of customer research wanting to focus on onboarding and thinking, "Boy, how can we get more customers to be onboarded by leveraging a marketing-driven function?"
Tara:
And so in the early days that was by, throwing up a landing page, creating webinars that essentially looked similar to what we did in the one-to-one success calls, and starting with cohorts of customers. That of course has scaled as we've started to grow out and see the success from it, into what's now a more sophisticated onboarding learning portal and academy. But starting scrappy is what helped us really truly scale the success of our onboarding program that exists today. And so you can do that too.
Tara:
On this slide, there are four different pillars that we look at when we think about the education paths that we drive to our customers. One is through live training and webinars. Then we've got self-guided now within our academy or within something like that landing page that I just mentioned. We have several communities that have stood up; again, getting scrappy, they live on Facebook and it's a great way for us to work with our customers on an ongoing basis when they just want to connect with us. And then thinking through how that all comes together in product tours.
Tara:
And so product tours can go far beyond just onboard and thinking through. As customers start to learn more, how do we reintroduce them into different parts of the product and then build some of the communications around that with some of our most popular educational content.
Tara:
Something I would list here too, and I'm kind of pointing over it, is each one of these also has a KPI tied to them. So while we think about customer satisfaction and net promoter scores, we also think about things like content consumption and customer engagement and satisfaction of the actual content that we're producing. This has made it really helpful for us to think about how we're producing content, but then also how we prioritize our next content.
Tara:
So by asking our customers, are they getting what they need from education? What else would they like to learn about? What's missing for them as they think about their own social education? It helps us determine what are going to be the most important things that we create from a content perspective that we know will end up converting based on customers helping guide us in that direction.
Tara:
And so when you think about growth and you think about upsell, a common denominator similar to voice of customer feedback for us has been that, great education always equates to great growth. So we use customer feedback really as that litmus test, to understand the impact of the content we produce. And we've also learned that every customer truly has a different learning style.
Tara:
So even our most robust, sophisticated customers on an enterprise plan will come in and much prefer watching a video over talking to someone. And so meeting them where they're at and creating great education has opened up the door for us to communicate and connect with them on different levels, but also determine when are customers ready to essentially scale and when are customers more focused on wanting to learn that next part of our product that helps them continue to grow in their social acumen.
Tara:
And so finally on the education side, I would say education is just something that's a must have for your customers. Sometimes this sits within customer marketing and often it sits within the success team and so regardless of where that sits within your organization, producing content that aligns to your education strategy and thinking about ways that you can stand up self-service motions to help scale the ability to grow the amount of customers engaging with your product, is something that you absolutely can and should be doing.
Tara:
For us, education is truly become our content marketing platform within our customer marketing team, because it's been such a huge advantage for our customers to start doing more. And as products evolve and tech stacks become more and more robust, I think also helping your customers continuously realize value in your product really should be at the core of what you do.
Tara:
And so in going down this journey something that we also found is that customers that are engaging with this type of content, anything, whether it's through an onboarding webinar to a social sophistication or strategy webinar, these customers are always much more likely to grow and have a much higher net dollar retention than the customers that aren't engaging. And so it's really about getting more customers to engage with that content that's fueling the value that then fuels the growth.
Tara:
And then finally, the last thing I want to leave with you is this idea of treating every customer as a VIP. And so at our company kickoff this year, our leadership team spoke about the idea of one customer and that it's more important than ever to treat every interaction and every opportunity like it's our most important one.
Tara:
And so we ask ourselves, what would we do differently if every customer we interacted with was the only customer and our success depended entirely on their experience. How would we build differently? How would we communicate differently? And how would we prepare for those interactions? And how would you react differently when you're faced with a problem and they needed your help?
Tara:
And this is the way that we think about our customer marketing activities across the board. And even though we're supporting 20,000 customers across the entire world in very different ways, we think about every customer as a really, really important one.
Tara:
And so I pulled this quote up because for me, it's never felt more real especially in the day and age in the world that we've all lived within this year; in where people are more isolated than ever and leaning to more of a digital experience and are bombarded by direct sales messages, they're bombarded by social engagement. It's never been more important for, I think, all of us to put the humanity behind what we do and really think about the fact that we're marketing to humans.
Tara:
So we've built great experiences that help our customers feel like they're getting VIP treatment. That's really, really supported in everything that we do. And we do that regardless of what their MRR spend is.
Tara:
So where we started here was first by taking the question to Twitter and asking people, what was a great customer experience that you recently had? And each of one of these experiences had a level of personalization in them; from personalized cake congratulating a colleague, from paying off student loans to custom snacks and a handwritten note after a long journey or finally surprise and delight moments such as free snacks for no reason.
Tara:
So first and foremost send food, if you aren't sending food. People love food. But also take the time to make your customers feel special. So we have one of these experiences we can think of; all of us do, and remember those brands that made it happen. These are the standout experiences. I think that they're actually pretty easy to replicate and not extremely expensive, but certainly create loyal and raving fans.
Tara:
And so a place to start, and where this is really scalable, is thinking about the power of a thank you note. As a business, we put so much time and effort into custom welcome kits, we do surprise and delight swag experiences and customed gifts, and those are all great and our customers love them. But at the same level, we get the same power of customer feedback when we do things like thank you note campaigns.
Tara:
When surveyed, 64% of Americans prefer handwritten notes to electronic messages, they're opened 300% more than printed ones. And so when we think about, in the previous slides, the impact of how hard it is to break through with things like email, don't undercut the value of something that a personal handwritten thank you note can bring. And even though that is hard to churn out a whole bunch of those, there's a lot of ways to get around that; whether it's rallying an entire team or even hiring an agency to do some of that work for you.
Tara:
And if you can't get to the custom thank you note, I think a personalized response is the next best thing and don't underestimate the importance of that. And so every marketing campaign that we send, even when I talked about all of the segmentation and contextual things that we're doing when it comes to our customer journey, we send them from our team. And so they come from a real person with a real email address.
Tara:
And it's part of everybody's role, including mine, to respond to any questions that come in and route them to the appropriate team, help find the information the customer is looking for, and to also make sure that we're parsing that information to understand; are our customers happy based on the things that we're doing? What questions do they have? And what other types of content do we need to build to help solve those questions?
Tara:
This sounds, and I think I get this question a lot, like it would be a ton of work, it's not. It's really only a few minutes a day, but it does make a huge difference; as you can see on this slide. We get these emails almost every day from customers just saying thank you, for a human being on the other side of our automation.
Tara:
And so I think to end on that, you just want to consider that we thrive on personal, meaningful connections and we want that with our products. Think from your own perspective, how would I want to be treated? And don't lose sight of that. Empathy is truly our secret weapon, especially on the customer side.
Tara:
And so to wrap it up in the age of the customer, your competitive advantage is really going to come from your ability to better connect with and serve your empowered customers. These are the five strategies we talked through today. They have become our foundation and our rocks to what's helped us scale our team and invest in how we're starting to see really incredible growth, but also even better customer feedback and happiness across everything that we do.
Tara:
And so to end it on an Alex Honnold quote. In a real sense, Alex performed the hard work of that climb during the days leading up to it. Once he was on the climb, it was just a matter of executing. And that's it.
Ramli:
Thank you so much, Tara. I really appreciate it. You brought up the rock climbing analogy, are you a rock climber by any chance?
Tara:
I'm not. You think [inaudible 00:35:19] talking about it. I'm a hiker.
Ramli:
Nice. Yeah, I'm going hiking this weekend. But also I told people the free solo that documentary, I saw it. It was great. He just climbed 3,000 feet or something like that without any rope and it was just absolutely nuts.
Tara:
Yeah. And he spoke at HyperGrowth a couple of years ago, so we saw him speak and it was just incredible.
Ramli:
Yeah. I thank you so much for presenting that. I already have a few questions from people who are here, the participants. If you have any questions, just drop it in the comments, this is also interactive. You can also unmute yourself if you're brave enough to do so. This is not a typical webinar where it's one-sided.
Ramli:
I'm going to go backwards because the most relevant one is about the emails that you just talked about, where it's personalized. Ryan asked if it's manually sent or do you have some tool where it looks personal but it's actually kind of semi-automated? How did you guys set up those personalized emails?
Tara:
So you mean all of this segmentation that we're building and automation?
Ramli:
No. There was one particularly where it says, hey, and then first name and then it looked like an email that a friend would send you. Is that through your automation email or are people actually manually sending those to your customers?
Tara:
Great question. Yeah, that's marketing automation. And so we've modified and built a ton of different templates. I'm a big fan of a less designed heavy template, because we get a lot more response from it. And this is where I think it's really important for us that we have a human on the other end answering the questions, because what you don't want to do is have it mimic looking like a personalized email and then not have that personalization on other end. And so we've got a couple of different templates. The one that you're seeing is a basic one that our design team built, and we use our marketing automation platform to send those out.
Ramli:
One question that came up during the presentation is; you have a bunch of emails, you have that circle with the emails, product might be sending some emails and then the app might be sending some transactional emails and marketing is sending other types of emails. Are you guys using one platform to tie it all together or maybe you're sending Intercom to do this and, I don't know, something else to do that? And how do you make sure that they don't fight with each other or collide?
Tara:
Yeah. I would love to say we're using one system and we make sure that they don't collide and everything's working beautifully, that is not the case. I think that, one is that you want to think about what the goal is for the email and then what you're trying to solve for within that goal, and then is the overlap something that is of concern based on that.
Tara:
And so a good example of that is our product emails, they're triggered, they're not based off of a time-bound reason. If somebody does something in the app and we want to notify they did something in the app, they get that email and sometimes they'll get many of those emails in the course of a day or any given week.
Tara:
And so first and foremost, we don't try to manage our comms around those, they exist for very different reasons, but we do make sure that the experience looks and feels differently. And so you don't want to mimic the same type of design or the same type of layout that exists for your marketing emails versus your product emails. And where we've got access to the different tools they send from, we don't actually worry too much about them overlapping with each other because their goal is so incredibly different.
Tara:
And so I think you start with, and this is where I mentioned a comms maps, so you've got a customer journey map. We also are building a comms map, where we can understand the different types of communications that can happen in any different stage of the customer's journey. And that's tight because customers that are on monthly MRRs, they have everything from an onboarding email to a renewal email happening in the same month potentially. And so we'll layer that in.
Tara:
And for marketing, one thing that we kind of hold ourselves as service level agreement on together is, we do not send more than two campaigns a month and we have to be very intentional on what those things are. And so if we're doing a webinar for example that month, that's one of the things and we have a product launch that's another thing, everything else can't happen. And that way we're not sending too much at the same time, but that's based off of understanding everything else that goes out.
Ramli:
And what I heard was that you said that you have a comms journey. Are you kind of planned out what emails they'll get from product, from marketing, so that you are making sure that you're minimizing the chances they'll collide, is that what I heard?
Tara:
Yeah, minimizing that they'll collide but also understanding that when they do, they should look and feel and act different.
Ramli:
So you're using the templates, right?
Tara:
Yeah. That's a really important part for us, so that if you end up getting an email from marketing and an email from product in the same day, they still feel like Sprout but you know that one's coming from a human, it's a campaign, versus one is just very transactional.
Ramli:
A fascinating thing that you talked about is sending physical stuff, like a note, you send a cake, was that you send a cake? Care packages. Who do you send it to so that you don't, I guess you don't want to send it to everybody you'll go broke, so who do you send it to and when do you send it?
Tara:
Yeah. So I'll use one good example. Our welcome kit, are a really good example that tie to our onboarding. I think we talked about this one actually, last time, because we just revamped our approach to how we send out those early stage surprise and delight moments.
Tara:
And so we've got a big one and those are for enterprise, high MRR spend that are more expensive. But those also, we kind of let our onboarding and success team determine when to send them out and they're based off of ask. And so somebody has to fill out a form, they have to request the welcome kit. That's very much in partnership with our success team.
Tara:
And then we've got a marketing welcome kit that's a smaller kit, but anybody can get it but they can get it based off of going through their first stages of onboarding. And so we use it as a way to motivate and incentivize customers to go through and engage with some of the on-demand learning. And once they do and they share their feedback, then anyone can get access to that.
Tara:
And while you said you could go broke, technically you could. One, not everybody wants it. But two, not everybody will request it. But three, if everybody does request it and you think about the value that we see when a customer becomes onboarded and the lifetime value that that drives, a $20 packet that you send to them or whatever the cost of it is really isn't that much money. And so for us, you make up that lifetime value in the acquisition cost just based off of them taking that very critical step that we need.
Ramli:
That's so good. That's totally true. I think it you might cost you some $20, but the long-term what is that customer worth to you? I'm curious about what's in that welcome kit, what do they get, stickers? What is in that welcome kit?
Tara:
[crosstalk 00:42:52] this very cool mug, I was drinking out of it this morning, that we actually have a brand theme around it for create, thrive and evolve. And so we've got Sprout branded coffee, because everyone needs coffee. And then with the smaller ones we've got some postcards, stickers, a welcome note with a checklist of things that we want them to go through. And your average SaaS stickers and fun welcome kit.
Ramli:
That's cool, I want one. I'll get things like [Wess 1212 00:43:27].
Wes:
Yeah, I like coffee too.
Ramli:
Well, it's funny. That's good to know. I think there's a lesson learned, is this stuff might be 20 bucks but you're right. You're just really hitting me, this sort of stuff that really delights them. I think you also showed people who shared this out. I would definitely tweet it out if I got a package surprise and I'm surprised about it.
Tara:
Yeah, they're so many awesome. We've got a hashtag that we use, #sproutlove, that you can follow where people are constantly just sharing some of the love. So there's that great social component that comes from it. And you touched on it just now, but for us the KPI is the critical piece and knowing that this customer is taking that step that we need them to take and that is just critical to their own success within the product, just makes the cost [inaudible 00:44:19] no brainer.
Ramli:
It makes sense.
Ryan:
I have a question, if we've got time. Hey, so you talked about all of the different ways that you provide people with education and I guess the question for me is across live training, self-guided product tours, your community engagement, you mentioned webinars a minute ago, I'm sure you mentioned checklists and your welcome kit, I'm sure once you log in there's actually some sort of workflow that you're trying to get people through; what combination have you seen work the best, because there's a lot of ways that you're doing it and I'm just curious if one or two have stood out?
Tara:
For us, it was very much since starting simple and that's where I mentioned the very simple webinar program that we put together for our education and onboarding was step one. And so we basically took what our current most successful onboarding looks like on the success side, what we were doing with humans, and then replicated that into a very scrappy, let's go through this onboarding with a bunch of customers at once.
Tara:
Then surveyed them, got their feedback; What was helpful, what wasn't helpful. Threw it on a landing page and then started to get that out in front of more customers. That was probably the most critical first step before we started building any of these other things that exist now today, because that's where we can start to see customers that were engaging with us.
Tara:
I'd also connect it to the first part I was mentioning in customer feedback. So I mentioned with those webinars, we have a mechanism with them where we'll survey afterwards. And early on, we would both survey and interview those customers that went through those stages to get their feedback on was it helpful and then look at what they did in the product afterwards, to then understand were we driving the thing we were hoping to drive.
Tara:
And that's what kind of helped us build a roadmap in the way that we think about the next stages or evolutions within our training. So I would say first and foremost, product training absolutely was critical and then from there we'll layer in some of those other things.
Ryan:
That's interesting, you started with people. So it's almost you try to create a human experience, like you said. It's like, okay, you took actual people that took these customers through whatever journey and then you just try to find ways to effectively automate it and take the human out a little bit, but it started with the human.
Tara:
Right.
Ryan:
Yeah, it's an interesting insight. Okay. Thanks.
Tara:
And the other thing I would add into that too is, now that we've gotten further along in it we surveyed all of our customers, and I think it's something like 82% of them are like, "Yeah, I just want to do this myself." And so it's been part of what's helped us build out our Academy.
Tara:
But starting with the human, even on the webinar side, is what helped us make sure that we were answering questions the right way, getting the framework for what that now self-guided training looks like. And so it was a short timeframe, I think three, to then six, to then 12 months, that we built out the different stages of what that looked like as a whole. But starting with the human helped us not make mistakes in building something that people wouldn't actually want.
Ryan:
Great. Thanks.
Tara:
Totally. Good question.
Ramli:
Thanks for asking that, Ryan. I just had one question, a little bit earlier, about the scope of the research in terms of the jobs to be done and other things like that. In terms of that research, are they the experienced team, the customer marketing team? And are they only limited to that customer journey mapping or do they also cover market research or even just user research?
Tara:
Yeah. So there's a lot of answers to that question in different ways. I can say what's on my team and then what we do in the rest of the business. And so on my team we have somebody responsible for research-ops, and their role specifically is doing a lot of the customer research on customer journey specifically within the stages that we're looking at.
Tara:
And so for every stage we have different surveys that are automated that will manually go out. At every quarter, we parse through that and kind of bring that back into a lot of our optimizations. And so with our onboarding comms, customers that responded to the post-purchase survey or to this NPS survey, this is what they're saying based on that, let's now do this. And so their role now, on the research-ops side, is very aligned to more of the CSAT and the customer feedback, based on the customer journey milestones.
Tara:
If I were to step back and say where we started, because that's where we are today. The customer journey mapping was something that actually happened in a squad model. And so we had people from the customer marketing team, the person that actually led the project was our growth marketing team, Nick, who's amazing; and essentially had built the framework for it.
Tara:
And then we had team members from product, team members from sales, team members from success, sorry, all essentially coming together within leadership across the entire team. So it sounds a lot. It actually was more aligned to the pizza pie model, where there wasn't more than eight people working and building it together, and then we would just cut it in lots of different ways and run different research, different interviews.
Tara:
That took us a long time, but we also were very lucky that we've got a very robust team and a lot of customers. And so I've also seen customer journey mapping happening, with one person leading it, starting very iteratively, where you just start with that one survey that I mentioned and then build it out from there. So I think it depends on your team but it's kind of impossible to do journey mapping without somebody from product and other components that lead into customer engagement.
Ramli:
Great answer. And I think we're about to hit the time and I'm going to pull one last question from Wyatt. You said that earlier you have a growth team and their goal is around PQL, that was one of the KPI that they have. Is a focus of that growth team to turn more users into PQLs and to try to get more PQLs to the product itself? And as a follow-up, how did your team define PQLs?
Tara:
Totally. So first, product growth marketing is not under customer marketing, they're a partner of ours and so the way our growth team functions is in more of a squad model. And so we've got a growth marketer, we've got a growth product team and then they align to different stages of the funnel. The PQL for us, specifically lives on the expansion side and so the way that we think about PQLs is really based off of self-service.
Tara:
And so a lot of the customer marketing efforts that we're doing are what we call our wrap-around the product experiences and then we partner with growth on thinking about those self-service models that we can stand up that aren't rep led. And so things like a demo in app or ways that we can drive product tours to kind of move people through the stages we want them to but on their own, all of that aligns to that big picture PQL that we're driving.
Tara:
And so we have essentially a PQL and an MQL, I know some companies will go just MQL or just PQL. For us, it's been helpful in thinking about it as the PQL is product self-service motion, really driving towards how do we drive expansion with the customer doing it on their own versus the MQL, is a conglomeration of all of these inbound and outbound things that we're doing that kind of can pass them over to the sales team.
Ramli:
Yeah, a really great answer with that as well. Oh, and Wyatt said thanks. We have about three minutes left. Wess, I know you're here as well, do you want to say anything else before we say goodbye?
Wes:
Yeah. So, I mean, I still got a ton of questions. But one of the things I really liked is just how you broke down all the different types of research methods, because I think it's easy to get the narrow tunnel vision of like, "Hey, it's just user research interviews, that'll be enough." But you really approach it from so many different angles.
Wes:
And I guess for someone, I was trying to think about this and rationalize it with myself but I'd like to hear your thoughts on this. So for the person who's specifically focused on just doing research, how do you really measure success for them? Because I know whenever it comes down to doing big research projects it's like sure, it's we can [check done 00:52:58] on that.
Wes:
But sometimes research just takes a really long time to get some of those results and so it's very hard, at least I think it's very hard, to be like, this is very measurable kind of role and this is your success metrics. So for someone who is in that position, how do you really define success for them?
Tara:
It's a great question. Honestly, it's something that we continue to talk about too on our end. And so the way that we think about it is, what is the goal of the research? And sometimes the research is to just share feedback. And so if it's something like our annual survey where we're getting customer feedback and we're more so just understanding a pulse on where that is, success for them is getting it out the door.
Tara:
When I think about their long-term role as the research-ops individual when it comes to optimization within some of these ongoing initiatives that we have running, and I'll use our NPS as an example. We don't use NPS just as an indicator for where we're at with the net promoter score, we use it to then determine if there's detractors can we get them back before we lose them. If there's an advocate, is there an opportunity for growth or is there an opportunity to leverage them in some of our advocacy campaigns.
Tara:
And so based off of what they're doing and analyzing on a quarterly basis, we then build what some of the optimizations are that we'd recommend from the qualitative perspective and we measure it the same way we would anything quantitative. And so their success is really defined by a lot of the recommendations they're making as being the person that truly is the owner of voice of customer and then the outputs that we're able to provide by making these changes.
Tara:
And so a lot of it comes into the parsing of the data and then the roadmap that we'll build into part of the work that we're doing and then tying it back to, "Hey, we said we'd do this thing. We did this thing, this was the result of that thing." And so we look at it the same way we would anything else when it comes to data.
Wes:
Okay. Awesome. Thank you so much for breaking that down.
Tara:
Yeah.
Ramli:
I think we just right hit on the hour. So I just want to thank you, Tara. Really appreciate you for joining us and sharing this presentation. For everybody else, thank you for joining us and that's it. Have a great weekend, everybody. We will all stay in touch. Thank you.
Tara:
Yeah, great. Thank you so much [inaudible 00:55:15].
Ramli:
[inaudible 00:55:15] have a nice time.
Tara:
Totally. Bye.
