Imagine you've just announced your Series A, and you get listed on ProductHunt on the same day...
and your main CTA is "Request a Demo"
Fortunately that didn't happen at UserLeap, because they had added a PLG motion. Instead, they had 500 new free trial signups in a week!
In this lesson, you'll learn how marketers can leverage their knowledge and experience from working in sales-led companies to enable product-led growth with confidence.
Ramli John:
I am super excited to have Katie here. She is the head of marketing at UserLeap and we're going to be chatting about how she transitioned in her role in marketing where she was working at a sales sled and now she's really focused on a product-like organization and leading their marketing. How's it going with you?
Katie Mitchell:
Good. I'm glad to be here and chat.
Ramli John:
Yeah. I'm super excited to chat about this. Let's jump in the topic that you have. I said you're head of marketing at UserLeap, but what is your main responsibility right now for UserLeap? And when you joined, were they already product led organization?
Katie Mitchell:
Yeah, that's a great question. So the company's really young. We started about two years ago, a little over two years ago and have been sort of quiet, not really doing much on the marketing front, taking time to build a really great product so that when we did start marketing we felt really confident that the user experience and the product would be what customers really needed and wanted. So just starting to ramp the marketing efforts. And I joined two months ago. They had originally started as thinking that they would be sales led, but our founder is a product manager. He worked at five different companies and realized that PM's, who are our target audience, really loved to get their hands dirty and their hands on things and test things out. We already see that on different social media posts where people are excited that they can just log right in and check it out, so. I think six months prior to me starting, they decided to switch it to product led. We still have an enterprise motion. We do have one sales rep, or head of sales right now. And we will be growing that a bit, but we're taking a bottoms up approach in that we really want to grow our user base and feel really confident in our product. And so wanting to make sure that that shines through and orient our marketing approach around a product led motion.
Ramli John:
Really fascinating. And I touched upon it a little bit before this, but prior to this you were working in marketing for a sales led organization, is that correct?
Katie Mitchell:
Yeah. Over the amount of the course of my career I've had a bit of experience in consumer, so larger brands, also digital e-commerce. And then I worked at two larger enterprise companies that had only enterprise sales, large enterprise sales teams, really focused on driving leads and pipeline and revenue through either inside sales or enterprise reps. And so understand that world and because I have that B2B experience, there's a lot of things I like about B2B, but the marketing in most B2B companies, especially in larger scale enterprise, I think it lacks a little bit of soul. And marketing at consumer companies tends to be just a lot more fun and exciting and has a lot more personality and interest. And I think B2B product led is sort of somewhere in between because you're marketing to an end user. It really does blend e-commerce and brand, consumer brand with enterprise in a way that's really neat. And that was one of the reasons I was excited to take this role and sort of the next stage of my journey.
Ramli John:
Let's jump in on that. And I have been there where in a sales led organization, you said it felt kind of soulless in the market sometimes versus they look at Slack and Dropbox and all this B2B product like companies where personality and brand is such a key part. Can you talk a little bit more about that difference in terms of your role as a marketer in sales lead? And now you've been at UserLeap for two months, what are have been the biggest, stark difference in terms of your role and responsibility?
Katie Mitchell:
Yeah, I think the biggest difference is the fact that we have more control then product led. And in essence, the website sort of becomes your inside sales rep. You're not making the jump from the marketing that you're putting out into the world, then you're transitioning over to sales, working on that handoff, making sure it's really seamless because you're in charge of acquisition. You are making sure that you're driving users to sign up. And you have full accountability and responsibility. And yes, you do have that with leads and it's just harder and there's a lot more coordination between different groups and different teams. So I think that's been the biggest differences is it's much more similar to DTC or e-commerce in that way at a product led company.
Ramli John:
That's really fascinating. Do you feel like you have more pressure to ... Like it's on you and the product team to generate revenue, right? Like you're hoping that all of the tactics that you have will work and people who sign up for the free trial or the free account end up converting, but do you feel more pressure now that you're like the revenue goal sets on you versus maybe in a sales [inaudible 00:05:51] organization where it's more like, I'm not sure, MQL or SQL goal at the [inaudible 00:05:59] organization.
Katie Mitchell:
So there's definitely the other side of there's the acquisition to sign up to free. At UserLeap we have a completely free version. We just launched our Essentials plan, which is a low dollar, $79 a month plan. And then we have an Enterprise plan. We are going to be having free trials on top of those as we continue to evolve, but that's just getting someone to sign up for free is really, as most people who understand product led growth know, it's the first challenge. The next challenge is getting them to use it, adopt it and then buy. And so that really becomes a question of what is your strategy to go into those accounts, either proactively from a sales perspective or a CS resources? That's something our team is trying to figure out right now as a smaller organization where we only have 15 employees right now, who is the right person to go into those accounts, nurture them and figure out the PQL strategy when they become a product qualified lead, when do we pull them out and try to use humans to take them further down the cycle?
Ramli John:
Interesting. You mentioned PQL and that's such a big topic. And I know that's something that I've been interested in lately, but it's not something that I sent over questions about, but is it okay if I ask questions about that particular piece on UserLeap?
Katie Mitchell:
Yeah. For sure.
Ramli John:
When you joined was speaker will already defined and how did that come about, that definition for you for UserLeap?
Katie Mitchell:
Yeah, we're still figuring that out right now. We're very early into our product lead journey and so we're testing. We have a framework of here are the different actions and attributes that we think trigger or give us a sense of if someone is product qualified. But we are in growth mode and I think something that most marketers feel in when they talk to their sales counterparts is sort of the FOMO, right? So do you really want to wait for someone to become a PQL? What can we do proactively to not feel like a sales touch, to feel more like a success, a customer success touch or support so we can intro ourselves to them, make them feel like we are really invested in their success. And so when either when they do PQL, either they're more likely to PQL or when they do PQL, they're more likely to convert or have a more positive relationship with us. So that's something we're thinking about right now is how do we think about the touch in addition to just putting together a framework of here's when we consider someone a PQL, and letting them get there on their own.
Ramli John:
Yeah. That totally makes sense. You had mentioned it six months ago they made a transition to product led. We've talked to other organizations has been three years and they're still in the journey to product led. So I'm curious what has been really working in terms of the transition. I know you've been there for, you said two months now, but what are things that you've seen that the UserLeap team has achieved in terms of that transition into becoming product led?
Katie Mitchell:
Yeah, I mean, in terms of what we're doing differently, the marketing playbook really changed a lot. So when I started, the primary way we were obtaining leads was more along the lines of a sales-led organization. We were promoting, we had paid mostly to get a download to a document that was a playbook of templates you could use for our product. Just to give a brief overview of what we do, we are a continuous research tool that product managers, user researchers and growth marketers can use to have sort of an always on view of their user experience. And it makes it really quick and easy to get qualitative insights about all your users at scale so you can continuously get insights as you have your continuous development cycle. So that's just a little bit about what we do.
Katie Mitchell:
So we have our product, which is our micro surveys that you can configure with different events and launch them pretty quickly and your product and get feedback that we categorize for you. We also have templates and so that content offer that we had was a collection of our templates that we had as a PDF document. And we collected leads, we put them in a nurture stream, that was happening before I got there, but that didn't really align with our product-led motion because we were collecting leads and then a very small percentage of them were converting, some of the nurture, now that could be optimized as well. But what we did was we basically took those templates and instead of having them in a PDF format, we created a whole architecture of website pages that explained what was in the ebook, just on our site, and then embedded URLs and links to get the template or get the collection of templates and sign up for your account.
Katie Mitchell:
And then once you signed up for your account, then the templates are automatically delivered you in your accounts. Instead of having to have the lower conversion rates on the nurture stream, we were getting higher conversion rates into the product, which was our ultimate goal and sort of bridging that gap. And we've seen a lot of success with that. People are proactively giving us feedback and letting us know that they're using that functionality. We see traffic to those pages as well so it's just a less friction-filled experience to get to the ultimate desired outcome.
Ramli John:
That's fascinating. So what I've heard was that before it was this ebook or guide, and then it was gated and now you've spread it out over pages and ungated it so that people can share it and read it and sign up. Is that correct?
Katie Mitchell:
Yeah. And it's still, I mean, if you want the template, if you want to use the template, you still need to create your account to get the template in your account, but we're giving away the content for free. We were having a really hard time in the beginning because of the quality of the leads that we were getting weren't as good as we needed them to be. They either weren't the right persona. They weren't the right type of company. We were just seeing that the lead quality was really poor because there wasn't enough context when they saw an ad about what we were talking about in the context of where we were showing it, which was paid, to really understand what the value was. And so they would be somewhat interested, but when they downloaded it, they saw it, maybe it was relevant, maybe it wasn't, and we'd paid for that acquisition or that click and that download, versus having them go to the page, read the page, self-select, "Is this something I actually want?" And then the intent is actually there so when they download or they decide that they want it, they've seen a really high quality page that we put together. We gave them a lot of value upfront and then they want to use us to extract that value.
Ramli John:
That's a really interesting concept that that's applied in marketing and product-led, in terms of the signing up. You're front loading your value, like you mentioned, it's really fascinating. People don't have to sign up, you're making it, like you said, as frictionless as possible, not just at the signup where they don't have to talk to a salesperson. But even consuming content now is they don't have to provide their emails unless they actually find value in getting that template or whatever you're offering there. It's not something that you're thinking about doing forward. What are your plans for 2021? I know you're probably neck deep in 2021 planning, but what are some things that you're thinking about in terms of like, "How can we take this product-led motion that you mentioned and really scale it up for 2021 in terms of marketing?"
Katie Mitchell:
Yeah. So I think we are looking at a variety of different channel opportunities, but establishing ourself as a leader in this space, we are in sort of category creation mode. It's this continuous research category that we're creating where you can really get insights at the pace of development. Might usually had to give a survey, wait a really long time for results, or you look at your analytics day to day but you don't really understand why users are taking those actions. So we're really trying to focus on our messaging this year and making sure that because it's new and because it's a different category that we can really explain it well. And because we are product-led and we want people to just quickly sign up, really able to nail that messaging on our site, because we don't have that extra layer of sales all the time to help explain it.
Katie Mitchell:
And then just testing. I think our big thing is really testing and learning and trying different strategies and seeing what works from a user acquisition perspective and what doesn't. We just launched our templates pages. We're doing some paid around that. We're working with different influencers and communities, I think, in some of these product led companies you are talking to end users and end users are out in the world. It's a lot easier to get access to the people that we're talking to then if you were in an enterprise company and you were talking to a CIO, or I was in education talking to a vice president of student affairs. These decision makers are just much harder to access, their day is really busy. So if you are selling to an end user, it's where are they spending their time? What communities are they in? What influencers are they listening to? What events are they going to? Everything that we're doing is mapping back to that behavior and trying to figure out where our users are and how we can get our message out to them in the most effective way.
Ramli John:
You mentioned something there that I want to fall up on. You mentioned sales, like you don't have as big of a sales team as you would. If I remember correctly, you do still have a few sales person?
Katie Mitchell:
Yes.
Ramli John:
What is their role in terms of this journey, or this process, or this motion, this product in motion?
Katie Mitchell:
Yeah. We still have sales and we're still doing some personalized outreach to companies that are important and priorities for us. And then we're sort of splitting it out into marketing is focused on free user acquisition. Maybe 10 or 20% of our time will help facilitate some of those relationships for sales, inviting some key accounts on podcasts or doing some smaller, intimate events that we can bring together some of our VIP's, but then repurposing those, taking the content from that, figuring out how we can use that to then go advertise or put that out into the market for additional, maybe smaller organizations, organizations that we wouldn't be touching with direct outreach from sales, and really using that to drive again, the free. So two separate motions, but both sort of feeding each other and helping each other achieve the ultimate goal. We just have two ways of doing it. The marketing led to freemium sign up, and then the sales, the smaller sales motion, which would be led by our head of sales will likely have one account executive and one SDR on that, just due to the size of our company.
Ramli John:
That makes sense. So I'm hearing this like you're splitting up in terms of the size of the organization or some kind of qualifying factor, if they're not a tier one or a higher level of quality, then they would go through the self-serve process and then the other side would be sales site if they're larger organizations, is that-
Katie Mitchell:
Yeah, I mean, we definitely are speaking to the larger organizations through our product-led motion as well. It's just knowing that we only have X amount of capacity. And we know that even in our sales-led, even in the conversations that our sales team is having, they still want to get into the product. They still want to see it, and they can. So it's not a one or the other, it's sort of that we're just taking two approaches and eventually that we're going to be showing the product and letting the prospect test it out, regardless of if they come through an introduction on our sales team and they source that opportunity. Or if they happen to knock on our front door because they've seen marketing and they never actually happened to interact with the sales rep.
Ramli John:
That makes a lot of sense. It sounds like 2021 is going to be an exciting and busy year for the UserLeap team.
Katie Mitchell:
Yeah, it's exciting. I think product-led is awesome because it really gives people what they want. I mean, we just announced our series a and we launched on product hunt in the same day and we had over 500 people sign up for free accounts over the course of a week. And just imagine if we had just had a demo request form up or they hadn't been able to get in. So our tool requires a very lightweight installation on your website. And even from that we've had a huge jump in installations in one week's time, so that would have just been delayed and potentially people might not have even come back and you've missed the opportunity for them, not to say that converting the signups into active users is easy. It's also a challenge and that's part of the reason why we created UserLeap, but it shows you the opportunity that you can lose if you don't really give them that one click way to access your product.
Ramli John:
That's so good. That is exciting. We've seen that things come through. I want to start wrapping up and we've talked about so much right now in this last half an hour, but if you can give one or two pieces of advice to product-led marketing leaders or product marketers who are in a product-led organization, it could be anything we've talked about so far, but it could be anything that you also want to share that you haven't mentioned yet. But what are those one or two pieces of advice that you'd like to give to them?
Katie Mitchell:
I think the most important thing is just realizing for the most part, if you've decided to go product-led, you're marketing to end users. You probably shouldn't be product-led if you're selling to a very high level decision maker that's going to delegate four levels down. It's probably going to be a pretty big challenge to then sell up the chain and you're going to need some additional marketing tactics to help influence those decision makers as well. My biggest piece of advice, always for marketers, is just to understand your audience and really create messaging that speaks to them and to create your strategy, whether it's product-led or sales-led that works for your audience. And product-led won't work for everyone and sales-led won't work for everyone and I think that's probably my biggest piece of advice.
Ramli John:
That's a good advice. And just one final question, where can people find out more about you and where can people find out more about UserLeap?
Katie Mitchell:
Yeah, so I publish on LinkedIn quite a bit. I'm not as active on Twitter, but I'm trying to learn that platform as well. And then UserLeap is just userleap.com U-S-E-R-L-E-A-P.com. Try us out, it's free. And I'm happy to chat with anyone if anyone has questions about us as well.
Ramli John:
Well, thank you so much, Katie. I really appreciate it.
Katie Mitchell:
Sure. Thanks so much.
