March 2018 Summaries

Dale Carnegie's self-help book "How to Win Friends and Influence People" remains a timeless classic in the digital age due to its fundamental integrity, underlying two core insights that every sales and marketing professional should internalize: developing empathy for others by understanding their self-interest and focusing on sincerity in genuine regard. The book's principles, including 30 sections on handling people, making them like you, winning them over, and being an effective leader, are rooted in Carnegie's observations of human nature and offer a formula for achieving success through virtuous principles and upstanding advice. By incorporating these principles into their strategy, sales and marketing professionals can cultivate a genuine connection with others, show appreciation rather than offering criticism, and ultimately find success through rigorous selflessness.

Real-time customer support, with response times under 5 minutes, can turn customer support into a revenue driver by increasing the odds of customers understanding the value of a product or service. Investing in real-time support led to 15% incremental growth in new business revenue for Intercom, as well as higher customer satisfaction and retention rates. While there were increased operational costs associated with implementing real-time support, these costs were offset by the increase in revenue. Real-time support is not just beneficial for businesses but also provides a more personalized experience for customers, similar to shopping at a physical store where they can easily find help when needed.

We are raising $125M in funding led by Mary Meeker at Kleiner Perkins to accelerate our product development and improve our existing products, particularly for larger businesses. This investment will also enable us to reinvent our core Business Messenger technology, investing heavily in machine learning to make automation personal at scale, and building a brand-new product that solves communication problems across the customer lifecycle. We value our customers' feedback and are committed to delivering new features and innovations that drive business success for them.

David Ogilvy, an advertising legend, highly recommends reading "Scientific Advertising" by Claude Hopkins, which he believes should be read seven times before engaging in marketing. The book, published in 1923, remains a timeless and influential guide to sales and marketing, with principles that continue to apply today. Three key pieces of advice from Hopkins are: (1) discovering what makes your product remarkable, (2) using psychology to sell products, and (3) being specific in your marketing claims. These approaches emphasize the importance of understanding consumer behavior, creating a compelling narrative around your product, and clearly communicating its unique benefits.

The key to getting attention for a product is not just its features, but the story behind it. Companies like Amazon start with their end goal and work backwards to create a cohesive narrative that captures customers' attention. To succeed in marketing, businesses need to ask "Why?" - understanding why they exist beyond making money - and craft a compelling story that resonates with customers. This involves identifying real problems customers are looking for solutions to, articulating how the product solves those problems better than others, and backing it up with hard claims about its effectiveness. By getting marketing and product teams in sync, businesses can create an advantage that sets them apart from competitors.

A successful SaaS business relies on retaining existing customers rather than just acquiring new ones, as customer retention has a significant impact on metrics such as virality, monetization, and acquisition. To achieve this, companies can use data from their product and customer behavior to create personalized messaging strategies that help customers realize the core value of the product, reducing the risk of churn. The Customer Retention Starter Kit provides guidance on identifying at-risk customers, crafting retention messages, and offers a series of pre-built messages that can be started using immediately, along with expert insights from industry professionals like Casey Winters who have helped companies retain millions of users.

At Intercom, the company's engineering interview process is designed to showcase its values and culture through a unique challenge called "Minicom," where candidates build a smaller version of the Intercom Messenger within a set timeframe. This approach emphasizes the importance of iterating quickly, shipping small products, and learning from failures, reflecting the company's philosophy of starting small and building cupcake-sized products. The interview process also highlights the value placed on collaboration, with pairing sessions that mimic real-world experiences, allowing candidates to work together with Intercom engineers to solve problems. Additionally, the company prioritizes learning curves, hiring individuals who demonstrate strong fundamentals and a fast rate of learning, as they scale with the company's growth. By doing so, Intercom aims to create a transparent and personal interview process that not only evaluates candidates but also provides them with a valuable experience that can be shared with others.

The concept of indirect competition refers to a situation where two or more products or services are competing for the same customer's needs, but with different solutions that may not be compatible. This type of competition arises when customers have multiple conflicting desires and want to achieve different outcomes from a single product or service. For example, a software product may offer features that align with one outcome, but conflict with another desired outcome, such as optimizing response times versus showing trust in the work environment. Understanding indirect competition is crucial for businesses to identify and manage these conflicts, and develop marketing strategies to make their product more attractive to customers by reducing the attractiveness of alternative outcomes. By recognizing the indirect competitors and their conflicting forces, businesses can create targeted marketing efforts that counteract these challenges and increase customer adoption.

To run a successful beta, it's essential to start by defining what problem you're trying to solve and how you'll measure success. You should also consider who will have access to the beta, how you'll communicate with them, and how you'll gather feedback. A small group of early adopters should be invited first, followed by a random selection of other users to ensure diverse feedback. The goal is to create a solution that's good enough as an incentive in itself, rather than relying on external incentives. Feedback should be gathered through messages, calls, and usage metrics, and codified using spreadsheets or similar tools. When evaluating feedback, it's crucial to chase the "why" behind each comment, look for patterns, and make decisions based on success metrics and qualitative feedback. Finally, set a timeline for when you'll decide whether to ship the feature, considering factors such as confidence in the solution, replacement of existing features, and marketing timelines.

Change aversion is a complex issue where users react negatively to changes in products, whether functional or interface-related. However, change can be necessary to solve problems and improve user experience. The key is to approach change carefully, test with multiple iterations, gather feedback from customers, and analyze the results to make informed decisions. Understanding where users are coming from, reminding oneself of the problem being solved, and making decisions based on a balanced input from stakeholders are crucial. Additionally, color choices can be particularly challenging, as they may not always elicit the desired reaction from users. A successful redesign requires patience, careful planning, and a willingness to adapt to customer feedback.

Sales teams are shifting from phone calls and leisurely lunches to messaging on live chat tools, reflecting communication habits where everyone messages their friends all day long. To build meaningful sales relationships, sales teams need to be attuned to subtle clues in the conversation that reveal a potential customer's tone of voice, urgency, and mood. Assessing the opening dialogue is crucial, as customers who open with direct questions prioritize speed and accuracy, while those with more traditional greetings seek a conversational experience. Reading between the lines involves matching writing styles and tones with customers, watching for details such as introductions, contact info, vocabulary, formality, and abbreviations, which convey attitudes and emotions. Embracing emojis and gifs can also convey emotions, qualify responses, and send signals in chat-based conversations. Understanding these clues matters because sales conversations exist within a relationship cycle that depends on factors like timelines, buying power, decision making, and integration, and establishing a healthy relationship starts with using all available tools to read contacts' attitudes and establish rapport.

Cities can teach us about building platforms by understanding how they maximize connections between people. Cities enable a high degree of connectivity, which is essential for creating value through increased interactions between consumers and producers. The number of connections in a group increases exponentially as the total number of people in the group grows. This is why cities and platforms are similar, as they both create value in proportion to their ability to maximize connections. Cities, like platforms, develop their own gravity fields that attract resources, people, and companies into their orbit, leading to growing inequality between global megacities and smaller domestic cousins. The key to successful platform development is to listen to the "promenaders" and adapt to the needs of your community. Platforms, like cities, are ultimately about people, not just physical infrastructure or efficiency. By focusing on people and creating a balance between personal and physical aspects, platforms can succeed in a similar way that cities do.

At Intercom, project retrospectives are an integral part of team planning and are used to reflect on how teams have worked together and improve for the future. The company culture values transparency and strives for continuous improvement, recognizing that doing the same thing over and over again will not lead to different results. To ensure effective retrospectives, Intercom uses a framework that includes gathering input in advance, sticking to the point, making it a democracy where everyone's opinion is heard, being open and honest, drawing action items and owners, getting consensus, and keeping within time limits. After the retro, outcomes and lessons learned are shared widely with the team, including via email, to ensure visibility into the issues encountered and what has been taken away from the project.

Live chat has become a crucial tool in Sales, allowing companies to respond to prospects in under an hour, increasing the chances of winning deals. However, many companies fail to maximize their messenger's potential or use it inefficiently. To address this, Intercom has identified three simple yet effective live chat time-savers: being selective about who is contacted, balancing bots with human touch, and setting proper expectations. By implementing these strategies, sales teams can improve the efficiency of their live chat efforts, provide a personalized experience to qualified prospects, and ultimately drive more conversions.

Marketing doesn't stop when you've acquired a customer; most new signups will look at your product once and never come back if they don't see value in it. To treat existing customers as well as prospective ones, focus on "product education" through marketing, writing core concepts down before creating polished content, giving customers the white-glove treatment with live demos, onboarding screencasts, activation webinars, and ensuring all content is crafted to sell, educate, and retain users after the sale.