June 2018 Summaries

There is a unique joy and sense of accomplishment that comes from being part of a high-functioning team, whether it's in sports or engineering. This shared experience has led to the adoption of similar terminology and concepts between the two fields, such as huddles and sprints for team meetings and practice sessions, and goals for achieving specific objectives. Both teams rely on preparation, analysis, and collective action to achieve success, with a focus on building on individual strengths and minimizing weaknesses. The sense of complementarity and collaboration is key to unlocking greater rewards, as individuals work together towards a common goal. By embracing team spirit, both sports and engineering teams can experience the ultimate satisfaction that comes from contributing to something greater than the sum of its parts.

The article highlights the importance of prioritizing service in SaaS businesses, often overlooked in favor of product development. It emphasizes that hiring and investing in sales, support, and success teams is crucial for building a successful company, especially in B2B markets where complex buying processes require human interaction. The author argues that self-serve software alone is insufficient, as it misses the opportunity to build customer intimacy and create genuine connections with customers. Instead, a combination of self-serve and full-service SaaS models can be effective, allowing businesses to scale while providing exceptional service. The article also stresses the importance of understanding prospects and customers, hiring talented support team members, and sharing responsibilities to provide great service. Ultimately, prioritizing service is key to building a sustainable and profitable company in the SaaS world.

The Growth Handbook` is a new book launched by Intercom, featuring insights from industry leaders who have grown businesses from $0 to many billions in revenue. The book focuses on six critical pieces of the growth puzzle: acquisition, activation, retention, monetization, testing and optimization, and metrics and measurement. It provides actionable advice on topics such as pinpointing product magic moments, driving word of mouth, and measuring growth experiment success. The book aims to help businesses find sustainable answers to their growth challenges, with the goal of empowering them to grow with more confidence and certainty.

Sales Days are a valuable knowledge-sharing experience where Intercom staff shadow the Sales team to learn about customer interactions, sales processes, and product usage. This allows for cultural transfer and better understanding of customers' needs, ultimately benefiting everyone involved in the organization. By participating in Sales Days, employees gain a fresh insight into how the sales team pitches products, responds to prospects, and identifies business value for customers. The experience also highlights how Intercom can be used throughout the full sales cycle, from SDRs to account executives and relationship managers. This setup enables an invaluable transfer of knowledge that benefits all parties, including product teams who build and ship new features week in and week out. By seeing firsthand how customers use Intercom internally, engineers and other employees gain a deeper understanding of the product's value proposition and can act on feedback to close feature gaps and add new features to their roadmap. Ultimately, Sales Days promote cross-collaboration, cultural sharing, and sales enablement across the organization.

Intercom has launched a new platform that enables seamless workflows by integrating with various third-party apps, making it possible for developers to build custom apps within the Intercom Messenger. The platform's early access program has seen over 600 companies participate, and nearly 100 apps are now available in the Intercom App Store. Some of these apps include Daily.co for video calls, Pinpoint for promoting open roles, Sherlock for targeted messages, JustCall Direct for phone support, and Upscope for co-browsing. Intercom encourages developers to build their own apps using the platform's simple framework, with many partners having built apps in under a day. The company invites developers to check out its developer docs and get early access to the Messenger framework.

You don't have to be an AI wizard or mathematician to use machine learning in your work. The fundamental ideas at the heart of machine learning are relatively straightforward and can be applied to a wide range of problems, including those that might seem complex or abstract. By representing posts mathematically and clustering them with K-Means, you can identify clusters of similar posts and generate suggestions for users. Machine learning is not only applicable to large abstract problems but also great at generating suggestions to help users with different workflows, such as adding tags in a project management app or assigning members of a group on a social network. With relatively high-level programming libraries like Python's Scikit Learn, books written for programmers, and online courses available, you can get started with machine learning even if you don't have extensive mathematical knowledge.

We learned at Intercom that as a company moves upmarket, it's essential to change how sales works with the product team to master both driving revenue and being the voice of customers. To achieve this, they focused on "why" instead of "what," being more specific and less prescriptive in their requests, and leveraging customer stories to inspire action that drives real customer impact. By prioritizing problems over features and investing in a positive feedback loop, Intercom's sales and product teams have built a healthy partnership that increases customer happiness and delivers more revenue.

The rise of innovative businesses is transforming the way customer support experiences are delivered, with a focus on proactive, personalized, and efficient service. With advancements in automation, messaging, self-service solutions, and changes in consumer expectations, companies like Monzo and Xplony are redefining the role of customer support in driving loyalty, engagement, and revenue. By leveraging technologies like Intercom, businesses can offer real-time support, improve NPS scores, and increase customer satisfaction, ultimately becoming differentiators in a competitive market.

Trust your instincts or rely on procedure – when to design with intuition` Designing with intuition can be a valid way to solve problems, especially for those who have refined their ability to make snap decisions through experience and practice. The "adaptive unconscious" allows our brain to quickly process data and make associations, saving unnecessary effort. However, relying solely on intuition can lead to flawed decisions due to biases and fallacies in the subconscious mind. It's essential to balance trusting one's instincts with a more rigorous design process to ensure better results. This balance depends on the project's complexity, potential impact, and confidence in the intuitive solution. By understanding when to rely on intuition and when to engage in a more thorough exploration, designers can improve their decision-making and create better products.

There are few issues more important than customer retention when running software-as-a-service businesses, as acquiring customers for a certain period is less valuable if they only stick around for a short time. Retention can be measured both qualitatively and quantitatively, with cohort analysis being a technique used to quantify it by analyzing groups with different starting conditions. Cohort analysis allows for the visualization of retention data over time, enabling businesses to identify trends, patterns, and areas where customers are lost, which is crucial in making informed decisions about how to improve retention. By using cycle plots, which group data points together to show both micro and macro trends, businesses can gain a deeper understanding of their customer retention rates and make data-driven decisions to increase retention.

Staging events can offer a unique opportunity to connect with customers and prospects in a targeted and personal way, relying on the difference that live events can provide. This approach is particularly effective when resources are limited, as it allows businesses to make an impact without breaking the bank. Events can attract, convert, educate, nurture, or delight audiences, depending on their strategy and execution. By hosting events, businesses can connect with multiple audiences simultaneously, including customers, users, prospects, and industry peers. However, this approach also requires significant investment of time, resources, and effort. To get started, businesses should focus on creating a moving target for themselves by traveling to their audience rather than expecting them to come to the event. They should also use existing channels to their advantage, such as tech conferences or meetups, and host spin-off events during these gatherings. It's essential to be intentional with resources and focus on delivering a unique experience that aligns with the company's philosophy and product positioning. When building events, businesses should prioritize control over the experience, avoiding outsourcing ideas or voice while leveraging the skills of their team. As they grow, they can take risks by introducing new speakers, personalities, and creative control to their events. Ultimately, staging events is an opportunity waiting for businesses, particularly in the early stages, when resources are limited but impact is key.

The Intercom team has shipped 7 new features to help users automate their funnel, streamline handoffs, and customize their Messenger. These updates include auto-assigning leads to account owners in Salesforce, adding notes to Inbox profiles for more helpful conversations, customizing the location of the Messenger on a webpage or app screen, controlling who can see the Messenger, capturing better qualification data from leads on the website, automatically disqualifying bad leads and sending targeted content, and driving more leads to conversions with Messenger apps in Operator's lead qualification. These features aim to strike a balance between being personable and efficient, allowing users to engage with visitors, leads, and customers quickly and effectively.

You can create an account plan to help your sales team nurture existing businesses and ensure customer success. Account plans bring together critical information about customers, competitors, and sales strategies in a simple document. They are often ignored by sales teams, who focus on acquiring new customers while neglecting retention and monetization. However, research shows that customer retention is more financially sound for businesses, with increasing retention rates by 5% leading to profits between 25-95%. To create an account plan, gather building blocks of information about the customer, create a 360-degree view, and put the plan into action. This involves gathering data points, mapping them out into an internal facing document, and translating research into a customer-facing presentation that aligns both sales reps and clients around a shared objective. The ultimate goal is to set up relationships akin to traditional client-consultant relationships where sales reps can be seen as trusted partners who improve businesses. By showing deep understanding of the business's problems and how your product can help, clients will be assured that your product isn't just a tool for the here and now, but a long-term investment that has flexibility to match their needs as they evolve.

The philosophy of continuous improvement known as Kaizen emphasizes making meaningful product changes that result in new customers or increased benefits for existing users. Product improvements can be made to either add new features, improve existing ones, or change the way they are used. Adding new features is risky and requires confidence that they will be valued by customers. Improving existing features can be done in three ways: making deliberate improvements, increasing frequency of use, or improving adoption rates. Examples of product improvements include adding notifications to address infrequent use of a feature, redesigning the message results view to display effectiveness metrics, and repositioning filters for easier configuration. To truly adhere to Kaizen, startups must balance finding meaningful improvements with ensuring that they are implemented effectively.

Sales teams are shifting from phone calls and forms to live chat for initial sales conversations. They're looking for messaging tools that can drive business impact, not just another communication channel. Salespeople want actions, not conversations, with 1 in 7 conversations linking out to external resources such as scheduling services or content. To address this, Intercom has redesigned its Messenger to facilitate action, including booking meetings automatically with Google Calendar, moving leads through the sales funnel with demos and content, and converting free trials with the Stripe Subscriptions App.

The author, who was the marketing hat for an early stage startup, emphasizes that writing code and talking to users are crucial tasks for any startup. The plan was simple: get people to learn about Intercom and talk about it. This involved creating content, meeting people at conferences, speaking onstage, etc., which appealed to the target audience of small SaaS companies. However, this approach may not be suitable for all industries or customer types. It's essential to understand the behaviors of the people you're trying to reach and choose a marketing tactic based on those exhibited behaviors. Once an addressable and responsive audience is built, pitching the product becomes easier, and personal emails can be sent with tailored messages that resonate with each recipient's use case. The author advises against relying solely on early tactics, as channels become saturated, competitors emerge, and platforms look to kill new startups before they're out of the gate. Instead, a fatter part of the market needs to be reached through various channels like PR, paid acquisition, and SEO to survive in the long term.

The Intercom team successfully scaled their email delivery pipeline to handle a massive influx of emails triggered by the GDPR regulations on May 25th, without causing any customer impact. They achieved this through various improvements made to their scalability and resiliency efforts over time. The company's ability to stress-test their system without breaking it was put to the test during the surge, and they were able to handle tens of millions of emails sent over a 24-hour period without an increase in bounce rates. Despite the high demand, Intercom's message queue times decreased quickly as the upscaling caught up with the backlog, and the company's biggest database briefly hit a max CPU load of 32.5% during this time. The success demonstrates that Intercom has made significant progress in improving its scalability and reliability, which is crucial for supporting larger customers and bettering customer experiences.