July 2018 Summaries

Typeform has developed an app on Intercom, a messaging platform, which is now publicly available and offers various features that enable users to collect better data and drive business decisions. The app was built quickly, with a working prototype created in just one afternoon, and has already brought value to Typeform and its customers. The development process was streamlined by Intercom's guidance and developer tools, aligning with Typeform's growth model approach of rapid iteration and experimentation. As a result, the app has increased product engagement, retention, and customer acquisition for Typeform, while providing users with a new survey distribution channel and improved response rates. With over 2,500 conversations already using the app, Intercom continues to support its partners in building apps that unlock new possibilities for their customers.

The Intercom App Store is now publicly available, providing over 100 apps that help users and customers get more done with Intercom. The store allows anyone to browse and search for apps that make them more productive and grow their business quickly. Intercom has also released new developer tools and workspaces aimed at empowering partners and developers to build rich and powerful apps on top of Intercom. These tools include a simple dashboard, free developer workspace, and revamped documentation to help developers get up and running fast. Additionally, the company is launching its brand new Messenger Framework, which allows users to build apps for the Intercom Messenger, with over 1,000 companies already signed up for the beta. The framework offers improved customer intelligence and communication through features like proactively soliciting feedback and sending custom responses. With these new tools and frameworks, Intercom aims to make its platform more extensible and powerful, allowing customers and partners to customize it to their own use cases and needs.

As an Inbound Sales Development Rep, the author faces challenges in hitting their sales quota due to uncontrolled leads and uncertainty about lead quality. To overcome this, they recommend creating a pacing plan that enables them to exactly hit their sales quota by converting a certain number of qualified opportunities per week. They also emphasize the importance of qualifying leads for quality, actively managing leads to prevent them from going dark, re-engaging cold leads with creative tactics, and communicating effectively with both leads and account executives to move deals forward. By embracing their "license to sell" and pulling the right levers at the right time, they can increase the odds of achieving success and consistently hit their sales quota.

We integrated Intercom into our revenue stack, a general automation platform provider of automated API integration tools, to capture and engage on target leads, primarily marketing, sales, and business operations leaders at enterprises and fast-growing companies. We use Visitor Auto Messages (VAMs) on high-intent landing pages to convert visitors into leads, engage with them in real-time, and speed up the sales process by converting 10-20% more leads. Our automated workflows across marketing, sales, and support help us respond quickly to customer questions, prioritize conversations with high-value leads, and personalize selling using Intercom and Salesforce. The integration has resulted in about 18% of our net new leads coming through Intercom, leading to faster sales cycles and higher conversions compared to other sources.

Intercom has shipped 13 new features to improve conversations and conversions across marketing, sales, and support teams. These features include embedding apps within messages, sending relevant help articles to users in outbound messages, syncing data with HubSpot and Marketo, and enabling mobile users to self-serve. Additionally, Intercom has introduced a new Events Log to review actions taken by users and a feature to export conversation metadata for analysis. The platform also enhances its integration with Salesforce, allowing businesses to automatically send conversations and data between the two tools. Furthermore, Intercom introduces a new 'Ask a Question' app to collect information at scale, and closes conversations in bulk to keep inboxes organized. These updates aim to drive conversions and enable better conversations for businesses using the platform.

Working remotely is challenging but growing a remote team into an office brings its own set of challenges. Intercom's APAC team, which initially operated as a distributed team across multiple time zones, grew to almost 20 people across four countries before opening their first office in Sydney, a 12,000km away from the company headquarters in San Francisco. This journey taught them about the challenges and rewards of remote work, likening it to being in a long-distance relationship where direct contact is limited and human connection is more difficult than in-person conversations. After initially onboarding new hires through video calls and screen sharing sessions, they found that working together face-to-face brought a sense of ownership and responsibility towards their customers. The team experienced the benefits of remote work, such as focused work time and being able to rock pyjamas all day long, but also faced challenges like difficulty in getting to know colleagues personally and learning from each other. After flying the entire APAC Alliance into Sydney for a week, they realized that being together brought them closer to each other and the company culture. The team is now enjoying their new office life, which offers opportunities for collaboration, knowledge transfer, and serving local customers. Despite some teammates still working remotely, the team feels like a startup within a startup, committed to honoring their remote origins and making their new office inclusive and accessible to all.

Here's an objective, neutral, and interesting summary of the text: Automating sales follow-up emails can help salespeople focus on high-value deals while nurturing smaller accounts. By separating leads into two groups - big whales (large, complex accounts) and long tail (smaller accounts), you can create personalized messages that establish a connection with each group. Personalize your initial touches to address the job the lead wants to get done, but also keep it human by adding value through case studies, demo videos, or blog posts. Automate follow-up emails using messaging tools like Intercom Smart Campaigns, personalizing messages with variables and setting cadence to avoid overboarding leads. By optimizing for both big whales and long tail, you can improve pipeline efficiency, save time, and increase positive responses from smaller accounts.

The new HubSpot and Marketo apps from Intercom aim to improve lead nurturing and conversion by syncing customer data across multiple tools, allowing sales and marketing teams to access a complete view of every lead's journey with their company. The apps enable seamless data synchronization between Intercom and these tools, making it easier for teams to track leads, follow up with them faster, and increase revenue. By automatically qualifying new leads, sending them to the right tool, and providing real-time context, the apps help businesses make the most of their customer data and drive more conversions.

The main challenge in customer acquisition for SaaS companies is getting prospects to sign up for a free product trial and ensuring they are successful in that trial. To maximize the value of a product trial, it's essential to understand the prospect's use case quickly, drive frequent and smart usage, and reduce any in-trial friction through friendly support, onboarding, and enablement. Effective communication is crucial, with personalized messages sent at strategic times to engage prospects and set expectations for their trial period. The key is to strike a balance between providing value during the trial and avoiding message fatigue, while also ensuring that every touchpoint is meaningful and relevant to the prospect's needs. By adopting this approach, companies can increase trial conversion rates and set themselves up for longer-term success.

You can spend months working on a great idea and pouring time and energy into crafting the perfect marketing strategy, but without customers, your business will cease to exist. A customer acquisition strategy is the set of activities used to bring in new customers or clients, using a systematic and sustainable approach that can evolve over time. In today's crowded marketplace, differentiating yourself from the crowd and building an enthusiastic customer base that sticks around is key. Successful strategies use channels such as mobilizing influencers, not trading growth for profitability, not investing too early, being relentless with content marketing, and acquiring the right kind of customers.

The article highlights the importance of understanding what customers want and how they currently get it in order to create a better solution. Focusing on the outcome rather than category, industry, or product type allows companies to understand their real competitors and deliver value to customers. The author cites examples such as newspapers struggling to adapt to changing reader behavior, highlighting the need for a focus on delivering outcomes over traditional product categories. To make things people want, companies should aim to remove steps, make it possible for more people, or make it possible in more situations. This approach is often adopted by start-ups and involves simplifying existing solutions, reducing costs, or removing barriers to use. The article concludes with the wisdom of Jeff Bezos, who emphasizes that focusing on the things that don't change allows companies to create value and deliver outcomes that customers want.

Intercom is a powerful tool used by Ad Reform and Userfeed, two profitable bootstrapped SaaS businesses. It helps with support, sales, marketing, onboarding, feature flipping, user feedback, and development platform use cases. Intercom enables teams to solve support issues faster, engage users in a human way, and provide targeted in-app or email messages to segments of users. Its data platform allows for segmenting users, sending relevant content, and improving customer retention. The platform also offers features like feature flipping, user feedback, and development tools that enable businesses to improve their products and grow their customers. Intercom's value is highlighted as a game-changer for bootstrapped SaaS businesses, providing an overall better experience than other tools in its category.

Shipping product fast and often means more opportunities for sales teams to delight customers and engage with prospects. However, this doesn't necessarily mean that the sales team has all they need to capitalize on these opportunities. Sales enablement plays a crucial role in ensuring that sales reps have the skills and resources needed to effectively sell new features. Before sales enablement became an official function, our sales team didn't have access to information about features before they were shipped, leading to awkward conversations with customers instead of informed discussions. Today, Sales Enablement acts as a filter for the massive streams of information accompanying launches and distills it down to what reps need to know to sell new features effectively. The work of sales enablement begins as soon as the product roadmap is set, where stakeholders in marketing and product collaborate to assess what's coming down the line and determine the best way for the sales team to get new features into customers' hands. This process involves assessing complexity, determining potential opportunity or risk, deciding on sales enablement activities, creating an execution plan, being prepared to react quickly on launch day, and measuring the impact of the product launch. By doing so, Sales Enablement acts as a filter for information and helps ensure that investments in products pay off in the market.

A sales pipeline is a visual representation of how close prospects are to converting into customers, allowing organizations to improve forecasting, optimize interactions, and identify bottlenecks in the sales funnel. To effectively manage a sales pipeline, it's essential to decide on your ideal sales pipeline stages, calculate the "magic numbers" needed to meet objectives, build stage-to-stage momentum by identifying key events that move deals forward, and find a routine to fill the pipeline through daily or weekly activities such as prospecting and calling. By following these steps, organizations can improve their sales process, close more deals, and ultimately build a successful business.