October 2018 Summaries

We believe that conversational bot technology will be transformative for businesses that embrace it, improving the customer experience at every stage of the lifecycle. Our customers are already seeing value from implementing Custom Bots on their website by personally engaging new visitors with video, automatically qualifying leads and nurturing new trial users to paid plans. OutSystems is using Custom Bots to drive 50% more engagement during onboarding, while Snapt qualifies leads and drives more meeting bookings, and Apply Pixels uses Video Bots to personally greet website visitors at scale, increasing subscriptions to their newsletter and engaging more visitors in conversations.

The traditional view of leads is often divided into inbound and outbound categories, but a new concept of "invisible" leads has emerged. These are website visitors who research products but never fill out contact forms or get in touch with sales teams. To engage these leads, companies need to find the right tools and adopt real-time sales motions that cater to their needs. By shining a light on invisible sales pipelines and taking action, businesses can convert more website visitors into qualified leads and ultimately drive revenue growth.

Delivery dates are often stigmatized as stressful and arbitrary, but they can actually help teams stay focused, aligned, and driven while keeping project scope in check. Crafting effective engineering deadlines requires setting a realistic date by agreeing on the project scope, estimating work involved, and breaking down milestones with achievable targets. Adjusting project scope and managing uncertainty are crucial, as estimates should have error margins to account for new information or changes, and teams should consider personal commitments when planning timelines. Clear engineering deadlines can transform how teams work, allowing them to ship quality product on time and make progress towards their goals.

** Customer success in the SaaS industry refers to creating long-term value for both customers and businesses. However, there is no clear definition of what this means to different companies, leading to varying approaches to customer success teams. Some organizations create resources for thousands of self-serve customers, while others focus on working with a select few. Customer success managers are often seen as the post-sale counterpart of account executives, but their primary goal should be creating long-term value rather than immediate revenue. To build this value, businesses need internal customer advocates who prioritize long-term goals over short-term gains. This requires separating selling and onboarding tasks to allow sales teams to focus on driving revenue while customer success managers work with customers to create tailored solutions that enhance existing product education resources. Effective customer success teams embed themselves in their customers' businesses, become true product experts, and prioritize product activation metrics to ensure alignment with customer goals. By investing in teams centered around customer advocacy, organizations can unlock more value for their customers and drive long-term revenue growth.

The Sales Handbook, the 10th book published by the organization, focuses on modern sales strategies and tactics for high-growth businesses. Sales is a critical function for any business, but it's also one of the hardest to get right, especially in today's complex buyer landscape. The book provides a fresh take on four key themes: developing a sales strategy, growing your sales team, modern sales techniques, and real-time sales. Industry leaders such as LB Harvey, Steli Efti, Jason Lemkin, Jill Konrath, John Barrows, Karen Peacock, Alyssa Merwin, Jill Rowley, Mark Roberge, and others share their stories and advice on scaling sales to drive predictable revenue growth. The book offers a comprehensive guide for businesses looking to master these critical areas and succeed in today's competitive sales landscape.

The text discusses how to retain more users by implementing a value-based onboarding approach. This involves identifying the "job" that new users hire your product to do, understanding the value they seek, and tailoring the onboarding experience to deliver on that value. By removing non-essential steps and finding shortcuts to provide value, you can create an engaging first-use experience that motivates new customers to continue through the process. This approach is particularly important for complex products where different stakeholders have varying needs, requiring a customized onboarding flow for each segment. Ultimately, great onboarding leads to active, happy users who are more likely to be retained and become loyal customers.

At Intercom, they employ a concept called "engineering tours" to spread engineering knowledge and culture across different teams. This involves temporary transfers of engineers to other teams to work on specific projects, allowing them to gain impact while still onboarding. The goal is to break down silos and facilitate cross-team relationships, promoting constant learning and growth. Engineering tours are not just about code reviews but also about building relationships and forging friendships across the organization. This approach has been successful in knowledge and culture sharing, even as Intercom grows with multiple offices. By adopting this model, other engineering organizations can benefit from enhanced employee engagement, cultural health, and ongoing challenge.

The story of Intercom's "Intercomic" is a unique way to celebrate employees' work anniversaries, showcasing the company's culture and emphasis on fun and imagination. The process of creating these portraits involves an extensive and meticulous effort, requiring careful planning, attention to detail, and collaboration between designers, illustrators, and managers. Each Intercomic represents a person's life inside and outside the office, capturing their personality, achievements, and contributions to the company. As the company grows, so does the number of portraits created, with dozens being worked on simultaneously. The process involves gathering briefs from managers, researching the employee's interests and achievements, and then bringing these elements together in a creative and imaginative way. The Intercomics are not only a celebration of individual employees but also a representation of the company as a whole, highlighting its diversity, smartness, and fun.

Answer Bot is an intelligent bot that automatically resolves customers' most common questions in the Intercom Messenger, instantly resolving 29% of queries and improving response time by 44%. The bot uses machine-learning to recognize queries and deliver exact answers directly in conversations. Answer Bot aims to make messaging transformative for businesses, automating tasks and providing a personalized experience while respecting customers' time, space, and dignity. By partnering with third-party apps, Answer Bot can automate end-to-end experiences, performing simple tasks and creating value for both businesses and customers. The bot is designed to be customer-centric, with full control over the tone and voice of its responses, making it approachable to humans who need to work with it. With Answer Bot, businesses can get set up and start using the feature in just five minutes, providing a tangible value proposition that demonstrates real benefits for sales and support teams.

When it comes to capturing people's attention, video is particularly effective, with 69% of people deciding to buy software after watching a video. Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) in sales teams struggle to engage potential customers through email, but leveraging the power of video can help cut through the noise. The company experimented with using video in emails and created a "cupcake" version of the larger project, targeting trialling leads and promising prospects. They found that videos were 52% more effective at getting replies compared to text-only emails and received positive reactions from leads who received the videos. Key practical learnings included keeping each video short, adding value by mentioning previous interactions, asking what leads hope to achieve, and finishing with a direct call to action. However, scaling this approach can be tricky, but the company has developed Video Bots, which combine the advantages of video with bot-powered automation, providing a scalable approach to video engagement for businesses.

The speaker challenges the common assumption in UX design that UX should be at the center of a company. They argue that this is a form of "navel gazing" and that it's time for UX designers to stop focusing on their own discipline and start collaborating with other teams, such as sales, marketing, and product management. The speaker believes that by doing so, UX designers can gain a more nuanced understanding of the company's goals and priorities, and develop solutions that are truly valuable to customers. They also note that many UX designers mistakenly believe they are the sole voice of the user, when in fact, everyone has a unique role to play in delivering value to customers. The speaker concludes by urging UX designers to stop navel-gazing and grow up, and to start collaborating with other teams to build great products.

Innovation company Intercom has achieved SOC 2 Type 2 compliance, demonstrating a mature and reliable commitment to protecting its customers' data. This industry-recognized accreditation measures security and availability, providing assurance that customer data is being managed in a controlled and audited environment. The certification builds on previous achievements, including the passing of the SOC 2 Type 1 audit last year, and will be maintained through annual audits to ensure continued commitment to customer trust and security. By achieving this milestone, Intercom prioritizes its customers' growth and focus on acquiring, engaging, and retaining them, while ensuring robust security practices are in place throughout the organization.

Inside Intercom has revamped its website, killing the traditional blog format in favor of a more personalized and curated content platform. The new design features four core categories: opinionated, straightforward, personal, and playful, which guide the tone and style of the content. A cross-functional team conducted user research to understand reader behavior and preferences, revealing a desire for faster discovery and serendipity in their reading experience. The new platform organizes content into dedicated sections for Sales, Marketing, Support, Engineering, Product & Design, and Growth, with features like color-coded categories, typographic studies, and curated content groupings. This redesign aims to enrich the reader's experience without overwhelming them with content, while allowing for flexibility and growth as a publication.

The company has released seven new data and customization-driven features to help sales and marketing teams better understand their funnel, optimize their experience, and personalize the interaction with leads and customers. These features include updated Clearbit Reveal app for personalizing outreach, new Revenue Reports for tracking key revenue metrics, Sales Team Performance Reports for monitoring team performance, control groups for testing message performance, bot flow experimentation through duplicating Custom Bots, customization of Operator's bot identity to match a brand's unique style, and advanced security features in the Messenger and emails. Additionally, the company has integrated with popular apps such as Woopra, PactSafe Chat-to-Sign, and Spinify to enhance their capabilities.