April 2018 Summaries

Intercom's on-call process was causing engineer burnout due to too many people being on call at any moment, inconsistent alarms and procedures, and lack of compensation for out-of-hours shifts. The company created a virtual team consisting of volunteers who took all out-of-hours on-call work from every team, defined acceptable alarms and runbooks, and implemented peer review and compensation for taking on call shifts. This change resulted in a significant reduction of out-of-hours pages to less than 10 per month, improved consistency across teams, and enhanced the quality of life for engineers. The company is continuing to refine its on-call process as it grows, but has seen positive results so far.

The Intercom team has released a new all-in-one Messenger platform that includes a customizable home screen, allowing businesses to create tailored experiences for leads and customers when they open the Messenger. This concept is considered a fundamental shift in what a business messenger should be about, as it moves beyond just conversations. The idea came from modest beginnings, such as adding a link to a knowledge base, which was later refined into a more comprehensive solution that integrates with existing features like article suggestions and extensibility frameworks. Businesses can now customize their Messenger home to focus on specific actions or purposes, such as sales, marketing, self-service, or support. The new platform also includes a revamped conversation list that is now more relevant and elegant, showing only active conversations within the past three days. Overall, this release represents a paradigm shift in business messengers, enabling customers to get their jobs done more quickly without starting a conversation.

The new Messenger update from Intercom is a significant overhaul of its business messaging platform, designed to work beyond just chat and towards more personalized, scalable, and automated communication. With over 500 million conversations every month, the update aims to improve how businesses communicate with their customers, integrating it with other work tools like booking meetings, video calls, sharing announcements, and helping sign up or make a purchase. The new Messenger features a customizable home screen, messenger apps that can be integrated with third-party tools, and an App Store where businesses can discover and install apps to enhance their customer experience. This update sets a new standard for business-to-customer communication, positioning the Messenger as the primary way internet businesses will interact with existing and prospective customers in the future.

The article emphasizes the importance of a strong privacy ecosystem, particularly with the arrival of GDPR, which brings data security and privacy to widespread public awareness. A company's security program is crucial in protecting customer data from external attacks and breaches, and investing in it is essential. Knowing one's own systems, choosing trusted vendors and partners, establishing best practices, and communicating actively with customers about privacy are also vital components of a robust privacy ecosystem. Companies that prioritize their privacy strategy will reap many rewards in the years ahead.

Well-thought-out engineering processes can be beneficial, but if they're not updated regularly, they can slow down a company. The author's experience at Intercom showed that lightweight weekly engineering processes, without estimations or separate QA teams, were more effective for a product-first company like Intercom. Processes should serve the development of the product, rather than constraining it. To design effective processes, one must clearly define the problem being solved and focus on what success looks like, rather than relying on familiar habits. It's essential to update or get rid of old engineering processes once they've outlived their usefulness and encourage everyone using them to challenge the status quo. By doing so, companies can innovate, move fast, and stay focused while solving real problems.

The text discusses the importance of writing effective sales messages in today's business communication landscape. It highlights Dan Kennedy's book, "The Ultimate Sales Letter," as a classic resource for sales writing advice. The article identifies seven key rules for crafting compelling sales messages, including making sure they are seen and read, demonstrating value rather than price, and injecting enthusiasm into the initial draft. These principles aim to help writers create sales messages that resonate with their audience and drive results.

You need to understand the nature of marketing at a software company is that it's easy to overlook hard-to-measure things like building a brand, focusing on optimizing funnels and growth hacking button colors instead. However, building a brand is crucial for creating emotional connections with customers, which leads to meaningful and sustained relationships over time. Your brand is not just your logo or identity system, but the emotional connection you establish with your customers. It's about how people feel when they interact with your company, and it can be controlled and managed through consistent expressions of your brand values, voice, and visual identity. These elements should reinforce each other and align with your mission and vision. By getting these three pillars right, you'll shape the perception of your brand and be memorable to potential customers.

The best SaaS sales reps are efficient, motivated, effective, and creative in their day-to-day operations. They have a knack for identifying quality prospects, making strong impressions quickly, and closing deals that seem out of reach. To excel in SaaS sales, one must understand the importance of upselling value to existing customers, persistence is key to connecting with prospects, technology is a modern sales rep's best friend, marketing metrics have an influence on sales metrics, and a growing sales team creates a growing company. Great SaaS sales reps are committed to learning and investing in themselves and their organizations to stay ahead in the industry.

The SaaS industry has experienced rapid growth due to low barriers to entry, venture capital funding, and a deeper understanding of internet businesses' problems. This explosion has led to an increase in competitors, both direct and indirect, making competition a good thing as it means the problem is worth solving. To master competitive selling, it's essential to acknowledge rivals, develop stronger customer relationships, and focus on how your solution solves the customer's problem rather than just comparing with competitors. A sales rep should know the competitive landscape, use comparisons as clues, hold their ground against price competition, speak passionately about their brand and values, utilize past success stories from customers who switched to them, and don't underestimate the importance of being a personable and friendly sales representative. By adopting these strategies, sales reps can close deals for their company while respecting their competitors.

The concept of growing a product's voice is crucial in today's software-dependent world, where users only truly connect with products when they speak to them in a distinctly human voice. To achieve this, marketing needs to develop its own line of enquiry into "why" - the purpose and value behind the product. By reframing features in terms of the problem they solve and the value they create, marketers can construct a narrative framework that ties together the various components of the product's mission. This framework should be grounded in reality and take into account the unique characteristics of each feature. To build a genuine voice, marketers must acknowledge that the message is automated and use techniques such as "suspension of disbelief" to suspend their audience's disbelief. The key is to do what fits for the current stage of the product, as branding is an ongoing process that requires constant reworking and readjustment. By adopting this approach, startups can build a unique voice that resonates with their users and sets them apart in the market.

In today's digital age, customer communication is a delicate balance between message volume, relevance, behavior, timing, frequency, and actual volume. To improve customer communication, it's essential to consider the perceived communication volume, which takes into account these five factors. Staying relevant, matching messages to behaviors, sending timely messages, limiting frequency, and strictly limiting campaign scope are key strategies to avoid overwhelming customers. Effective governance and feedback from customers are also crucial in achieving the right balance. By understanding perceived message volume and continuously testing and iterating, businesses can improve customer communication and increase engagement rates.

Live chat can be used to warm up cold outbound leads by continuing engagement after an initial click-through, reducing spammy follow-up emails and increasing conversion rates. By personalizing live chat messages with unique URLs, sales teams can create context around marketing content and build meaningful relationships with prospects. This approach has been successful in Intercom, where leads are 82% more likely to convert if they've chatted first, and can be applied to other products using triggers and unique URL codes. By warming up cold outreach experience, live chat can turn outbound emails into inbound conversations, providing a new opportunity for building relationships with future customers.

We try to merely survive getting feedback on our work instead of embracing it wholeheartedly as an opportunity to make things better. Fear of feedback is a major cause of this reluctance, stemming from fragile egos that don't want to be told they're wrong or need improvement. This fear leads us to prioritize preparing and presenting our ideas over collaborating with others, which can result in a lack of ownership and responsibility for the project's outcome. Our technical design process intentionally structures collaboration and early feedback to encourage engineers to own their projects from start to finish, rather than passing responsibility to a "sign-off" authority.