February 2019 Summaries

The new features and updates shipped by Intercom aim to boost productivity for users in sales, marketing, and support. The Accounts view helps organize target accounts and their owners, enabling personalized messages on the website using Clearbit Reveal. The Outlook Calendar app facilitates scheduling meetings with leads and customers directly from Messenger, eliminating back-and-forth coordination. SLA rules help prioritize conversations based on specific customer types and expectations. Additionally, Custom Bot conversations can be auto-closed for incomplete replies, improving team efficiency. Improved Articles search provides more accurate results by matching entire search phrases and highlighting search terms in article headings. New integrations with Jira Cloud, Zoho PageSense, Calendly, and 24sessions enhance productivity and streamline workflows.

The article highlights 10 essential sales apps that every sales team should know about, which can help streamline workflows, reduce friction, and increase productivity. The apps are categorized into three main areas: communication, scheduling, and tracking/management of leads. These apps enable sales teams to quickly engage with VIP leads, book meetings, track pipeline progress, and nurture leads without wasting time switching between tools. Some notable apps include Slack, Aircall Now, Google Meet, Calendly, Salesforce, HubSpot, and Pipedrive, which can be integrated with Intercom using various methods such as the App Store or Zapier. By leveraging these apps, sales teams can focus on what matters most - selling.

Product design is a cost-benefit analysis, weighing the usefulness of a feature against its effort level. Every type of feature falls into one of four quadrants: low reward and low effort, low reward and high effort, high reward and low effort, or high reward and high effort. It's wise to avoid the upper left quadrant for non-essential features. Understanding where your feature fits in is crucial for effective product design.

Product engagement is a crucial metric for SaaS businesses as it directly affects customer churn. Without a proper method to score product usage, it's challenging to understand the health of the business. Creating an engagement score helps organizations prioritize their efforts, identify areas for improvement, and make data-driven decisions. The process involves defining what engagement means for each product, tracking relevant activities, weighing these events based on their impact, normalizing raw scores, and applying them to drive actionable insights. Effective use of engagement metrics can help businesses rank users, score accounts, calculate overall product scores, compare populations or cohorts, and correlate with other business metrics, ultimately predicting and forecasting business progress. By measuring and improving product engagement, SaaS companies can unlock valuable insights to inform their strategies and drive growth.

We used DynamoDB Streams to capture and process updates in user objects, allowing us to visualize changes in frequently updated objects. By leveraging existing technologies like AWS Lambda and DynamoDB's built-in TTL functionality, we were able to build a serverless solution that automates repetitive tasks and provides valuable insights into historical user states. This enables our Customer Support team to self-serve when digging into the past state of a user object, reducing manual work and minimizing mistakes. The system is designed to be simple, elegant, and scalable, with a focus on leveraging common technologies to achieve its goals.

You often hear great talks about the founding story and how to drive that first phase of growth, but what happens after that is just as important. When you hit your initial goal, whether it's launching a new product, defining a new category, or reaching $1M in revenue, you realize there's more work to be done. To continue growing, you need to expand your market, build your next big product, and find product-market fit again and again. You should also decide on a platform play, as customers want you to integrate with the things they already use, and build a team that can take you to the next level by hiring the right people for the job and applying Lean Startup principles to the hiring process.

The secret to scaling product announcements lies in developing a framework for scoping announcements and tactics that can scale with the cadence of feature releases. A common strategy is grouping similar features together into a single announcement, or ruthlessly prioritizing and not announcing the least impactful updates. This approach helps maximize touchpoints with customers, reduces over messaging, and increases feature awareness and adoption. A changelog serves as a curated feed of relevant updates and changes that raises customer awareness around new product features, and its primary goal is to increase feature awareness and adoption. To create an effective changelog, prioritize updates that are valuable to most customers, avoid posting about minor updates, and keep updates clear, concise, and benefit-oriented. Promoting the changelog through easy-to-share links and social media can also help increase visibility and engagement.

In the SaaS industry, acquiring new customers is not enough for sustainable growth; nurturing existing customers and maintaining relationships with them is equally important. The cost of selling SaaS can be high, and it takes nearly a year to make back the money spent acquiring a customer. To achieve sustainable growth, companies need to keep their customers around for as long as possible, which requires dedicated account or relationship managers who support businesses in three ways: expansion, retention, and contraction. Treating customers like they're disposable is not an option for companies built on recurring revenue.

We explored designing a solution to measure the quality of our customers' interactions with us, building on industry standards like Customer Effort Score and Net Promoter Score. We chose an emoji scale with faces representing a five-point scale from "Terrible" to "Amazing", specifically using a row of faces – 😠 🙁 😐 😃 😍 – to represent each rating level. However, we discovered that customers were reluctant to use the heart eyes emoji (😍) due to its perceived romantic connotations and lack of professionalism in certain contexts, particularly among males. We replaced it with a starry-eyed face (🤩), which was well-received by both our customer support team and users, resulting in an 11% increase in "Amazing" CSAT ratings and a notable improvement for male customer support representatives. Our experience highlights the importance of considering cultural and gender differences in emoji usage and interpretation, as well as the potential impact on design decisions that may seem minor but can significantly affect user behavior.

Karen Peacock, COO of Intercom, shared her journey to business success on the Growth Everywhere podcast. She discussed her background in applied mathematics and business, including her experience at Intuit where she drove growth from zero to $50 million in recurring revenue. Karen emphasized the importance of finding a big problem that customers have but aren't being met, and solving it with a durable competitive advantage. She also highlighted the value of hiring the right team, conducting reference checks, and interacting with customers in real-time to drive business success.

As a product-first company, Intercom has developed an efficient launch machine over the years, but as they grew, challenges arose from shipping more updates and features, expanding their go-to-market teams, and marketing to new audiences. They realized that their "old way" of launching products was no longer effective, leading to "ever-bigger cookie-cutter launches." To address this, Intercom has reworked their framework to prioritize based on impact, bundle features for stronger announcements, and get super targeted with their messaging. By doing so, they aim to focus more resources on high-impact activities, avoid overwhelming customers, and tailor messages for specific target audiences, ultimately making their launch processes more effective.

Developing a successful sales strategy is crucial for any business aiming to achieve sustainable growth. Industry leaders emphasize the importance of understanding what it takes to attract target customers, knowing when to add sales to self-serve models, establishing clear and differentiated roles on the sales team, defining an ideal customer profile, acting like a consultant and advisor to prospects, being deliberate in moving upmarket, experimenting with sales strategies before pivoting, and using channel partners to accelerate growth. A well-defined sales strategy helps sales teams execute with focus and can lead to meaningful growth for businesses.

You're taking over an established team in a new role and want to ensure a smooth transition. Focus on people first, considering their anxiety and stress, and ease their concerns. Align with the team on goals and plans, but be realistic about what's achievable. Share your opinions and ask for feedback, holding them "extremely weakly" to avoid being perceived as trying to impose your will. Evolve processes slowly, understanding their purpose and consequences before making changes. Learn about the data the team measures and why, and use it to align the team behind a higher-level strategy. Finally, be deeply curious and ask questions, gathering insights into your shared understanding of everything you do as a team, including how they trust each other, their velocity, and what they think about their work.

We can see that onboarding a company to a product is different from onboarding an individual user, requiring participation from multiple people across departments. A linear sequence of steps designed for individuals breaks down for groups of people, who often have unpredictable paths and varying levels of permissions. This requires designing onboarding that acknowledges these differences and provides flexibility, escape hatches, and ways to invite others for help. To support larger companies, it's essential to identify and empower an onboarding leader, while also providing resources and context to ensure a smooth onboarding process.