March 2019 Summaries

When working in marketing or sales, identifying and targeting high-value accounts is crucial. Account-based marketing (ABM) involves creating a hyper-personalized experience for these targeted companies, using tactics such as targeted outbound emails, webinars, or ad campaigns to reach them. However, simply reaching the account may not be enough; follow-up conversations are necessary to keep interest alive and avoid lost opportunities. Intercom's new ABM capabilities enable personalized messages on the website, automatic routing of responses to sales reps, and prioritization of high-value accounts. With these features, businesses can measure success through pipeline and deal tracking, making it easier to track the impact of their account-based marketing approach.

In the SaaS industry, customer retention is crucial to a company's success, as it can increase the bottom line by up to 7% more than increasing conversion rates. However, many businesses focus too much on acquisition metrics and neglect retention, with 44% of companies admitting to prioritizing acquisition over retention. To address this, Intercom implemented a campaign that sends targeted messages to customers at key stages of their journey, leveraging behavior-based data attributes to provide personalized engagement. By doing so, the company aims to build better relationships with its customers, reduce manual check-ins, and ultimately increase customer retention in the small business segment.

When designing good user offboarding, it's essential to understand that churn is a natural part of business and can be due to various reasons. To learn from churn, companies should focus on identifying the nature of the problem causing customers to leave and devise methods to get valuable feedback to improve their product. A satisfying leaving experience can make customers more likely to consider coming back in the future or recommending the company to others. The peak-end rule suggests that people judge an experience based on how they felt at its most intense point and end, which should be considered when designing offboarding experiences. Companies should resist using dark patterns to manipulate users into staying and instead provide easy cancellation options. By surfacing benefits, offering alternatives, building a feedback loop, and being memorable, companies can improve their product to prevent churn and ensure customers leave with a favorable experience of the product.

The rise of smartphones, messaging, artificial intelligence (AI), and other groundbreaking technologies has led to a new set of expectations for buyers, with live chat becoming an essential component of the buying experience. However, many businesses are concerned about managing the volume of messages that might come from adding live chat to their website, fearing it will drive them insane. Fortunately, it is possible to provide a high-quality experience on live chat with existing teams without burning through cash or driving the team crazy by following best practices and planning carefully.

At a growing company like Intercom, maintaining high-quality conversations with customers is crucial for building valuable relationships and delivering world-class support. To achieve this, measuring conversation quality is essential, but it can be challenging due to the variance in conversation quality among support agents. The company developed a peer review system called Conversation Carousel to address this issue. This tool helps onboard new staff members, identifies those who need further guidance, and ensures that all team members review a certain number of teammates' conversations every week. The system scores conversations based on tone, quality, and adherence to internal processes, providing feedback in the form of ratings and comments. By implementing this peer review system, Intercom has seen significant results, including improved conversation quality and a culture of collective upskilling among support staff.

You're looking to expand your addressable market and drive the next wave of growth for your company. This is a crucial step in scaling your business, as it allows you to tap into new customers and revenue streams. To achieve this, you need to identify opportunities to expand your market by targeting different verticals, starting at the higher end and expanding downmarket or upmarket, or through classic disruption strategies. It's essential to consider what you say yes to and what you say no to, focusing on investments that will scale rather than getting blinded by a big check. A key approach is to expand upmarket one step at a time, finding customers who are slightly larger than your current sweet spot, understanding their needs, and assessing what you need to do versus what you could partner for. By doing so, you can create a more robust product that meets the expectations of higher-end customers, ultimately growing your business and ensuring your customers always have a place with you.

A seasoned manager starts a new team within their sales organization, tasked with growing current customers at scale. They emphasize the importance of measuring impact to justify hiring and investing in the team, recognizing that the "juice" is worth the "squeeze." The team's success relies on embracing a bias toward "yes," adapting to new information and hypotheses, and hiring for ownership. To overcome challenges, they channel their inner MacGyver, stepping outside their comfort zone and seeking solutions from unconventional sources. As the team grows, it becomes essential to find and cultivate a supportive village of colleagues who can provide valuable guidance and assistance. The journey is marked by growth, learning, and overcoming obstacles, with the ultimate goal of driving real impact and achieving success.

To build loyalty among customers and help them experience the full value of a product, it's essential to uncover the activation steps in the product. These are the actions that guarantee customers will start seeing value in the product and stick around. The key to getting this right is to know what the key actions are for your product, starting with the steps taken by your most successful customers. Activation varies from product to product, and companies often focus too narrowly on activation within the first 14 days of a customer's life cycle. Instead, it should be approached as a continuous process that happens long after a customer's trial ends, and involves individual feature activation to help customers see value in different areas of the product.

The role of the sales development representative (SDR) is evolving as automation technology like chatbots enables them to focus on higher-value tasks such as understanding customer pain points and building relationships. SDRs are now incentivized to prioritize stage two opportunities, having conversations with prospects to confirm their use cases, rather than just passing along leads. This shift allows humans to take over tasks that bots excel at, while chatbots handle repetitive and routine inquiries, ultimately making SDRs more strategic assets to the sales organization.