October 2021 Summaries

At Intercom, building a sales team in a high-growth environment requires careful consideration of values, behaviors, and beliefs that enable the team to perform at its best. To grow a world-class sales team, the company focuses on creating a scalable hiring profile that reflects its core values and ways of working. The non-negotiables include being customer-first, personal, and valuing impact. The hiring profile should be clear but not rigid, allowing for diverse candidates who embody these qualities to join the team. Intercom looks for salespeople with specific skills such as respecting the product, being resilient, caring about more than just quota, and embracing ambiguity. The company adopts a consultative, value-based selling strategy that meets buyers where they are in the purchasing process, automating tasks like lead qualification through chatbots. Account executives work to deliver ROI-driven discovery, deeply understand products, build relationships with prospects, and manage trials. Intercom's sales approach enables prospects to move through the funnel as fast as they're ready to go, cultivating trust and building stronger relationships with customers. The company is still growing and looking for more salespeople to join its team.

The Intercom team is excited to attend Web Summit 2021 in Lisbon, connecting with the tech community after a long period of remote work. They will showcase their latest features and improvements, including their leading customer communication platform used by innovative companies worldwide. Des Traynor, co-founder of Intercom, will give a keynote on "How to grow up without growing old" and participate in a startup party hosted by AWS and Aircall. The team will also offer 1:1 mentorship opportunities with Des Traynor, and attendees can subscribe to the Intercom podcast for valuable insights into developing customer relationships at scale.

Intercom's principles for building product aim to create a unified approach across the organization, avoiding conflicting methods and encouraging alignment. The company has four top-level principles, five product design principles, and five engineering principles that guide their work. These principles help encode successes and avoid mistakes, ensuring that everyone who works on Intercom's product inherits shared values and adapts to their domain. The principles focus on problem-solving, design, and technical decision-making, emphasizing the importance of understanding the problem, thinking big while starting small, shipping quickly, delivering outcomes, connected modular systems, opinionated yet flexible designs, following fundamentals, making it feel personal, and what matters is what's shipped. By adopting these principles, Intercom aims to build software that is repeatable, scalable, and aligned with customer needs.

Customer engagement is a crucial aspect of recurring revenue growth, as it helps businesses build strong relationships with their customers and keep them coming back for more. To achieve effective customer engagement, companies need to craft a messaging strategy that resonates with their recipients on a regular basis, creating an outstanding customer experience that exceeds expectations. This involves adopting best practices such as getting to the point quickly, using a personal tone, making messages relevant, considering cultural differences, and speaking consistently. The anatomy of an effective message includes a clear subject line, a compelling call-to-action, and tailored content that addresses the recipient's needs and interests. Examples of effective messages include welcome messages, activation messages, milestone messages, feature announcements, feedback messages, and promotions and upsells. By incorporating these strategies into their customer engagement approach, businesses can improve customer loyalty, reduce churn, and ultimately drive growth and sustainability.

The SaaS industry is filled with advice on product metrics, but it's essential to identify the right questions to answer. Product metrics are data measurements that evaluate a product's success and inform business decisions. However, not all products are created equal, and traditional metrics like churn rate and conversion rate may fall short for product teams. To find the right metrics, collaboration between analytics and product development teams is crucial, starting with defining product goals and asking the right questions. The use of product usage concepts such as intent to use, activation, and engagement can help answer these questions. By developing impactful product success metrics and advocating for them across teams, organizations can make data-informed decisions that drive growth and improvement.

The Intercom Data Infrastructure team was facing growing demand due to the company's rapid growth, leading to a tipping point where they struggled with minor issues and had too much context switching. To address this, the team established principles to align their work, focusing on deliverability and quality over speed. They applied these principles to three main problems: prioritizing speed over problem-solving, knowledge silos, and under-prioritization of system health. By adopting "do less, better," pairing up engineers on projects, and making system health a top priority, the team was able to improve their efficiency, reduce context switching, and increase overall quality of work.

Support leaders play a crucial role in empowering their teams to deliver exceptional customer experiences by leveraging both automated and human support. Investing in human support is critical for businesses, as it directly impacts customer satisfaction and ultimately the bottom line. The rise of automation has changed the career landscape for many support professionals, but this also presents opportunities for growth and specialization within the field. By mapping out career paths, rethinking metrics to reflect the work being done by humans, and treating humans like humans, support leaders can create a culture that values their team members' skills and well-being, leading to improved engagement, retention, and overall customer satisfaction.

The Inter-Amigos employee resource group, founded by Latinx colleagues at Intercom, aimed to create a space for exploration of shared cultural background and elevation of voices. The group's first anniversary coincides with Hispanic Heritage Month, which they celebrate with events such as Cafecitos and speaker series. Through the past year, the team has learned valuable lessons on building community, including gathering member feedback, welcoming different approaches, and not assuming everyone wants the same thing from the community. As a result of their efforts, Inter-Amigos has built a solid foundation for the future, with a renewed leadership group and executive sponsors to champion their ERG across Intercom. The team is excited about the future and plans to continue creating spaces to connect through various events and activities.

Saying no to customers can be challenging, but it's essential for building a successful product. The key is to communicate the decision effectively, without being too personal or robotic. Explaining why the "no" is necessary can help soften the blow and reassure the customer that their needs are still heard. Involving the customer in finding alternative solutions can also strengthen the relationship and provide a positive outcome. Focusing on the job to be done rather than the "no" itself can help shift the conversation towards a solution-oriented approach. Breaking up with customers who no longer align with the product's goals is sometimes necessary, but it should be done with empathy and understanding. Finally, having empathy for both sides - the customer and the company - is crucial in making these conversations confident and positive.