2-min Product Marketing Insights: September 2023 Releases
Part 1 Release Date: Sep 14, 2023 (2 min read).
📈 4 MICRO [PRODUCT MARKETING] CASE STUDIES
[1] Assign Growth AEs to cross-sell/upsell and run renewals to scale Net Revenue Retention (NRR).
Outreach created a position called Growth AE on top of the traditional acquisition-focused AE (Account Executive). Part of the reason was to free CSMs to focus on product adoption efforts while getting great talent to fill the role of Growth AEs. This new position has a similar pay structure as AEs and works as a replacement for Account Managers.
[2] For early-stage startups: Shift focus and optimize for 3 down-funnel metrics once you're growing after a successful product-market fit.
The CMO of Virtualis uses an early-stage growth framework to drive marketing efforts for scaling ARR from zero to $1 million during the first year. The final component of this framework involves implementing strategies to increase customer lifetime value (CLTV), reduce churn, and lower customer acquisition cost (CAC). These metrics dictate the sustainability and profitability of your business.
[3] Leverage freemium to not just acquire new users but to also align your future customers with your company mission.
Substack wants every writer to have the tools to build an independent business. Therefore, the company offers their platform for free until the writer starts charging for their work.
[4] Expand into a new vertical after evaluating pull, timing, and network - in that order of importance.
Alloy Automation stumbled into the commerce vertical by tinkering with a few cases. As they decide which vertical to expand into, they're researching patterns in their website visitors by industry, prioritizing the industry with the most urgent use case, and looking at existing relationships within each new vertical.
📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS
“The SaaS Playbook: Build a Multimillion-Dollar Startup Without Venture Capital” by Rob Walling
[1] 4 cheat codes to grow any SaaS business fast - (i) Expansion Revenue: customers paying more as they see value via pricing tier upgrades, (ii) Dual Funnels: targeting a wide audience at a low price point and enterprise audience at a high price point, (iii) Virality: each new customer bringing at least a fraction of a new customer, (iv) Net Negative Churn: expansion revenue exceeding revenue lost from churn.
[2] The 3 HIGH/3 LOW framework gives you the minimum, highest impact SaaS metrics you should look at beyond MRR and monthly growth rate. You should push down the 3 low metrics - CAC, Sales Effort (includes your sales cycle duration & no. of touchpoints), and Churn. You should push upward the 3 high metrics - Annual Contract Value (ACV), Expansion Revenue, and Referrals.
[3] The 3-factor framework to filter and prioritize your marketing approaches (ex: SEO, content, affiliate, etc.) - (i) Speed: time to results, (ii) Cost: hard costs in dollars & cents, (iii) Scalability: can you scale this approach to reach more folks?
🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES
[1] “Did We Make a Good Pricing Decision?”
[2] Should You Launch Products During a Recession?
[3] What makes a strategy great
[4] The decline in Design (Thinking)
[5] What exactly are the economics of AI?
Part 2 Release Date: Sep 28, 2023 (2 min read).
📈 4 MICRO [PRODUCT MARKETING] CASE STUDIES
[1] Monitor user experiences and build a robust customer support mechanism to ensure early customer delight and supercharge sales.
Retool's pivot to inbound sales meant onboarding multiple early customers to a product with a "lot of bugs." Using a smart Slack automation system, the company could track user activities and intervene in real-time to offer support when users hit errors.
[2] Lean on a nuanced selling motion with great storytelling if your prospects are buying a 'process change' from you.
The CRO of Starburst Data suggests first identifying if your prospects are buying a process change (ex: devs changing the way they build code) vs. a product change (ex: upgrading iPhone models). A process change requires your sales team to educate before selling, plus it also deserves a lot of documentation, community focus, videos, and digital assets.
[3] Send monthly NPS surveys and focus on feedback over time from detractors to shape your future product strategy.
Zola (an online wedding registry) has better NPS scores than Amazon and the retail industry benchmark. The company favors detractors partly for their straightforward feedback and uses their comments to build 'themes' over time to improve its product.
[4] Don't use DAU/MAU as a default metric to gauge engagement; instead, align with the behaviors of your core user base.
DAU/MAU is a great metric to measure daily engagement in ads-driven social platforms like Facebook. Typical SaaS products like Salesforce, Dropbox show 'low frequency, episodic' use. A better engagement move would be to focus on your valuable hardcore users and see how you can produce more of them.
📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS
“The AI Dilemma: 7 Principles for Responsible Technology” by Juliette Powell and Art Kleiner
[1] There are 4 perspectives to consider for Triple-A (autonomous, analytic, and AI) systems: engineers, society/activists, government/regulators, and corporations. You may relate better to one or more perspectives. None of them are wrong, but they highlight the possibilities and issues that may surface to find solutions that work for everyone.
[2] Study these 3 factors if you're developing an AI system that generates text, images, or other content to prevent the spread of false or manipulative information: (i) the people who might use the system to mislead others, (ii) the way these people may act, and (iii) the new types of propaganda that might proliferate.
[3] Every company should hold critical discussions at 4 key moments during the R&D process for any AI system: "(i) when the model is being constructed, (ii) when people are given access to it, (iii) when content is disseminated, (iv) when end users recognize the impact their digital tools are having on their beliefs and behaviors."
🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES
[1] Why do users prefer certain designs? Insights from the landscape theory
[2] To Build Value in Tech, Build Different
[3] How to do product positioning (using abstractions)
[4] KPIs for Developer Relations Teams. You can’t optimize what you can’t measure!
[5] How we learn to recognize problems
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