Tag Archives: Customer Acquisition

customer success

Customer Success: Product Creators Need To Know The Customer’s Voice

by in Build TV, Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Product Development, Product Management, Software Development, , , , , , , , , 0 Comments

Customer success has become a key differentiator when it comes to building software products and retaining customers. Baking customer success into the product and its experience is key. Unfortunately, it has become a real challenge for many companies because silos start to form as a company grows, causing employees in various departments to become distanced from the end customer. Hence they lose connection to the customer and think less about the customer’s success. In this post, I’ll share some strategies for breaking down silos and ensuring customer success.

I am the self-appointed family travel agent. Though if you ask my partner and the rest of my family members they’d agree that I am the best person for the job.

Why?

Because over the years I have become adept at making sure I don’t overlook the details when planning a vacation—you know where the devil hides! And who wants the devil to turn up on their vacation?!

Unless of course, it’s a blue devil 😉

I take the time to read through ALL the descriptions and fine print, talk to customer support agents to find out if there are any additional fees, and make sure that family members who have accessibility needs like my 10-month-old baby and 82-year-old grandma will be taken care of.

Once I’ve done all this planning, I know I have truly earned my vacation 😉

Despite all my effort, there have been times when things didn’t turn out as planned. Like the time I booked a home in India only to find out that the address was incorrect. The host mixed the street name with the city name. We would have had to drive 3 hours after 24+ hours of travel, but I called customer support and they resolved the issue for us quickly.

Elements of customer success

It was a positive customer support experience: responsive, seamless, and efficient. As a result, I continued using that service to book my travel, knowing that if something screwy happened I could count on them next time.

But there are other companies whose customer support agents place me on hold—for more than a few minutes. When the agent returns, they tell me that I’ve reached the wrong department. Then they transfer me to the “correct” department. Once the transfer is complete, I have to repeat what I told the first support person to the second support person, all the while hoping that they can help me resolve the issue. They can’t. When I look at how much time I’ve spent, and the exorbitant fee or unreconcilable charge, I am frustrated and vow to never do business with them again!

I know I’m not alone.

No one likes being at the receiving end of a bad customer support experience

It’s easy to place blame on customer support, but it’s not their fault because the problem originated somewhere else—when the product or service’s feature was being created.

Someone designed the experience in a way that wasn’t particularly customer friendly, and then it became a challenge to change the experience because of the silos that formed in the company between teams: sales, marketing, product, engineering, and customer support.

At the start of a company, teams are usually flat and highly collaborative, but over time, silos start to form, slowing things down, making it hard to innovate, and distancing teams from their customers.

How silos stop customer success

Is it even possible to slow or stop them from forming? And to enable everyone across teams a chance to interact with customers?

Well in today’s episode of Build we’re going to answer these questions and more. We’ll show how silos form of overtime, some best practices for keeping silos at bay, and what to do once they have formed to break them down.

To help us out I’ve invited Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré who is a B2B SaaS Consultant with 20+ years of experience in online marketing, and a champion for customer success.

As you tune into today’s episode you’ll learn the following from Nichole Elizabeth:

  • Why everyone on a team including software developers and engineers should have a chance to interact with customers, not just people who are on the customer support, sales, and marketing teams
  • How to empower teams to break down silos, and a framework for evaluating experiments and features that factor in constraints
  • When to automate and when to interact with customers
  • How silos form over time, how to avoid them, and what to do once they’ve formed
  • Why when building B2B products it’s important to focus on making your customers successful not happy
  • Why you need to rethink off-boarding customers and make it easy for them to leave

“When everyone on the team is aware of the voice of the customer, everyone is super excited about what is going on (with the product).

If you really want to stand out right now it isn’t pricing, it’s team alignment and customer experience.” — Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré

Prefer to listen to the episode?

Listen on iTunes here or listen on Stitcher here.

Check out the resources Nichole Elizabeth mentions on the show:

Challenges of Getting Early Adopters, Acquiring Customers & Monetizing

by in My Startup, Product Development, Startups, , 4 Comments

I’ve gotten some requests recently to write a post on how we’ve gotten early adopters at my startup BizeeBee and how we got them at Mint.  I hate to burst everyone’s tech bubble but there is no secret for getting early adopters.  I also want to address two concepts in this posts getting early adopters vs. methods for customer acquisition.  The reason for the dichotomy is that an early adopter is essentially a product tester and product evangelist.  They will stick around forever and are highly critical to the success of your business because they promote your product, but to me they are not really customers.  Why?  Because early adopters are people whom you get by talking to them directly and they help you build out the alpha/beta versions of your product. They’re loyal, and will give you lots of feedback. Customers are the people you pay to acquire through advertising, struggle trying to keep engaged, churn through, and whom early adopters get to buy your product through word of mouth marketing. Keep reading to learn more about getting early adopters.

Why do you want early adopters? And how to do you get early adopters?

Because early adopters actually prove product/market fit.  Your early adopters are the folks who are going to use your product, give you honest feedback, and will wade through bugs and various iterations.

First you need to figure out who you’re trying to solve a problem for by creating a persona.  Then you need to get out, show them your prototype (preferably one that is paper-based), and then ask them to try out the actual prototype.  Drop-off point #1, people  are busy…  You’ll get a lot of “sure contact me when it’s ready” or “send me access to a demo”.   In reality you need to talk to a lot of folks before you can even get one to respond, play with the product, and give you feedback, which by the way is the whole point of getting early adopters!

The key to getting more early adopters is to think like one.  Figure out where these folks hang out (online and offline), what they read, where they learn about products, and who they learn about products from.  Then go out and talk your product up in these channels.  What you’ll most likely hear is what we heard at BizeeBee a bunch of: “No, we’re not interested.”  So we changed our approach, instead of trying to sell the product to people we started asking “Why don’t you like our product?  Who do you think would be interested in trying this out?” And that’s when things got interesting…

We got some “Well I know this guy in New Orleans who just opened a small studio…” and a “Oh my studio is too big, but our second studio is relatively small…”

Now of course we get “Well I really need this for my vertical, when is it going to be out?” Hook, line, and sinker 🙂

The final point I’ll make about early adopters is that they’re great for testing out the product’s concept, workflows, and positioning in the market.

And now the challenge begins…

How do you get customers?

When I first moved to the Bay Area in 2004 I’d heard buzz words like social and viral, because Facebook was dominating the market in terms of growth and there were social networks galore.  Now 7 years later I hear countless stories from startups who basically talk about how they hustled by iterating on the product, and finding the right customer base to target until they saw traction like Airbnb and Square.

At Mint we acquired customers through a combination of AdWords, InfoGraphics, and PR in print (blogs, magazines, newspapers, etc.).  PR was the most significant channel but also the most expensive approach, so I don’t know if I’d advocate it for every early stage startup.

What’s more interesting is the approach we took and how we explored various channels, measured the results, measured engagement, and then looked to see a correlation between engagement and monetization.  IMHO you don’t really have a customer until you monetize off of them.

We monetized off of lead gen, which is one tactic amongst a wide array.  The good news is that unlike the early to mid-2000s when everyone was giving away their product in hopes of  making money off of advertising and users were use to everything being free, nowadays users are willing to pay for things on the interwebs, but only for things they absolutely can’t live without…

Acquire first, monetize second?

Call me a capitalist but I’m not sure when the concept of going into business to give stuff away became the norm.  Yes I think you should pay to acquire a customer, that is of course the point of advertising and marketing, but this phenomenon of essentially giving away your product for free in hopes of luring a bunch of users, getting them hooked on the product, and then charging them seems silly to me.  That’s got to be the fastest way to make a hockey stick graph flip 180 degrees on its x-axis…  Even in a platform play there’s going to be a level of engagement (as in click throughs and conversions).   So what’s the point of having a 100k users if you can only monetize off of 1k or worse 1 of them?  You can of course build a cool product to sell it to someone else, in which case that should be your monetization scheme, i.e. exit strategy.

So to summarize:

  • Get some early adopters to fall in love, play with your product, and give you constant feedback.
  • Getting customers is going to be a bit of a shotgun approach, but measure each channel, and test which ones convert to paying.  Be quick about this unless your gut tells you that some channels take longer than others.
  • If you’re going to give something away for free you need to make up the cost of building it somewhere else.

Remember this is a hard process and it takes time.  But it gets easier if you create feedback loops, listen to what your early adopters and customers are telling you.  If the product sucks fix it, if the pricing is confusing make it clearer, if marketing is expensive look for less expensive channels, and if you aren’t building something that people want then figure out what they do want and build that!

Getting Your Startup Team to Understand Your Customer

by in My Startup, Product Development, Recruiting, Startups, 4 Comments

Its been 8 months since we launched our first product at BizeeBee.  When we launched we had 3 customers (yoga studios), they saw the value in what we were building, so much that one studio owner  worked very closely with me for almost year.  Since launching my desire to please customers hasn’t stopped.  The buzz bee and I spend nearly every week talking to customers either on Twitter, Facebook, via email, or on the phone.  I’m always asking for feedback on the product, improving how we react to bugs, and listening to their problems.  Why am I so obsessed with talking to customers?  And why do I care about their business?  Because no one on my team including myself has ever owned or managed a yoga studio!  I’ve worked behind the front desk, and seen how they operate, but I myself have never owned one.  Since none of us have lived the life of a studio owner and we’re designing a product for them, we have to learn to think like them.  Here’s how to cultivate the learning and get your team to understand who you’re building a product for:

1. Develop personas

Sure some would say this is easier said than done because at an early stage the customer is constantly evolving.  But if you’ve gotten some level of product/market fit you should have customers that are using your product everyday, or have some predictable rate of use.  Fortunately for us we have a core group that is using the product everyday, and I know this because I log into the admin I’ve built everyday to see what people are doing.  But here’s the next part that is hard for startup folks to do… pick up the phone and give customers a call.  Yes I know they’re busy, you’re busy, everyone is freakin’ bizee. But I’ve learned more about the nuanced ways in which people use our product by listening to them on the phone or watching them in person.  The other great thing is that once you’ve got them on the call you can learn more about their needs. Its finding out the needs that’s the key to developing personas.

To me a persona is a set of personality traits and problems that a person faces.  We currently have 3 personas that our product works well for, meaning they adopt our product and are relatively happy.  I know those who don’t fit the persona will drop off, and that’s fine too.  Here’s what I do with the persona:

  • I convey it to my team so they develop empathy.  Its that empathy that lets them design and build a product that actually meets the needs of the persona.
  • I use it when talking to potential customers.  When someone calls us, I ask them some pretty basic questions to see if they’re a match.  If they are I try to sell to them, if not I tell them they’d be happy with one of our competitors.
  • I put the personas in ALL of our marketing materials.  I want the world to know who BizeeBee is for and who it isn’t for so that I get a match.

2. Build a Community Brand So You Know What to Build

I’ve always had an issue with the vocal minority and using anecdotes to build features, to avoid it even being an issue I actually took sometime to create a customer feedback forum.  Our customers can post bugs, ideas, and vote up  features.  We use the forum as a guide for what gets built.  There have been a couple times when I have literally dropped everything to build a feature because I saw how popular it was and I was tired of losing leads.

I know there are a lot of founders out there who take a “father know’s best approach” to product development.  That works too.  The reason I chose the community route is because I saw that the people we’re catering to weren’t being heard by our competitors!  The other is that people who have a voice that is being heard are willing to contribute their ideas to improve the product and tell other potential customers about it!

Now the one caveat I will mention is that what gets built still needs to match the main persona.  And this is important, because then your team begins to understand the reason why they are building or refining one feature as opposed to another.

3. Let Ideas Simmer

One of the interesting things I’ve learned about the bees is that on average it has taken each one about 3 months to get into their groove.  By groove I mean building, selling, and communicating with one another.  As a founder you cannot rush this process.  I know it can be painful for them, but watching them go through the process and coaching them through it has actually been really rewarding for me as a founder.  People need time to absorb the vision, adjust to their environment, and let the ideas simmer before they really feel like they get what it is they are working on.  There will be moments of confusion and clarity.  What helps bring clarity is having your teammates talk to customers, read customer emails, and understand the dichotomy of who is and isn’t a customer and why (once again refer to #1).  There will also be a lot of “Why don’t we go after this new group?  Why did so-and-so not convert to a paying customer?”  Instead of answering these questions yourself have the last hire explain the answers.  You’ll be surprised by the results 🙂

So why is it so important that your team understands your customer, why not just have them shut up and build?  I’m no genius nor am I capable of coming up with solutions to every problem.  I’ll admit I need help selling, building, and running a company.  The more I communicate with my team the more they know what’s going on, and in turn can make educated decisions.  Having direct interactions with customers is even more powerful because part of the reward of being in an early stage startup is seeing that what you build actually matters to people and improves their lives, that’s the greatest motivating factor of all!

If you’ve enjoyed this post and want more one-on-one coaching on how you can get your startup team to connect with your customers then check out our Lean Product Development Course Learn more!