The art of sales has evolved dramatically with the rise of the Internet. Today, modern buyers have access to vast amounts of information about your product, competition and the market. With a Google search, buyers can compare product features, pricing options and more. Information is both a blessing and curse.
Your customers and teammates want to be the hero, so the greatest opportunity is to help them get there; be the Yoda to their Skywalker. Most of us see ourselves as the hero. We need to save our customers to win them over. We need to save our teammates and direct reports to add value. The best products and leaders recognize this nuance and make an ever-lasting impact.
Collecting customer feedback is crucial to making smart product decisions, but it can be time-consuming for both our team and our customers. This might mean compromising on production speed, or on customer satisfaction if our users feel they’re being contacted too frequently. Here are three tips for collecting customer feedback quickly and efficiently.
Whether you’re doing content marketing in-house or as an outside consultant, you’re inevitably going to get asked, “What’s our ROI from content?” Or, if you’re just beginning your content marketing efforts, “What can we expect our ROI from content to be?” The first step to measuring your return on investment is to choose a content marketing metric that actually has value.
Every SaaS entrepreneur knows it can be difficult to execute a significant business pivot. Yet the reward may be worth it. Vimeo CEO Anjali Sud shares how a pivot from targeting B2C creators to the B2B market put the company on the path to success. In 2017, Vimeo was targeting consumers and creators. It was known as the “indie YouTube.” However, that space was too difficult to dominate, and customer feedback and behavior signals indicated that the B2B market would be the better path.
While great ideas are sexy and exciting, that’s not what’s going to change the trajectory of your business and uncover that hidden opportunity you were looking for. Sorry to inform you, but there are no silver bullets. It’s easier to believe that Dropbox’s growth success came from one idea about a referral program — but they fail to mention the hundreds of interactions required to achieve such a level of customer satisfaction.
Generating a new pipeline is the biggest challenge for marketing teams. Solving it is more than marketing tactics. 5 things the best marketing teams do: The ‘how we will grow’ model, What swings do I make?, Choosing > Prioritizing (People often think the hard part about strategy is prioritization. But prioritization doesn’t reduce the size of the list, it simply orders it.), Operating models to grow fast, Hire Talent vs. Everything.
Product Qualified Leads (PQLs) are users who signal their buying intent based on product usage rather than just traditional marketing or sales qualification. Data consistently shows that PQLs convert at extremely high rates - often 15-30% - and are far more valuable than MQLs. The benefits of a PQL strategy include: Higher free to paid conversion, faster and more efficient sales process, tighter alignment between product <> sales, and clear north star for product growth efforts.
Early in my career, one of the issues I struggled with more than I should have was figuring out how to price my company’s product. Throughout the entirety of my first company’s existence, our pricing constantly fluctuated. In retrospect, what I didn’t realize was that my struggle to find the “perfect price” was a warning sign my company was going to fail. It meant I’d built a product before I knew what market I was going to sell it to.
Last month, we promised the full onboarding case study of Blinkist if enough people asked. Turns out 983 people requested it! This case study shows how Blinkist onboards new users, and how one simple psychology framework could to improve your user onboarding (and retention).
There are roughly three and a half billion Google searches made every day. Consumers begin their journey with the tool that many of us use hundreds of times a day. Thus, the connection to revenue becomes clear — it starts with search. A website is often the first, and most lasting, impression customers will have of your organization. Here are some strategic actions marketers should take to ensure their online properties are optimized for the search-first age.
How many times have you Googled “effect vs. affect”? Looked up what an oxford comma is? Probably more than you would like to admit. But don’t beat yourself up, companies are hoping you forget so you will rely on Google instead of your own brain. Entire marketing strategies are built on the premise that we are going to forget something we just read. Grammarly has built an impressive $35M+ content moat based partly on this simple fact.
I took some time off. And made a masterpiece. I wanted to make the site you open up every time you’re writing new copy. All free. It’s a deep sea. Dive in. Filter to find what you’re looking for. Hover over each example to see why it works.
As the old adage goes, you have to spend money to make money – SaaS businesses are no exception. Arguably the most important spend decision SaaS operators make is focused on acquiring customers. Collectively, these expenses are referred to as Customer Acquisition Costs, or CAC for short. CAC encompasses all of the sales and marketing costs that a business has to shell out to land a single new customer. While CAC is accepted as a cost of doing business, it should not be a blank check for your sales & marketing team.
I often see designers make interaction patterns that can’t be found anywhere else because “it’s cool”. Many of us designer have a strong creative urge. But, if there’s one takeaway from this article, that is —please please don’t re-invent the wheel when there’s an existing pattern you can reuse. Product design is all about creating tools for people to use. It needs to be utilitarian first and foremost. It’s not art.