You need to understand your product usage at the deepest level before you can start using product-led strategies to drive positive business outcomes and, ultimately, identify your product’s biggest advocates and activate them. Remember Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs from grade school? Physiological needs, safety, belonging, all the way up to self-actualization? Well, there’s a version of that for building successful product-led organizations, too.
How can data driven content drive backlinks? I dug deeper into Glassdoor to better understand what content helped support their SEO / backlink growth. A few key trends stood out for me as it relates to the type of content that gets links: Make sure the data is helpful / useful, make the story evoke emotion, make the data exciting, and lots more.
When Stripe launched in 2010, dealing with payments online was painful. It required significant development work, working with banks and other financial institutions, passing multiple verification and compliance hurdles, and so on. Stripe came in with a vision to solve this problem. They focussed on going after developers — the main group of people involved in integrating payments. To achieve that, they knew they needed to provide a super simple solution that allowed developers to receive payments with as few lines of code as possible.
You’re launching a new product. How should you price it to maximize profits (optimal price -> optimal quantity sold -> maximum profit)? You have roughly 3 ways to figure that out: Sell it, ask potential customers “How much would you pay?”, or look at what similar products are selling for in the market. In an ideal world, everyone uses the first, most accurate method. In practice, most companies, market research firms, and consultancies use the last two methods.
To wrap up Women’s History Month, I wanted to take a moment to recognize nine amazing women who are changing the game in sales – a field traditionally dominated by men. These women show us everyday what it takes to lead their teams and companies while also building and supporting the next generation of sales leaders; so we asked them to spill their secrets.
Addressing every stage of the customer journey creates a never-ending to-do list for marketers at PLG companies (from tackling onboarding, customer acquisition, lifecycle messages, referrals, churn, and more — not to mention optimizing all the things!). But the cold reality is that you have limits on time and resources.
Back in November I started writing about why forward-thinking SaaS companies are shifting to usage-based models. While many of the most successful public and private SaaS companies were already usage-based, there wasn’t a clear playbook on the complexities of scaling a usage-based business. I’ve learned a bunch more about usage-based pricing since that first artice.
The question we always go back to is: “Will this be a good experience for our customers?” And it’s the reason why we don’t buy technology when we want to deliver a new product to our customers. We build it. When two completely different systems are cobbled together after an acquisition, the burden of making them work together is foisted onto the customer. We focus on five foundational elements that span all of our products, and we work at improving each one of them, all of the time.
Millions of people are visiting Glassdoor properties every single day. And employers are spending millions to reach them. So how did they do it? They focused on weaving together the biggest story possible surrounding their brand. Events. Webinars. Blog posts. Academia. Social. Analyst relations. And even influencer activation… Were all a part of the strategy for Glassdoor to dominate the market.
You’re in charge of choosing a new piece of automation software for your company. The first link you click on google has a beautifully designed website. The images show attractive young people smiling in a chic office space. Despite lacking some key features, you’re impressed by the design and eager to give it a try. You go to the next search result. The website doesn’t tickle your aesthetic fancy as much as the first, but it checks all your boxes and is slightly cheaper than the first. Which do you choose?
For those of us working in tech, it’s easy to become so enamored with what we’re working on that we fail to see the customer’s reality, and the drivers that lead them to think about not only not renewing their subscription, but also unsubscribing completely. To tackle a low SaaS renewal rate, it’s imperative to understand the common reasons why renewals don’t happen. Think of this as a 101 class if you’re a small SaaS startup, and as a refresher if you’re working on a larger, more well-known SaaS product.
Buying journeys are no longer linear. In fact, they are more like “journeys” these days with lots of “touchpoints” (i.e. site visits, form fills, social media interactions) as well as random distractions and interruptions. While the discovery phase (when your target customers are still researching their options) may often be out of your control, is there a way to shorten your site visitors’ buying journeys once they land on one of your pages?
A headline isn’t just an article title. It’s a tiny window of opportunity to connect with your audience. It’s a subject line, a tweet, a h2, a video title – basically anything that aims to: Convey information succinctly, and encourage a desired action – ie. clicks, views, shares etc. But writing a good headline is no mean feat – especially today. So, what constitutes a “good” headline?
You are not alone in struggling to decide which features to put in which packages… yet again. Or debating with your leadership whether to add a 2nd or 3rd or 4th package. Or questioning what should be included in a package versus sold as an add-on. To help make these everyday decisions a little easier, I’m sharing my top 10 guiding principles for SaaS packages.
Ask a Product Designer what their job is and what you’ll hear is likely very close to what a Product Manager (PM) would say about their job: to know what customers need and to deliver it in the form of products that drive the business. We all want the same thing. But, we often have very different approaches to achieving these goals, which can lead to friction in our collaboration. By combining forces, we can build much better products.