Have you heard of the term “bus factor”? If only one or two people hold all the knowledge and expertise about your growth tools, your bus factor is dangerously low. This means that if they were to leave—whether by finding a new job, taking a long vacation, or, as the term suggests, getting hit by a bus—your team could face major setbacks.

Let's face it: team churn happens. People move on to new opportunities, life changes, or sometimes they just need a new challenge. But when someone leaves, especially someone who's been trained on your growth tool stack, it can feel like a bomb just dropped in the middle of your team. Suddenly, the person who knew the ins and outs of your critical tools is gone, and you're left scrambling to fill the gap.

Your technology team has probably developed a number of different strategies to ensure that the bus factor is not so low - but that’s for the tech stack. Many companies neglect to think about this concept when it comes to their growth stack.

So let me ask you this. How many tools are in your growth tool stack? 3? 5? 7?

And just to be clear these are the types of tools that make up your growth tool stack:

• Marketing Automation Tools that comprise ways to send messages (emails, SMS, etc) to your customers.

• Integration Tools that connect your growth tools together. This can be Customer Data Platforms, ELT or Reverse ETL Tools, Automation tools like Zapier and Make.

• Product Analytics tools that help you understand what is happening in your product and how customers are interacting with it.

• In-Product Activation tools that use no-code approaches to present messages to your users while they are inside your product.

• Advertising platforms like Facebook and Google Ads.

• Advertising analytics tools that help you to determine which campaigns are most effective.

• Lead Scoring and Data Science tools that allow you to determine best fit leads and customer to act upon

• Other tools that are integrated with your growth tools like a CRM and a Data Warehouse.

And how many people in your team are sufficiently adept at each of these tools in your stack? Are you starting to understand this challenge? So, how do you future-proof your growth stack against this inevitable churn?

Risk of Departure Metric

It starts with understanding your team’s proficiency in each tool. Let’s dig in further to this analysis. This metric evaluates the impact on the team's proficiency and overall productivity if a particular individual were to leave. Here's a step-by-step framework to calculate this risk:

1. Assess Individual Contribution

Determine each team member’s contribution to the team's proficiency with each tool. This involves evaluating their proficiency levels and the criticality of the tools they are proficient with.

2. Identify Critical Tools

Identify the tools that are most critical to the team's success and the proficiency required to manage them effectively.

3. Evaluate Team Coverage

Assess how well the remaining team members can cover the skills of the departing member. This involves looking at their proficiency levels in the critical tools.

4. Calculate Risk Score

Develop a formula to calculate a risk score based on the above factors.

Step-by-Step Calculation:

1. Define Proficiency Levels:

2. Create a Skills Matrix:

3. Assign Weights to Tools:

4. Calculate Weighted Scores:

5. Calculate Total Contribution per Member:

Sum the weighted scores for each team member across all tools.

6. Evaluate Team Coverage:

Determine the coverage by the remaining team members for each tool if one member leaves.

7. Calculate Risk Score for Departure:

For each team member, calculate the risk score based on their total contribution and the team's ability to cover their skills. A higher score indicates higher risk.

Risk Score Formula:

Example Calculation for Member 2:

1. Total Contribution of Member 2: 40

2. Average Coverage by Remaining Members for Each Tool:

   • Tool A: (3 + 2) / 2 = 2.5

   • Tool B: (4 + 5) / 2 = 4.5

   • Tool C: (2 + 4) / 2 = 3

   • Average Coverage: (2.5 + 4.5 + 3) / 3 = 3.33

3. Maximum Proficiency Level: 5

Repeat for each team member to determine the individual risk scores.

What’s Next?

By using this risk score metric, you can quantitatively assess the impact of a team member's departure on the team's overall proficiency and identify areas where cross-training or additional hires may be necessary to mitigate potential risks.

The next step you will take is to figure out how to mitigate this risk. Unlocking Growth can help bring your team up to speed, not just with the understanding and use of each tool, but with the growth methodology and mindset needed to power your growth team. Learn more about our Customer Activation Rocketship program.

In the fast-paced world of sales, time and efficiency are paramount. Every lead represents a potential opportunity, but not all leads are created equal. Enter lead scoring—a transformative strategy that enables businesses to prioritize leads, optimize sales efforts, and ultimately, boost conversion rates. By bifurcating your sales process through lead scoring, you can unlock significant value, enhancing both productivity and profitability.

What is Lead Scoring?

Lead scoring is a systematic approach to ranking prospects based on their potential value to the organization. This ranking is typically derived from a combination of explicit data (e.g., demographics, firmographics) and implicit data (e.g., behavior on your website, engagement with emails). The result is a score that helps sales teams determine which leads are most likely to convert into customers.

The Mechanics of Lead Scoring

Lead scoring models can be simple or complex, depending on the business's needs and resources. Common factors include:

• Demographics: Age, job title, industry, and company size.

• Behavioral Data: Website visits, email opens, content downloads, and social media interactions.

• Engagement Levels: Frequency and recency of interactions with your brand.

• Firmographics: Company size, revenue, and location.

Using these factors, each lead is assigned a score, which can be adjusted as more information is gathered.

Bifurcating Your Sales Process

Bifurcation in sales involves dividing leads into different categories based on their scores and tailoring your approach accordingly. Here's how lead scoring aids in this process:

1. High-Scoring Leads: These are your hottest prospects. They show strong buying signals and align closely with your ideal customer profile. For these leads, immediate and personalized attention is crucial. A direct approach from a senior sales representative can expedite the sales cycle and increase the likelihood of conversion.

2. Low-Scoring Leads: These leads may require more nurturing before they are ready to buy. Automated marketing efforts, such as drip email campaigns and targeted content, can keep these leads engaged until they show stronger buying intent.

3. Middle-Tier Leads: These leads fall somewhere in between. They are interested but not yet committed. Personalised but lower-touch strategies, like periodic check-ins and invitations to webinars, can help move them down the funnel.

The Value of Lead Scoring in Sales Bifurcation

1. Improved Efficiency: By focusing sales efforts on high-scoring leads, sales teams can spend their time more effectively, reducing wasted efforts on leads that are unlikely to convert.

2. Higher Conversion Rates: Personalised attention to high-value leads increases the likelihood of closing deals. Studies show that companies using lead scoring see significant improvements in conversion rates.

3. Better Customer Relationships: Tailoring your approach based on lead scores ensures that each prospect receives the appropriate level of attention and nurturing, fostering better relationships and customer satisfaction.

4. Sales and Marketing Alignment: Lead scoring bridges the gap between sales and marketing teams. Marketing can focus on generating and nurturing leads, while sales can concentrate on closing high-potential prospects.

5. Data-Driven Decision Making: Lead scoring provides valuable insights into what characteristics and behaviors are most indicative of a potential sale. This data can inform future marketing and sales strategies, leading to continuous improvement.

Implementing Lead Scoring

To implement lead scoring effectively:

1. Define Your Ideal Customer Profile: Understand who your best customers are and what characteristics they share.

2. Identify Key Behaviors: Determine which actions indicate strong buying intent.

3. Assign Scores: Develop a scoring system based on these criteria.

4. Integrate with CRM: Use a CRM system to automate and track lead scores.

5. Regularly Review and Adjust: Continuously refine your scoring model based on performance data and feedback.

Conclusion

Lead scoring is not just a tool; it’s a strategic approach that can revolutionise your sales process. By bifurcating your sales efforts based on lead scores, you ensure that your team’s efforts are directed where they are most likely to yield results. This targeted approach not only improves efficiency and conversion rates but also enhances customer relationships and aligns your sales and marketing teams toward common goals. Embrace lead scoring, and watch your sales process transform into a finely tuned engine of growth and success.

In today's competitive landscape, businesses constantly seek innovative ways to scale and grow. Central to this ambition is the growth team, a cross-functional group dedicated to driving user acquisition, engagement, and retention. A common debate among companies is whether growth team members need to possess technical skills. While there's no one-size-fits-all answer, exploring the advantages and disadvantages of technical expertise within growth teams can provide valuable insights.

The Case for Technical Skills

1. Data-Driven Decision Making

Technical growth team members can effectively leverage data analytics tools to make informed decisions. They can analyze user behavior, identify trends, and measure the impact of various growth initiatives. This data-driven approach ensures that strategies are not based on intuition but on solid evidence, enhancing the likelihood of success.

2. Experimentation and Optimization

Growth often involves running A/B tests and other experiments to identify the most effective tactics. Technical skills enable team members to design, implement, and analyze these experiments without relying heavily on other departments. This autonomy accelerates the experimentation process, allowing the team to iterate rapidly and find optimal solutions.

3. Seamless Collaboration with Engineering

Technical growth team members can bridge the gap between the growth and engineering teams. Their understanding of both domains facilitates smoother communication and collaboration, ensuring that growth-related projects are executed efficiently. This synergy can lead to quicker implementation of features and improvements that drive growth.

4. Automation and Efficiency

Technical expertise allows growth team members to automate repetitive tasks and processes. Whether it's setting up automated marketing campaigns, creating scripts to analyze data, or building custom tools, automation can significantly enhance the team's efficiency and productivity, freeing up time for more strategic initiatives.

The Case Against Technical Skills

1. Diverse Perspectives

Non-technical growth team members bring valuable perspectives that might be overlooked by their technically-inclined counterparts. They often excel in areas such as creative thinking, customer empathy, and marketing strategy. These skills are crucial for crafting compelling narratives, understanding user needs, and designing impactful campaigns.

2. Collaboration and Specialization

A growth team that relies on diverse skill sets can foster a collaborative environment where each member brings their unique expertise to the table. Non-technical members can collaborate with technical colleagues to execute complex projects, ensuring that the team benefits from both strategic and technical insights. This specialization can lead to more innovative and well-rounded solutions.

3. Cost and Resource Allocation

Hiring highly technical growth team members can be costly. Depending on the company's budget and growth stage, it might be more feasible to hire a mix of technical and non-technical members. By allocating resources wisely, companies can build a balanced team that leverages external technical resources when needed, such as hiring contractors or using specialized software.

4. Focus on Core Competencies

Non-technical growth team members can focus on their core competencies, such as user research, content creation, and partnership development. By excelling in these areas, they can drive growth through creative and strategic initiatives that don't necessarily require deep technical knowledge.

Striking the Right Balance

Ultimately, the ideal composition of a growth team depends on the company's specific needs and goals. Here are some strategies to strike the right balance:

1. Cross-Training and Skill Development

Encourage cross-training within the growth team to develop a baseline understanding of technical concepts among all members. This can enhance collaboration and enable non-technical members to contribute more effectively to technical discussions. Unlocking Growth’s Customer Activation Rocketship course is a great baseline for both technical and non-technical team members.

2. Hybrid Roles

Consider hiring hybrid roles that combine technical and non-technical skills. For example, a growth marketer with basic coding skills or a data analyst with marketing experience can provide the best of both worlds, ensuring a versatile and adaptable team.

3. Leveraging External Resources

Utilize external resources, such as freelancers, consultants, and specialized software, to supplement the team's technical capabilities. This approach allows the team to access technical expertise as needed without incurring the cost of full-time technical hires. Unlocking Growth’s advisory services have helped many teams with backup knowledge and guidance to support teams in their growth strategies.

4. Continuous Learning and Adaptation

Foster a culture of continuous learning and adaptation within the growth team. Encourage team members to stay updated on industry trends, attend workshops, and participate in training programs. This commitment to growth and development ensures that the team remains agile and capable of tackling new challenges.

Conclusion

The question of whether growth team members need to be technical does not have a definitive answer. Instead, it hinges on the specific needs, goals, and resources of the company. While technical skills offer significant advantages in terms of data analysis, experimentation, and automation, non-technical skills are equally valuable for creativity, strategy, and user empathy. By striking a balance and fostering collaboration, companies can build a growth team that leverages the strengths of both technical and non-technical members, driving sustainable and impactful growth.

In the competitive world of SaaS (Software as a Service), metrics like monthly recurring revenue (MRR), customer acquisition cost (CAC), and churn rate often take center stage. However, there’s one crucial metric that frequently goes unnoticed but is vital for understanding customer behavior and optimizing growth strategies: Time to Conversion (TTC).

What is Time to Conversion?

Time to Conversion (TTC) in the context of SaaS measures the time it takes for a user to complete a desired action, specifically from signing up for a free trial or account to adding payment details and becoming a paying customer. This metric provides insights into the customer journey, highlighting the duration from the initial sign-up to the moment they commit financially.

Why is Time to Conversion Important for SaaS Companies?

1. Customer Journey Insights: TTC sheds light on the length and complexity of your customer’s decision-making process. Understanding this can help SaaS companies tailor their onboarding and engagement strategies to better guide users through the trial phase to conversion.

2. Revenue Forecasting: By analyzing TTC, SaaS companies can more accurately forecast revenue and cash flow. Knowing how quickly users convert to paying customers helps in predicting short-term and long-term financial performance.

3. Optimizing Onboarding Processes: A lengthy TTC might indicate issues within the onboarding process. By identifying these bottlenecks, companies can streamline onboarding to ensure users quickly realize the value of the product and are more likely to convert.

4. Customer Retention: A smooth and efficient conversion process can enhance customer satisfaction, leading to higher retention rates. Customers who quickly find value in a product are more likely to remain loyal and continue their subscription.

How to Measure Time to Conversion

Measuring TTC involves tracking the time from the initial sign-up for a free trial or account to the moment a user adds their payment details and becomes a paying customer. Here are the steps to effectively measure TTC:

1. Define Conversion Goals: Clearly outline what constitutes a conversion for your SaaS business. In this context, it’s the transition from a free trial user to a paying customer.

2. Implement Tracking: Use tools like Amplitude, Mixpanel, or your own product analytics platform to set up tracking for the defined conversion goal. Ensure you capture data from the initial sign-up through to the addition of payment details.

3. Analyze Data: Review the collected data to determine the average TTC for different user segments and marketing channels. Look for patterns and outliers that can provide deeper insights.

4. Optimize: Use the insights gained from TTC analysis to optimise your onboarding and engagement strategies. This might involve refining your onboarding process, enhancing user education, or improving communication strategies to nudge users towards conversion.

Case Study: Reducing TTC for a SaaS Company

Consider a SaaS company offering a project management tool that noticed a high drop-off rate during the trial period and a lengthy TTC. By analyzing TTC data, the company identified that users were struggling with the initial setup and understanding key features.

To address this, the company implemented several changes:

• Improved Onboarding Experience: Launched an interactive onboarding tutorial that guided users through the initial setup and showcased key features.

• Targeted Email Campaigns: Sent personalised email campaigns to trial users, highlighting the benefits of the tool and offering tips on maximising its use.

• In-App Messaging: Used in-app messaging to provide real-time assistance and encourage users to explore advanced features.

As a result, the company saw a 25% reduction in TTC and a 20% increase in conversion rates, demonstrating the power of focusing on this often-overlooked metric.

Conclusion

Time to Conversion is a powerful metric that provides valuable insights into customer behaviour and the effectiveness of onboarding and engagement efforts in SaaS companies. By understanding and optimising TTC, SaaS businesses can enhance the customer experience, improve conversion rates, and drive sustainable growth. In the competitive landscape of SaaS, those who pay attention to this unsung metric will have a significant advantage in creating efficient and effective growth strategies.

In the ever-evolving landscape of Software as a Service (SaaS), staying ahead often means harnessing the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to predict and preempt user behavior. Among the myriad of potential predictions, two critical areas stand out: likelihood to convert and likelihood to churn.

Understanding the Core Predictions

Likelihood to Convert

For any SaaS company, understanding the likelihood of a lead converting into a paying customer is paramount. By predicting conversion probabilities, businesses can tailor their marketing efforts, prioritize leads, and optimize their sales pipeline for maximum efficiency.

Likelihood to Churn

Equally significant is predicting the likelihood of churn – the rate at which customers discontinue their subscription. Identifying users who are at risk of churn allows proactive engagement, personalized retention strategies, and ultimately, the preservation of valuable recurring revenue streams.

The Data Behind Predictions

To effectively predict conversion and churn, SaaS companies need to leverage two primary types of data:

1. Firmographic Data

This includes information about the company itself – its size, location, industry, current technology stack, revenue, and more. Firmographic data provides crucial context for understanding a lead's or customer's potential value and propensity to convert or churn.

2. Behavioral Data

Behavioral data encompasses how users interact with the SaaS product. It reveals valuable insights into user engagement, feature usage, session frequency, and other behavioral patterns that can signal conversion intent or churn risk.

Challenges in Data Utilization

While the potential benefits of leveraging AI for predictive analytics are clear, the road to implementation is not without its challenges. One of the primary hurdles is determining the right tool or platform for conducting predictions. With a plethora of AI tools and frameworks available, selecting the most suitable one requires careful consideration of factors such as scalability, accuracy, ease of integration, and cost-effectiveness.

Furthermore, once predictions are generated, the challenge lies in translating them into actionable strategies that drive more conversions and reduce churn. It's not enough to merely forecast outcomes; SaaS companies must also implement targeted interventions based on these predictions to maximize their impact.

Leveraging Predictions for Actionable Insights

To ensure that predictions translate into tangible results, SaaS companies can adopt the following strategies:

• Personalized Marketing Campaigns: Tailor marketing messages and offers based on predicted conversion probabilities to effectively engage leads and nurture them through the sales funnel.

• Proactive Customer Engagement: Reach out to users identified as at-risk of churn with personalized incentives, product recommendations, or support resources to re-engage them and prevent churn.

• Defining Persona Cohorts: Segment users into distinct persona cohorts based on firmographic and behavioral characteristics. Customize conversion and retention strategies for each cohort to address their unique needs and pain points effectively.

Let Us Help You Harness the Power of AI

If you're a SaaS company looking to harness the power of AI for conversion and churn predictions but find yourself grappling with data challenges or unsure about which tool to use, we're here to assist. Our expertise in data management, AI modeling, and predictive analytics can streamline the process, enabling you to unlock valuable insights and drive business growth.

Conclusion

In the competitive landscape of SaaS, leveraging AI for predictions is not just a luxury but a necessity. By focusing on key predictions such as likelihood to convert and likelihood to churn, and harnessing the combined power of firmographic and behavioral data, SaaS companies can gain a competitive edge, optimize their operations, and ultimately, drive sustained success.

Ready to take your predictive analytics to the next level? Let's talk. Together, we can transform your data into actionable insights and propel your SaaS business forward.

Onboarding Canvas

The onboarding canvas is a very neat and structured framework to capture all the information required to allow a customer to have a seamless onboarding experience. This canvas details:

• Who the user is, and what is their intention with the product

• What the pains are for the user, and how the product solves this pain

• What are the key milestones (“initial value” and “activation”), and what are the steps to get there

• What events/actions that we want to track

• What are the indicators (good or bad) that signals a user is on their correct journey, or is deviating from the journey

As I was putting together my onboarding canvas, I realised we were really laying the foundation for success. I gained so much clarity from 1) being able to see everything on one page, and 2) stepping back and really defining the key milestones and the steps needed to get there. As a result of this clarity, I went back and revised my tracking plan, and events that I want to track. Previously I had taken a high level approach, forgetting that there are so many touchpoints for a customer with the product, and that it is so important to track the correct events at the correct intervals. 

Most importantly, this canvas helped me really think about what support should be provided to the customer if they have seemingly deviated from the intended journey. This neatly ties into another framework we were taught called the “bowling alley framework”.  As the name suggests, in a bowling alley, the intention is for the bowling ball to go straight down the middle, however, very often, new players will see their ball go straight into the gutter. In the product world, the intention is for the user to reach their initial value (the first aha moment) asap, however, many users do not get to that point. How many times have you signed up to something, played around for a few minutes, and decide not to continue with it? Too many times for me! So how does a business prevent this from happening? By putting “bumpers” or safeguards along the user journey. These can be either conversational (out-of-app) such as onboarding emails, or product based (in-app) such as product tours.  Ultimately even with these bumpers, there’s no guarantee the user will reach the initial value; and this is why analytics is so important! Analytics, if set up correctly, can inform businesses where exactly the user has dropped off, allowing them to constantly monitor and improve the user onboarding experience. I guess it’s a never-ending process of refinement because products evolve, users evolve or users change completely, but as the saying goes, prevention is better than cure! 

Initial value playbook

This flowed on from the onboarding canvas and it allowed me to have an overall picture of the different interactions by the different stakeholders (both user and system). The initial value playbook is essentially a swimlane diagram that outlines who does what in a given process, up to the point where the customer reaches the initial value. By drawing the interactions as flow diagrams, I could visually see how any upstream changes can impact the subsequent interactions. Additionally, I was able to design different email campaigns by seeing the decision trees based on the different paths a user undertakes. 

In-app engagement platform 

Another week, another tool! Last week we were introduced to the in-app engagement platform Appcues. This tool facilitates anything from getting started checklists, welcome messages, new feature pop-ups and tool-tips to name a few. I’ve always seen it on websites that I visit, but it never really crossed my mind how it was created, or the intention behind each engagement. To be honest, I’ve always viewed it as pesky pop-ups that I close almost immediately, but realising there is a science behind this is quite fascinating. I guess the way I see the in-app engagement platforms is like a warm embrace – I have walked into a room full of strangers and the host intentionally creates a supportive and inviting environment. 

It’s funny, I’m realising the way I’m learning about product-led growth is perhaps by relating these concepts to real life situations. I guess the idea of PLG is not completely new – there have always been components of it throughout time – but bringing it all together is the missing piece of the puzzle. I’m excited to put it all together and see it come to life at the end of this course! 

About Rocketship Scholars:

The Rocketship Scholars program offers participants special access to Unlocking Growth’s world leading SaaS Trial Rocketship program with course content and live coaching in theory and practical skills to grow your startup.

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Interestingly, I feel like the last two weeks were when all the pieces of the puzzle slowly came together. I feel that I have a much more developed understanding of what can and should be done in an increasingly competitive environment to drive product sales but at the same time, feel that I have only scratched the surface and there is still so much for me to learn! 

From my personal experience of working in international companies with hardware as their sales product, it has been eye opening to learn about the end to end customer journey and the way in which companies can automate multiple stages of that journey without compromising on customisation and manage to scale growth whilst optimising the customer journey experience. This course has really shown me that adopting a growth mindset can be transformative, so long as individuals are willing to explore this new way of thinking. 

This week, I felt that refining my initial value ladder was a huge win! After completing last weeks’ tasks and content, I was under the illusion that I had a solid customer funnel framework without realising there were so many more components to personalising my customer’s journey to initial value and activation. 

There were so many interesting concepts that solidified in my mind this week. In particular, working through the AppCues tool and the different in-product checklist features. I was fascinated by the level of personalisation that you can build into the onboarding experience, at scale, to make your product truly unique. Some examples of the in-product bump messages I created this week, that I’m super proud of are below:

Without any prior experience in marketing, product or growth, (but perceiving these areas to be manual and conventional) it is so interesting to learn, implement experiences that target the right users, at the right stage of their onboarding journey and be able to generate detailed reporting that allows me to quickly change and iterate the experience if its not delivering the impact I’m intending. 

In terms of areas of knowledge that I’m really keen to continue developing, interestingly, I’ve found that learning about these different tools, methods and ways of thinking has really piqued my interest to understand more about template language and the product objects they support. I’ve found myself googling a lot more and reading articles about different templating languages to expand my knowledge which has been super fun and interesting!  

With only a few more weeks of the course left, I’m so excited to pull all the different pieces of knowledge and tools together to experiment and for final activation!

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The Rocketship Scholars program offers participants special access to Unlocking Growth’s world leading SaaS Trial Rocketship program with course content and live coaching in theory and practical skills to grow your startup.

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“What’s your story? What makes you different from your peers?”

I always hear that everyone has their own path to follow, be it they’re in the same profession. Everyone has a story, but that’s not to say articulating your story or who you are is easy. 

If you think about it, it’s also an interview question “Tell me about yourself”. We’re taught, or at least I was, that we should talk a bit about our current role, scope, and accomplishments, but is that really the right way to tell someone what your story is? It’s standard, but I don’t think it’s the best way to articulate your story. You’re more than just your job and accomplishments. Your culture, parents, specific events, that a-ha moment… all that ties into shaping who you are and why you do what you do.

It’s so important to know who you are. Studies say it helps you build;

1. Confidence/Understanding of your worth

2. Understanding of others

I realised that the buddy program at the SaaS Trial Rocketship course where we catch up with a different buddy every week has been a great catalyst for me. Talking about myself with someone forces me to reflect and articulate different versions of stories. Sometimes I go back and think “Why did I say that?”, or at times “mm.. I just articulated a story of myself that I never thought about before”. I find that when I’m put in the spot… there’s new things that I discover about myself, and it helps in formulating my “story” and understanding who I am.

It’s been so fun being able to hear and learn about others too; what makes them different, things that make you go “WOW! I would love to be like that too”. I’m looking forward to more catch ups and chats with my cohort.

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The Rocketship Scholars program offers participants special access to Unlocking Growth’s world leading SaaS Trial Rocketship program with course content and live coaching in theory and practical skills to grow your startup.

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This week we focused on top of the funnel and ran through a case study. It was interesting to see a live case and how all the principles operated in practice.

On a high level, two things stood out to me: 

• No implementation is ever created equally

• If you don’t track it, you can’t measure it

As every project is different, managing the funnel with best practices and a flexible mind is crucial. I loved the practical tips that Audrey taught us, such as: 

1. Work backwards 

2. Use a blank slate

3. Use correct naming conventions

4. Be incremental with change

5. Plan with the future in mind

6. There’s a solution for everything

While these things might seem like no-brainers, these lessons come from 20+ years of working closely with teams. And it makes sense! It’s tempting to rush the process or build out a band-aid solution when you’re on a tight deadline. The irony is that planning with the future in mind and implementing change slowly saves time and money in the long run! So if you slow down at the start, it makes it easier to complete the marathon.

I am really enjoying how practical this part of the course is. Next week is analytics so I’m eager for that!

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The Rocketship Scholars program offers participants special access to Unlocking Growth’s world leading SaaS Trial Rocketship program with course content and live coaching in theory and practical skills to grow your startup.

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It’s been almost 1 month since the SaaS Trial Rocketship course started, and I can honestly say I have learnt even more than I expected to. I therefore thought this would be a good point to reflect and share with you the key highlights that I have faced so far on the Rocketship Scholar journey.

Highlights

🏫 The coaching sessions are great, and I look forward to them each week. They are interactive, and John is doing a really good job hosting them. 

👥 The scholars all seem very focused and motivated. It’s an honour being surrounded by such entrepreneurial and skilled people.

🧩I really enjoy the practical part of the course and seeing how all pieces fit together. It allows me to see the broader picture much better when I understand how campaigns and event data are related. It also shows how important it is to set up the event and tracking process properly for subsequent parts of the customer journey to work efficiently, and for being able to analyse each step.

🤖I got to refresh my Regex skills. They were a bit dusty, but came in useful when creating the tracking plan and properties for the track events.

The first month has gone really fast. I’m excited about the highlights and learnings so far. I also got to challenge myself which is what I was aiming to achieve from the course - ultimately that’s how you grow. I’m looking forward to taking the skills to the next level and seeing how all pieces fit together over the next 2 months. 🎓

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The Rocketship Scholars program offers participants special access to Unlocking Growth’s world leading SaaS Trial Rocketship program with course content and live coaching in theory and practical skills to grow your startup.

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Prior to this week's content, I believed my understanding of personalisation was above par. However, the deep dive into personalisation in Customer Journey Optimization has really shown the gaps in my knowledge. I had only really been using the basic personalisation techniques which included adding various user-level data such as first name, last name, company etc. I’ve now learnt that they don’t really add much value because everyone is doing them! We must go deeper into personalisation so we can actually add value to the users.

The section on computed traits was an eye-opener. When John defined computed traits and went into detail regarding how they work, I got many flashbacks of services/apps that are utilising computed traits in their efforts to personalise the product for me. Strava Achievements is a great example. Among my social circle, they‘ve been used for bragging rights, and the personalisation has led to us consistently using the app and even some mates downloading the app to get amongst the bragging rights to see who can be the local legend. 

It is clear to me how computed traits can play a powerful role in the adoption and promotion of a product. My brain is firing off on how I can use the different trait types within my organisation to deliver an even greater level of personalisation and take us to the next level.

About Rocketship Scholars:

The Rocketship Scholars program offers participants special access to Unlocking Growth’s world leading SaaS Trial Rocketship program with course content and live coaching in theory and practical skills to grow your startup.

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The biggest misconception I’ve had this week is that PLG is not just about offering free trials. Of course, it is the first strategy anyone thinks of when asked – “how do you get the product to sell itself? Let the people test the product for themselves”. In the physical world, it’s exactly the strategy adopted at Costco with the food stalls giving out samples – shamelessly I can definitely say it works! However, this week I’ve learnt that surprisingly, free trials by itself is not enough – there’s a whole suite of other strategies required to convert a potential customer – strategies like in-product onboarding, product analytics and self-service buying experience. It really is about creating a seamless customer journey, and putting customers first. Realistically, it is obvious all businesses should put customers first, but there are so many times when I questioned this when seeing businesses put in features they think are “cool”, but it actually creates a minefield for the customer. It’s an interesting dynamic – you need to put yourself in the mind of your customers, and question how you can improve their experience AND put yourself in the mind of your business in order to ensure profits. This journaling is great, I’m realising things that are beyond my narrow world of being the “developer”, the “data cruncher”. 

As I go through the exercises each week in this course, I really wished I had started this course with my own product, business idea, or already working in a startup. As I get to know more about my peers through my weekly 1:1s, the more I feel imposter syndrome. These wonderful people are actually reflecting and applying the learnings to real-life situations, whereas I am here being the studious person following instructions to a tee. Abraham was my buddy last week, and during our conversation, he said that I seem to be cruising through the course with no difficulty. I told him it’s only because I don’t have anything to customise the learnings to. Silly me, the product that I have chosen actually is a company that already adopts PLG strategies! I guess the way I can see it is that instead of customising the learnings, I can compare the PLG learnings in this course to what is adopted by the company, and other PLG companies out there. In a broader sense, my focus will be on learning, and not necessarily getting it right, or coming out of this course with an amazing PLG roadmap. I know if I can fully understand the learnings, I will have the knowledge and skills to apply it to a company down the track. 

You’ve got this Helena!

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The week started with a presentation stack around product-led growth. This was a great addition to the course, as convincing teams and stakeholders to invest in a restructure towards PLG can sometimes be the hardest part of the whole process. The slide deck spoke to the persona of an executive team, with key metrics around revenue, case studies, scale and opportunities for PLG. 

Continuing on from that presentation, we then looked at some important first steps.

1.Understanding your persona

This step I think is critical in understanding who it is you’re speaking to, and ensuring that everything you do is built to help this persona. I found the questions really insightful to build an accurate portrayal of key messaging elements. Especially in comparison with general persona’s I’ve seen, which talk about, for example, what hobbies does your persona have, which to me seems irrelevant to the messaging. 

2.Preparing copy and images for communication

This is a great step, as one of the core aspects we are going to iterate on, seen also in our funnels, is emails. It clearly outlines the importance of marketing in helping achieve customer onboarding and PLG. The AI copy tool was also a great addition and I had a lot of fun playing around with our messaging, using Copy.ai.

HowToo

All in all, this week was a nice way to take a break from technical implementation and ensure we clearly understood the crucial points of:

• Why PLG?

• Who are we messaging and how can we improve this messaging?

• What is the purpose and benefit of these new tools?

I think it's a very important lesson, that Segment is not the tool for PLG, it just makes it easier to implement downstream tools, such as Amplitude and Customer.io.

Great pace, and excellent course so far! Thank you, you have made these processes really easy. 

This was written by Jasmine Brunsdon, Product Manager at HowToo.

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With my background in customer journey and funnel analytics it was therefore a no-brainer to join the Product Led Growth related SaaS Trial Rocketship course. I was interested in learning more about how to apply the techniques in a start-up environment, and learn more about product analytics. The course itself is not the only tool I use for career development, though. Reading books is also a great way for self-improvement.

Self-improvement can be defined as the process of continuously assessing your life goals, values and building your skills and qualities to reach your goals. By allowing you to explore key areas of self-improvement, you’re more likely to feel fulfilled in your personal and professional life. And it doesn’t stop just there.

Companies will also benefit

Self-improvement and career development is not only important from the individual’s point of view. It’s also important for businesses and organisations, then fostering a growth culture has numerous benefits. It increases innovation, employee engagement and satisfaction. A Better Buys survey found that retention rates are 34% higher for employees who have access to development opportunities. It’s also important in attracting talent. Job ads mentioning ‘growth mindset’ fill 1.5 times faster than jobs which lack growth mindset language. That rate increases to five-fold when phrases such as “learn new things”, “love learning” and “strive” are included. 

To create the best learning environment companies need to understand the career and personal goals of the individuals. Transparent and honest communication is therefore key. Companies can encourage a growth mindset by clearly communicating the benefits it will have for the employee and their career goals, and how it relates to promotion opportunities and performance reviews.

Offering the right types of development opportunities is important as well. Since individuals often have different preferences, companies should offer a variety of options. Examples include training, reimbursing courses and books, attendance at conferences, internal workshops, and integrating learning time into daily routines. Taking the time and effort to create this will pay off for both the company and their employees, then a growth mindset culture will set everyone up for success.

Motivation to learn must come from within

We can get motivated by external factors, such as praise and money. But ultimately the motivation to learn has to come from within. When we are self-aware and know where we want to go, then learning and self-development becomes a tool to achieve our goals. We get motivated to learn the tools needed, and it can even have a spiralling effect as it opens up a world of new possibilities.

There are many small tweaks we can do in our lives if we really want to make a change, succeed and achieve our goals. A few hours per week for self-development might be one of the best and cheapest investments you can do.

Sadly, my mum passed away in 2003, but the older I get the more I realise how strong she was. I’m very impressed and forever grateful for all the things she has taught me about lifelong learning. As Loyal ‘Jack’ Lewman said “Never stop learning; for when we stop learning we stop growing”. 

Note: Some of this content is based on a LinkedIn article which I wrote in March 2022.

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Truth be told, I still watch videos on what Product Managers do on YouTube, whether it be Webinars, interviews, or even Vlogs. I think it hinges on a need to reassure myself that what I’m doing is best practice, I am doing enough and a good job as a product manager. 

And… no it didn’t help with my confidence. 

Perhaps it’s because of my obsessive, overly curious personality that I always think I’m not doing enough. I want to do everything that other product managers do. The more things I discover other product managers do, the more impatient I get realising I can’t practise them at work.

That’s why I find being part of the Rocketship Scholars program nothing short of a privilege. It’s been so fun learning and putting everything into practice with the different tools we have to trial our ideas. I must admit it’s difficult and I’m struggling to juggle between work and study – but do I still think I’m not doing enough even after joining the course? Sometimes. 

The more I reflect the more I understand that it’s not the amount of things you do, but whether you are doing things to reach your goals, or are you just aimlessly doing as much as you can to fill up time? The same goes with work. You can’t do everything, but keep the main thing the focus. 

For 2022, outside of my work, my focus is on absorbing as much as I can from the SaaS Trial Rocketship course so I can help whichever company I’m working for to create a Product led culture. This focus has certainly helped calm the thought of “not doing enough”. 

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In the first few weeks, I struggled with the deep dive into the technical aspects and I was particularly keen to understand the why and how. Taking a step back this week to understand the key drivers of Product Led Growth has been incredibly eye opening as well as formative in allowing me to piece my understanding together. 

I found it interesting to learn the three tidal waves that have given PLG such momentum; those three factors once articulated make so much sense. It was particularly insightful to learn that B2B buyers want to self-educate rather than talk to sales representatives to learn about products and services and when combined with the knowledge that product experiences have become an essential part of the buying process, I feel this is a really powerful insight and has transformed the way I think about customer acquisition, conversion and expansion. 

I also really enjoyed learning about and reading more into the Bowling Alley Framework. Without any prior experience in understanding customer onboarding and conversion, it was really enlightening to wrap my head around a structured framework that guides and streamlines the customer onboarding journey to convert customers to paid users which is always the most challenging part! 

I had a real aha! “This is so cool and crazy” moment when I was playing around with the copywriting tools. As naive as it may sound, I didn’t realise that there were tools in the market that could provide personalised content. I had always marvelled at social media content/blog posts etc because it seemed quite difficult to me to have to come up with original, inspiring or engaging content. Playing around with Copysmith and CopyAI blew my mind in relation to the AI that exists in SaaS tools to assist with this.

Challenges - I really enjoyed the theory presented this week which helped me tie together the technical aspects. The User Persona activity really challenged my way of thinking to encourage me to dig deeper to understand the real challenges customers and users of my product are facing. I’m looking forward to more of these challenging moments which guide me to think differently! 

This week in particular has allowed me to better understand the concepts I’ve learnt to date on the course and start thinking about how I can apply them to my Trip Planner App. It has transformed my understanding of modern marketing techniques and the way in which it differs from a traditional sales led approach including the ownership of growth across sales, marketing, design, product and technology teams more broadly. 

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This module was definitely a challenge – there were quite a few emails, and various tools to sign up and follow. I felt everything was very process driven, very hands on, and I just got lost in the details. The course content was good in that it showed step by step how to set up the tool stack, however, I felt it was lacking the why, and an overview of what each tool is used for. At the same time, I didn’t step back and try to question why we use these tools and how these different tools correlate. It was just a week of following instructions and “ticking boxes” for me. 

Overall, it was a week of struggle, trial and error, and a lot of learning from mistakes. I guess you could say it’s through these struggles, the learnings will be ingrained with me more. Onwards and upwards from here! 

Module 4: Implementing a customer journey playbook

This module of the SaaS Trial Rocketship course was much easier to follow than last week. I guess it’s because I am more familiar with the concepts taught this week. The concept of ‘Playbook’ is one that I am familiar with, however, instead of calling it ‘Playbook’, I’ve always known these as ‘swimlane diagrams’. Naming aside, this week, we implemented the processes in the playbook using a tool called ‘customer.io’. It was quite interesting for me because I have always created and used swimlane diagrams to understand business processes and the flow of data. I’ve never used it for actual implementation, from start to finish, so it was great to see it in practice. 

This week was also quite enlightening as I didn’t realise how easy it is to automate and track emails, and add personalisation for customer names.  For some reason, I thought the developers created this using code. It was also the first time I heard of the term ‘liquid script’, which is the code used for personalisation. Again, it’s just interesting how similar concepts can be called different things across industries, and seeing it implemented in different ways is eye-opening. 

Also, funnily enough, I noticed as we are creating email campaigns for our business models, I am also receiving email campaigns from customer.io regarding their onboarding tutorials. I realise I am now more conscious of the emails I receive from companies, and now I often think about the purpose of the emails and what stage I’m at in their customer journey.

This week we also dabbled with the slightest bit of HTML. I used to create webpages using HTML a long time ago, so that was exciting to revisit. Overall, this week was an exciting week, as I was able to apply my existing knowledge to a new environment. I used to think some of my knowledge and skills would be non-transferrable when trying to pivot to a new industry, but this course is slowly proving me wrong.

Module 5: Refining your playbook: trial signup

Module 5 was fun. Maybe it was because this week is all about the analytics, insights and dashboards. It’s something I am very familiar with, and something I enjoy doing. I guess I’ve been so  deep in the world of coding, that I haven’t really explored self-service analytics tools out there. I was quite surprised at how fast I can generate a dashboard from a tool such as Amplitude, and it’s something I will definitely explore more of in the future. 

Speaking of tools, I realise this course so far has been very tool-heavy – every week there is a new tool introduced, and I guess this is why there is a need for a central customer data platform to link it all together. I am slowly understanding how the different tools fit together, and where it fits in the customer journey. I look forward to learning more about this customer journey and I have no doubt there will be more tools to be introduced over the remainder of the course! I do wonder though, if there is one tool out there that can do it all – one tool tailored for PLG and tracking the customer journey – it would definitely be so handy! 

Till next time, 

Helena

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I went into the exercises with gusto, but struggled quite a bit trying to put together a tracking plan. I found myself essentially trying to re-create a relational database - trying to map out all of the possible data points and how they relate to each other. I started down that path with employee leave requests, mapping out a user table and a leave request table, each with its own data points and the user ID linking them together. I felt like I was re-inventing the wheel, but I couldn’t quite wrap my head around the task at hand.

It was late in the week by the time something clicked. Segment is a CDP, which is a fundamentally different tool to a data warehouse. It can push updates to the warehouse, but the true value of Segment is in its ability to send those events to other destinations, enabling non-engineering users to leverage them to drive growth.

The basic B2B SaaS events like creating an account, adding a user and upgrading a subscription plan are important, but at the end of this SaaS Trial Rocketship program I want to be able to draw a path to supercharging our growth. I need to be able to demonstrate that by leveraging a tool like Segment and enabling the revenue operations team with a customer journey architect, we could more effectively grow annual recurring revenue and monthly active users. Showing how Segment can capture account sign up events is not going to cut it. I fell into a trap that I often find myself in, not starting with the why!

Why is Segment valuable? Why should we invest time and effort in a CDP? What challenges do we face today that could be alleviated with this tool? Once I started asking myself these questions I felt like things started to come together. 

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I believe planning is the key in juggling between work and studying - or any other activity we want to focus on. Personally, planning my week ahead helps me in several ways. It allows me to consider how much time is required, when I can fit it in my schedule and when a deadline is looming, whilst also adding some extra levy for unexpected events. Having said that, planning does not mean you have to stick to it 100% of the time. After all, an agile and flexible mindset will help you achieve your goals - even when things change. Even so, planning makes you aware and gives you a rough idea of ‘what’ and ‘when’.

Here are my top tips for juggling work and study:

1. Plan your week ahead. Block off time required for the course.

2. Be flexible. Watch the course videos while commuting. 

3. Take notes if possible. Reflect on the content and let it sink in.

4. Remind yourself why you are participating in the course. How will your new knowledge help you in your current role? Focus on the end goal. This will keep you motivated.

5. Write down achievements and learnings. What did you struggle with? What did you enjoy the most? Do you need to change your approach to learning or maybe change your habits to make the next weeks easier or more efficient?

6. Finally, look after yourself, and make sure you still have time to relax and turn off your mind. 

At the end of the day, learning something new is a gift to you. Seize the opportunity. Make the most of it, and enjoy the journey along the way.

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Excitingly, Week 2 has made so much more sense! At a high level, It’s been amazing to see email campaigns successfully created from my Unlocking Simulation events and then being able to schedule them for delivery in customer.io before (in my instance) pushing them to be sent and seeing them in my test email inbox! Seeing the automation of emails has been amazing and also slowly wrapping my head around the lingo and concepts. 

I’ve really enjoyed walking through the steps of setting up sources and destinations to respectively pull and push data to, even given my lack of familiarity with all the tools. It’s been fascinating to see test events being generated and automatically flow through to the different platforms. It’s exciting to learn a different skill set and to see firsthand that whilst this would normally be incorporated into a developer’s code, I can run these analytics and campaigns independent of code. 

Trying to wrap my head around what I’m actually doing has been difficult. With more familiarity using Unlocking Simulation, Customer.io, Segment and now Amplitude, I’m working on really understanding the lingo and how the different platforms interact. I’m hoping a deep understanding developed from playing around with the four tools will allow me to self troubleshoot because I’ll understand where my blockers/errors are coming from. 

I can see the knowledge slowly coming together which is incredibly exciting. I’m trying to intentionally reflect on past weeks, as I progress through the course to remind myself how much knowledge I’m ingesting and also hopeful for Week 8/9 – karate kid mentality!

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