Product Management Confabulation
What Product Managers are talking about.
I’ve noticed that more and more people have been asking, “what is growth product management?” and “is growth product management right for me?” These are fantastic questions! Growth product management is a variant of the “traditional” product management discipline, and there’s more and more interest from startups and tech companies in hiring growth product managers. First, I’ll discuss what a ... Read More
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Xnor.ai, spun off in 2017 from the nonprofit Allen Institute for AI (AI2), has been acquired by Apple for about $200 million. A source close to the company corroborated a report this morning from GeekWire to that effect.
Apple confirmed the reports with its standard statement for this sort of quiet acquisition: “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.” (I’ve asked for clarification just in case.)
Xnor.ai began as a process for making machine learning algorithms highly efficient — so efficient that they could run on even the lowest tier of hardware out there, things like embedded electronics in security cameras that use only a modicum of power. Yet using Xnor’s algorithms they could accomplish tasks like object recognition, which in other circumstances might require a powerful processor or connection to the cloud.
CEO Ali Farhadi and his founding team put the company together at AI2 and spun it out just before the organization formally launched its incubator program. It raised $2.7M in early 2017 and $12M in 2018, both rounds led by Seattle’s Madrona Venture Group, and has steadily grown its local operations and areas of business.
The $200M acquisition price is only approximate, the source indicated, but even if the final number were less by half that would be a big return for Madrona and other investors.
The company will likely move to Apple’s Seattle offices; GeekWire, visiting the Xnor.ai offices (in inclement weather, no less), reported that a move was clearly underway. AI2 confirmed that Farhadi is no longer working there, but he will retain his faculty position at the University of Washington.
An acquisition by Apple makes perfect sense when one thinks of how that company has been directing its efforts towards edge computing. With a chip dedicated to executing machine learning workflows in a variety of situations, Apple clearly intends for its devices to operate independent of the cloud for such tasks as facial recognition, natural language processing, and augmented reality. It’s as much for performance as privacy purposes.
Its camera software especially makes extensive use of machine learning algorithms for both capturing and processing images, a compute-heavy task that could potentially be made much lighter with the inclusion of Xnor’s economizing techniques. The future of photography is code, after all — so the more of it you can execute, and the less time and power it takes to do so, the better.
It could also indicate new forays in the smart home, toward which with HomePod Apple has made some tentative steps. But Xnor’s technology is highly adaptable and as such rather difficult to predict as far as what it enables for such a vast company as Apple.
PayPal announced today it has agreed to acquire Honey Science Corporation, the makers of a deal-finding browser add-on and mobile application, for $4 billion, mostly cash. The acquisition, which is PayPal’s largest to date, will give the payments giant a foothold earlier in the customer’s shopping journey. Instead of only competing on the checkout page against credit cards or Apple Pay, for example, PayPal will leap ahead to become a part of the deal discovery process, as well.
Currently, Honey’s 17 million monthly active users take advantage of its suite of money-saving tools to track prices, get alerts, make lists, browse offers and participate in an Ebates-like rewards program called Honey Gold. Its users tend to be younger, millennial shoppers, both male and female.
PayPal aims to add Honey’s technology to its own product line, expanding its reach to PayPal’s 300 million users.
“What’s exciting is that we can take the functionality Honey now offers — which is product discovery, price tracking, offers and loyalty — and build that into the PayPal and Venmo experiences,” explains PayPal SVP of Global Consumer Products and Technology, and former Xoom CEO, John Kunze. “When Honey says they’re putting money in the pockets of their customers — that’s perfectly in line with what we want to do. We want to make digital commerce and financial services more affordable, easier to use, more fun and more accessible to people around the world,” he says.
In addition, PayPal’s network of 24 million merchant partners will gain the ability to offer targeted and more personalized promotions to consumers as a means of acquiring new business and driving increased sales. PayPal Credit may also be integrated into Honey to help finance larger purchases.
Honey has flown under the radar to some extent since its founding in 2012.
Originally only a web browser extension, Honey tracks sales and retailers’ promo codes, as a rival to RetailMeNot and others. What makes the extension so useful is that it automatically tries all the eligible promo codes for you during checkout then selects the one that provided the most savings and applies it on your behalf. This helps shoppers feel more comfortable with their purchases and reduces shopping cart abandonment.
The company also rolled out features to inform shoppers of an item’s price history, including the historical pricing of any product on Amazon’s marketplace. In 2017, Honey launched DropList, which would track and alert users to lower prices, as well as tools for finding travel deals.
As more consumers shifted their shopping to e-commerce merchants, Honey’s user base also rapidly grew.
Its browser extension now works across approximately 30,000 merchant websites, including fashion, technology, travel and even pizza delivery. Last year, Honey publicly shared that its 10 million members had saved over $800 million using its tools. As of today, Honey’s 17 million members have saved more than $2 billion to date.
“Honey is amongst the most transformative acquisitions in PayPal’s history. It provides a broad portfolio of services to simplify the consumer shopping experience, while at the same time making it more affordable and rewarding,” said Dan Schulman, president and CEO of PayPal, in a statement.
“The combination of Honey’s complementary consumer products with our platform will significantly enhance our ability to drive engagement and play a more meaningful role in the daily lives of our consumers. As a partner of choice for our merchants, this is another way that we can help them build and strengthen their customer relationships, provide personalized offers, and drive incremental sales. The combination of Honey and PayPal adds another significant and meaningful dimension to our two-sided platform,” Schulman added.
The acquisition also gives PayPal a way to fight back against the increased competition from Apple, Google, Facebook and other tech companies that have entered the payments market in recent years. On Apple’s Q4 2019 earnings call, for example, CEO Tim Cook noted that Apple Pay has now exceeded PayPal transaction volume with 3 billion transactions in the quarter. Meanwhile, analysts are predicting Facebook Pay has the potential to unseat both Apple Pay and PayPal alike.
Then there are PayPal’s original rivals — the world’s biggest card networks like Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Discover. These companies are also fighting to remain relevant online, with a new PayPal competitor of their own to simplify online checkout.
With Honey, PayPal immediately shifts the battle away from the checkout page itself to instead compete against all the places people go to discover, browse, get inspired and deal-hunt — whether that’s directly on retailers’ sites or through newer platforms, like Pinterest or Instagram Shopping.
As a result of the acquisition, Honey co-founders George Ruan and Ryan Hudson will join PayPal where they’ll work on product integrations and scaling the technology to a much larger user base. Also joining is Honey’s predominantly L.A.-based team of 350 employees.
The Honey team and headquarters will remain in L.A., where they’ve just signed a lease on a new office space with expansion goals in mind.
“Combining PayPal’s assets and reach with our technology, we can build powerful new online shopping experiences for consumers and merchants,” said Hudson. “We’ll have the ability to help millions of retailers efficiently reach consumers with offers that deliver more and more value to Honey members.”
To date, Honey had raised $49 million from investors, including Ludlow Ventures, Zuma Partners, Mucker Capital, SXE Ventures, BAM Ventures, Plug and Play, Wonder Ventures, Cendana Capital, Anthos Capital and others, according to Crunchbase.
Honey was already profitable on a net income basis in 2018, PayPal notes. The acquisition is expected to close in the first quarter of 2020, subject to regulatory approval. It’s expected to be accretive to PayPal’s non-GAAP earnings per share in 2021.
PayPal will hold a conference call at 2 PM PST today to discuss the transaction further.
Brava had a lot of things working in its favor as startups go. It was founded in 2015 by serial executive John Pleasants, whose past stints have included as co-president of Disney Interactive Media Group, COO of Electronic Arts, and CEO of Ticketmaster.
His plans to create a suite of snazzy direct-to-consumer line of smart hardware and software products, beginning with the Brava oven, also attracted tens of millions of dollars from an impressive line-up of backers, including True Ventures, TPG Growth, and Lightspeed Venture Partners, among others. Indeed, though some sophisticated kitchen devices have come and gone (Juicero), some liked what Pleasants and his growing team in Redwood City, Ca., were trying to cook up, and one of these admirers, apparently, was the Middleby Corporation, a publicly traded commercial and residential cooking and industrial process equipment company in Illinois that just acquired Brava — though neither Brava nor Middleby is disclosing terms of the deal.
We were in touch via email yesterday with both Pleasants and the CEO of Middleby, Tim FitzGerald, to learn what they can share about the tie-up, as well as to ask what happens to Brava and its tens of employees now.
TC: This was a young company. Why turn around and sell it?
JP: The company itself is four years-old and we’ve had product available in market for one year. We’ve been venture funded to date and had the option to continue raising growth capital or merge with Middleby Corporation. Brava’s mission has always been to enable everyone to cook delicious, healthy home-cooked food with minimal time and effort, and we believe the fastest way to achieve this bold goal is through a strategic partnership with someone who can help make that happen.
TC: How did Brava and Middleby come together? Who brokered the first conversation? Was Brava talking with anyone else?
JP: We’ve been in talks with many people about financing, and a select group of strategics about a deeper partnership to achieve our objective. We had the assistance of City Capital in the process, and they made the introduction to Middleby in Chicago.
TC: How much is Middleby paying for the company? Also, is this an all-cash deal?
JP: While not disclosing the total amount, the consideration includes a mix of cash and stock
TC: So what’s next? Will Middleby retain the Brava name or will this be phased out over time?
JP: Brava as it’s known today will not only continue but see accelerated growth and expansion. We will continue to sell the product and support our customers under the Brava brand while further innovating new products and services for our customers.
TF: The Brava name will remain. The product and technology will enhance our existing residential and commercial kitchen appliance portfolio. In Middleby Residential, we manufacture and sell Viking Range and other well-known consumer brands.
TC: How many people does Brava currently employ and how many if any are going to Middleby?
JP: Brava employs 38 people and all will be going to Middleby. I will remain as the CEO of Brava and will also work with other Middleby divisional leaders to leverage Brava’s light cooking platform and services for their existing brands. We’re excited by this because we currently have many ideas and plans for leveraging the Brava technology across new form factors, business segments (residential and commercial) and geographies. This all becomes more feasible with Middleby.
TC: We last talked before the Brava oven was out in the world. How many units did you wind up selling?
JP: We’re closing in on 5,000 customers and expect to have a big holiday.
TC: What were some of the lessons learned with this experience?
JP: People love it. You can see this every day throughout our online communities. It’s not just about the quality of food and the ease in creating it . . . we hear comments all the time about how spouses who hardly ever cooked now do, how kids who never liked vegetables now ask for more . . .
In terms of what people want that doesn’t currently exist, [I’d say] more recipes and programs (we have thousands, but there are so many more we can do) and more flexibility; we can uniquely cook multiple ingredients simultaneously to perfection with our light-cooking technology and this enables lots of fun combinations [but] our customers would like even more flexibility in mixing and matching ingredients.
TC: Any business lessons?
JP: In terms of business lessons, it’s challenging to explain Brava’s full value proposition in a quick ad on social media. We have revolutionary technology that enables a new way of cooking that’s better, easier, faster — and that sounds almost too good to be true.
TC: Do you think the market for smart cooking appliance is big enough at this point? What do you think are the remaining hurdles and how do consumers get past them?
JP: The “smart cooking appliance” market is in its infancy. There are still very few pioneers in the space and household penetration is negligible. But this is all about to change. Once people know someone who can personally attest to the benefits, I fundamentally believe the adoption curve will bend exponentially. People spend a lot of money on household appliances…once they can be “smart” and “chef powered” and deliver well against that promise, why would most people not want a “smart” one versus a “non-smart” one?
TF: We see this market growing significantly with the next generation [of home cooks] who currently rely on and demand a digital experience.
Mirantis today announced that it has acquired Docker’s Enterprise business and team. Docker Enterprise was very much the heart of Docker’s product lineup, so this sale leaves Docker as a shell of its former, high-flying unicorn self. Docker itself, which installed a new CEO earlier this year, says it will continue to focus on tools that will advance developers’ workflows. Mirantis will keep the Docker Enterprise brand alive, though, which will surely not create any confusion.
With this deal, Mirantis is acquiring Docker Enterprise Technology Platform and all associated IP: Docker Enterprise Engine, Docker Trusted Registry, Docker Unified Control Plane and Docker CLI. It will also inherit all Docker Enterprise customers and contracts, as well as its strategic technology alliances and partner programs. Docker and Mirantis say they will both continue to work on the Docker platform’s open-source pieces.
The companies did not disclose the price of the acquisition, but it’s surely nowhere near Docker’s valuation during any of its last funding rounds. Indeed, it’s no secret that Docker’s fortunes changed quite a bit over the years, from leading the container revolution to becoming somewhat of an afterthought after Google open-sourced Kubernetes and the rest of the industry coalesced around it. It still had a healthy enterprise business, though, with plenty of large customers among the large enterprises. The company says about a third of Fortune 100 and a fifth of Global 500 companies use Docker Enterprise, which is a statistic most companies would love to be able to highlight — and which makes this sale a bit puzzling from Docker’s side, unless the company assumed that few of these customers were going to continue to bet on its technology.
Here is what Docker itself had to say. “Docker is ushering in a new era with a return to our roots by focusing on advancing developers’ workflows when building, sharing and running modern applications. As part of this refocus, Mirantis announced it has acquired the Docker Enterprise platform business,” Docker said in a statement when asked about this change. “Moving forward, we will expand Docker Desktop and Docker Hub’s roles in the developer workflow for modern apps. Specifically, we are investing in expanding our cloud services to enable developers to quickly discover technologies for use when building applications, to easily share these apps with teammates and the community, and to run apps frictionlessly on any Kubernetes endpoint, whether locally or in the cloud.”
Mirantis itself, too, went through its ups and downs. While it started as a well-funded OpenStack distribution, today’s Mirantis focuses on offering a Kubernetes-centric on-premises cloud platform and application delivery. As the company’s CEO Adrian Ionel told me ahead of today’s announcement, today is possibly the most important day for the company.
So what will Mirantis do with Docker Enterprise? “Docker Enterprise is absolutely aligned and an accelerator of the direction that we were already on,” Ionel told me. “We were very much moving towards Kubernetes and containers aimed at multi-cloud and hybrid and edge use cases, with these goals to deliver a consistent experience to developers on any infrastructure anywhere — public clouds, hybrid clouds, multi-cloud and edge use cases — and make it very easy, on-demand, and remove any operational concerns or burdens for developers or infrastructure owners.”
Mirantis previously had about 450 employees. With this acquisition, it gains another 300 former Docker employees that it needs to integrate into its organization. Docker’s field marketing and sales teams will remain separate for some time, though, Ionel said, before they will be integrated. “Our most important goal is to create no disruptions for customers,” he noted. “So we’ll maintain an excellent customer experience, while at the same time bringing the teams together.”
This also means that for current Docker Enterprise customers, nothing will change in the near future. Mirantis says that it will accelerate the development of the product and merge its Kubernetes and lifecycle management technology into it. Over time, it will also offer a managed services solutions for Docker Enterprise.
While there is already some overlap between Mirantis’ and Docker Enterprise’s customer base, Mirantis will pick up about 700 new enterprise customers with this acquisition.
With this, Ionel argues, Mirantis is positioned to go up against large players like VMware and IBM/Red Hat. “We are the one real cloud-native player with meaningful scale to provide an alternative to them without lock-in into a legacy or existing technology stack.”
While this is clearly a day the Mirantis team is celebrating, it’s hard not to look at this as the end of an era for Docker, too. The company says it will share more about its future plans today, but didn’t make any spokespeople available ahead of this announcement.
Canadian technology holding company Tiny, home to companies like Dribble, Flow and Unicorn Hunt, today announced that it has acquired Meteor, the JavaScript-centric open-source app platform.
Meteor launched back in 2011 and while it was a developer darling for a while, its momentum stalled a bit in recent years as other technologies rose to the forefront.
Meteor promises developers that they can build their applications’ front- and back-ends as JavaScript apps and also offers Galaxy, a turnkey hosting service for these apps.
Meteor founder Geoff Schmidt will continue to focus on Apollo GraphQL, a platform for making GraphQL run at scale.
“We found ourselves in an interesting situation where we had two great products, Apollo and Meteor, living under the same roof,” Schmidt told me. “Apollo started growing so quickly that the right thing always seemed to put our incremental hours or dollars toward Apollo. So over time it became clear that they needed to be under different roofs so that Meteor wouldn’t get starved for resources and would have the room it needed to grow.”
Tiny promises that it will continue to invest in Meteor, Galaxy and their developer communities. Tiny and Apollo also say they’ll work closely during the transition and “pair their deep knowledge of the platform with Tiny’s ambitious plans.”
What exactly that’ll look like remains to be seen, of course, but Tiny has a relatively good track record of keeping the companies it acquires afloat. Schmidt also notes that users shouldn’t expect any major changes to Meteor or Galaxy in the near future.
“We talked to a lot of more conventional acquirers but ended up working with Tiny because of their strong values in design and community,” Schmidt explained. “At the core, I think Meteor is about developer experience, community, and empowering people to do things that they thought were out of their reach. Tiny is the group that we think is best equipped to carry that mission forward.”
VMware today announced that it has acquired Bitfusion, a former participant in our Startup Battlefield competition. Bitfusion was one of the earliest companies to help businesses accelerate their complex computing workloads on GPUs, FPGAs and ASICs. In its earliest iteration, over four years ago, the company’s focus was less on AI and machine learning and more on other areas of high-performance computing, but unsurprisingly, that shifted as the interested in AI and ML increased in recent years.
VMware will use Bitfusion’s technology, which is vendor- and hardware-agnostic, to bring similar capabilities to its customers. Specifically, it plans to integrate Bitfusion into its vSphere platform.
“Once closed, the acquisition of Bitfusion will bolster VMware’s strategy of supporting AI- and ML-based workloads by virtualizing hardware accelerators,” writes Krish Prasad, Senior Vice President and General Manager of VMware’s Cloud Platform Business Unit. “Multi-vendor hardware accelerators and the ecosystem around them are key components for delivering modern applications. These accelerators can be used regardless of location in the environment – on-premises and/or in the cloud.”
Prasad also notes that to get the most out of hardware accelerators like GPUs, most enterprises deploy them on bare metal. VMware, however, argues that this leads to poor utilization and poor efficiencies (as it would, of course, given that it is in the business of virtualization). “This provides a perfect opportunity to virtualize them—providing increased sharing of resources and lowering costs,” writes Prasad.
The two companies did not disclose the price of the acquisition. Bitfusion had raised $5 million in 2017 and a smaller, strategic investment from Samsung Ventures in 2018.
There’s some new consolidation in the mobile event technology space this morning, with news that the meetings, events and hospitality technology provider Cvent has acquired San Francisco-based mobile event app maker DoubleDutch. The deal includes both DoubleDutch’s mobile event app technology as well as the team, the company said in announcing the deal on Monday.
Founded in 2011, DoubleDutch created both mobile and web apps that gave event hosts everything they needed to set up and monitor the success of their events through a white-labeled solution they could customize to their own needs. The overall platform included event registration technology, the event content management system to manage an event’s entire program, and the event app for the attendees.
To date, DoubleDutch had raised nearly $80 million in funding according to CrunchBase, from investors including KKR, Bessemer Venture Partners, Index Ventures, Bullpen Capital, Enspire Capital, Mithril Capital Management, and others.
The company saw some upsets in more recent years as it struggled towards profitability. It laid off 25% of its workforce in 2016, then laid off another 40% of staff the following year, including its CFO, CCO, VP of Customer Success and others. Also in 2017, DoubleDutch replaced CEO Bryan Parker as CEO after only two months on the job after being appointed to the position from his earlier role as COO. DoubleDutch founder Lawrence Coburn took the CEO role instead.
However, in March 2018, DoubleDutch announced it had finally become cash-flow positive. At the same time, it announced new funding from existing investors KKR, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Bullpen Ventures and that it had completed the acquisition of Eventgrid, an events platform used by Adobe, Dropbox, Sony, and others.
According to DoubleDutch, joining Cvent made sense as both “share a passion for delivering innovative technology solutions for event organizers, including world-class mobile event apps.”
“DoubleDutch is an innovator in the mobile event app space and both Cvent and DoubleDutch have a shared mission to unlock the business value of human connection,” said Lawrence Coburn, CEO and founder of DoubleDutch, in a statement. “We are incredibly proud to join the market-leading team at Cvent. With their global reach and scale, we can fuel our passion to change the way people connect, learn, and grow at live events.”
DoubleDutch customers include SAP, Akamai, WPP, CenturyLink, Innovation Roundtable, BlackRock, ASAE Bosch, and others.
Coburn is expected to depart following the acquisition, according to a report from Skift. DoubleDutch’s other co-founder, Pankaj Prasad, had left in November 2017 to join Salesforce.
The company stressed that existing customers would see no disruption in their service or with their upcoming events — likely a big concern for those who relied on the platform, given how complex setting up and managing events can be. Customers were also invited to Cvent’s Connect User Conference in July in Las Vegas where they could learn more about Cvent’s full suite of solutions.
Cvent, meanwhile, sees the addition of DoubleDutch as a further investment in the onsite experience for events.
“We are extremely excited to add DoubleDutch to the Cvent family,” said Cvent founder and CEO Reggie Aggarwal, added. “By adding DoubleDutch’s industry expertise to Cvent, we accelerate our investment in mobile event technology. We are also proud to welcome the talented DoubleDutch team to our more than 4,000 Cventers worldwide. Together, we will continue to drive innovation in how attendees engage at events.”
Cvent itself was acquired by Vista Equity Partners in 2016 for $1.65 billion, and ceased to trade on the NYSE on November 29, 2016. As both it and DoubleDutch are private companies, they declined to comment on the deal terms or price beyond their press releases.
Cvent tells TechCrunch its interest in DoubleDutch was for three main reasons: the product, people and the customers — the factors that drive all its acquisition decisions. Over the years, the company has picked up several other businesses, including Wedding Spot, Alliance Tech, Social Tables, and others. It also merged with Lanyon a few years ago. Cvent owns other event apps including CrowdCompass and QuickMobile, as well.
The company tells us it’s still working through how it will integrate DoubleDutch into its global organization, and can’t comment on specific positions or rolls at this time.
Getaround, the peer-to-peer car-sharing startup that launched at TC Disrupt back in 2011, is making moves to become a global car rental service. Today, the Softbank-backed startup announced its acquisition of Drivy, a Paris-headquartered car-sharing startup that operates in 170 European cities.
“We were obviously looking at what our European strategy was and how we would expand out of the U.S. and into other parts of the world,” Getaround CEO Sam Zaid told TechCrunch. “When we started looking at Europe, it became clear Drivy was the market leader. They also shared the same vision.”
This marks Getaround’s first expansion out of the U.S. As part of the deal, Drivy founder and CEO Paulin Dementhon will run the company’s operations in Europe as CEO for the continent.
“Getaround is an ideal partner for us because our companies are aligned in so many ways while being complimentary on key aspects of our business, like geography or fleet acquisition,” Dementhon said in a statement. “I look forward to seeing what we can accomplish together.”
Combined with Drivy, Getaround now has more than five million users. Moving forward, Getaround has its eyes set on becoming a truly global company.
“The objective here is to build the iconic brand for consumers in car share and next-generation mobility, and be one of those companies with a global footprint,” Zaid said. “Servicing people living in their home cities but also when they travel to other cities across the world.”
This acquisition and plans for expansion are undoubtedly fueled by the $300 million Series D round Getaround raised in August from SoftBank.
In the SaaS industry, we have all come to realize that retention is just as important as acquisition. There is no point exerting lots of energy attracting new customers if you struggle to keep your existing customers happy and subscribing to your service.
Indeed, we have gone so far as to say that “customer retention is the new conversion,” and the data backs that claim up. For instance, Price Intelligently found that a 1% increase in conversion increases the bottom line by about 3.3% whereas increasing your retention rates by the same amount can increase the bottom line by up to 7%.
“In my role as an Account Executive, that bias towards acquisition is even more pronounced”
Acquisition metrics are the headline, major league metrics, and traditionally the measure of success most rewarded by businesses. As a result, it’s really easy to get blinkered by them – according to research by Invesp, 44% of companies admit they focus more on acquisition than retention.
In my role as an Account Executive, that bias towards the new is even more pronounced – my job is to work with emerging businesses and fast growing start-ups to get them set up on their Intercom free trial, show them the value in using our products and ensure they are set up for future success.
This poses a potential problem – how do we ensure I don’t focus exclusively on acquisition and pay little attention to these new customers’ long-term success? How do we ensure that all the roles in the Sales team are aligned with the wider company focus on retention and providing lifetime value?
“I am incentivized to make sure customers have seen the full value of our offering”
In a closing role, and working as an AE in particular, a lot of emphasis is placed on acquisition metrics such as your conversion rate and time to close. However, as a new business rep, not as much attention is given to retention rates and ensuring your accounts don’t churn initially after their first invoice.
To ensure alignment with Intercom’s goals, the solution is simple – I am comped only if the companies I work with hit their second invoice. That means I am incentivized to make sure customers have seen the full value of our offering and not, say, simply forgotten to cancel their subscription.
That brings a few fresh challenges, however. Those of us working in the emerging and small business segment deal with high volume, high velocity transactional deals, and we are constantly looking to significantly speed up and simplify the sales cycle. For these smaller accounts, their upfront investment in our product is minimal, and it’s our job as sales people to make the product sticky for them by helping them see value, fast.
“We have begun experimenting with ways of automating this process”
In practice, this means I am in a sort of hybrid account executive and account manager position. But with the volume and velocity of deals we are working with, it is not scalable to perform manual check-ins on hundreds of accounts each day.
In an effort to ensure our customers achieve continued success using Intercom, we have begun experimenting with ways of automating this process.
We implemented a campaign with Intercom’s Messages’ product with a combination of both in-app messages and emails to keep engagement high with our customers post trial. Rather than communicating with these companies intensely from day 1 to 14 (during the free trial period) and sporadically there after, we began sending targeted messages all the way up to day 40.
To get this engagement campaign off the ground we worked closely with our Customer Engagement team to build out a series of messages. The Customer Engagement team are experts in user onboarding in Intercom and we leaned on their expertise to see what sort of messages resonate best with our customers.
We then had to select the correct channels and corresponding data for these behavior-based messages. Using targeted custom data attributes, we built out a mixture of in-app messages and emails based on actions customers had taken in the product, prompting them to take specific actions that would unlock more value from the product. This might be to suggest they import existing user and lead data, or highlight how they can begin playing with Smart Campaigns.
Once built, the engagement campaign consisted of a combination of educational content, technical tips and tricks and sales upsell messaging.
An engagement campaign such as this might not feel so engaging if the messages were coming from multiple different people at Intercom, so we needed to ensure these contacts would only receive messages from a single point of contact. To do this, we used criteria such as the following to make sure they entered the correct engagement campaign and exited any other onboarding campaigns in Intercom.
We believe that by having messages come from the same sender during a customer’s journey in Intercom we were able to build better, longer relationships. This guarantees not just consistency from the customer’s perspective, but also helps develop a sense of confidence and connection with their point of contact.
We have been running the engagement campaign for three months (a full sales quarter) now and since then have seen a notable increase in customer retention in the small business segment. As an AE it is easy to say all is done when you close out an account. By shifting our focus from first to second invoice it has allowed us to think more in terms of the overall health of the business. The related engagement campaign has also heavily reduced the amount of time we spend manually checking in on our customers, and yet has helped us forge stronger connections with them.
Intercom works across every stage of the customer relationship, from acquiring leads to supporting customers. It makes sense, then, for us to use our own tool in this way, extending the relationship beyond the close and ensuring they’re set up for long-term success.
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