Customer Success at a Product-Led SaaS Company: How did we start?
Key Takeaways (a tldr;)
- Content about starting a Customer Success program at a Product-Led SaaS company is hard to find. Instead of translating the traditional Enterprise Customer Success model to your customers, focus on the problems customer-facing humans can solve for your company.
- Start with the customers that are looking for your help. When we started onboarding our customers, we weren’t picky about who could work with us so long as they would engage with us. We weren’t chasing customers that didn’t need or want to talk to us.
- Start small and make incremental improvements. Our new CSMs (transferring from Support) didn’t have much expertise working with Customers in a Success model. So, we started with what we already knew (a product demo with sprinkles of tips for customers) and slowly added more value-driven scripts into our calls.
- Align your short-term goals around the goals of your company. Like the Activation Product squad at Hotjar, we were looking to drive product usage with our program because we knew it would lead to long-term retention. We didn’t focus on retention, though, because it was a more lagging metric that wouldn’t allow us to iterate on our program quickly.
Earlier this month, I celebrated my fourth anniversary working at Hotjar. Of course, I had to pause and reflect on what I’ve learned since that first day in 2018.
In my first two years at Hotjar, we were hard at work trying to figure out what the role of a Customer Success team would look like in the future. As the CS Lead and eventual Director, I struggled to understand the role of Success, being nestled between several already-established teams: Sales, Support, and Product Marketing.
I would spend hours Googling how Success works at a company like Hotjar — one that didn’t require sales to be profitable and had a pricing model ranging from 0–20k a month — but I could never find any content for companies with business models that weren’t Sales-led.
At the core of Hotjar, our strategy is — and forever will be — product-led growth. We want everything our users experience to remain in the product; self-service is the crucial component of our success. We rely on automation and timely Customer Education resources because we believe our customers prefer to be independent. Customers can sign up, pay, and achieve value from our products without ever speaking to humans. As a millennial, this model ✨speaks to me✨.
The problem for me was not that Hotjar was a product-led company but rather that I was a Customer Success Manager at a product-led company that had no idea what my purpose was. I needed to determine where my niche would be in a world where Customer Success primarily existed in Sales- and Customer-Led business models. While I tried to find our niche, our team stalled in a very passive Success mode, taking calls from customers as they demanded but rarely asserting our guidance to customers that were not taking the time to reach out.
As I was in my feelings about how to break out of this reactive work mode, a significant shift in my career happened unexpectedly. Our Director of Support was leaving, and someone needed to fill their shoes. So I began leading both teams. Through this work, I was able to dive deeper into the themes of problems our entire customer base was experiencing. I noticed that Hotjar was very easy for specific customers who already knew what they wanted for the platform (think agency reps and experienced digital marketers). However, I also noticed a segment of customers that desperately wanted insights from our product and had no idea where to start (often members of a company that was embarking on digital analytics for the first time). In short, our onboarding was not evolving a the same rate as our customer base.
Even worse, our Product teams noticed a steep drop in product usage for our new customers after the first few weeks after signing up. Through the help of the Activation Squad (a squad devoted to helping customers view their first insight from Hotjar), we learned that Customers needed to use Hotjar at least 4x in their first 30 days to achieve First Value and remain long-term customers.
As a company, we moved fast to make iterative improvements to the Activation experience. Still, I wondered if putting more “feet on the ground” with customers would help us gather more feedback from our Customers while also figuring out what use cases were most effective to drive more regular usage.
At this point, I’d love to tell you I made all these changes at lightning speed, and we all had a happy ending, and now I’m writing this with my feet up on the dash of Jeff Bezo’s oddly shaped spaceship, but that’s not the case.
Despite complete awareness that Customer Success might be a possible solution to this problem, it took many failed initiatives before we landed on one that worked. I struggled to get the Success program off the ground because I believed that Customer Success teams should prove retention and expansion, but I had no idea how to get there. Luckily, I can share what I know now: build out your program by focusing on metrics that lead to retention and expansion so you can learn quickly.
Eventually, after a series of failed attempts to create massive low-touch campaigns, I discovered the best way for us to learn quickly would be to take calls with customers and walk them through a custom journey based on their goals. In short, do things that don’t scale to learn fast.
Knowing we had a wealth of experts to help with this initiative, I eventually shifted two brave members of our Support team to our Success team. We introduced call invites for all paying customers and began taking 30-minute “Onboarding Training Calls” for any new customers looking to learn how to use Hotjar to meet their goals. In the first quarter of this work, we discovered that customers onboarded by our Success team were 40% more likely to use Hotjar with frequency (4x a month or more) than customers who did not participate.
We continued on a path of iterating on our onboarding program in 2021, shifting from a call that was a glorified product demo to one that catered to specific use cases based on the goals of our customers. Since then, we’ve grown our portfolio to over 3 million ARR and counting. We’ve implemented additional playbooks in our program featuring touchpoints at all customer journey phases.
We now understand and continue to thrive within our proper niche: the humans on the ground from which the rest of Hotjar’s product and marketing teams can learn. My goal is to share our learnings so other product-led success professionals can learn more quickly than me. Hopefully, your Google quest brings you here first — and if that’s the case, let me know what you learn.
