The New Path to SaaS Company Success (Opening Thoughts)
Opening Thoughts
Note:
This article covers opening thoughts of the “Mastering Product Experience:How to Deliver Personalized Product Experiences with Product-led Go-to-Market Strategy” book written by the Aptrinsic team: Nick Bonfiglio, Mickey Alon, and Myk Pono. Please don’t forget to like and share.
The nature of SaaS startups requires founders to pay attention to product adoptions and renewals as soon as the company hits a certain level of initial growth. In the early days of Insightera, all my co-founder, Mike Telem, and I cared about was closing the next deal. Getting prospective customers to agree with the premise behind our product wasn’t difficult; delivering meaningful personalized website experiences to each individual visitor would help B2B companies increase conversion rates. But building a new and innovative product with well-defined requirements, on time and on budget, did not guarantee success.
We were operating with scarce resources in a highly competitive market. We had to quickly discover the path to building a sustainable business, and that meant testing our hypothesis early with minimal investment so we could validate which parts of our strategy were working and which ones were failing.
Measuring adoption, getting real feedback, and validating our assumptions was not a simple task as we passed 30 paying customers. In the process of getting these accounts to adopt our product and realize its full value, we discovered interesting patterns that separated early adopters from our early majority.
We continued experimenting with new features that were part of an annual roadmap strategy. Getting feedback and re-prioritizing our roadmap based on real value discovery was very resource-intensive and complicated. We wanted to decommission features that were not adopted over time and didn’t fit our product strategy any more, but it was challenging to reach consensus around these decisions since we didn’t have enough data about which customers were using which features and the revenue impact of pulling a given feature from them. Yet avoiding those decisions has immediate and long-term impact on delivering the right product to the market!
Along the way, we pinpointed our ideal account size and the sequence of core features that, once adopted, would lead to successful adoption and renewal (we called those “Golden Features”). Our goal was now to influence user behavior and guide customers to use these Golden Features through our webinars and e-mail marketing campaigns, but those marketing tools were ineffective — mainly because the timing didn’t match the context of what our users were doing with our product. In other words, Tuesday at 10 a.m., or a day of the week determined by the most recent e-mail open-rate study, in no way correlated to our customers’ actual product usage. The right time was when they were using the product and needed to get something done; that was when they were most receptive to our messaging.
We started tracking our own app so we could engage our users more contextually, based on their stage in the customer lifecycle and use case. In essence, we were following the same idea as that encompassed in our product: If you provide the right content to the right prospect in real time, based on intent and actual behavior, you’re more likely to win their undivided attention.
As we grew our customer base to 60 paying customers and signed on some hot logos, we knew we had a product/market fit. My focus as CEO shifted from proving our business model to driving business growth. I soon realized that using a traditional outbound B2B sales model wouldn’t move the needle fast enough. Rather, we needed to adopt a different, more scalable model to win against larger and more established brands.
We found that offering product demos and trials worked much better than a long sales process or outbound nurturing. That approach made it possible to clearly demonstrate our product’s value, and differentiate ourselves from the competitors, whose sales forces were armed with slideware and buzzwords. Showing the product was worth a thousand slides, especially when we could demonstrate a relevant use case as part of a quick feature walk-through.
Thanks to the rapid changes in our digital space — both in technology and in customer expectations — we were able to launch our product, drive awareness, and become the leading B2B real-time website personalization player. In less than two years, we went from receiving our seed funding to being acquired by Marketo, the fastest growing leader in the marketing automation space. We were fortunate to join this iconic company, which was built by the founders from the ground up and had a highly committed product leadership team.
Once we became part of Marketo, we had a big a-ha! moment. Although Marketo was a multi-billion-dollar company, it faced the same challenges as any startup. It needed to figure out how to:
- Get validated metrics about current product usage compared with customer lifetime value (CLV)
- Drive strategic product decisions based on empirical facts
- Tie bookings and revenue to engineering resources
- Increase adoption to newly launched products, set measurable goals, and take effective actions to improve bottom line results.
That realization led to the founding of Aptrinsic, and in this book, we share what we each have learned along the way about what it takes to succeed with a SaaS company. We explain how to deliver a winning customer-centric experience strategy to your customers throughout the customer lifecycle, from acquisition to up-sell/X-sell. We show how to implement a faster and more effective product-led GTM strategy to meet changing customer expectations, and how to optimize CAC and increase CLV by building better contextual relationships through personalized product-driven engagement.
As a seasoned product professional and SaaS executive, I’m incredibly excited by the way a product-led GTM strategy can change the game for SaaS companies. We’re already seeing its impact on Aptrinsic, and are confident it can change the future of many other companies for the better. Here’s to your product-led success!
Read the next chapter — CH 1: Welcome to the Customer Experience Era
Read the full “Mastering Product Experience: How to Deliver Personalized Product Experiences with Product-led Go-to-Market Strategy” book written by the Aptrinsic team: Nick Bonfiglio, Mickey Alon, and Myk Pono.
In this book, we share what we have learned about what it takes to succeed with a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company. We explain how to deliver a winning customer-centric experience strategy to your customers throughout the customer lifecycle, from acquisition to up-sell/X-sell. We show how to implement a faster and more effective product-led go-to-market strategy to meet changing customer expectations. And we share how to optimize Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and increase Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) by building better contextual relationships through personalized product-driven engagement.
