0:06

Hello everyone. And welcome to another finite podcast episode.

0:10

We often discuss customer acquisition, tactics, channels, and strategies for growing B2B tech and SaaS companies here on the podcast.

0:16

But today we're gonna be talking about the other side of things, which is customer retention and how to reduce churn.

0:22

I'm joined by Jesus stren, VP of growth marketing at Figma, which you may know as a collaborative interface design tool.

0:29

Jesus is an expert in reducing customer churn, specifically for self-serve SaaS companies.

0:33

And we'll cover important points such as the importance of retention for scaling or stage your company should start thinking seriously about retention, understanding why your customers may be churning and ways you can minimize churn.

0:45

It's gonna be a very tangible episode with lots of takeaways.

0:47

You can apply to your own marketing. So I hope you enjoy before we continue with the episode, I'd like to go a quick shout out to our partner Terminus.

0:56

The only account based engagement platform built to deliver more pipeline and revenue through multichannel account based marketing as the only native multichannel marketing platform, Terminus helps you convert target accounts through orchestrated campaigns using personalized advertising, email signatures, and chat Botts.

1:11

Visit terminus.com to learn why doing effective ABM at scale means better marketing.

1:18

Hello, ha Jesus. Welcome to the finite podcast. Thank you for joining me.

1:22

Hello Alex. Thank you for having me excited to be here.

1:25

Yeah. Likewise. Excited to be talking. We have a really interesting one coming up, talking all about reducing churn in the self-serve space, which I know you have a lot of interesting insights to share with Allison listeners on before we do that, as we always do, I will let you tell us a little bit about your background and experience.

1:42

First of all.

1:43

Yeah, so I'm Jesus and I, I spent the last probably decade working with companies that had some sort of freemium or bottoms up approach.

1:52

And I've been over 12, 13 years in the SA technology business, trying to grow businesses and take them to market.

1:59

So really specialize the go to market motion.

2:02

Sales led product led growth, and currently I'm a Figma, I'm the VP of growth market and Figma.

2:09

And I'm really happy to be here with you today.

2:11

Very cool job. I'm a big Figma fan. Tell us a bit about how marketing happens at Figma.

2:16

What does the marketing team look like? How's it structured that kind of thing.

2:20

So Figma, we have, um, really interesting setup because we don't have a CMO.

2:24

We have a chief customer officer Figma grew really rapidly, and I think the approach was to have anything facing customer under one leader.

2:34

So we had support sales and marketing under Amanda, which is our chief customer officer, but we do have a marketing team.

2:41

Um, we have pre-standard, um, organization, so coms, product marketing, brand design, and design growth marketing.

2:50

So, um, and then some international teams and communities, so growth fits under that leading sort of the top of final effort and acquisition helping the program and activation and conversion to pro and a big focus on the, um, also on the sales led pipeline.

3:08

So supporting sales lead pipeline, which a big portion of it come from the existing user base.

3:12

Awesome. It's something we see more and more often.

3:15

I think they're kind of consolidating well, particularly sales and marketing under one leader often in the form of a chief revenue officer rather than chief customer officer, but actually chief customer officer sounds, uh, a more well customer focused and holistic approach than the, the chief revenue officer.

3:30

I'm sure you've worked in all kinds of different organizations with different leaders at the top, from CMOs and, and others.

3:35

But how do you find that kind of structure of bringing everything under one roof?

3:39

I think it's very common for early stage startups.

3:42

It's easier to manage on a scale cause you don't have bigger teams at the beginning and especially some, some of the POG companies bottoms up.

3:50

Normally the growth on the human touch or sales lead is more upgrading customers.

3:56

So companies like<inaudible> or others or FMA start maybe with more account managers or people that upgrade users until they mature to have a sales team.

4:05

So I think it makes a lot of sense for early days.

4:07

Yeah. As few scale is, is hard to have such a big org under one.

4:11

So sales team mature and you wanna have more about motions and things like that.

4:16

So normally it's common to have a CRO or someone that leads that that orcas grows.

4:22

Yeah.

4:23

Interesting. As I mentioned, we're gonna be talking all about reducing churn in this self kind of self-service base.

4:28

I realize that actually we're probably missing one obvious talking point before we dive in, which is maybe giving listeners for anyone that's not familiar with Figma, just a bit of a sense of the sales motion, you know, the kind of price points broadly, how you acquire customers, first of all, cause I know we're gonna be talking about the importance of retaining them and you know, how we reduce churn and stuff.

4:46

But I think obviously some of our listeners are in much more enterprise, you know, thousands of dollars a month type sales motions, and some are in$10 a month type things.

4:54

I think maybe that's an important kind of framing for, for people to understand the Figma kind of universe.

5:00

So maybe you can give us a bit of a sense of, you know, what that looks like a Figma.

5:03

Yeah. I think Figma like many other bottom set company, we have a free immune.

5:07

So the whole go to market is driven by just acquiring users that see value on the free version and then they graduate and go from there.

5:14

So the classic, I start with one user that are using it.

5:17

They start sprint into a team, you of the credit card, you start seeing real value.

5:22

And then within those, you have your classic, I'm just an individual that I'm gonna keep'em free.

5:28

You have small teams that might stay with the credit card online.

5:31

And then some of them, those that start with the credit card online might belong to larger companies that might be suitable for, or might be in need for some of the features of the enterprise product tier.

5:43

So that's where our sales teams and account managers.

5:46

And when they jump into upgrading those into higher tiers, just to make sure that they, you know, they set up for success.

5:52

So that classic journey of a complain like, so there's many, many like Figma, like the Dropbox of the world or the slacks or the many of them, but that's the way we go to market to very, very center into the user on the product.

6:06

Yeah. Yeah. It's the best way. And I assume you see lots of people starting with, as you say, one free account and kind of, it's kind of, yeah, as you say, bottoms up, I've had someone describe as the Trojan horse approach where kind of one, one account gets you in the, in, into the company and suddenly it's expanding outwards before you know it, so it's fascinating and I'm seeing more and more traditionally what you would think was more enterprise technology businesses trying to kind of flip things around and go from very outbound sales led kind of set up a cool and sell thousands of pounds a month or hundreds of thousands a year to the CTO and actually start, you know, adopting the O automat approach.

6:41

Exactly. There's something really interesting about Figma, which is a really viral tool and there's not too many that has that virality, meaning are using my, started using it.

6:50

They might create something on Figma, then share the URL or share the creation.

6:55

And it's as simple as a, so that's really powerful.

6:58

And then what happened is like, I know that 20 people coming in one though, where there other tools that I work with in the past, maybe don't have that such a massive virality, Dropbox and example, or maybe it's slack.

7:08

The group will be smaller at the beginning. Definitely other tools that I work like unity or Golia, they were more for reduces group in, within a company.

7:16

So I think that that variety drove a lot of the growth of, and it's a remarkable, beautiful growth

7:23

Engine. I guess it's the advantage of being a, a visual tool that outputs something that probably by definition is going to be shared.

7:30

Right. And I, I assume people share stuff around and immediately get the question.

7:33

How did you make that? And the answer is Figma and suddenly it's you get that kind of viral viral loop, which is pretty cool before we move on may maybe you can give us a very quick sense of just growth at Figma and what the last few years have looked like, just overall growth of the, the team company, whatever you can share.

7:48

I know it's often one of those things that you can, you can only share so much.

7:51

Yeah,

7:51

Well, FMA grew really rapidly. And I think the, the remarkable thing is that the user, because of that virality, uh, we've been doubling on users for a long time, year, and year and even faster in the early days.

8:02

So the company grew from think around three years ago, less than a hundred employees all the way to today.

8:07

And we are like cross racing a hundred or something.

8:09

So, uh, very, very fast growth because of that community and that virality on the user and obviously similar trends on revenue and number of customers and number of paying users and whatnot.

8:20

Cool. Well, let's talk a bit about, I mean, this is probably an obvious point.

8:24

I think most marketers will, to some extent, understand the importance of retaining customers in, in order to scale, but maybe you can tell us a bit more about the importance and how you look at things.

8:34

I think you and I took before about the importance of making sure that you acquire and retain your customers.

8:39

I think that's something that it's been pretty obvious to me seems like very, very early days when I started marketing your company grows rapidly.

8:47

If you acquire the right customer, number one, especially if you're in more traditional B2B, but even if you're in a bottoms up, you just need to make sure that you acquire the right users and you manage the expectation of what the user is gonna do with the tool.

9:00

And then the second one is that you make sure that you match the expectation of those pain users, teams, or customer, whatever you wanna call them enable to increase the expansion rate.

9:10

So that's something that you wanna keep an eye on, like, um, are we expanding rapidly?

9:14

Cause the expansion really is equally important to the acquisition when it comes to growing a business.

9:18

So I'm, I'm fascinated about both understanding who the right fit is, even from the very early days.

9:25

If you even, I talk to a lot of C companies and serious a, they get really excited about volume, but they, most of the time ignore that I might getting the right people in that they're gonna see the aha moment and really realize, oh my God, this is a game changer for me.

9:41

I went from my, always to the new ways with this thing.

9:44

I think that's equal important. If you understand those, then putting the teams and measures in place and data to understand, are these people understanding the value in the first place?

9:53

Are they, are they sticking around? So retaining them both from a usage point of view on the Freeman, but also from a paying point of view.

10:00

So adoption of the features in the early days, and then, you know, be ready to renew and upgrade.

10:05

So, so I'll love to explore that with you today, Alex

10:09

Surely. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, I think it's, it is obvious when you say it that finding the right fit customer to begin with is the key to longer term retention.

10:18

But actually I think in a lot of cases, that connection can be lost and that people view retention in, in isolation.

10:25

And sometimes maybe that feedback loop to kind of analyzing who it is you're acquiring at the very beginning is sometimes lost.

10:31

And a retention issue is seen as just purely a retention thing.

10:35

Like why aren't they using the tool or it's a problem with the product or it's a problem with account management or when actually maybe there is a bigger, maybe more difficult, painful question that needs to be answers.

10:46

Have we actually acquired the right customer to begin with?

10:49

So it sounds like a lot of what you're doing is really completing the loop and going back to the beginning when, when you're analyzing the, the data, which I'm sure we'll talk a bit more about

10:56

Yeah, exactly. Right. I, and, and, you know, I made the mistake in my life where we were acquiring as many uses as possible and then, and upgrading them as much as possible.

11:05

And then we realized that there was a return, it was a feed problem.

11:09

So, and this is a classic also in sales led, um, companies where sales are just trying to sell sales, sell, but they're not stopping to say, am I still into the right people?

11:18

Those are the people that gonna onboard properly.

11:21

You need to have the champion, someone that understand is gonna see the value.

11:25

And this is a classic in the growth stages of sales companies, where the scale sales teams, and they don't truly understand who to go after.

11:32

And they're just trying to hit their quarters and things can get messy really, really, really easily.

11:36

Uh, and then normally what you see is a symptom of like low, low adoption of features and then, uh, starting to see the churn.

11:43

And normally that's when executive comes like, why are we churning?

11:46

And then you don't realize like, what is that Aion problem?

11:49

So I would say the, the first thing to look is like, who are we going after?

11:52

Now? We selling to the right teams, user or companies.

11:56

That's the first thing that, that will probably mitigate the majority of your problem.

11:59

And then the second one is to understand how to two things, I think onboarding is critical.

12:04

So if you sell into the right people, do we have an onboarding, whether it is human touch or tech touch through the product or through marketing touches as well, that really convey the aha moment.

12:17

So that first impression, which is I, I got it, I know what this is gonna solve for me.

12:22

And then two that then you have a journey on the right users adopting the right features.

12:26

So now every feature is for everyone and know every feature has to be adopted from the GetGo.

12:31

So that's another thing that I see a lot where tools trying to onboard users to set, to see everything and adopt everything.

12:38

I think it's better to break them down and say, well, what are the, the first three things these users should do in the first, next number of days?

12:45

So almost I break it down by number of days and maturity and, and feature that should be adopting.

12:49

That's sort of my, my thinking. And, and then if you nailed that one and I'm trying to describe sort of the high level framework, but if you nailed that one, um, the next step is like, well, some uses might need extra help because they didn't do that properly.

13:02

So you wanna have some sort of retention mechanism where you understand which ones are going, you know, from green to maybe in risk or gone dark, I call them, which is like, they got no usage or low usage and then to have reactivation mechanisms to bring them back.

13:18

And that's normally sometimes overseeing where, where companies try to bring more in versus trying to reengage people that maybe are about to, or have disengaged.

13:28

Right. Yeah. That's interesting. We can talk a bit about some of those in a sec.

13:31

I'm interested in the stage at which a company should be thinking about retention.

13:36

Obviously we see B2B tech businesses starting marketing growth generally at kind of different stages, depending a bit on the nature of their, their product and, and sales motions and stuff.

13:47

But is there a point where you think retention is more important or is it really something that should just be completely built into everything the marketing team is thinking about from the, from the very start,

13:59

Assuming that you have nailed your feet, your acquisition from the very, very good goal, and I'm gonna recommend you do this from your seat.

14:05

From the very beginning. I think the onboarding has to be addressed very early too.

14:10

I think there's very little products that they're so self explanatory that you might not need onboarding very little as soon as your product has a bit of complexity.

14:19

And I work with very complex products like Figma.

14:21

I think Angolia was a complex one, was an API for developers.

14:24

So it was hard to set up. It require a group.

14:28

Unity was extremely complex. You need, need to know C sharp and C plus plus, and you need to be a developer and there's a group of people working.

14:34

So as soon as your, um, product is complex, you wanna have a great onboarding flow in the product.

14:40

Ideally, uh, if it's a free in and, uh, also outside the product.

14:44

So at unity, we, we didn't have much onboarding in the product for many years and we had a massive job of users and, um, we couldn't solve it properly until we started doing some more ized onboarding in the product, which is hard to get started.

15:00

So there's a lot of product out there where you get in, and it's a blank canvas.

15:04

You, you might have some few tips here in the product, classic tip things, but it's a really blank canvas, I think, unless it's extremely easily to set up like Dropbox, we're just gonna drop some files in there and create some folders.

15:16

I mean, how much important you need with that at least to see the immediate value I'm talking about.

15:22

So unless it's really, really self explanatory, you need some sort of studying point with the user might through Ize, uh, or guided onboarding, understand how to see the value very quickly.

15:34

And I guess, again, that's one of the advantages to a visual tool.

15:37

That's got visual output and designers that you can build lots of resources and templates and all the different assets that people might be signing up to Figma to create you can, yeah.

15:46

Part of your marketing is I know, focused on that, that kind of thing, right?

15:49

Yeah. I think, um, this, I think we are doing it.

15:52

We have a bunch of collections for users when our, our new product feed jam.

15:56

We spend quite a bit of time, the last six months developing a lot of templates for the use to, to get started with the templates.

16:03

Uh, and most of our acquisition journeys are, um, now these days guiding through that template environment versus a blank canvas, but cam is another company that has nailed that one.

16:13

So you have a lot of companies out there that really have nailed.

16:15

I think Twilio did a good job too on having sort of that code exchange for the developers so they can see a lot of examples that they can start with.

16:22

There's a lot of companies that have great examples out there where you bring in uses from a, a studying point where they can understand the value very quickly and then build their own from there.

16:32

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And I guess it becomes, I mean, it becomes like a, an SEO play sometimes too.

16:37

If people Google like business cards, template or something, and suddenly a design tool has one and they can get started and you've, you've required a user through organic search or something and given them an asset and onboarded them and those kind of resources can be, can be pretty

16:50

Powerful. Absolutely. And I think the beauty of the campus is a great example.

16:53

We do at feed jam. There's a lot of companies out there is that if you nailed that as your point of view, and you really understand that a acquirer user with an intent to do something is better than just acquiring a user, your acquisition engine becomes way more powerful.

17:07

So all the time you can do campaigns around a specific personas, a group of personas that wanna start with an intention already to do something in the product.

17:14

I think that's really, really powerful. Cause then you immediately allow the user to understand the value faster and then maybe build from there.

17:22

Yeah. It's very cool. I imagine you've got case studies probably somewhere deep within the data where someone's Googled for like a poster template.

17:28

And one user has signed up to design a, a poster and suddenly there's a, a year later big enterprise license and the whole, the whole company's using Figma or something.

17:37

It's pretty, it's pretty cool when you think about it like that.

17:40

Yeah, exactly. And, um, and the word of mouth, I think the virality is a really big one too.

17:46

So part of that is you must start with a little temporary collection or something, and then you immediately share, and then you grow from there.

17:53

I think a Figma is pretty, is one of our main core, um, growth engines.

17:58

So if a marketer thinks that they've got a churn problem for you, what's the first step to understanding kind of why customers churn that you probably touched on a couple of bits already, but I think anyone listening that might be feeling like China is potentially an issue like where where's the best place to start.

18:13

Oh, I'll do two things. I will start making sure that you are onboarding, as we mentioned is solid.

18:18

So maybe start understanding why users are not seeing the value in the first place.

18:21

And that could start from the new user acquisition.

18:24

So you have a Freeman tool, make sure that when the users come in, just ask them in the product or ask them outside of the product.

18:30

Do they see the value, if not, what, what, why they didn't?

18:33

And there's many ways to ask that to a user. And then if you nailed that one, and let's say that you are getting a lot of people seeing the aha moment and understanding the value and then turning it into pay.

18:43

But the second point I will start questioning is that, are they adopting the right features?

18:48

And if not, why? So I'll start making some surveys or pause again in the product to understand that data can help with the behavior.

18:56

Cause you can might see. And I've done this in sort of my previous companies as well, where you looking to the patterns of a champion user and see the actions that they take to adopt the features.

19:06

And then you compare that with the ones that they're not adopting the features, and you might see missing gaps that they're not doing.

19:11

So, uh, there might be a step that they're not completing or actions that they're not taking, and that might help you understand where to boost them.

19:19

I think Wes, in the, in the PLG book, he talks a lot in the onboarding of, uh, your champion uses and your rookies.

19:25

So there's always gonna be a little percentage of their, those champions that they're gonna spend, you know, any time needed to nail your tool, but there's gonna be a cohort that they might give up easier if you don't give them a little push.

19:39

Those are the ones that you wanna focus on and you wanna understand what are the behaviors that they're not doing to boost them to do that through onboarding on the product, onboarding outside of the product.

19:48

So we'll nail that, nail that one, again, questioning the user, understanding through data and building some onboarding flows.

19:55

And if you have nailed that one, I'm gonna assume that you've nailed those two.

19:59

Your turn should be pretty reasonable at this stage, but let's say that those are nailed and then your customers are paying and then churning, I will do the same with the pain onboarding.

20:10

So you might have features on the pain stage and you wanna do exactly the same as the freemium tier.

20:15

If you don't have a free frontier, you just wanna do it there.

20:18

But once you have nailed that, I think it's a matter of understanding the way we did at unity for example, was we haven't got yet here Figma, but we did some modeling on where were the actions that indicate that someone might come into an activity in the next 30 to 90 days.

20:33

So we almost identify like, Hey, if I used to start having this behavior, I'm most likely it's gonna start decreasing activity.

20:40

And normally the decreasing activity leads into churn.

20:43

So you don't wanna mitigate the churn when it's done. You wanna start mitigating the lack of activity to then avoid the churn.

20:49

And if you get to understand what things are they're not doing, or what things lead to inactivity, sorry, you might wanna put programs in place to mitigate that.

20:57

So we have a lot of reactivation flows where if I use start doing these things and that the client will try to bring them back into the product to incentivize them to do either the feature that they didn't adopt or come back into something that didn't finished.

21:10

And again, you can play all the content plates that you wanna do in there, like templates, examples, invite like appear, whatever you have to do to get them back into the product.

21:20

Normally that will mitigate a lot of the churn. And then the last resort is obviously going back into already inactive users or churn users, but I don't recommend you start there.

21:30

A lot of companies start directly there and probably you're gonna move the needle very little compared with, with the other early stages that we just described.

21:39

And I mean, hearing you say all of that makes me realize just how much data is involved in this and how actual kind of product usage data is so key.

21:45

And I guess again, depends a bit on the organization, but marketers and product teams, you know, in certain environments as marketing generated, lead and hand it over and that's it in this environment, you know, you're really looking at how the product is being used on a regular basis to, to kind of build, you know, build, build the picture of when usage might be dropping off or, you know, as you said, like what the most engaged users do, how they behave.

22:08

I assume you're using some sophisticated kind of products, analytics type stuff to do that, but are there other tools that you use or any other tips you've got for gathering churn data generally, you know, beyond just kind of product usage data?

22:21

Well, let's put it into, I think you should start gathering your product behavior data.

22:25

So all those events, um, collect them and use your segments and your customer data platform understand that at agranular level, it is important to map the right themes in the product.

22:36

So what are the actions that we really wanna monitor, whether that happens or not, and create some sort of milestones, if you have that data correctly, that plus the kind of qualitative data that we mentioned before is important to have some sort of tools that you can ask people in the product or outside of the product.

22:52

And there's many are there, like from the Pendo of the world to there's actually specific Paul tools that you can use in product.

22:59

And if you have that, then the second thing you wanna start probably doing is collecting some sort of that survey, um, data to understand like, Hey, you didn't complete this or you didn't do that.

23:10

Like tell me more about what was stopping you to do that, to start gathering that, and then analyzing that in different dimensions.

23:17

Like what stage in the journey were these people sort of the action that they took in the product or not.

23:22

And then if you wanna get more sophisticated, I think having a data analyst from early days helps a lot.

23:27

So not just an, probably a data scientist that can help you start modeling things from early days.

23:32

So the best companies I've seen out there have the behavioral data map really early days, properly map collected accordingly in a, some aggregated level.

23:43

And then they bring data scientists to model that in from very, very early days, not just to map and report, but also to start modeling like what is happening, right.

23:53

They don't wait to be like a 200 million companies to do that.

23:57

They, they start from very early days. And then on the churn data, you mentioned, I think again, if inactivity happens, I think it's important to start asking the users like what happened, right?

24:07

And I start collecting that data to start giving you some sort of insight.

24:10

So I, I I'm final doing that when at two points are then an activity point and at the pay turn or complete user churn point.

24:19

So if the user has becoming inactive for a period of time, go and ask them if the user has never come back, maybe ask them either the user is paying and churn for reals or not, not downgrade or, uh, upgrade or anything like literally gone.

24:33

Um, you wanna ask them immediately, like what happened and probably the best way to do it is not after the fact is at the time on the pay turn at the time they wanna cancel the subscriptions.

24:42

So have a little pull on your tool that says like, Hey, sorry to you go tell us like sort of the reasoning behind something simpler, you can collect data.

24:49

I think that plus the behavioral data will give you a really good understanding of what is happening.

24:53

And then obviously like any company doesn't matter if it's a bottom up free or whatever, talk to your users.

25:00

Good advice. We talked a lot already about some of the solutions you found for reducing churn.

25:05

And we've talked about the importance of the onboarding process.

25:08

Maybe you can talk a little bit about some of those kind of win back programs, you know, the, the ways of kind of reengaging, any, any kind of practical examples of that kind of thing.

25:14

Yeah. I think that I, I learned over the years and you know, two might be different, but I learned over the years that if I usually doesn't see the value.

25:22

So if they paying the pricing become a problem, when the value doesn't suppress the, the pricing, right?

25:31

So because the examples I might be paying for a storage solution or a tool, I don't use it much and I'm paying this bill and I'm like, well, is that worth it?

25:40

Cause if you're using it, you you're gonna keep paying.

25:43

So the best win box or retention program that I've seen is to either one reinforce the value.

25:51

So give them love, give them additional resources or things that they might value to them.

25:56

So might be a free paying template, might be a free asset.

26:00

So our unity, we did a lot of, one of the best assets we will give them for free is like, Hey, um, here's something to incentivize you, giving you for free this paid asset for you to get started on a new project.

26:11

So those type of thing, incentivizing them, um, work really well.

26:15

And I'm talking about people that might have gone inactive or might have churn and on the paying churn thing, it depends on your tool on your internal, um, policy, but some sort of incentive.

26:26

Um, at unity, we try a lot of things like incentives at our pricing level.

26:30

So Hey, stay with us. And we, uh, we'll give you a couple of months for free, but the best ones will actually give you then a bundle of resources.

26:39

So like, Hey, continuous subscription. And we, you an additional set of resources that you can pick from.

26:43

So again, we, we let them pick up bunch of visual assets to start a new game or, or, um, improve their game or analytics or whatnot.

26:51

And they could pick from a list of them and say like, this is great.

26:54

I can keep going. It's almost like an incentive.

26:56

Right. Um, imagine that you and a, are you going yeah.

26:59

And they, they send you say, Hey, come back. Well, give you a free lesson with a trainer to get you incentivized again.

27:05

I think those are the best incentive to bring people back.

27:08

But again, each product's different. Each product is different.

27:10

Each company has different policies around where to use discount, where to use frees or free stuff.

27:16

So

27:17

I guess we could, we could probably do a whole nother episode on price pricing theory, but the in interesting perception of reducing costs and maybe reducing the perceived value by reducing costs and then adding value by sharing resources and assets and to completely different perceptions of value potentially.

27:33

But, you know, as you said, almost more effective than the other interesting.

27:37

Maybe it's the wrap up I'm conscious of time, but there's, there's kind of balance between the technical stuff and the human stuff.

27:43

And you know, the data, obviously there's quantitative data, qualitative data, how much of this is about human contact and, and obviously you can't scale that be beyond a certain point and any valuable, I guess, for, for bigger accounts, but I guess how do you find that balance between yeah.

27:58

The more manual human quality of stuff versus the more data driven, automated stuff?

28:03

That's a great question. I think it depends on the average lifetime value of the user.

28:07

If your tool has a really low lifetime value, uh, meaning it's in the hundred, couple of hundred, a year, it's hard to put a human on the onboarding or the retention side, but if your tool is made by teams and the average value is in the low thousands of dollars, it works really well to have both in the onboarding and reactivation or retention, I call it a tech touch plus human approach, which you might automate the onboarding, but there might be a human behind it.

28:37

And that will be for a selected teams or customers that have a, that sort of LTV potential.

28:43

And literally what you do is that you allow them to talk to a user, to a human if they need to, so they can reply an email or chat or some tools actually do it in the product.

28:52

I've seen some tools like co or whatnot that allow you to talk to your body from the company directly in the product.

28:59

I think those things work because, uh, it brings the human part of it to the, to the company.

29:05

So a human can reply very easily to say, Hey, actually have a look into these and it could be ized and whatnot, but have a look into these.

29:12

What about we give you these? And that normally has better traction than just the fully automated

29:19

Yeah. Yeah. Good advice. I mean, I think there's nothing worse than getting a email from a no reply at company name, email or something.

29:25

Right. So there's ways of automating this stuff. So it feels human.

29:27

And if they respond, it goes to a real human and a real human then responds, but equally you can achieve some, some scale and, and automation.

29:35

So, yeah, it's a good, right.

29:37

I think we're getting to a point in the world that I think we are a bit tired about dealing with bot 10 automated stuff.

29:42

Yeah. We've covered a lot.

29:44

There. It's been fascinating. I feel like we could go on for another two hours, but we have to draw a line at some point.

29:48

So I'm gonna wrap things up there and, uh, just say a big thank you for, for joining the podcast and, and for sharing everything.

29:54

So, yeah. Thanks again. Jesus.

29:56

Thank you, Alex.

29:58

Thanks for listening. Before we go. Just one final shout out to our finite partner, 93 X, the digital marketing agency working exclusively with ambitious fast growth, B2B tech and SaaS companies visit 93 x.agency to find out how they partner with marketing teams to drive growth.

30:14

We're super busy at finite building the best community possible for marketers working in the B2B tech and SAS sector to connect, share, learn, and grow.

30:21

Along with our podcast.