Bridging the Gap with Product Led Retention with Gainsight | SaaStr

Alright, so we're getting to that time. Hello everyone, and thank you so much for joining. Good afternoon, good evening, good morning, depending on where you are in the world. I'm really excited to talk to you today about how to drive retention with your product during this time. A little bit about me. Uh, I'm the head of design at Gainsight, and prior to that, I worked in product and design at some really amazing companies like Box and Salesforce. And on a personal note, I am also a crazy cat lady. So if we're lucky, maybe some of my friends at home will make an appearance during the meeting. So in our industry, a lot of you probably have heard of Gainsight and know us as a leader in the customer success industry. But as you know, as you scale a company, the one-to-one relationship between a CSM and the people at your customer's company, you know, needs help to scale. And so that's why we launched Gainsight PX last year. Gainsight PX is all about product experience. Experience and the integration between customer success and products, and how you can combine those to drive outcomes. And the reason that we launched PX was really to help bring a more personalized experience into your product. And we do that by letting you know what people are doing inside of your application. What is their feedback? You know, that can be anything from NPS surveys that are in context of very specific area of your product, or things like customer effort score. And finally, helping to drive people to value. So that means personalizing engagements to help scale your onboarding and adoption. So, uh, in SaaS, sometimes we take this recurring revenue model for granted, but we know the models are emerging and COVID-19 is accelerating this change greatly. Every executive, you know, they're in a spreadsheet, they're modeling out what the future might be, and they're looking to consolidate spend. They're looking to, they're looking to see outcomes. They need to see the ROI of your products. And because of this, churn is really a top priority. So for those of you who have been watching and following the, the show today, you've probably, you've probably talked about this a lot, but my CEO, Nick, he's had a lot of conversations with executives and CEOs in other SaaS companies over the last few weeks and over the last month. And overwhelmingly, you know, over even new business, churn is extremely important. So because of this, the responsibility for retention doesn't just lie with the CSM. Especially right now, we need to be creative and, you know, how we're shifting people and, and how responsibilities might change within an organization. So because of that, I'm going to share 3 retech— 3 strategies for using your product to survive and thrive during COVID-19. Now, one thing I want to mention is that this is really interesting among our customers. About 50% of the customers have an increase in daily active usage. And so what— the reason I bring this up is not to say that pandemics are great or that this is going to last forever, but this is a very, very unique time where you have the ability at scale to see how your users are performing within your app. So the first strategy that I want to talk about is analyzing product usage. and you may not be a product person. That's totally fine. I think that talking about analytics can be a little bit daunting at first. And one of the hardest parts about this is the actual instrumentation of your product. You know, sometimes you need engineers to code it and things like that, but there are plenty of tools out there, including PX, that'll do that automatically for you. So, um, you know, that's one thing. And then within, you know, a lot of analytics products, they'll come out of the box with some of these pre-built reports. And so what I want to do is walk you through how you might use some of these reports right now to understand your customers better. So, you know, the number one cause of churn is the underutilization of seats. Now, of course, there can be a bunch of other factors that influence that, but we know that, you know, if everybody is using the product, it's likely that there will be a case for renewal. Now, what I want to emphasize here is this is a really great time to know what is a healthy active user. So a lot of times you'll hear or talk about daily active users, weekly, monthly, and daily active usage doesn't necessarily mean that your product is going to be retained any better. So if you have the data from, you know, previous years, I encourage you to take a look at what is the right cadence for people to be using your product in order to retain them and renew them. And the reason for this is we have to be especially careful about what we're communicating to people right now. And so, you know, you don't necessarily want to try to push that daily usage if it's not appropriate. You know, on the other end, if you find that, hey, you're a productivity app, you know, then that might be okay. but also take a look at who in your user base is underutilizing the app. So are there any trends among these groups, and what can you derive from those trends? I also encourage you to learn from what your users are doing in the app. So this is a, you know, a very nice graphic, but basically, we have a feature called our cockpit, which is where our users go to see kind of a list of tasks, we call them CTAs, a list of things they're supposed to do that day. And we also heard that people were saying, you know, I don't know where I am inside of your app all the time, and it gets really confusing. And so we said, okay, well, we know we need to do a redesign. What do we need to redesign? And what we learned from this path analysis is that they'll start from the homepage, they go to the cockpit, then they'll go to a detail, then they go back to the cockpit, then they go back to another detail, and they're just clicking around, and it's so obvious things are opening in tabs everywhere. And so this gave us really great insight that we needed to find a way to just open that thing in line so that they didn't have to leave the context. And this is just one example, but every— everything that people have to learn counts, every frustration counts. Um, and I want to mention funnels. So a lot of the time we talk about funnels in the case of acquiring new customers, but funnels are really important for in-app too. So, uh, think about, you know, you should always know what are the top 3 to 5 most important workflows in your app, or if you work on a certain area of the product, what are the most important workflows there? Um, you may be lucky enough to have the data that tells you what those workflows are, but if not, just go ahead and guess. I mean, you probably know what you what the intended actions are for people to do. And then, um, you know, just set those up and see where people are dropping off. If people are dropping off greatly at some point, it's usually due to two reasons. One, they're not expecting to see what, what you're showing them, so they didn't know that they were going to get what you gave them. Or the experience is too complicated and needs to be simplified. We're going through radical simplification right now, and you know, I encourage you, it's going to be uncomfortable, but take a look at this drop-off point and see what are the things on here that 50, that, you know, less than 80% of the population is using, or less than 50%, and see if you can live without those, or if they're for, if they are just for power users, you can train those power users. If it's someone's full-time job to use your product or administer your product, they're going to take the time to invest. The second strategy I want to bring up is being really thoughtful about he— how you engage your users. So we know that there are some companies that are being really negatively impacted by COVID. It's these category 1 kind of businesses. And then there are businesses in category 3 that may be seeing a big surge right now. Uh, and of course, you know, I think SaaS sometimes or generally can fall in this category too, but we often serve people in category 1. So, uh, you're going to need to use a very different tone for each of these different groups of people, and you're probably going to want to highlight different offers. So for category 1, I think we know that there are things that, like extending trials or, you know, giving sort of a— some exposing some features or maybe doing some kind of a freemium thing that may be in scope. And if you have the ability or it makes sense for your business to do that, that's great. But you should also be conscious that some of these companies are just going to churn. It's very important that you think through how you treat these companies because sometimes— in a lot of cases, there's going to be nothing you can do about it. The business goes out of business, it's gone. But the people that are in that business are humans. And so they're going to remember how you treated them. So even if you can't get them to stay with your product or pause your product, um, they still want your help. Uh, and then category 3, you know, take a look at if it makes sense to expand with those customers. They may need more services. They need more, they may need more training. Also, getting those communications ready. None of us were prepared for this, right? You know, unless you're a crisis communications team. But we launched about a month ago this 5 Best Practices for Crisis Comms, and it actually was one of the top 5 now most viewed posts that Gainsight has ever had. Has ever written on our blog. And so, you know, people are looking for help, they're looking to connect. And let's say that you are experiencing a surge in traffic or in usage, you may have delays in support, you may, you know, you may need to, you may have outages that are coming up, or you're going to do a new release, all of those things, it's very important to have them planned. So try to think about, you know, what might come up so you're not caught off guard in that scenario. And think through how you can create user journeys to reactivate your dormant users. So there might be things that are now, now useful in your product that may not have been useful to certain populations before. And I would think about how you can, how you can bring those back up. And let's say that somebody clicks on your email, let's say it's just content, and they don't go into your app. You can still learn a lot about what people care about right now by what they're actually clicking on and engaging with. And also, you know, like I mentioned earlier, be very conscious of what is the right channel and what is the right frequency of outreach right now. The third strategy I want to mention is helping your users find immediate value. So, uh, in your onboarding experience, people want to know right away why they're here and what they need to do. So, um, which features are more relevant now? But also, people are nervous. People are nervous about their jobs. Everyone's nervous. So how can your product help them be better at their job? Be very specific. And then also, how can your product help your users help their customers? You also want to help people win every time. These small wins really matter. And, you know, like I mentioned, there are definitely— there are going to be brand new people coming into your product right now, there's going to be people coming back after, you know, some period of time, and there's going to be advanced users. So, you know, in this example, this is a, you know, this is an HR app. And, you know, coming in and onboarding, like, if you can complete a task, that's really important. And especially if you find that you're one of those products that maybe isn't a daily, doesn't need to be a daily active usage product, like HR is a great example, but there are others. Help people to know what to do. Guide them, tell them, and help them win. And finally, the third point here that I want to mention is, as much as I'm talking about in-app engagements and in-app experiences, what I'm not encouraging is popping a modal every time somebody clicks in a new page of your app. It's very important to figure out the least invasive way to not break the person's workflow. And there are also going to be promoters, and your promoters are really important right now. So what we're looking at is the Gainsight Experience Center. This is the kind of a customer experience product we're launching, and it's sort of the source of the voice of a customer. So, um, it's important to collect data so you can collect NPS data, customer experience, but also things like sentiment analysis and kind of mashing those up. And the great thing is sentiment analysis is one of those other things that it's like Oh, I, you know, 5 years ago, I was like, oh, I'm not a data scientist. I don't know how to do that. It's, you know, there are plenty of, you know, products, platforms available to help. Seeing the influence maps in your organization. So the person that you're selling to, or the person that you're selling to may not be connected to your biggest promoters. How can you create those relationships? And finally, taking that data and showing it to the decision makers to really prove ROI. Did their people save time? Are they happier? That will help you to drive your renewals. All right. So, um, I'm going to get into a little bit of workshop, but I want to just take one minute to invite you to join us next month for our free Pulse Conference. If you liked what we talked about today, there's going to be a lot more of it. The URL is here, so feel free, feel free to do that. And I want to offer you this take-home exercise, which kind of summarizes, you know, a couple of the categories that we talked about. And every business is different. And so, you know, I would encourage you to brainstorm and kind of see what's appropriate for your business and how you can best leverage these strategies for your own. All right. I think we can go to Q&A. So let's stop sharing. All right. So, great question. What's the best way to get to the executive sponsor? We're seeing more and more decisions be harder to make where the CFO or the CEO needs to sign on. Yeah, I mean, I would go with a couple things. You know, first is trying to kind of prove that ROI. I mean, what, what the CEO and CFO cares about is Are you helping, you know, are you helping, are you helping our team in some way? Are you helping us to save money? They want to consolidate their spending as well. So how can you better integrate with the tools that are already there? I think, you know, I think that would be very, that would be very useful at this time. Okay, what is the most common thing What do applications devs get wrong from a CX design perspective? Hmm. Okay. So I think it's really important to be able to surface up the right information. So there's a question that product managers get asked all the time, which is like, how do you take in all these different sources of information and how do you kind of like, How do you figure out how— what to prioritize? The same thing applies to CX. And so, I think one thing is kind of ensuring that you have a way to sort of set up filters on the topics that are important to you, while also enabling that free-form kind of input. Alright, let's see. Yes. So then, can you post a link to the take-home exercise? Yes, the link is, is right up here, and I don't know if I can get the copy and paste it in, but it's gainsight-sites.com/exercise. Disaster-plg. All right. Can you summarize the strategies? Yes. So strategy 1, analyzing the product usage. And I think you'll have access to this document afterwards as well. Engaging users really thoughtfully, so sending the right message into the right people. And helping your users find immediate value. And I think that is it. So thank you everyone for joining, and I hope you have a great rest of your day. Ciao!