How Product & Marketing Should Work Together with PagerDuty CPO Sean Scott + CMO Julie Herendeen

I'm going to give everyone just a couple seconds to get themselves situated. Our first official session of the day. We're excited to kick off SAS Start Enterprise. So thank you so much for joining us. Just going to give everyone another second to filter through. Thank you guys for coming and excited to kick things off. So today we have Julie Herendeen and Sean Scott from PagerDuty. They're going to be talking about how marketing and product work together in a product-led growth model. Super excited to welcome both speakers. Before I do, just a couple housekeeping reminders for everybody. So first off, this is an interactive session. So to submit a comment, response, or question, you can use the Zoom chat box at the bottom of your screen. The speakers are going to be asking questions, answering your questions questions and chat throughout. If you'd like to speak directly with the speaker, feel free to come off mute or turn your camera on. Welcome to ask a question live if you would like, and we have 35 minutes here, so encourage you to ask as many questions and get engaged. One last thing, these sessions will be recorded and available post-event, so I will drop us a link in the chat so you can view those. Julie Shaw, thank you so much for joining us. Take it away.

All right, thank you so much. First, thank you to the SaaStr team for having us, um, and I'm going to kick it off with some introductions. I am Julie Herndeen, I'm the Chief Marketing Officer of PagerDuty, and I'm here with Sean Scott, who's the Chief Product Officer of PagerDuty. And we're here, as you heard, to talk to you today about how product and marketing work together to build a successful product-led growth model. And as context, for those of you who don't know PagerDuty, What PagerDuty does is we help teams manage the time-sensitive, mission-critical work that's so essential to keeping modern digital systems always on. And PagerDuty is a great example of a company that's really grown through product-led growth. Oftentimes with, with our product PagerDuty, just as context, it's often bought by developers directly through our website, and then the product grows virally within the organization. So What might start with a customer purchasing with a team of 5 or 10 developers can grow into thousands of users in the organization across DevOps, IT Ops, customer service, and other functions. So we'll be drawing on our PagerDuty examples quite a bit as we go through the session today. And now I'm going to hand it over to Sean to introduce himself and give you a preview of what we're going to be talking about in the session.

Hey, good morning everyone. I'm Sean Scott, the Chief Product Officer at PagerDuty, and I'll share some of the insights around product-led growth, largely that I learned from my time at Amazon, where I was responsible for a lot of the shopping experience, like the homepage, product page, and checkout, and how I brought some of those same practices and principles to enterprise software. This may be a dramatic change from some of your approaches and how to apply this to the SaaS world, but a lot of those B2C kind of techniques where we're hyper-focused on the metrics and high-value actions are absolutely applicable. And you'll see, and I'll talk about some of the changes we've actually made from this, from this exercise. So jumping in, so I'll share product-led growth and how it all starts with the virtual flywheel and what that, what that actually means. I'll share a working backwards example and my press release and FAQ for a cute little robot that you may have heard about, may not, but it's pretty exciting. We'll then talk about what good self-service looks like and how to really know if you're succeeding. And we'll jump into funnel metrics all the way through to user behavior and high-value actions. And then we'll wrap up with some key takeaways. So in product-led growth, product and marketing work together to really build that customer journey. And we think of this as a self-reinforcing loop or a virtual flywheel of growth. And so as a product leader, I'm really focused on engaging customers and delighting customers. And the output of that is actually attracting more customers because they'll tell their friends or tell their coworkers or colleagues or people in their network about the product itself.

Right. And on the marketing side of the fence, so half of that flywheel is product, half of it is marketing. And as Sean's creating happy customers in the context of the product, Marketing's job is really to find the right prospects, bring them into the product, and turn them into those happy customers together with product. And by finding the right prospects and really reducing the friction in their journey, we can make acquiring customers as efficient as possible and make the flywheel spin faster. And really what's at the heart of that is the happy customers, right? Because they have an incredibly important role in marketing. The best marketing you have is the word of mouth of your own customers. So when you think about marketing's job in creating this flywheel and making it go faster, a really important role for marketing is thinking about how do we really amplify the voice of the customer, right? Once they're happy with the product, how do you amplify that through social, through online reviews, and really harness them as advocates for the product? Just so critical as you think about building that go-to-market. So with that, let me hand it over to Sean, who's going to talk a little bit about, now that we have this framework, for product-led growth, a little bit about how we drive alignment up front in the product-led growth process.

Yeah, thanks, Julie. So where do you— jump a few slides there. So where do we actually start? Well, it starts with clarity and alignment. So at PagerDuty, one of the plays we've taken out of the Amazon playbook is working backwards process, starting with the press release and FAQ. And we actually write the press release and, you know, work on the FAQs and answer all those hard questions before we start any development. And that's pretty critical if you think about driving alignment across an organization. So one of my last jobs at Amazon was actually building this robot. So I was the first employee of the Scout team and actually grew it up to delivering tens of thousands of— tens of thousands of products every day across multiple states. But I started spending the first few months really working on that press release and FAQ. So writing, iterating, and requires a lot of critical thinking and making the hard trade-offs. And a key step in this process is shopping it around internally because you're really looking for those contrarian points of view that can either strengthen your hypotheses or blow holes in it, actually, and tell you that no, this is wrong and here's why. Uh, one of the kind of more interesting stories we had around that was we started off thinking we wanted this really flashy robot that could just blow people away the first time they saw it. And the more we shopped it around, we started getting feedback that, well, it's actually got a job to do in actually delivering packages. And so think about designing it maybe for boring. And so we actually did. The more we thought about this and iterated on it, we thought, you know what, that makes a lot of sense to design it for boring. We still wanted to be cute and kind of accepting in the neighborhood, But we wanted to fade into the neighborhood and fade into the fabric of the neighborhood. So you don't just— every time you see it, you're like, oh my gosh, there's another robot. It just becomes part of the neighborhood fabric. And so we actually came up with a new design principle called design for boring. And it's, uh, you know, I think that's a pretty, uh, surprising aspect of when you look at this thing, uh, and to think about boring. But if you think about like things that have a job to do, like your dishwasher, you don't really think about the attractiveness of your dishwasher. It's got a job to do. And so that was was some of the iterating we did in that press release and FAQ. But it all really comes around driving not only what those hard decisions are, but also the alignment across the org with marketing, with sales, with everybody. And so it applies why we, you know, I'm giving an example of this robot here, this delivery robot, it applies to everything we do. And so we're actually, every feature piece of functionality we build now at PagerDuty, we start with, the customer and work backwards with the press release and FAQ. And then Julie and her marketing team will really flush out the go-to-market aspects of the project and of the effort as well.

Yeah, that's right, Sean. The PR FAQ has been a really— it's a really powerful tool, not just for product but for all of the teams across the organization, in particular marketing, because we can really use the PR FAQ to really better understand and help us answer questions around who specifically is the customer. And oftentimes, that's one of the, the points that we iterate on in the PR FAQ is getting really specific about who we're selling to, and then really building the marketing plan around that, right? Thinking about how are you positioning the product? What channels are you going to reach to use the customer and even what level of marketing investment is necessary to succeed? Because just like the PR FAQ team allows you to iterate and ask those hard questions about the product strategy and the product definition, it also allows the marketing team to iterate the go-to-market strategy and get visibility around that early. So if there's any disconnects in terms of how you're taking that product to market, and probably all of us have lived through a situation where maybe we launched a product and it kind of gets knocked over the fence to marketing and marketing isn't sure how to take it to market. So having that PR FAQ process to align up front is really critical to the success of the product. And speaking of go-to-market, I think that's a good segue to one of our next lessons learned.

Yeah, so product-led growth is all about self-service and how the customers can control their journey. So here we're actually showing one of the changes we made, which is gating and ungating content on our website. And so putting customers in control of their journey still requires the sales team, as opposed to sales-led growth. This is product-led growth, where the product is actually doing a lot of the hard work. But the key is injecting sales at the right point in the customer lifecycle. It also means that marketing and product should be building an experience that answers many of the customer questions as possible. So we know that when we take friction out of the journey, we increase the likelihood that customers will succeed in what they're trying to accomplish and, and deeper engage in the product. So one of the other kind of things I noted was my time at Amazon and running the shopping experiences. I ran Amazon Checkout, and we were hyper-focused on removing friction. So where customers are getting stuck, which customers are getting stuck, how can we simplify the experience and really thinking about every aspect, every click to make that as simple and as streamlined as possible.

Yeah, and when you're in a digital-first model, Friction really is the enemy that slows down the customer's journey. And one of the things that you think about a lot in marketing, particularly when you're doing a digital-first journey, but you're in a B2B model where you're selling to businesses, often there's a tension between building that self-service model where you have open access to all of the content and having gated content, which is more of the classic sales-led model. With gated content, marketing is getting a lead, and oftentimes marketing is evaluated on leads. So that feels like something that's very comfortable in the marketing model. But in driving a self-service journey, you really want to think about how are you providing broad access to the resources that the customers need and kind of letting them drive their own journey, right? Letting them find the content that's important to them. So again, you can shorten the distance between them starting to learn about your product, and actually being able to try the product. An example of this is just recently, we had a demo that was a gated demo, drove leads to sales. And as we ungated that demo, we saw 3 times the number of customers viewing the demo. And just instinctively, you know that's great. And the data also shows us that viewing the demo is really highly correlated with people entering our trial and actually being successful in our trial and converting to, to purchasing the product. So from a marketing standpoint, it felt a little uncomfortable because we had to give up leads and we had to kind of rethink how marketing was being measured. But from a customer standpoint, it really felt like the right thing to have the customer be able to be in control of that journey. And then as the customer gets into the product, as Sean was saying, we start to have a lot of really robust data about how they're engaging in the product, what kinds of products are they integrating with, right, and, and how are they using the product. And then when customer does— do reach out, uh, when sales does reach out, they have a lot more information in order to have an informed discussion with the customer.

And from a product standpoint, how you kind of leave those fears of like we're giving up the the sales walls, so to speak, is by having everything instrumented for self-service. Every contact, uh, and all the way through to customer service, and then looking at why people are contacting customer service. And every one of those contacts is a defect that you want to drive to zero. For example, I started looking at our customer service contacts, and I saw a customer who was in a specific type of role, type of user within our product asking why they can't do X. And when I looked at the user experience, I saw that we were actually— for their— that role, we were hiding a button as opposed to showing the button, having the button grayed out, and then telling them why they can't actually perform an action. And in this case, it was creating a service through the product, but they were an observer role, so they didn't have that ability. And so then I can actually apply that to a lot of other areas of the site. And so finding little nuggets like that gets me excited. Because that one little customer service contact then applied to about 20 or 30 areas within our experience that we could then go kind of transform to this self-service model. And so how do you know if the customer journey is being successful and the customer is being successful? And how do you identify those points of friction? So one of the other common missteps here is that marketing and product often look at the aggregate metrics. So if you take something like conversion, so maybe your conversions from a trial is 20 or 30%, or maybe it's 50%. But what does that actually mean? Who's actually converting? Who's not converting? Maybe the 50% conversion means 100% of one customer segment is converting, but 0% of another customer segment is converting. And so that would actually tell you, wow, we really need to go focus on this, the 0%. The 50%, while it's interesting, it's not that helpful to drive, to drive the actual actions that you'll need to take to improve your product and to really think about this product-led growth model. And that really brings us up to our third lesson and the importance of funnel metrics and how they relate to high-value actions.

Yeah, and the funnel metric journey really starts with the top of the funnel in the customer journey. And as Sean was saying, it's really important to both have those aggregate metrics, but then be able to really dive into the segmentation of those metrics so you can understand how the customer journey is working for different segments of customers and where it's successful and where it isn't successful. Particularly as you think about customers coming into a website, you really want to understand which resources are most important to them, which messages are resonating with which audiences, and being able to work backwards and see which channels are bringing us the most valuable customers. Because as we know, aggregates aren't that helpful and averages lie. So as we dig in, we may find that customers that are coming from, for example, an organic channel, heard about us word of mouth, and came in looking for PagerDuty are having a very different journey than maybe someone that came in from a top-of-funnel webinar and doesn't know as much about the product yet. So we really need to think about how do customers come into the customer journey that we're creating through our website, and how are they able to convert to one of those high-value actions that Sean was talking about. And at the website level, it's really thinking about do they come into a trial? Do they want to contact our sales team? Are they viewing a demo? All of the things that we know are really correlated with longer-term success in them on their journey to becoming a happy customer. And Sean talked about defect rate, and that is 100% applicable to marketing and the marketing journey as well. If there is a gap, if there's a drop-off, if customers aren't doing what we expect them to do on the website, it's really an opportunity to be curious and ask why and start to dig in and see if there's a part of the customer journey that either is different than we expected or something that maybe customers are looking for that we don't have. So the defect rate is as applicable to marketing as it is to product.

That's a great point, and following your curiosity and really having all those metrics and then looking at them frequently. When I say frequently, I mean daily or weekly, worst case is weekly. But once we have customers using the product, we use the metrics to really understand what those high-value actions are. So these are the actions that create long-term value. So here you see a couple screenshots of our mobile app, which is key to alerting users that there is a problem that needs their attention. And it's one of our high-value actions is that time to download our mobile app and is key, right? So you think about, they've installed, they've gone through the self-service process, they're using the website, and we're telling them, okay, now install the mobile app because that'll be kind of part of this whole process of your transformation to DevOps. And so we measure that time to download across, again, across these different segments. We also look at time to invite other users, time to add integrations, and then our customer users finding these high-value actions because up there, if we know what the high-value actions are but customers aren't finding them or clicking on them, then that's a problem. And again, back to the segments— what segments are finding, what segments are not. And it's, um, and having that performance by segment, uh, really helps us, you know, understand where we need to focus our time and our resources, right, from a prioritization standpoint, from product and engineering. And so marketing is also part of this process. Again, is understanding where those customers engage, and because they can actually help them along their way, and they can actually start very early in that funnel. If we see something in the product that's not really resonating, then we can actually change some of the branding and some of our campaigns around how we go to market.

Yeah, and then to Sean's point, the marketing outreach doesn't stop when the customer goes into the product, right? Marketing is still an equal partner in that journey. So to Sean's examples, as the customer is looking to— if we're trying to expose those high-value actions and help them maybe find the mobile app and download it, or if we see that they're looking at integrations and maybe integrating Slack with PagerDuty or Salesforce with PagerDuty, we can educate them on the capabilities of those integrations and make sure that they're able to fully take advantage of the capabilities that we have in those integrations. And even as we see customers engaging in the product and see the intensity of usage and some of the challenges they might be having as their teams are troubleshooting incidents, we can provide more context to make them successful along that journey. So the marketing partnership with product certainly is at the top of the funnel and bringing in the right customers, but also in helping to educate those customers as they go through the product process. So that again, going back to our flywheel, they can really become those, those happy customers that then are going to help drive our marketing flywheel down the road.

Great. And so to wrap up, next slide. Yeah, so the— again, my top takeaways, our top takeaways, is really starts with that press release and FAQ to do that critical thinking, making those hard trade-offs, and but more importantly, drive the alignment across the entire organization.

Yeah, and then of course, uh, just recapping, you know, really having that self-service journey and making sure that you can instrument that self-service journey so that you can measure it at a detailed level all the way through the top of the funnel and into the product. And those metrics are going to be kind of the North Star that bring product and marketing together. So with that, I think we're going to go into Q&A.

There's one question here. What type of tools are you using to get to the why behind these funnel fall-offs. So that's a good question. And so it starts with having it— the first step is understanding kind of who's actually falling off, right? And I've kind of iterated this on a few— said this a few times, but when you look at those metrics by segment, then you get a much narrower example. And then one of the things we can actually do is we know who's actually falling off if it's in the product. So once they've actually logged in, we can see where people are getting stuck. And we can experiment there, but we also have the advantage of just reaching out to the customer and asking them, hey, we noticed that you haven't installed the mobile app, or you haven't done, you know, an integration or one of our other HBAs, and say, what are you thinking about? How are you— how can we help you? And how can we make our product better? And, you know, not only does that start to build the rapport with the customer to get deeper insights, but it also, you know, often it makes a big fan of the customer if an actual product manager or even I'll reach out directly to the customer. You know, it turns a lot of heads when a chief product officer or anybody, a senior product manager, reaches out to a customer and says, we want to help make our product better, give us some feedback. And that goes a long ways, right?

And oftentimes the, you know, the tools that you might be using to instrument the, the website versus the product might be different, but then as a team you need to be able to bring all of that data together and have a really standard set of dashboards that, again, kind of provide that north star and give you the ability to constantly be seeing what's happening with the data across product and marketing.

And Bernard asked, what about enterprise SaaS that is related to highly process-oriented industries like logistics? So some of the concepts we've talked about here are absolutely directly applicable. So we've talked a lot about The pressure is in FAQ, which is driving alignment. No matter what you're doing, you need alignment across your organization. And you need to have that clarity of thought in what you're actually building. So that's one. Another one is the metrics. So no matter what you're doing, I was part of the— like I shared the Scout robot, but that was part of our transportation delivery organization at Amazon, which is a giant, the largest logistics orgs in the world. And we were hyper-focused on metrics and the same types of— while, you know, we're talking about funnel metrics here and usage of the application, it's very similar to look at your process flows and your operational flows around, you know, what are your metrics at each step of the way? And, you know, what is the output of those metrics? And we're looking at those metrics weekly. So on the robot, we looked at our kilometers per interrupt, how far we could drive before we needed a human intervention. You know, when it comes— we got to a customer's house, what was the success rate of delivering that first-time delivery success to a customer? So all these are metrics that— and then kind of the same process, it's just this iterative loop of now getting, you know, taking those metrics and figuring out, okay, what is our top 10 reasons why this is happening? Now let's go start tackling those one by one, right?

And even if your marketing, um, go-to-market is, is has more in-person outreach, right? If you have a very specialized industry, if you have a smaller set of customers. What we find even with enterprise customers is, is digital is a critical part of the journey. So even though it may be mixed mode, it may not be an industry where you have a trial, you— they're still going to have a lot of customers that are looking to learn about the product on their own time. So the more that you can provide that information and guide them on that journey and recognize that it may be a combination of sales and marketing conversations, as well as the digital journey that you're providing on the website, you're going to be able to understand what customers are like, what customers are coming to the website, what are they looking for, what are they engaging in. And that's a really important lead indicator in terms of how they, how they perceive your product and what kinds of questions they have.

Here's a couple, Julie, I'll let you kick this one off. As you mentioned, marketing doesn't end When the user is in the product, who in the org is responsible for setting up actions, e.g., emails, users, or pass-offs to sales based on user behaviors inside the product? And there's a kind of related question, which is how often we meet and/or our teams meet.

Yeah, that's a great question. And as you get into the product, that's really a place where the partnership between product and marketing deepens, right? Because based on those metrics, you know, first it's agreeing on what are the high-value actions and when do you kick off that communication to sales. And then how that happens in the organization, it does differ by team. In, in our case, we— marketing and product work together to figure out which actions is marketing setting up, and we're triggering off of our tools. And it's important to have tools that can trigger off of product actions. Not all tools can. So being able to— we set that up through marketing, but it's really done very closely in conjunction with the product team, because we have to agree on what are the high-value actions, what are the actions that are really correlated with knowing that a customer is, is ready for that sales conversation. And then also, how can we make sure that we're providing sales with some of the context and information so they understand what's happening with that customer and the product? And I think the other question was How do we sync up on a regular basis? And that really, I think, speaks to having teams that are dedicated to products and to product journeys so that the team leads are constantly using those metrics as a North Star and looking at what the experience is in the product and going through that iterative process because it's constantly changing, right? The products are— living, breathing, adding features all the time. You're constantly thinking about how you're reaching out to new customers and new segments. So that's an ongoing conversation around how successful is the— is that product flywheel.

Yeah, you know, and we do meet regularly, both our teams do, and Julie and I meet regularly as well. And we have, you know, sometimes we'll have readouts of kind of the metrics and what's working, not working. But the other thing is, if you find something you know, that's, that's pretty interesting or pretty pivotal, I'll share it instantly or pull us together instantly to go, let's— hey, we found a new nugget, let's dig in on this and see what we can do. So it really depends on the kind of the magnitude of what we're finding.

Yeah, just last week we had pulled up some data, uh, that, that, uh, the marketing team had pulled up, and then Sean was looking at it, and together we were like, hey, wow, this is really interesting data because it's showing us what the the top things are that customers are looking at before they start a trial, right? And helping us understand, like, where are those questions that people have as they go into the trial process, and how can we get that information more in front of the customer as they go through their journey?

And then back to those HVAs, you know, ideally you want to tie that. So what was— what Julie's talking about is what was the page they looked at before they clicked the start trial button And then looking at that, following that through is, okay, the customers that saw that page, are they going to be good customers? Are they going to really have those deeper relationships? And because we want the high-quality traffic, right? It's insufficient just to have a bunch of traffic thrown on the website. We want the traffic that's really going to convert and be a long-term customer in perpetuity. So just following all the way through and then looking at synthetic cohorts around, okay, people that saw this and then what did they do for the next 3 months on the site? So regardless of time. Another good question here from Phil. Voice of customer is the best marketing, makes total sense. Our smaller customers are active in forums and refer to best practices to each other. Is this dynamic just as true in enterprise customers? What are some of the mechanisms to drive that dynamic for enterprise customers?

Yeah, Phil, that's a great question. I can kick that off. I would say that the dynamic is true for enterprise customers first. More than ever, as I said before, enterprise customers also chart their own journey and are looking for resources out digitally on the web. But there are things that you can do that are different for enterprise customers in thinking about how they connect and how they refer to each other. So I think with, with smaller and more specialized groups of enterprise customers, you can think more about things like roundtables where the customers are sharing best practices, or something we do at our PagerDuty Summit, which is our once-a-year global customer conference, which is coming up in June, quick plug. But what we do there is we have customers come and talk about their best practices and ways in which they've used the product. And it really is focused on how customers learn and become successful with PagerDuty. But in having those conversations, customers can hear their peers and hear how they're using the product. And that's a really powerful way to communicate the benefits of the product.

Yeah, and we have some of the same plays, it sounds like, that you have as well. We have forums that we have a lot of customers that are active there and sharing kind of their best practices. And then you will also see just, you know, everything from Reddit posts to across the board where you see customers actually engaging. So we have a pretty large customer base. So we're fortunate enough to have 50% of the Fortune 100 and 60% of the Fortune 500 as customers. So we do see a lot of engagement across the board from our customers. But then, as Julie said, those kind of smaller, more intimate settings, we have customers advisory boards. We'll pull together a select set of customers to talk about a new feature to get their inputs early. We look at customer service. We are always surveying, asking for— asking our customers for feedback. And then we also publish operational guides that we then again share with our customers and they give us more feedback there. And so just kind of all needed and it all helps to really create that virtual flywheel of growth that we talked about in the beginning.

Yeah, and one other thing that PagerDuty has done from the beginning that's been really successful in bringing our customers together is building a community. So we actually have a very active PagerDuty community for our users. And that's a way that they can, on an ongoing basis, be sharing content, best practices. We have open source resources there. So it really does bring that, that community together and influencing people in the organization too. I think the, the best marketing that you have in the organization is also the developer saying that they love the product, right? So even as you're thinking about how do we deliver the value proposition to maybe CTOs or CIOs in our case, Really, a lot of that is already coming from the developers and the IT teams that are using the product and talking about how much it helps them in managing the very complex digital operations that sit behind all the services like Slack and Zoom and others that we enjoy.

There's another good question. How do you create an unengated self-service models for industries as such? Julie kind of alluded to this in the, in her presentation when she was talking, but so our customers span very small businesses, like a couple people, 2 or 3 people, all the way through to the biggest enterprises. And what's interesting about that, especially if you take that product-led growth model, to think about, you know, a Fortune 100 customer can literally self-service on our product and come and engage and start a trial just like a mom-and-pop business that's running customer service with our application. And so, you know, to ungate, again, it comes back to those basic practices around everything needs to be instrumented so that, you know, you're not dropping anything, that, you know, you know who's coming in. Once they're logged into the trial, you have their email, their contact, you can look up to see, you know, what company they're with. Are they another kind of another organization within a larger company that may already also be on the experience? 'Cause you can imagine if you didn't have all that, then you're just kind of blind and it's like, maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. You're not throwing it to chance, you're actually making sure that you have everything you need to ungate it, which is critical. And like I said, our product works across and it's used by tens of thousands of small businesses and as well as the biggest companies in the world. And so I think that shows that in this model, like I said, the biggest companies in the world will actually self-service a trial without any engagement from sales. So it just shows that this model does work, but it takes— it does take a lot of work to get it to that state.

Yeah, and I think to that point, just recognizing that the customers across all segments, as Sean was saying, I don't want to be in control of their journey. So the more information you can give them, the better the content is that you can put in front of them, you know, the more likely that they're going to more quickly— I'm going back to that flywheel— more quickly get to that aha moment. With your product, where you— they're like, oh, okay, I really, I really see the value of the product. Because that's when I think about the job of marketing. Obviously, you want to build the brand and make sure customers understand what the product does. And then it's really building the most effective journey to get them to the product value, right? Because you're really there to deliver value to the customer.

And is the trial compulsory for self-service models? And what are the other alternatives? It's not. It's just we found that for us, it helps And we used to not have this, right? We used to just, you had to come in and you had to pay out of the gate, but we actually opened it up to have a free trial and went to a freemium model. And that actually had a significant boost in traffic, right? Because now customers, there is no less friction, right? It all comes down to friction and they can use the product in a trial mode for a few weeks and then they can decide if they want to convert to paid or stay with our free edition. As well. So all these things are just little kind of tricks along the way just to help reduce the friction and to get customers deeper engaged with their product. Because if they, you know, if they see they have to pay out of the gate, maybe they, maybe they will, maybe they won't. Depends on how good the traffic is. If you're there free, then it's like, how good is your product at actually teaching and educating and informing the value and the benefits of the product once they're in to really help make sure they're seeing the value and they're getting the value that you're selling. There was a question about, could you share the tooling, a short list maybe, that is used to empower marketing and product teams? I'll give a few, but there's— I don't think there's a lot of magic here. When I talked about the presentation FAQ for Scout, we used Microsoft Word to write that. We had some internal tools as well around just, you know, getting feedback and everything on a doc, but it was just the basics. And here we use Google Docs. And then for metrics, you know, it doesn't matter. You would take all the metrics that we had, you know, that I did at Amazon, and most of the time they were in Excel. Here we have, you know, other different dashboards and such, but it's just at the end of the day, it's just something that— a way that you can actually see what's going on. You can get at the data. I think the tools are less important in that case, from a metrics and a PR FAQ, and more just about making sure that everything is instrumented and you have ways to actually get the data that's readily accessible.

Yeah, and from a marketing standpoint, you want to think about both having that data so you kind of have that 360 view of the journey, right? So you're going to be instrumenting. It's really important to make sure you're instrumenting both the website and the product so that you can pull that data together. Sometimes teams underestimate the importance of instrumenting everything in that journey. And then from a marketing standpoint, you just want to make sure that you have tools that allow you to take that data and be able to take action based on the data to communicate with customers. So, you know, that can be everything from communicating on your website, integrating it maybe with like a chat tool with Drift. So as you're reaching out to customers, you have data in that process. It can be how you reach out through email, through Marketo or HubSpot or other tools. And it can be how you reach out in product and making sure that you actually have targeted in-product messaging so that you can, based on that customer journey again and that segmentation, you can be surfacing the right information to customers in product. And there's a lot of in-product tools, Pendo or Iterable. And there's a long list. But from a marketing stack standpoint, I think the CMO increasingly also has to be a CTO for marketing to make sure that you've got that right marketing stack to be able to support a product-led growth model. Because it is actually different than the tools that you would be using to support a sales-led model.

Wonderful, Sean, Julie. I think we're out of time, but so many questions, and this was so helpful. Little tactical tips. That hopefully the audience can take away and try themselves. So thank you both so much for your time. Really appreciate it. There are other enterprise sessions going on, so make sure you head to sasterenterprise.com to view what sessions are up next. Thank you both