How To Build Customer Loyalty With Subject Matter Expertise

Hi everyone, I'm Allie, obviously. I'm the CEO of Mapistry, and I'm really excited to talk to you about how we've created some really loyal customers at Mapistry using our weird niche area of expertise and our domain knowledge. Let's see if this works. Hmm. Okay. Oh, there it goes. I just maybe had to press harder. Okay. So before I get started, I just want to give you guys a quick overview of what Mapistry is. Probably none of you guys are Mapistry customers. So— and I'm— but I'm going to use some examples from my experience. So I want you to understand a little bit about what we do. So Mapistry is a SaaS tool for environmental compliance. What that means is that we help manufacturing companies comply with environmental regulations from the EPA and from state regulators. Basically, we help them make sure that they don't get in trouble and they don't get sued and they don't get fined. So I'm sure, especially since so many of you are in customer success, that you've all thought a lot about customer loyalty. The whole SaaS model only works if you have loyal customers and low churn, and you have more and more customers coming in every month. That's the only way you're gonna get that exponential MRR. And so we've thought about that a lot as well at Mapistry. So I'm gonna give you the recipe for how we've created a really loyal group of customers at Mapistry. So our first step is that we picked a really narrow niche to focus on. We're expanding that, but we started really, really narrow. And the second step is you gotta get the word out there. This is all about marketing and content marketing and letting people know that you should be the go-to resource in— for your area of expertise. The third step is you want to take all that knowledge you have in your head, all that expertise, and build it into your product. So I'm gonna talk about how you can do that, maybe even more than you're doing today. And the final step, our 4th step, is how we take our customer success and our consulting services to the next level. And I'll share what I mean by that towards the 2nd, 3rd of the talk. Okay, so step 1, like I said, was to pick a niche, something that you are an expert in or something that your team is an expert in. You don't want to go too wide if you're going to take, follow this recipe that I'm laying out for you. You want to pick something really small. And for us, I think it was really important to have someone on our team who was an expert. But actually, I was listening to the Guidewire talk a few— like an hour ago, and he was saying that they had no one on their team who knew anything about insurance when they started their company. So maybe you can bring in someone from the outside, or you can learn as you go. But for us, we started by focusing on industrial stormwater compliance. My co-founder Ryan, he's an expert in industrial stormwater compliance, but my guess is that none of you guys have any idea what that means, and that's totally cool with me. Maybe you know what some of those words mean, but not strung all together. But there are millions of people out there, the people that are our customers, who really care about it, and there's no resources available for them when they have problems with industrial stormwater compliance. So there was this big big gap and this huge hole where we could establish ourselves as experts. So if you can find something like that where you really are an expert and you can establish yourself as a resource for people, you're going to create some really loyal customers because you're the only place they have to go for that information. So, okay, so you figured out what you're going to focus on. The next step is you got to actually get the word out there. First I want to talk about what you want to talk about when you're communicating with your potential customers. So I like to think about two types of things that we communicate with potential customers on. The first is thought leadership. And for this I think about we really want to be inspiring our customers. So, or our potential customers and leads. So the people that are gonna buy Mapistry or any of your products, They're gonna be the kind of people that are gonna stick their neck out there and tell their colleagues and tell their boss, "I think we should solve this problem using a new and innovative solution." And so those are the kind of people that want to be inspired. They want to think of you as an innovative leader. So inspire them. We like to talk about how regulations are changing in our space, because for us, the regulatory landscape is really crucial for our customers. They wanna know what is gonna be changing in a few years because that's really scary to them. And they love to hear that we're thinking about it for them. We're attending meetings in DC to hear how laws might be changing in the future. So we share that kind of stuff with them. But don't stay up in the clouds with thought leadership. I think it's also incredibly important to get down deep into the weeds and give your customer some really tactical advice. If you can show potential customers that you understand the big picture stuff, but you also understand the daily grind of their job, they're gonna be much more loyal. So here's an example from Mapistry. So as I mentioned, we're all about stormwater compliance. So one of the many requirements of industrial stormwater regulations is that you take a little glass jar and you stick it into a storm drain and you take a water sample and you send it off to the lab. And before you take that water sample, you have to measure the pH of the water. And you guys might remember from chemistry class or from maybe measuring pH in your pool that you might have used litmus paper like on the screen here. And so the way litmus paper works is you dip it, a little piece of paper, into the water and then it changes color. And what you might not remember, but you can kind of see on this callout thing, is that the difference between a 5 and a 6 and a 7 and an 8 and a 9 and a 10, they're incredibly subtle. Even if you're not colorblind, especially up on the screen there, I don't know how anyone's gonna tell the difference between a 7 and an 8. But for our customers, it's a huge problem because the difference between a 5 and a 6 is the difference between being in trouble and being in compliance. So if somebody has a problem with pH, they can read a blog post about— from us about what to do about it. They can hear from us about how they should actually be using a pH meter, which is that other thing up on the screen. And we can show them how to calibrate a pH meter, which is a little tricky but not so hard. And they can understand that we are here for them when they have those everyday problems, those tactical problems. It's not just about thought leadership. It's not just about telling them, "Here's our innovative solution for managing your data." We understand their day-to-day struggles. So you figured out what you're gonna talk about. You're gonna talk about your thought leadership and your tactical advice. Now you gotta get the word out there. There's lots of talks and lots of stuff written on content marketing, so I don't want to go too in-depth on this. But some of the stuff that's worked really well for us is we do a lot of webinars. We do a lot of emails and a lot of blogging. And this is just an example of one of our emails. I really like our brand voice that we have. It's very snarky and, you know, lots of GIFs and stuff like that in our emails. We try to make fun of ourselves and fun of the community. And I think people really appreciate that, because they're, you know, used to getting pretty dry content. They're in the manufacturing space. There's not a lot of people emailing them with Sharknado GIFs. So I really love our emails. But the other thing that we did that I really would like to encourage you to do, especially if you're a small startup just getting started, is you can host an event or a conference before you're a really big company. It certainly doesn't need to be as big as Zaster. So we hosted our first conference when we were only 6 people on the team. and we had about 85 people attend. So it was a pretty nerve-wracking decision to make because we spent about $25,000 on it, and we'd only raised some angel money, so that was a huge portion of our bank account. But it was a huge— hugely successful event and a really good idea because everyone who attended was able to see that we understood our space better than anyone. So we spoke for about a quarter of the event. It was a full-day event. And then we had speakers from regulators to environmental lawyers to peers of the people in the audience, so other people who worked in manufacturing. And we did a lot of question and answer time. And so whenever a panelist was, or a panel was answering a set of questions and no one on the panel knew the answer, someone on our team, probably Ryan, would jump up and say, "I've got the answer to that one." And so by the end of the night, everyone was thinking to themselves, "Man, Mapistry knows stormwater better than the regulators," which is a little scary. But that means that if I have a problem with stormwater, I want to be using Mapistry. They know this better than anyone else I've ever talked to. So you don't have to be a huge company to host a conference. You can be— it doesn't have to even be a conference. It can be a breakfast. Events are a really great way to let your customers know that you know your space better than anyone else they're talking to. And that you know their space better than they do. So you can be a really great resource. Okay. So third step is you've got— you've picked out your niche. You've got the word out there. Everyone knows that you're the go-to resource in stormwater or whatever it is that you're an expert in. So you've got all these people coming to you saying that they want to buy something from you because you're obviously the expert. So you're obviously selling software, but I think that what you really want to do is take all that expertise that you've developed and bake it into your product as much as possible. And every SaaS product does this to some extent, but I really feel that most— that a lot of products could do it even more, especially if you're really focused on a specific domain. So for example, if you are Salesforce or any other CRM, somebody has sat down, the founding team, the product people have sat down and thought about how they think a sales team should operate, how they think sales processes should work, and they've built that into the product. Or let's say you're HubSpot, you're all about inbound marketing, you've built that into your product so that it's easier and more efficient to do inbound marketing. But I don't think anybody is sitting around saying, "Well, we were thinking about hiring a marketing person, but we decided to buy HubSpot instead." Nobody says, "I was thinking about hiring a sales team, but I'm gonna just buy Salesforce instead because we don't need sales experts, we have Salesforce." That's not really the goal of Salesforce or HubSpot or a lot of SaaS tools. But at Mapistry, that's actually our goal. Our goal is to allow our customers to not have to hire or employ a contractor to be the expert because we're the expert for them. So I think another good example of this is TurboTax. You guys, a lot of you probably use TurboTax or a competitor. If you're using TurboTax, you don't have to hire a CPA because all that expertise that used to be trapped in CPA's head is in the software. So if you can do this, your customers are gonna be incredibly loyal because they're gonna know that if they leave you, they're not just gonna have to have another product to manage their data or remind them to do things, but they're going to need somebody to be an expert, and that's kind of hard to find. So one really specific way we've done this at Mapistry is— so environmental regulations often vary from state to state. It's not just in the US. It's not just the EPA, and it varies in other countries as well. So one thing that varies is I mentioned that you have to take water samples a few times a year when I was talking about pH. So you tap the regular— the frequency that you take these water samples varies from state to state, and the way that the results are averaged varies from state to state, and the actual allowed pollutants in every state varies. So for example, in California here, we can have 1.04 milligrams per liter of nickel in water. But in Florida, you can have 1.417 milligrams per liter of nickel in your water. Obviously I memorized that. I don't have all those numbers in my head because no person could, right? It would have to be in your software package, or if you don't use Mapistry, you're probably hiring some outside contractor to read through all these regulations and maybe build an Excel spreadsheet for you if you're really sophisticated. So if you have a product like Mapistry and you're thinking of leaving us, you're thinking, "Man, where am I gonna get all that expertise? All that stuff that's baked into the product, I'm gonna have to find a human to know it all now." So, okay, so that's step 3. You're gonna create a product that has all your expertise baked in. And step 4, this is the stuff that I think is really exciting and the stuff that I'm really passionate about that we're doing at Mapistry. We try to take our customer success and our consulting services to the next level. And what I mean by this is what we realized is that we really wanted to be a complete solution for our customers. We didn't want to be a tool. I don't know if you guys have read— Jason has written a really great blog post on solutions versus tools. But to— so solutions are great because people are willing to pay a whole lot more money for them. They're willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars, millions of dollars as opposed to let's say $10,000, $20,000. So that can be a great reason to want to be a solution. But the other great thing is that solutions solve a really core business problem for your potential customers. But what we realized was that to be a complete solution, software is not always enough. Sometimes you need to go above and beyond software. Sometimes you need to have a customer success team. Sometimes you need to have consulting services, which a lot of people are afraid of, and we were at first, too. But we've really embraced that now, and I think— and we're not the only ones. I was listening to this Guidewire talk I mentioned, and they mentioned really briefly and just sort of moved on that a third of their revenue comes from services. And I think that's actually true of a lot of companies that sell to big enterprise companies. So Box actually made this announcement last month, or in December. They said that they were launching a new consulting services branch. And they're calling it Box Transform. And the idea was— I'll read this Aaron Levie quote first. So he said in their earnings call that our customers are looking for us to be their trusted advisors to not only ensure they are incredibly successful in their Box adoption, but also to help them think through their digital transformation for content management and collaboration broadly. So that's a bit of a mouthful, but here's how I interpret that. Basically, Aaron's saying that we've been doing consulting services for a while, 'cause we sell to big enterprise companies, but what we've been really helping them do is implement Box and integrate it in with their existing ecosystems. But what we've realized is they actually, our customers actually want us to go further. They don't want us to just help them implement Box. They want us to help them be better at content management and collaboration. And our— and Box customers know that Box is an expert at content management and collaboration. So they don't want to go to some third party to sort of finish off the solution. They want Box to help them do that. And we've been doing the same thing at Mapistry for years. We've had a very similar realization that I imagine they had. And what we realized was that our customer success teams and our consulting and services teams have to be subject matter experts. So for us, that means everyone on our consulting team and everyone on our services team and our customer success team, they all know environmental regulations really intimately. And most of them are all really deep stormwater experts 'cause that's where we started. So the first time this became really obvious to us was when we were trying to win AC Transit as a customer a few years ago. So they are the bus authority in the East Bay, which is just east of San Francisco. And they have 5 bus terminals ranging from Richmond down to Fremont. And they had a big stormwater problem. They had someone leave, and with that person leaving, they lost all this institutional knowledge because everything was just recorded on paper. And so they had a new employee who was supposed to manage all their environmental programs including stormwater, and he was really overwhelmed. And we happened to come to them at the right moment, right after this person— new person had been hired. And he said to us, "Look guys, your software is pretty great and it would solve a lot of my problem, but it doesn't get all the way there. What I really need is I need someone to take those water samples that I've mentioned a few times. I don't have anyone who knows how to do it in the company, and we're a union shop, so it's kind of challenging to get people to take on new roles, and I don't know how to train them to do it, and I guess I could hire someone else, but I don't know who to hire. I don't know who is good at this. So if you guys— I know you guys are experts, so if you guys could just take care of the sampling thing, I'd be happy to use your software. And we were really resistant to this idea. We hemmed and we hawed, and we thought, you know, I have a software background, but my co-founder, he left his consulting company 'cause he didn't wanna be doing things like going out and taking water samples. So why would we say yes to this? We wanted to be doing things that were scalable, and we didn't wanna be doing grunt work like taking water samples. But what we decided was that, you know, A, we were really early in the company and we didn't have a whole lot of money in the bank and they were going to pay us to do it. So, okay, sure, maybe that won't be such a bad thing. And we decided that we maybe would learn something. And we figured we'll never do that again. But what we learned was that it was actually a really good idea to do this kind of work for them. Because by going out and walking their site for them, we were able to really get to know their locations, and we were able to give them really specific advice. So we could say to them, "Hey, we noticed that your dumpsters aren't covered because we've been walking around your site. We've noticed that you have these tanks of chemicals that are not covered, and you guys should probably fix that. It's probably causing some pollution in your stormwater." It was a really painful experience. I mean, we— one of the challenges of taking water samples is you have to do it when it rains, And in California it doesn't rain that much, and we got this contract in December, and there had to be 2 samples taken before the end of December, which means that we couldn't miss any rain event. So we were literally waking up at 2 AM to go out to like a super sketchy part of Oakland and take water samples, and Brian's like, "I think I heard gunshots, but the security guard, they seem not fazed, so maybe it's cool." So we really didn't want to keep doing that, but what we realized was that maybe we weren't going to keep taking water samples. Maybe we were going to really give people a hard sell about training them to do it in the future. But we wanted to give that complete solution to our customers, because when we did that, they were never going to leave us. They realized that we knew their problems better than anyone else they'd ever worked with, because we weren't just giving them software. We were giving them a complete solution. So we do that today. We do a lot of customer success that isn't implementation services or integration services. It's more like environmental advice. So a really common thing our customer success team will do is using our software, they will be much easier for them, for the people on our customer success team to understand when our customers are headed for trouble. And so they'll proactively reach out to a customer and say, "Hey, I noticed you have really high zinc in your latest lab results. It's not too late to stop that from taking you into trouble. What can we do to fix it? I think it might be coming from your roof because I understand your site really well because you're using our software. Maybe you could purchase some downspout filters. We could even teach you how to make them and save a lot of money." That's the kind of stuff that we do as part of customer customer success. We actually spend very little time on technical implementation or software customer success. And we also realized that services were a really important part of our business. So these are some pictures of us doing some stuff out in the field. This picture here of Amber taking soil samples to figure out where some iron is coming from on a site because we hypothesized that it might be background. And there's a picture of Ryan here doing some investigation to determine where, I think it was again iron, was coming from on a site that probably was not background, probably coming from a bunch of rusty stuff they had sitting around. And then this third picture I think is a great example of how we often get customers. So we often get customers who come to us because they know that we are the experts in industrial stormwater compliance. But they don't actually realize that they should be using software to solve their problem. They just know that we know this stuff backwards and forwards, and they have a big problem, so they come to us and they ask us for help. And they're used to paying consultants and contractors to solve these problems for them. But they're not used to buying software. We sell to environmental health and safety departments. They never have bought software before. They all use computers, obviously, but they're just using software that someone else in the corporation has given to them. So what we often do is we'll start working with a customer and we might even just do a services contract with them to get started. So this is an example, these big silver tanks are an example of that. We had a— these guys came to us because they were getting sued and they had really high levels of metals in their stormwater samples, so that's why they were getting sued, and the lawyers, as part of the settlement, said that they needed to fix the problem, which is pretty typical, and But the lawyers didn't give them a solution, and they had tried to find someone to give them a solution, and that person had given them a $300 treatment system that didn't work. And so they were out $300,000 plus the lawsuit, and they still hadn't fixed the problem. And they said to us, "You guys seem like you really know this stuff. Will you guys build us a treatment system or tell us how to build a treatment system, and we'll only pay you if it actually works?" And I don't think they thought— they certainly did not think we would say yes to that. But we were confident, so we said, "Yeah, no problem. We can do that for you." And so we didn't build it for them, but we— because we kind of try to stay away from that kind of stuff. But we told them how to build it themselves because they have the skills to build it themselves, so it's just easier for them and it's better for us. We don't want to do that kind of stuff. And they built this— you know, all these beautiful silver tanks. This is one of the pictures that they sent to us. They were obviously really proud of it. They framed it with a flag in the background and everything. And it actually worked, and because of that whole process, they really started to trust us. And so when we came back to them a few months later and said, "Hey, your system was working really well. I think you should start using our software because you have a bunch of other locations, and you don't want to get sued at any of those other locations." either, and if you use our software, I really think that you're gonna be, you're gonna prevent those problems from happening in the future. And because of the work that we'd done with them as traditional services, they trusted us when we told them that was the solution to avoiding future problems. That's a really common paradigm for us. Services first and then software. OK. So I think I'm almost running out of time. I'm just going to go over real quick an overview of what I went through today. So this is our recipe for creating really loyal customers, customers that trust us to be the solution to their entire problem. So we've picked a really small niche. We started out with stormwater. But we're actually going to use this same recipe to start expanding to others. Environmental areas. So we picked stormwater as our niche to start with. We got the word out there. People in this industry know that we are the go-to resource for this stuff. We built a product that takes all these nitty-gritty details of stormwater compliance, and we built it into the product so that our customers don't have to hire an expert to solve this problem for them. And the fourth step is whenever software is not enough, because sometimes software is not enough. So whenever it's not enough, we are there with humans who are really, really knowledgeable about this space who can fill in any gaps that the software misses. And that's it.