Using Empowerment, Engagement & Expectations to grow with Pinterest Global Head of Customer Success

Okay, we'll begin. Welcome everybody, thank you for joining us at SASTR Annual today. My name is Lindsay Leggett and I'm on the SASTR team, and I'm thrilled to be able to kick off this next session using the 3 E's— empowerment, engagement, and expectations— to to grow your customer profitability with Pinterest. Before we dig into the conversation, I have a few housekeeping items I did want to share with you to help facilitate the conversation. This is an interactive session. It's 30 minutes and we really do encourage you to join the conversation. We ask that you keep your cameras on if you're open to it, your audio muted while you're not speaking, but feel free to unmute and speak generally to the conversation at any point. We've got a few ways you can join the conversation. You can submit a question, a comment in the actual chat box at the bottom of your Zoom page. You can also click the raise hand option at the bottom of the Zoom page, or you can simply unmute and speak. So we do really encourage you to make this as interactive and engaging as possible. These sessions will be recorded, and with further ado, I'm going to pass it over to Duta Sandeep, Global Head of Customer Success and Operations at Pinterest. Duta, thank you very much for joining us today.

Thank you so much. Um, so hi, my name is Duta, and I want to talk about, uh, growing your customers profitably. And maybe before I jump into all of this, if it'll be good to kind of give a little bit of a background about who I am and what's the approach I'm taking for this conversation. I've, in the last 10 years, I've been a part of Google and Pinterest. And prior to that, I spent some time in HP. What's missing over here are the many logos that the companies no longer exist. They simply did not work out. But one of the great things that I have learned in the last year, and I think it's a, it's a real privilege in many ways, is both Google and Pinterest have a dual sort of, a dual way of working. On one side, there are users who use the platform. On the other side, the company makes money by doing B2B transactions, which is either selling software services, and that's kind of like the two worlds. And that's really— think about sort of Pinterest, where I'm at right now. At Pinterest, it's really a place where people come to look for inspiration, share what they're looking at, and do them in their real life. And the way we sort of monetize this experience is through advertising. So we sell advertising in the form of ads, and those are B2B, B2B B2B transactions that we do. And what I wanted to really talk about, sort of engaging customers, is I found being in this unique world, there is a lot of things that we can learn from each other, both from the B2B and the B2C side, to hopefully grow customers profitably. But let's sort of go to the next thing. Why are we talking about growing profitably? I think this business, this Crunchbase article sort of sums up the new cool in startup world as SASE and profitable. I love this because I think a lot of companies at Zaster are definitely SASE. So now we're gonna have the conversation about how to make it hopefully profitable. But levity aside, I think there was a phase up till 2019 where a lot of growth was being fueled Through venture money, through fundraising, without a really a look into bottom line. And as these companies have gone public, uh, they really haven't performed very well. And when you look at the fundraising sort of rounds, people are not looking for profitability immediately, but they are definitely asking the question around what are the unit economics, what is the path to profitability. Um, so Growing customers profitably means different things to different companies, but I'm kind of curious to sort of hear from a few people. Maybe put this in your chat window. What does that actually mean for your company as of now? So I'm gonna hold for a few seconds. In this new world of Zoom, pauses are good. So I'm gonna give a little bit of a pause and hopefully see a few responses, whatever comes top of your mind. Great, thank you. Longevity of a customer, which is a great one, which is basically kind of like lifetime value, right? Win-win opportunities for your business and your customer base being Continuously solving problems that people are willing to pay for. NPS, building expanding relationship. Ah, it's a good one, pricing model testing. I love that one. Um, good. So there's some good ideas. Um, and I would say all of these are absolutely, absolutely important. I think, um, when I sum it all up, when you're talking about a good pricing model, or, uh, somebody just said growing recurring revenue. In many ways, what you're really trying to drive, if you're trying to do profitable growth, you have to scale your business. And I wanted to sort of talk about— we hear the term growth, and I oftentimes hear sort of when I'm, when I'm talking to people, you know, in private conversations, etc., use growth and scale very interchangeably. So I want to sort of take a kind of a double-click down and really talk about the difference. Growth is growth, but scale is accomplished when you are increasing revenue without incurring the same rate of incremental cost, meaning You're— if you get $100 in revenue, you're not spending $100 in acquiring and servicing and doing all the things. You're trying to get $100 of revenue and you're hopefully spending only $50 in costs. Now, no company gets to that sort of ratio in their first try. It takes a while, but that's the question here. Right. So thinking about this a little bit more, how do the customers play, come and play? And a lot of you talked about sort of keeping customers, um, you know, NPS, creating a win-win longevity of customers. I want to take one step further and really talk about in the terms of a customer journey. Now there are many ways to define it, um, for the purposes of this discussion I'm creating something super simple. It's 30 minutes. There's only so much you can do about this, right? Uh, so, um, when I think about customers, you start with any customer when they are prospective customer, which is you're trying to woo them. They're not a customer yet, but you want them to be a customer. The second stage is they become a customer. They've agreed to pay you money and now they're engaging with you. And hopefully they become something which is what I would call a loyal customer, which would become a customer that is continuously doing business with you, and they're able to exchange not only sort of like the value you're, uh, you're giving, but also able to pay you on an ongoing basis. Ultimately, you want more and more loyal customers, but you have to go through the all the 3 stages. Now again, let me go back to the chat and ask you, what do you think are some of the challenges that you are facing today in either of these segments, either in getting prospective customers, getting paid customers, or making customers a little bit more loyal? So I'm just going to put a D marker on this question too so that I know where to read it from. Procurement. Amazing. Yeah, that is always hard, isn't it? Feedback is difficult to get, hard to find out where to engage with them. Okay. Ah, getting someone monthly versus term contracts. Okay, okay, that's some good ones. Well, hopefully I'll be able to get to some of this. Um, overall, I, um, as I work both at Google and at Pinterest, in both of these companies, uh, we now see them as sort of like this billion-dollar companies. But when I joined Pinterest it was about $300 million, and it was a very fragmented sort of revenue stream with most products actually having less than $100 million in ARR equivalent, right? Like $100 million in revenue. Some had like, you know, about $50, $60 million. And over a period of time, over the 3 years, we have scaled them up to sort of the billion-dollar-ish revenue point. So what worked for us? When I kind of take a step back, if I think about sort of the prospective, paid, and loyal customers, what has really worked for us to really ask the questions in the following order. And what I'm gonna do in the next part of the conversation is really sort of walk you through a couple of examples of what worked for us, and hopefully they're kind of good idea starters. So first and foremost, when we think about our perspectives, we really think about not selling, but are we enabling our customers to see the value? And how do we combine that with education to drive conversions? When we think about that conversion point, we're really talking about how are we enabling customers to get started correctly and understand what to expect. I can tell you, like, if somebody is giving us bad scores, but like the first 40, 45 days of working with us, there's a very high degree of probability they don't know what they bought, or they had some very different expectations based on either what we sold them or what they thought we sold them, etc., etc. And it's amazing how often it happens, which still sort of like surprises me, but now I just take it in stride. And the last one is really engagement, which is really helping customers learn and engage by, you know, helping them be more self-service and creating the right incentives to go along the way. So let's talk about each of these step by step. When I think about sort of empowerment, what I'm really thinking about is How are you, or how am I, sort of ensuring that the product and service options that I'm delivering are really meeting my customer outcomes? Not how many I need to sell, but how I need to do it for my customers. So let me take an example for this one. Um, last year we were having, uh, really, this is all public information, it's in our earnings and so on and so forth. Last year we were having sort of this challenge which is eternal with any company that goes public or trying to grow. Hey, we need to get more customers onto our platform. We need more customers actually like using. The challenge we had was a lot of customers, which is our B2B advertisers, didn't really know Pinterest. In fact, they could care less about Pinterest. They were having great success at, you know, you know, advertising on Google, advertising on Facebook. They simply did not realize why they should be even on Pinterest. So we kind of said, hey, why don't we create a version of our freemium, which would be what we call a verified merchant program. And it was very simple. We're gonna go ahead and identify the most Trustworthy customers. And the reason we honed in on trust was some research we did ourselves, like people who came to Pinterest really trusted the brand. We also found a lot of shoppers really had trouble identifying new products and buying it from sites that were not familiar to them. I, I can personally say I have bought products of an amazing ad and then what I got back wasn't great. I couldn't return it. And now I'm stuck with one of those kitchen gadgets that is completely useless. I can't return it. And like, it reminds me of the $20 I spent that I probably shouldn't have. Um, but going back, trustworthiness was something we knew was of value. And we actually went through, and we went through a full acquisition program. And we did it for free. We didn't ask them for any money. We gave them this little interesting badge, which now everybody understands a blue badge means good on the internet, which we borrowed from a lot of social media sort of places. And we showed them value, which we did basically content marketing to say, hey, you are getting all these visitors. If you see over here, there's some monthly visitors. It's like all these visitors you're getting. And as they kept getting more visitors, we would then engage them in a sales journey and say, "Hey, you're getting all this organic value of our product. You should consider actually paying some more." And it ended up being pretty darn good. Uh, we have scaled the program up from basically zero to thousands in less than 6 months. And this was in the middle of the pandemic. So Clearly something that we were able to make it work. Um, but the overall sort of, uh, experience here is really show the customer what value they can get out of our product before asking them to pay for something. The next thing we did, sort of next thing I want to talk about is expectation. I talked about, hey, the time when I have to sort of get on these calls and explain to people like what's working, what's in the contract, what this product does, because they're important people, and it's obviously, um, important for us to sort of talk to customers and get feedback and all of that kind of good things. Um, I want to borrow something, and this is something we do, but I really couldn't take a screenshot of the product specifically, so I borrowed something. And this example is actually from Apple. And has anybody bought— I don't know if anybody has bought a laptop recently, uh, but if you buy a laptop from Apple, what's gonna happen is pretty much right after that box is delivered, within about 20 to 30 minutes, you're gonna get an email, and the email will basically say some version of the following. Hey, welcome! You got your laptop. Would you like to schedule a free online personal session? And what it does, it does two things. If somebody is unfamiliar, they only take about a few minutes, like 15-20 minutes, but they walk you through different things. They walk you through the new features they have introduced and that really gets people a very scalable way. And we have adopted something very, very similar where in the product you can actually ask for help and you can schedule time. We open up, we have done an integration with Calendly and you can actually schedule time with people. And the reason we went this direction was very, very simple. We know some customers know the product. And when we send them emails and we try to like schedule meetings, they find it annoying. We also know there are people who are very busy, uh, they're probably not reading emails that we are sending them. So we want to have a good balance between our customer success teams that do reach out, but giving some of this control back to the customer in helping them schedule time with us so that we can do a successful onboarding with them. And we find like this double kind of like two-way strategy has increased the number of people who actually engage with us and subsequently are able to get a much better idea about the product itself. Last but not the least is engagement, which is we always talk about self-service, right? How do you make sure that the assets and all the things that you have People understand that. And if they understand that, that they can use it themselves, and you have— you can, you can sort of deliver all of this at the lowest incremental cost. And I'm going to borrow an example from Spotify because I think they have really done it well. At Pinterest, we are doing it. We are not there yet, but I think Spotify has done it really, really wonderfully, which is building communities. Now, community is an amazing platform. It was very hip back in the day. But now with things moving online and a lot of it moving online, this is, uh, I would say an asset that is often not used as much as it can be. And what Spotify has done is something brilliant. It has not only built a community, but it has created incentives and really recognized the power of their users and creates peer-to-peer engagement. Let me talk about what they do. They have this section in there, you know, there's any community has a typical kind of ask a question, blah, blah, blah, but they have this area called idea submission, and anybody can go in there and submit an idea. People will typically comment, vote on it, and when, um, uh, when ideas get picked up, the product managers, etc., sort of communicate back on the forum, etc., and What it ends up becoming is this amazing way to engage your customers at scale, but also they have other mechanisms to reward them, to really promote their power users. And in many ways, the power users, because they feel good about it, they end up actually helping out and pointing to resources to many of their other regular users. So the power users in many way become an extension of the customer engagement team. So I feel that's a great way, and we've been doing this a lot. So these are sort of like my 3 things, sort of really talking about, talking about like the 3 pillars. I found like if you think about these things in a more structured way, it yields much better engagement with customer in the long run. It helps educate customers about what they are buying. And for prospective customers, you really start the footing by giving them choices and seeing them value upfront versus, hey, pay me some money and then I'm going to show you some value. So, um, I'll open up for, uh, questions. I know we have, uh, Lindsay, maybe like 7, 10 minutes-ish.

Exactly, about 8 minutes left.

8 minutes left. So, uh, hopefully, um, um, now we can take some questions and we can go from there.

Looks like we have a question or hand raiser from Kevin. I will unmute Kevin. There he is.

Thank you.

Hi, Duda, thank you very much. Uh, so I'm a customer success, uh, manager currently, and I was just curious because I typically see in a lot of B2B companies that they treat kind of admin users as king. However, when it comes to the B2B2C environment that you're in, you focus mainly on your end users and then it goes from a bottom-up kind of, kind of strategy. Do you believe that this is something that more and more B2B companies should take a look into?

I definitely think so, because here is how most adoption ends up working for most products. It is ultimately about the user. So yes, there is an admin for a B2B product, but there are typically end users who are using that software also. And how you engage them and how you bring them along ultimately creates a lot of cult when it comes to the renewal conversations because they already have so many active users on the platform. So the renewal conversations become much, much easier because the admin is not trying to make some passionate plea about why this is going to help them, but there's so many users already using the system, so the renewal motion becomes super, super easy. Uh, second, A lot of B2B companies are realizing, looking at the successes of companies like Slack, et cetera, that by introducing a more consumer-like experience, the product becomes more sticky. They find more use cases, and it's easier to grow the product from one team, one organization, to multiple organizations. So I definitely feel there is a lot of learnings that can sort of be transferred. Hopefully would be very good for the B2B businesses.

We have another quick question coming through. Any quick tips on empowering end users at scale?

Yeah, I, I would say we have found like the community as a way to sort of do that. To really sort of get them to be power users. One of the ways I'm seeing a lot of products starting to incorporate this is to really sort of make sure that if it's a B2B product, have a more real-time way to understand who is using the product and really recognize them. I think when it comes to B2B customers, really talking about who are the power users Bringing them really in terms of sort of, you know, when you're having like product discussions, roadmap discussions, forward-looking discussions, really inviting them along to see, get their feedback goes a long, long way. Because then people know like their feedback is really being used. So I think feedback has been another way for us to sort of really engage the customers and really keep them engaged and tell to their colleagues like, hey, I had these ideas, I went to the session with the company, they heard, they did X, Y, and Z. And I think that has always also gone a really long way for us. Let's see, I see some new— oh yeah, there's the empowering end user scale.

Okay. We've got about 4 minutes left, so please do submit your last question, and if we don't receive anything maybe in the next minute, we'll, we'll close the session.

Absolutely.

I could probably go ahead. I'll follow up to my question earlier here. Kevin Leonor here. So when we're developing new features for customers, given that we want to— you preach having more of an end-user focus, should we place more priority on features for the end users over features for the admins? Because a lot of companies feel like going after the admins is what really brings in business to the door.

Yeah, I found a good way to balance that out is to actually share some of this with some data and what will help the admin. I think what ends up happening is sometimes when feature requests or when product engagement happens, we end up doing it in silos. It happens everywhere. It happens to us also. We end up doing it in silos and we treat both of those personas completely differently. And what we have, at least we did this a lot at Google, we would try to like create what the customer journey would be. And once we have gotten the feedback, you would actually go back and replay that feedback back with the admin or back with the primary person who was making the decision. And say, "Hey, we look at this, you know, these are overall set of things we have. We are prioritizing this because, you know, 100 people within your company," it was a large enterprise, "are using this and really asking for this. And I think it's gonna make this product be very, very useful. And you're gonna also benefit from it," kind of implied, because they're all gonna be happy. right? So that's number 1. Number 2, the other tactic we have used also is sometimes we will use customer support data to sort of make that argument back saying, listen, yes, these are like important to admins or like the power users, but the regular user is facing all of these challenges. And we see this because they contact us via support. And here's the overall breakdown of that. So sometimes You don't have the ability necessarily to go talk to the users, but like the support tickets, etc., can be a very good proxy to sort of make— create that balance in the process.

Thank you.

Well, we're right at about time, so I think we can wrap. Duda, thank you very much for sharing these great insights with the group. And for those that joined us today, thank you for joining us at SaaStr Annual. Be well.

Bye-bye.

Thank you all. Bye-bye.