Engagement Is The New Growth: How To Plant Seeds for a Hyper-Growth Future, Anna Griffin, Intercom

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Startups the most important business metric today is net revenue retention. This is the easiest way to grow your business because you're dealing with customers who already know your brand. You know who they are and where they are, which makes that a lot easier for upselling and cross selling.

I need some traction. You need some traction. Let's get some traction.

Hey, what's up innovators, entrepreneurs, visionaries and disruptors. This is your Traction podcast host, Lloyd Lobo. We're a community of over a hundred thousand people just like yourself, on a mission to help you get the methods, the money and the madness and to explode your business growth. Featuring stories and tactical advice straight from those who've done it before, like Shopify, Twilio, Asana, and many more.

I'm gonna talk to you today about the one thing I think we're all wrestling with. It's like, where am I gonna find new growth right now in my business? And we all know that the easy money growth train has kicked into low gear and we're all trying to reassess, like what are we going to do about this? And this is that moment where you get the opportunity to question an action against the sacred cows. I'm going to give you a quote from a book that I read a while back that I love from Robert J. Kriegel, the Book with Sacred Cows make the Best Burgers. And here's what he says. Today's marketplace is a turbulent ocean and we're all surfers struggling in a sea of change. Huge waves are breaking on us, barreling at us at beat neck speed to keep up. We've got to think like a surfer on the horizon. We have to start moving before the wave hits. If you don't, you're going to end up flailing in its backwash. And that's exactly where we are today. Your investors are asking you for more substance. Less promises, more substance. And you know what that playbook is? We have all lived it. It's you'll do more with less. Rationalize those resources. Time to get creative and or it is time to action those sacred cows and really think about what you can do and lean into differently right now to get ahead of that horizon and create competitive advantage. So pressure's on. Don't freak out. We're all here looking for new ideas today. And I want to give you one. I want to give you something to think about. You are already going, you know what this means. I'm going to punch above my weight class and I'm going to consolidate our wins and I'm just going to optimize that marketing, spend a little bit more and trim some budgets and we're going to ride this out. But there is another way to prepare for growth that's not about mortgaging your future or your present. And that's the realization that we are here again where the Internet is changing. And that means that every business is going, every Internet business particularly is going to change with it. In this influx right now, customers are demanding this frictionless experiences. They demand to be treated as human beings and one on one, and frankly, you as a company have to figure out how to do that at scale. They are not going to be treated as tickets anymore. They are not going to be left on hold. They are not going to tolerate being bombarded with more marketing messages and spam. They are not going to get lost in your product and not have somebody engaging with them to tell them or to explain to them how to get more out of a feature. They're just not going to tolerate it. Because just like you, they too are re questioning where they're going to spend their money, who they're going to be loyal to, how they're going to get more out of the dollars that they're investing. They won't make more from every dollar, just like you want more from them. And so you're going to have to figure out how to meet them in a new way. And that can be something as simple as the thing that you all know. Again, I don't feel like I'm telling you something you don't already know, but it's how you action on this is what we're going to talk about today. And that is businesses of the future are going to compete and win on one thing only, and that is customer relationships. This is going to be the future of how you're going to grow your business. It's less about moving away from how you're going to acquire and acquire more volume, how instead of putting all of your emphasis on getting more people to a trial, for instance, it might be how you're going to convert more out of that trial, how you're going to get more quality and you're going to do that through relationships, because. And you're going to do that through relationships that are personal, they are in real time, in the moment, effective, and they're human. And that's how we're going to get to this thing that we call radical retention. That ability to become indispensable to your customer. This means that you're going to be able to anticipate their demand in real time. It means you're going to start maximizing your most valuable asset, your customer, and doing everything you can to cement and deepen those relationships, those experiences that create word of mouth experiences that are going to elevate loyalty and repeat business and more fanfare to your business. Because we also know this, that the most important business metric today is net revenue retention. This is the way that you're going to grow your business. And it's the easiest way to grow your business because you're dealing with customers who already know your brand. You know who they are and where they are, which makes that a lot easier for upselling and cross selling. And you know what they need. So these are the tools to building customer relationships that are going to deliver growth. So that's hard to deny. So why aren't we doing that today? Or how do you get started building, building new customer relationships. And part of that's rethinking about who owns the customer relationship. I've been part of a lot of organizations like, well, sales owns the relationship. No, marketing owns the relationship. Support owns the relationship. And everyone's trying to figure out who owns customer relationship. And the fact is, you all own customer relationship and you have to own it in a way that's good for the customer. So we're not going to just ride out this uncertainty. We are going to win the moment with engagement. Modern engagement is how you're going to have the opportunity to build deeper, more meaningful relationships. This is going to be the future of Internet business, modern engagement. And in this very nature, Internet businesses are going to change because businesses are going to depend on loyalty. Loyalty is going to depend on relationships. And relationships is going to depend on ongoing engagement. And I'm going to talk to you today about, about ongoing engagement and how you build that to create growth at scale. Okay, so most companies think of engagement as a tactic that they worry about after they've made it big or after they've acquired the customer. Engagement starts before someone even comes to your site or the second they touch your product for the first time before they ever become a customer. And you build on that engagement. And you build on that engagement and this is where you start to create a competitive advantage for your business. Those engagements become very valuable because they also, done right, become first party data engagements. And this is important. So Gartner defines, and I think this is interesting, Gartner defines engagement as the process of engaging with customers in all channels. And the emphasis for so long has been on the channels and that's the wrong way to think about it. The emphasis needs to be on the engagement, the art of the engagement, the personal engagement, the in the moment engagement, the when they are there and they want to interact with you, you need to be there to meet them engagement. And it sounds like that could be a really expensive and daunting thing to do. And it's not at all. It's just rethinking how you think about engagement. Oops, we're going the wrong way, guys. Okay. A lot of engagement today is one way. Think about it like I was trying to explain to my children what I do for a living and what Intercom does. And I said it's a modern communication platform. So just think about it. If you went to McDonald's and you bought a hamburger and what if two days later McDonald's emailed you and said, would you, would you like some fries with that hamburger? No, you don't. You have moved on. That's one way engagement. Something that's pushed to you, not in the moment, not in context. Sure they know who you are and they know you bought a hamburger, but that's not a two way live interaction engagement. So modern engagement is much more than that. Let's talk about what modern engagement really is. Number one, it is in context. And I put text out here for a reason. When you think about how technology has changed human communications over the years, think about how you guys interact right now. When was the last time somebody left a voicemail? You don't leave a voicemail, you text someone. When was the last time you really initiated a phone call and had a phone call with someone? You don't. You text someone or you're chatting with someone at work, you don't even email anymore. You slack. We have become a product of real time, instant communication. And now we expect that in our business lives as well. Because it's instant. It's gratifying. You get what you want when you need it. And now you expect and businesses have to create that channel to keep up with what's happened in consumer life, into business life, it's just more convenient. It's always there, it's always on. And your expectation is to have that instant gratification, so contextual. That's modern engagement, number one. Number two, it's personalized. It is that ability for a company to pay back customers with the data that they've collected in a form of something useful, personalized, a richer experience. If they're going to give you data, and particularly that valuable first party data, number one, you have to have a window to collect first party data. That's what messaging does. It's that it's a direct open channel between a business and a customer that allows them to input and give you first party data that is more valuable than ever right now. And you're able to take that data and give them something of value back. And that's their expectation. More value, more personalized. Modern engagement is also, it's continuous, it's ongoing. It's not a one time triage transaction or something that happens after you bought your hamburger and you get an email that you know you might want to buy some french fries in the future. It is these constant iterations of constant communications throughout the entire customer life cycle that build, you can build, you have a single customer record that can build and you have more windows and opportunities to transact, to have dialogue, to engage, to collect data and to understand your customer. So it has to be ongoing. Because when it's ongoing, you can move from do not reply, submit a ticket, please wait on hold or call us to cancel and you can shift into hey, I notice you're having difficulty. I think I might be able to help you out or let us show you how to fix that or hey, I was thinking about you, I thought you might really enjoy this or I want to let you in on something that's relationship. Those are experiences that are built on, off of contextual ongoing conversations. And of course the message has to become the medium. We talked about the preference for real time instant communication, the role that text is and that need to have that open direct channel directly to your customer. So you're adding a channel. Channels aren't going away, email's not going away, marketing automation's not going away. These are all things that are very much an important part of a communication strategy. But what I'm telling you is in context, in the product, in the app, on the website, that open channel is going to become the preferred method of communication. And that's the one that needs to get dialed up and prioritized. You will sequence it in with all of your other communications. But you have to have this new ability, this new channel for that direct, ongoing, real Time access with your customers for your business. I want you to think of that as you're establishing customer presence, a way to be there for your customer even when you can't be. Now, that's huge. And this is where the role of bots and automation and live chat and botchat and everything, you have lots of channels and ways to create this experience, but at the very least, you're now always there, even when you can't be. When you can't staff a team or you can't follow the sun staffing or whatever you're dealing with. Window allows you to always be there when they need you. And of course, as I was just saying, modern automation is also, it's automated. That's how you deliver all of this capability and that improved customer experience with limited resources. It's using bots that are smarter and more personal. It's no code software that is easily customizable for anyone who needs to touch it and use it. And it's ultimately how you're able to scale up and scale out without having to add more resources. So a lot of companies just aren't there yet today. And why? It's because they're defending all of their existing martech or tech stack stack investments because they have multiple systems all trying to do the same job. They don't integrate, they leave cracks. They're dependent either on live calls or live chat that costs too much and they have limited hours. So they end up frustrating customers and ultimately their teams alike. And I just did a study with HBR and they wanted to know this modern engagement, are people onto it? Where is this going? And do savvy companies understand that this is the future? And what was interesting is that 92% said, oh, yes, effective customer engagement is critical to our company's success. I was like, okay. And then Forrester says that, hey, brands that excel in customer experience and enrich customer engagement, they grow twice at the rate of brands that don't. Okay, so it sounds like people get it, but however, only 36% of companies rate their customer engagement as consumer good, and only 9% rate it as excellent. And in the survey, I also found out that only 50% are actually investing in it. But we know it's important. And that leads me to believe that we don't know how or we need to rethink completely how we're going to get this done. Because this is not a vision for 10 years from now. These are things that you can do right now, this month, this week in your business to create results you just have to think about it differently. Number one, here's how I want you to think about it. Sales and customer success teams are going to completely change. They are gonna be working together in unison with marketing teams, support team, sales teams. They're all going to be operating off a clearer single customer record. So they know how to maneuver all of that manual processing that happens between sales and success teams now trying to pull data out of a system or try to understand some piece of intent behavior data that you had in another system and mining that together so they can have an effective outreach that just doesn't scale. And so in the future, customer success teams and the companies that get it, who are doing this now, which I'll share with you in a few minutes, they know that because they're already working in unison. They know how to look at data, they know how to pull data in that single customer record, know where they've been on the site where, what interaction they had with a sales member, what was promised so it gets delivered in customer success. They're all sharing this data and they're working together. It is all fueled by context. And that is not going to go away. Marketing teams are going to change email, push other messaging channels. They aren't going away. But engagement is the new acquisition. Engagement is the new acquisition. Gone are the days. And I can tell you, as a cmo, I've lived many of days just like this. Ooh, economic downturn, let's slash the marketing budget. Those are the moments, those are the sacred cows. Because we put so much emphasis on the millions of dollars that we would spend to get somebody to a point of acquisition, to get someone to your site, to get someone to your product. And then we have accepted a 2% conversion rate for some reason. And the old adage is just put more money on the top, more top of the funnel, more top of the funnel. You can't do that. In moments like this. You have to figure out how you're going to get from a 2% conversion to a 4% conversion. And it doesn't have to be, again, expensive or complicated. You just have to create a window to be there to work with a customer in a means that can convert them. So in context, channels are going to come preferred by your prospects and your customers because they're timely and useful and they're engaging. It's a way to meet someone, to offer them something useful and. Hey, you're here. Can I help you? Can I help you find this? Hey, I see you're a cmo. I bet you want to look at our demo for marketing? Let me show you that. Hey, you want to talk to someone? Hey, I've got this customer and I was a CMO at Nike. I bet you want to talk to them. Could I facilitate something? These are things that you do at the point of acquisition that actually become useful and meaningful. It's a different type of acquisition and it's acquisition that helps you convert. But then also when you're ready to take an action or you're exploring or you're in a demo or in a product, you're also engaging and you're upping your conversion rates. And then customer support is going to change. It's already changing. I watch a lot of savvy companies think about support totally different. They are moving out of the world of endless ticket triage and I guess what I call going from an operating emergency room to a preventative care and wellness center, that ability to understand it's a not working the backlog of customer tickets, it's being able to anticipate that they're going to have a problem, when they're going to have a problem and starting to solve it. And again creating relationship instead of ticketing. You get that from these insights, these first party data moments that you get through a direct channel between your customer and your business. And then automation is going to become the customer's first choice. They're already wanting to self serve more and more. You have to allow them the option to self serve. You probably see it all the time. A lot of people don't want to talk to someone. Same reason you don't make phone calls anymore. You want to text, you want to work remotely, you want answers now. You want to self serve, you don't want to wait, you don't want to be put on hold. And so all of this starts to change the face of support and how we support customers. So I'll give you one example of one of my favorite companies. I think they're doing a lot of things right right now and that's Amplitude. They are the number one company in product analytics and everything that I just told you is not a future statement. Amplitude does this. Today they have completed, they have created a platform where they put engagement into the heart of their tech stack. Now of course, being a product analytic company, they already have a philosophical belief that being in the product, collecting insights in real time is valuable. So if that's the product that they offer in the world, you, they have to be able to meet customers with that same philosophy. And so they put an engagement tech stack engagement platform into their tech stack and it allows customers, product teams, success teams, marketing teams to all work as one off a single customer record. And so they're now truly being able to optimize and share insights as such, placing this at the right places at the right time to deliver right messages and outreach. Just in the I think we've had this up and going for about four, four months. They've been able to increase their product engagement by 11% or they've been able to Engagement rates have gone up almost 30% and just in a quarter they've saved a million dollars on resourcing and the people that it took to again try to create those rich experiences that you're cobbling together versus letting it flow by putting engagement right in the heart of your text app. I always get excited when I see savvy companies embracing new ways of working and new ways to think about their tech stack and getting results. So in summary, engagement is not a new thing, but it's where everything's going and I want to leave you with three thoughts today. You need to rethink what engagement is. It is that ability and should be that ability to be real time in the product, in the in the moment when your customers are already thinking about you and want to talk or transact or engage. When you do that, number two, that's when you can create those really personalized experiences. You're creating trust. They're giving you data. You're able to action on that first party data. You're able even to take those first party data and action into real time workflows. So you're actually moving to that preventative state, potentially of a problem with your product or your service. And then number three, if you do this right, you will thrive like we are, creating a truly authentic, available, accessible relationship with your customer. Giving them something of value that never fails. No matter what economic downstorm we have or whatever we might endure next, this is always going to happen. Guys, I'm old. I can tell you that. A lot of you are young. This is one of 50 of these you're going to experience in your lifetime. But I guarantee you, you treat your customers like human beings and meet them with value and you will always succeed. So thank you guys.

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Trying to be a hypocrite?

No.

I've done some silly shit. Focused on the tech stack, thinking it was brilliant. Now I know that it's no way for you to.