SaaStr Soundbites: Karen Peacock, COO @ Intercom, On What To Prioritize For Scaling Your Startup

Do you have any quick hit advice for the audience here? If you were to join them in a boardroom or an executive team off site, is there a low hanging fruit that operators today could implement that you've seen from your years of experience?

Yes. And so I'll share with you one of the first things that I have done in literally every business that I have run over the years and it has always worked. So I'll share with you guys because I bet it'll work for you as well. And that is to focus on that magical time when a customer first comes to you or a prospect first comes to you and is interested in learning about what you do and thinks they might want to become a customer. Focus on that onboarding process for new customers and making that experience amazing, making it very clear what the benefit is that they're going to be getting like we were talking about in terms of value and then streamlining and speeding people through the process as soon as possible. And there's a phrase that the Mint team developed that I really like. So Mint, for those of you who don't know, is basically a personal financial management solution. And the first thing you do when you start using Mint is you basically plug in and connect your different bank accounts or credit card accounts. And then what happens once you plug those in and get those all hooked up is it creates a pie chart. And that pie chart is a distribution of all the things that you spent on and it's done all sorts of cool things behind the scenes of machine learning to do different categorizations and auto categorize things. And it shows you here's where your money is going and then it gives you recommendations and a lot of other things from there. And what the Mint team discovered is that for customers who get to that pie, they have this aha moment. Like you literally see people's eyes light up the very first time they see where their money is going. And then that aha moment. And that pie leads to much higher engagement down the road. And so my advice to both myself that I take and to all of you is to figure out what is your pie in your product or service. What is that moment that when customers get to that their eyes light up and they say, yes, this is the thing that I wanted, this is why I bought the product and why I did all the work that I was doing. So figure out what is your time to pie and, and then figure out what is your pie and then figure out how you can make that time to pie as fast as possible and Just lightening speed through there. That's one of the areas that I've focused on. As I said, in every business that I've ever run, it always leads to good short term results. And I think along the way there, interacting with customers during that magical time when they're first considering your product being as real time as possible also changes things in a big way. So as much as you can reach out to customers with your sales team, within a minute of a customer coming, who's the right type of customer for your product, as much as you can reach out the second somebody has a question, answer that instantly. We have seen this is one of the things that the Intercom product actually helps you do. And frankly, one of the reasons why I was so attracted to and joined Intercom to begin with is I saw the value firsthand. Is the ability to interact with customers in a real time way during those magical moments can massively change the trajectory of customer adoption. We've seen customers who have grown their conversion rates by as much as 4x when they interact with a customer right at that point of need within a minute of that customer needing that. So figure out how and figure out how you want to interact with your customers. But figure out how to do it as real time as possible and you will see great results.