Exercising done differently. The story of Crossrope with Srdjan Popovic

Hello and welcome to E Commerce Growth Stories. This is your hostess with the mostest, Juliana Jackson, aka the CLV lady. And also I am the Chief Evangelist for OmniConvert.

And this is Valentin Radu, CEO of OmniConvert. Thank you for tuning in today for a new episode of E Commerce Growth Stories.

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Welcome to a new episode of E Commerce Growth Stories. I'm Valentin Radu from OmniConvert and I'm here with Sergeant Popovich all the way from Toronto, Canada. So hello Serge and welcome to the show.

Valentin. Thanks for having me, man.

You are, you're more than welcome. So just to give a a bit of context to our audience, Serge is the chief marketing officer at Crossrope, a fast growing fitness brand on a mission to inspire millions of people to get fit in a fun, different and affordable way with their highly rated jump rope system. He's coming up today to shed some light on how exercising is done differently with crossrope and what we can learn from his marketing insights. So, Serge, we're here. Let us know how you've got here, how you've got into the e commerce and marketing arena. If we can get a time machine and remember how it was back then.

Oh yeah, that's always a fun question for me. Definitely not a typical journey to get into the e commerce space. So I think there were maybe a handful of moments in my life that sort of led to it. My family moved to Canada when I was five, six years old. So we kind of started from nothing and I feel that's where a lot of drive and ambition has come from. You know, I played basketball when I was growing up. It's always been a big part of my life. And that's what essentially led to my, you know, passion for fitness and training in general. It was a big part of the sport. When I was in high school, you know, I think I accidentally took this course called communications technology, where I first got introduced to, you know, building websites. At that time, it was like Dreamweaver and Flash and stuff like that. Yeah, yeah, we learned all about, like, video editing. We learned about audio recording. Sort of like a. Just a really interesting course. I remember I crushed it because I just enjoyed it so much. And then, you know, I did the prototypical thing. I went into engineering because, you know, my parents were all about engineering at that time. And so did five years of that. Finished with a degree in mechanical engineering, Went into the field, and I enjoyed it. I had a pretty great gig. I was in a structural engineering field doing all sorts of product design and whatnot. Ran my own department. So all along these years, while I was an engineer, I was sort of tinkering with the online marketing stuff. It never sort of left me since those high school days. So I ended up building a fitness blog. That's where, like, that fitness element really comes back. I built this fitness blog. This was probably starting in 2010, tinkered with it. It was my playground. I loved writing still do. And loved exploring and figuring out new ways to get fit using portable fitness equipment. So I love kettlebells. I love jumping rope, bodyweight stuff. And essentially I added a YouTube component to it. And that's when things started to really work for me. I started generating a lot of traction through that channel, and that's the jump rope space is really small. And back in 2012, that's how I met our CEO now, Dave Hunt. You know, he launched this crossroad product roughly at the same time. Some of my videos were doing really well, and the space was really small. It was a tiny niche, and so you can't miss each other. So we started working together, collaborating. I was still doing my thing, you know, building this blog and channel on the side. He was in the Navy at the time. And so 2015 came around and he's like, hey, let's just go for this thing. And so, you know, it was a big moment in my life. I mean, I was in a pretty, I guess, important phase in my engineering career. And I chose to put it all on pause to give this thing a go figure. If there was ever a time to pursue this passion for online marketing, online for tech, for fitness sort of all converged and took the leap, and it was the best decision ever made. So here we are, six years post that mark still going.

That's great. So, Serge, regarding the humble beginnings, let's say when you've just started out, how it was, how you've made it, that you've attracted visitors, first time on the website, what was your secret sauce? Let's say, if there was any.

Are you talking about in 2015 when we first started with Crossroad? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I came in with a very fundamental, basic understanding of online marketing. There are some things that really worked for me and those are the first things I brought to Crossroad at that time. One of the things that really clicked for us that we started getting traction through was launching sort of like these free online fitness challenges. There are some other industries where challenges were big and for us, like, hey, let's just put value out there. And so we started hosting, doing these really robust 30 day free fitness challenges, bringing in people into the marketing funnel that way, giving away a ton of free content, bringing people together into a private fitness group on Facebook, which we can talk about, because that's a big part of our structure right now. Once we started bringing people together and over, like one event that they can all connect on, you know, people started, you know, talking about it, sharing it. So we were starting to really ramp up in those early days through that, through that, I guess, acquisition channel. And then there were other, you know, we really just tinkered. I mean, both Dave and myself have engineering backgrounds, and so it was really just testing different things, trying different things, seeing what clicks, what doesn't. And one of the pivotal, I'd say, moments for us was adding a little bit more structure to the way we operated as a business. So we came across, I'm sure you're aware of traction in the EOS system. Like that was a real. Introducing that system into our business in early parts of 2016. I mean, it just changed the way we approached, what we did, how we operated. And so since then, it really guided us in terms of, hey, where do we want to focus? And so from there, sort of things came together, spiraled a little bit here and there. We've had pretty steady growth ever since, but it all kind of started with this, like, how can we get value out there? Let's host these challenges. We started doing them every month. More and more people started finding out about crossroad, jumping rope in general. I mean, it's a growing exercise, even though it's. So that's how it started to come together early on.

So what about the adoption of The. Of the product. Have you analyzed that? Have you analyzed the feedback of the product first customers, how the products evolved based on the feedback? If you can share with us, sure, yeah.

For context, I mean, we rely pretty heavily on feedback. I mean, the product itself, every component has been changed at least once since the inception. And so we're very big on product design based on feedback, and that is sort of translated into sort of. We have this companion fitness app now, and that's sort of, you know, using the same feedback methods. But early on, I mean, it was mostly through, you know, customer calls. It was a lot of participating and being part of this Facebook group. I mean, it was a treasure trove of information and feedback and what people were saying about, you know, what they liked and disliked about the lengths of the ropes and the size of the handles and the texture when their hands get sweaty and the sort of combination of rope lengths and weights that they get. And so, I mean, our product looks today, in essence, looks. It's the same fundamental principle of having different weights of ropes that you can clip in and out of your handles. But everything from the materials to the texture, you know, to the rope combinations, to the weights, I mean, that was largely driven by what customers were telling us and what, you know, something that I think is important. You know, we're heavy users of the product ourselves. You know, Dave created the first crossroad prototype because he couldn't bear using any more of those weighted ropes to just keep breaking before then. And so I used to jump rope before I joined crossword. So we're always heavy users. I mean, this is part of our own fitness routines, A big part of our own fitness routines. And so we have our own nuances and things we like that we fed back into the product iterations. And so eventually, I mean, that evolved into more robust systems. I know you guys talk about MPS a lot. That's a big component for how we get feedback in terms of just general, obviously, organizational feedback, product feedback, customer experience, and service feedback. So, you know, now it's probably half a dozen to a dozen different places that we compile and aggregate feedback from. And that gets fed back into, you know, we try to launch a new version of the product every two years and usually looks very different than what the previous model is. And a lot of that is at this point, I feel like we've gotten it to where it'll probably be for a bit, like, you can only optimize it so much. So a lot of that feedback is now going into the app and really Trying to deliver a fun and unique experience there.

I think it's important, Serge, to emphasize a bit about this, about your journey. What were the most impactful struggles that allowed you to innovate and to, let's say, get to the next level? Thanks to those struggling moments.

I'd say initially, it was a little bit of, you know, figuring out what category we want to be in, where we wanted to play. Right. I mean, exercise, like the fitness industry as a whole, is obviously massive with different options. With jumping rope, I mean, initially, it all started like, all right, you look at all the jump rope manufacturers and retailers, they're all going after the CrossFit space. I mean, that's where there were people looking for specialized jump ropes. But it was all about the same thing. They all wanted lighter, they all wanted faster. That's all they cared about. It was very difficult to enter that space. And so just because people just loved their ropes, they were loyal to their ropes, and that's what they were going to use. So those were our early attempts. We'd go to CrossFit boxes, we try, we do workshops, and eventually we just realized that's not the area we wanted to play. We had larger ambitions, and so we sort of pivoted into this different category, a category I can't even say existed. And this is jump rope fitness. And so let's not worry about CrossFit. Let's not worry about the tricks and the freestyles. Let's just focus on creating a product that serves those people that are looking for a different way to do cardiovascular. Right. Cardio, most people find boring and monotonous, and it's just dreadful. Most people hate. Just so happens that the jump rope is one of the greatest cardio tools you have, which is why it's been around for so long, used by athletes and more lately in other sports. And so it sort of allowed us to create the product in a way where when you add that resistance component, now it becomes a more dynamic exercise tool. Right. And so, to answer your question, I mean, the pivotal moment for us, like, early on, it was like, where are we going to play? Right. Do we want to be like a jump rope for the CrossFit community? You know, are we going to enter, like, this freestyle trick section? It's just going to be some sort of, like, general rope, or do we want to, like, focus in and really dial in on serving those customers that have a fitness need? Right. It's obviously a much larger market, much more difficult market, because now we're competing against all sorts of other fitness solutions that are geared towards making cardio fun and accessible, etc. So when we decided to go that route, I mean, that's where it really allowed us to focus, focus our content, focus. It's where some of these challenges that come from as well. Right? It's all about, hey, how do we help people lose a few pounds? How do we help people, you know, improve their endurance, their cardio, their strength? And so that's everything sort of focused in, around that. And so that was, I'd say, tinkering around with the different communities. Initially it was tricky, but that eventually led us to make this call on, hey, let's just focus in and build this category of jump rope fitness. And so we've been doing that ever since.

Excellent. On your website, there is an intense, let's say, the component of Social proof. And you've said that you've started initially by building a community, by going out there in 3D in the 3D world, let's say. But how come you've managed to know, to have people sharing their results with you? Because it's clear that the fitness community and this, this tool, even even though it's so, so simple and you've made it the, the weighted jumping rope is affecting their life. So tell us about how social proof became a, a component of your website.

Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, like, you know, what people really care about is, you know, the results that they're going to get, you know, from the, from whatever it is. So for us, I mean, we're. The jump rope or the weighted jump rope system is just a medium to getting from, you know, where you are right now in terms of the way you look and feel to where you want to be, where you aspire to be. So we're well aware of that and we've sort of been aware of that from the very beginning. So when we first started, we structured these challenges in a way to sort of engineer and manufacture, like, get people really incentivized to share. So early on in the days when we run these challenges, there were, you know, prize packs and giveaways and whatnot that were built into these that would incentivize people to share their befores and afters. And, you know, a lot of fitness brands did that at that time. For now, like how that I. How I feel that's changed over the years. I mean, especially when you look at some of the larger brands, it's more like an aspirational lifestyle. It's less about the before and Afters, like when you go on the pelotons or some of the, some of the other larger, growing, connected fitness brands or just fitness brands in general, it's more about how it makes you feel, how it integrates into your lifestyle. And so for us, I mean, that's really pivoted into leaning harder and harder on ugc. It's less about like, hey, you know, let me see how much weight you lost. It's like, let's see you using the product, enjoying the product, seeing it out in the wild. And you know, different people like to integrate crossrope into their workouts and their lives in different ways. So it's showcased that. And so I like to show the before and afters because at the end of the day that's people want results and those, those work, but people also want to see how they, how they can integrate crossrope into their existing routines, into their life. And so we try to balance it out with some UGC that we get from our community, that we get from our customers. And so that's sort of changed something over the years.

Yeah. Serge, regarding the way you are seeing growth at this moment, so thanks to your experience right now, what would be your suggestion to brands which are just starting out, not particular in the fitness category, in the sports category, but let's say if you would be sharing some wisdom from your path until today to direct to consumer companies, which will. What would those advices sound like?

I'd say community and having like a way to speak with customers, sort of participate customers is where I'd start. So for example, like our, you know, I would figure out a way to replicate what we did in terms of delivering value and creating a place for people to come together, to work together on a unified goal or whatever it is. And your brand is really just a component of that. I've seen other brands do this successfully. There's a way to build challenges and events. People are just looking for ways to, especially today, come together. And so I think figuring out how to deliver value and how to bring people together serves a few different purposes. One, obviously your brand and your product is tied to that. But two, it allows you to compile and generate an insane amount of feedback around your product, around what you can do better, what you can, and it's not necessarily an expensive approach. So I think for us, especially early on, I mean, we were able to generate a lot of interest, you know, if you can structure a challenge or an event the right way. So for me, I mean, everyone's focusing in on the paid socials and the traditional acquisition channels and I feel like those are just changing too quickly, too saturated, too expensive. So I'm looking for ways for how I can approach it differently. And I don't see brands doing this as much where they're creating events and or challenges to bring people together. And I think just if you can get creative about it, I think it can be a really interesting play.

So Serge, regarding the adoption, how was the. I was looking before at the some trends and it looks like the queries for jumping rope were like two and a half times more after the pandemic hit. But right now they are still 50% more than what it used to be back in 2019. How was your experience and how you coped with the demand?

Oh man, Valentin, last couple of years have just been been crazy shit show. So, you know, we were. And that's something that's, we've learned a tremendous amount from like the last year and a half have just been really interesting. So, you know, coming in early parts of 2020, before all the craziness happened, I mean we were on pace to, you know, hit projections. We were, we were trending, you know, to grow our usual steady, steady rate. And then once that took off, I mean, we essentially had quadrupled or quintupled overnight. It felt like. So, I mean, props to the entire team. I mean this was a challenging period on the supply chain side. On the fulfillment and customer service side, I mean, we were almost fitness brands were stocked out and unable to really serve customers during a time of peak demand. Like we were air freighting for like two, three months, you know, and just making it work. So that whole, I mean, so we figured it out, we were able to deliver ropes to customers. It wasn't always pretty, you know, and, but I feel like we did a much better job than most other fitness brands where it just had even an opportunity to at that time. So taught us a lot about supply chain management and just inventory management and how to deal with those crises. But it also opened up obviously a lot of opportunities for us to test out and really get creative with the marketing mix. So we started really, we started testing podcasting, we got into sms, we started playing around with more publishing oriented affiliate plays. Just like, hey, let's just, you know, this is a time where we can really go for it, try to get as many learnings as we can, see what clicks. And you know, obviously we knew there was going to be a normal period of normalization. It's not going to be this peak Demand for, you know, the rest of time. So we were preparing for that and I mean that's been a new challenge for us. Right. We knew that the demand that came from the pandemic and from everyone being at home was going to die down and we were going to see what the new normal was going to look like. And so that's where we're at right now. So yes, the demand has come down now. It's more like we kind of have to throw 2020 out of the window, you know, and so it's skewed and made some forecasting projection methodologies a little bit more challenging. So. But we've taken everything we've learned from 2020 from all the different channels we've tried, from all the learnings we've gotten and I mean it's definitely accelerated us probably by two, three years and it's accelerated the jump rope category. But I think now, you know, one thing we've always faced as a challenge is how to grow this category. Right. I mean there's people are now vying to get back into the gyms and so get outdoors and so nobody wants to do home workouts. And so how do we sort of pivot, adjust And I mean the last two years have really taught us how to do that quickly and effectively. So I mean I feel real good about how we managed through that period. And right now it's just a new phase where it's, you know, that's what I love about, you know, what we do. It's always changing. It's always figuring out, solving new problems. And so maybe that's the engineering side of me that's always been fulfilled. It's like, it's like every day is something different. And so that's kind of like what I love about the E commerce space.

Yeah. So from your, from where you are looking at the e commerce world right now, Serge, it's, you know that we are big fans of full customer life cycle and focusing not only on the acquisition but also on the retention and usage and customer happiness because that's, that's from our perspective long term growth. What's your take on customer retention and where, where do you think this is, this is going, do you think is going to be a market around customer retention? Are agencies going to focus on this? Are companies going to invest in this aspect? How do you feel about it?

Yeah, I mean for those that want to stick around for a long time, I think they're going to put more focus on it. For us, the whole customer lifetime value Piece, I mean, it's been top of mind from, from the early days, sort of like, you know, even going back to some of the product feedback and iterations that we've done by talking and listening to customers. I think at scale, those things become a little bit more challenging. And so you're sort of trying to, you know, you know, speaking to customers, a lot more difficult when you've got, you know, 100,000 customers, when you've got, you know, 10 customers. And so, you know, trying to get a good pulse on what the community wants and what the general consensus is is really good. I mean, now, I mean, we rely. For me, like, when I think about customer lifetime value, probably, you know, first is just like, you got to have a good product. So I feel like if your product is shit, you know, good luck, right? No reason to come back. So for us, it's a big focus on how can we make our weighted jump rope system in our app the best that it can possibly be. The app obviously has shown another light on the whole retention piece because that's a whole different ball game as we get into the subscription side of the business. That's been something new for us to explore. For me, it starts with having a good product and constantly iterating on that product. Another piece is just having a system and method to aggregate all the feedback and insights you're getting from customers. Like I said, at scale, it's a lot more difficult between Facebook group of 100,000 people, the NPS responses, the reviews, the DMs, the customer emails, the phone calls, all of that has to be sort of systematic, automatically aggregated. So you're compiling the right insights and not jumping off on anomalies. Right. And so that becomes an interesting, like, data challenge. And so we're, you know, to me it's like, how do we pull the right signals from the noise? So a lot of time, effort, energy is going into, you know, really identifying, like, what is it that we should be focusing on based on what customers are hearing. And then, you know, for us, I mean, it's, I'm curious even in your thoughts how this plays out. Or, you know, brands that have, that are, have like a low to mid AOV but, you know, are really built on subscription or really built on, you know, CPG brands, for example, or any brand that has a, you know, a reason for the customer to buy again, you know, for us as a high AOV brand selling a weighted jump rope system. I mean, once you buy the ropes, I mean, those things are built to Last. Right. Like, you know, you know, yeah, there's opportunities and we have different sets and you can come back and you can buy, you know, eventually upgrade to the full Get Fit bundle that we call it, you know, with the Get Lean and the Get Strong set combined. Once you have that and you've got the app and you've got the mat, you've got everything you need to basically enjoy cardio until your ropes break down, which is going to be in a really long time. For us, it's like, how can we. What's the next thing we want to introduce? And for us it's the app. But I'm looking at all these other brands, right. I think I was listening to one of your episodes recently. Think it was another Canadian. It was a beverage brand or something. And yeah, yeah, you guys were talking about product, market fit and how it's all about solving a particular need for a customer and it's all about retention and coming back to solve them. So when somebody goes out, you know, I'm mattress shopping right now, right, because we're moving into a new home and I haven't bought a mattress ever. My parents, I think, gave me one when I moved out and now I'm like, all right, I want to buy a mattress for myself. But I'm thinking like, hey, this thing's going to last me 10 years. The brands that are vying for my attention and my dollars, how are they thinking about customer lifetime value? They deliver a great experience. That's going to solve my problem. But 10 years down the road, am I going to go back to the same brand? Is that brand even going to be around in 10 years? Yeah, I think about that a lot because you asked like just generally for where CLV going. I think it's brand dependent and obviously for brands that have a, you know, that are built on subscription or high repeat purchase rate or you know, consumable goods like that makes a lot of sense for us. I mean, as a high yo people I'm focused on like I gotta get you to try these ropes, right. Because I know when you try them, you're gonna love them, you're going to use them for a long time. Sure. You might come back to buy some other things. So curious in your thoughts inputs just around that comparison.

Yeah. So. But indeed, from where I see the world, indeed, if your product is suboptimal, don't even bother to repeat that. And if you haven't validated that the customers are even using the product, product or. And if they use it, if they are happy about using it continuously, then that's another, that's another thing that it should be handled properly. But if we are looking at the, the brand experience and the consumption cycles, there is this game that the brands are doing. For instance, at least from where I see your, your products are pretty strong and they look, at least with this metal stuff that they are going to last for at least, I don't know, one, two years. So what I think the game is and the trade off that the brand should do is am I going to diversify into different product lines so that I can maximize the profit per customer and to be able to actually have a living as a brand, or am I going to diminish the quality of the product and the life of the product with the risk that customers are going to notice this, of course, and consider that they should be migrating to other vendor. And from my perspective, for instance, where you are niched right now, this debate is simple. I mean, you've consciously decided from the way I look at things that you will diversify and you will expand with those mats and those, I don't know, T shirts and other stuff so that the brand is going to be surviving and thriving on the existing customer base. And of course the, the customer lifetime value is strongly affected by the customer experience as well. Because we've seen all sorts of companies at this moment. We have the, let's say, privilege of looking at 2000 different brands and their data and we could see that there are at this moment there are three different pillars that are affecting the customer lifetime value, product experience and marketing. And ideally you should have all of them. But if your product is poor, then don't bother. I mean, you could give an outstanding experience by selling bullshit and it's still not, not going to move the needle in the, in the future. So you need all of them. But product is mandatory. If you've nailed the product and in order to name the product you need customer feedback, then you need this type of nps. And that's why we are completely obsessed about NPS at different moments. And there are two and even three different moments depending on the product. Let's say if you are selling consumable goods, then you do it only two times when the customers are placing the order and when the customers are getting the order and consume it right. And that's a single moment. It's not like if you are selling for instance, coffee or tea or whatever, snacks. It's the lifetime of the product. It's pretty short. But if you're Selling this type of product like you are. I would do the NPS at three different moments and I would look at the deltas between all of them. When, when I analyze the shopping experience, how was the, the initial shopping experience? Which means, which means user experience. Then I would analyze the shopping, the buying experience at the end. Right. So how was the delivery, how was the overall experience to actually get the goods? And the third moment was, I don't know, after a month or two have you used the product? Because if you have zombie customers which are getting the product but they are not using it, you don't want that to happen. You don't want to get revenue from customers which are not getting the value of your products because that means you are wasting the resources of this beautiful planet. You are tricking customers into buying stuff that they don't actually need and you are not benefiting from the network effect of happy customers which are actually using the product and having the network effect and word of mouth. And that's how I see the CLV game.

Yeah, I like where you're coming from on the nps. I mean for us it's primarily the third one. You know, just your traditional how likely are you to recommend after giving them a few weeks to use the product, what question are you using? Obviously you're not going to use how likely are you to recommend X after they've shopped on the site. So are you asking them to rank their shopping experience from 0 to 10?

No, we're actually asking the same thing throughout the whole experience. Because once you, it's like you are just touching the product. Right. When customers are buying, they are not buying the product, they are buying the promise of the product and they are paying for getting something in the future. And that's why you want to see if they are already willing to recommend after the shopping experience, then when they receive the product or when they use the product, you are asking them the same thing so that you can see the deltas between them.

See if there's drop offs basically between the experience.

Yeah, yeah. This is showing the expectation gap. That's what we call it. Because if you set expectations, for instance, we have brands which they have the expectations set at 90, you know, and the marketing is so compelling, everything is so beautifully done that customers are getting their card and they are inserting, giving you money for a promise. Right. And Nati, it's a pretty good nps. We are not seeing this that often. I mean, I mean the, the average NPS for instance is around 70, 71. But if they have a 90, imagine that they've set the bar over there and then once they got the product it's like 75 and that means they've over promised and under delivered and that also means that their retention is not going to be there. It's actually better not to over promise and not to promise the moon and the earth and the. And more. Mark.

Yeah, gotcha. Yeah, that's interesting. Thanks for sharing that. I'll dig a little bit more. I haven't seen, I mean I have test shopped plenty. I can't say I've seen many post purchase NPS requests. It's maybe some SaaS stuff but in the E Comm space at least I haven't seen that played out very much. But it's interesting like that.

Yeah, that's what we've discovered by working closely with our customers. And we made it after we realized with some of our customers that they had issues. The products were great but they had issues with the fulfillment and packaging. And then we drilled down. The bigger the company, the more segmentation they will need.

Right.

What we've put in our own technology reveal is you'll be able to see the NPS by city location and by the picker, let's say who picks the product, who fulfills the order, who's touching the customer on the customer support. So the bigger the company the more data you need because you can't do 10x anymore. You need to do, I don't know, 12% uplifts. You know 12% is fantastic if you can do it month over month with incrementally optimizing the whole process. And that's why this delta NPS is great. And also the segmented NPS throughout the whole value chain, who's touching the customer. Because we have for instance a pretty large company which has like 20 people in their customer service and they are constantly looking on the NPS by their customer reps and they constantly improve by looking at the guy that gets 96 or so and he's training the other ones around what they are doing, changing the procedures around that.

That's what I love about ecom. I mean it's. The NPS alone has just evolved so much over the past. I mean I first learned about NPS 5, six years ago. I mean it's. And we lean on, like I mentioned earlier, I mean we lean on the feedback we get from our. You know there was a. Initially, for example, like our process was call up every passive. Like what did we miss on, you know, on the on the expectation, like what was the one or two things we could have done better? Right. And that goes into a queue obviously for detractors. I mean, you know, let's fix those problems. Usually it's some sort of issue that may or may not already be in the queue. Right. And then for promoters, you know, trying to really run through and try to find patterns for what, what is it that they're the most people are saying they love and amplify that. So we try to like lean heavily on the, on the different categories and approach them a little bit differently. But yeah, it's real cool to see how it's expanded. I love that the deltas in terms of tracking to see if you're setting the expectations the right way and if you're meeting those expectations. So I'll take that back, thanks.

Yeah, yeah, you're welcome. And another interesting thing is that the E commerce companies are using this type of siloed technologies, but those should be orchestrated completely around the customer. So one more thing that we are doing with our customers is that we connect things like Shipstation with Gorgias as a help desk, with Reveal as a customer segmentation with Shopify to tag the customers, with Facebook to do remarketing campaigns based on the detractors and all of those things. When you orchestrate them around the customer, they will feel like you actually care about them because you are relevant at any touch point. So if I give you a zero on the NPS and I'm a former loyal customer, we have this RFM segmentation, right? And we call them the Soulmates. You know, for companies with a large SKU base, that's fantastic to be able to see. I don't know. We have a customer that placed 25 orders and suddenly he gave us zero at the end. NPS, you want an alert in your ticketing system and you want someone to actually pick up the phone and call that valuable customer that spent, I don't know, $3,000 and it's a consumer. It's not like a B2B and someone spent $3,000 on your shop and he's giving you a zero on the NPS and you do nothing. That's even more frustrating for, for that customer if you do nothing about it. And that's why you need this real time orchestration throughout your systems.

Yeah, that's fascinating. I like that a lot. What do you think is the biggest sort of. For the, for the brands that have bought into the, you know, what it takes, you know, on the CLV side like where do you think the biggest challenges are over? You know, for those who are really trying to do it the right way.

I think it's the short term expectation. It's hard. CLV is hard. It's not, you know, you add the new campaign and you've hit the targeting. You know, it's like 17 to 20 from Florida and that's it. You hit the nail on the head. CLV is hard and it's more systematic. So you need to tweak the whole customer journey and that means you need a internal alignment. But the beauty is that once you start it, then you've suddenly aligned other departments. Like social media is now suddenly caring about what the email teams are doing and what the customer service is doing and what the fulfillment center is doing. Because everyone is aligned around the North Star metric, which is if it's going down or if it's going down or up, then everyone is involved and they need, they now have to understand how they are contributing. So internal alignment and short and long term perspective, these are things that are more, are not that sexy. It's not like, oh, we've, we've reached internal alignment. Nobody talks about it in the E commerce. Everybody talks about new campaigns, ROAS, iOS 15, stuff like that. Because this, this is the hype, you know, that's everyone talking about. Yeah, nobody's talking about the basics like, hey, get your shit together and align everyone around. What's the most important thing? The customer happiness. The customer lifetime value. Because that's how we make money. That's the growth wheel in E commerce. You know, I mean you have this flywheel, happy customers bringing other customers, coming back, buying again. That's it. You've made the system working and now you can expand, I don't know, to go to Singapore and to Asia and you can go, that's another thing that they go international, but they have a broken system where the customer is going and it's frustrating. It's like you bombard him with remarketing ads but you haven't sorted out a ticket. That is.

So. I mean, when it comes to sort of KPIs that help you keep a pulse on these things. I mean, we look at obviously the NPS like we talked about, minus some of the delta things you mentioned. There's, you know, the repeat purchase rate, you know, there's the, what else do we got? There's the NPS, the repeat purchase rate blanket on the third. What other KPIs are you guys looking at to make sure it's like all Right. You know, are CLVs trending in the right direction?

What is heavily affecting the CLV is not that known is the average days between the transaction. If this is going up or down, that's pretty important. Let's say if the cadence of buying depending on the purchase cycle of your product. So if it's, I don't know, three months or something, six months or two months, and if this is going to free four months, that means you're acquiring not fit customers. If you don't measure it, you can't improve it. That's what the saying is. Right. Another thing is the chance to place the next order after the first and after the second. How is this going? No, month over month, like after one order or quarter over quarter depending on your purchase cycle. Again, if you're buying fast moving consumer goods, that then that means this, the purchase cycle is like six weeks or six days. Right. And people are buying every two weeks. They are, they are restocking every two weeks. But another important thing is to calibrate your email remarketing on the average days between transactions. Because if you are bombarding at the wrong time, then nobody's gonna be at home when you, when you knock at the door, they haven't consumed the product or they've already consumed the product and they had the bad experience. So every base between transaction, chance to place the next order cohort stickiness rate. It's another thing that we are looking at in Reveal. For instance, it's out of the customers that bought this month, how many of them are buying next month and how is this training, this going up or down? So the second month cohort stickiness is showing you if your retention efforts are going well because retention is hard to move from. I don't know, let's say you have 20% retention rate. It's hard to get from 20 to 24%. But if you make experiments to improve the customer retention, for instance, you change your onboarding campaigns and you do a surprise and delight campaign in the package. You know, you want to see if this cohort from last month has a higher stickiness rate because if you look at that, then the retention is not going to be so heavily affected because it takes into consideration all the other customers. But this particular cohort, you can see it right away and other metrics are more in the field of let's say customer experience, like time to first response, time to resolution, stuff like that.

Yeah, okay. Interesting. Yeah, I love it. I love where the seal, you know, the whole lifetime value field's going I think there's. Especially today, I mean everything is so acquisition focused and like you said, just not as sexy of a topic but definitely as important. So yeah, not very cool.

We're hypnotized about it and we. Our bet is that in two, three years there will be a total ecosystem that's going to be building. We will have a new role in the company like the customer value optimization person whose hand. If nobody's responsible about clv, who's gonna increase it?

Right.

Who's gonna improve it? And we build this academy around customer value. We are, we definitely bet on this because having a data driven approach and listening to your customers and taking into consideration what they actually want and how they feel, it's common sense. But nobody's doing, I mean we have this topics that we're handling but we are not orchestrating this around the customer. So Sergio, I have the last question for you regarding the how you blend these roles. I mean you're a father and you're proud of it and so you're a dad and I can see on your social media that you're not the workaholic, that avatar that we used to refer to a few years ago. How you are blending this, how you are mixing those two lives. And are there two lives or it's actually a one life where you need to deliver?

Yeah, no, it's a good question. Obviously a relevant one more now than ever just because of everything's just been sort of been blended for everyone. I mean I don't have that much experience as a dad yet. I've been doing it for three years, but it's been the best job I've ever had. Really fortunate. The whole craziness from last year, I mean is really made things challenging in the sense that you know, everyone you know is home and you know, see behind me, I mean that's, that's where my baby sleeps. So everything's just come together and so I just felt super fortunate. And I think I'll look back one day to this time and say like man, like I feel really blessed that I got to spend all this time with a growing 8 month old with a growing 3 year old. See them 24 7, as tough as it's been to try to make everything work and props to my wife for sort of leading the charge on that. But for me, I mean I've always been like very driven, very ambitious. I've always got stuff going on. I wouldn't have lasted at crossrope if I'm not sort of developing myself. As I need to. Like, my roles changed dramatically from when I first started as sort of like tinkering and trying to build something to, you know, now leading a team of 10 and our organizations almost at 40. And, you know, the roles evolved quite a bit. And, you know, it's forced me to really level up and, you know, and learn quickly and adjust. So. But I mean, I'm. I'm all about, and always have been about systems, and so I feel like I'm very effective and efficient and compartmentalizing and creating a life for myself where I can. When I'm working, I'm 100% focused. It helps when you find something you really love and that doesn't feel like work. Like, yes, it's incredibly challenging. Things are always changing. Feels like day one still, or you're just like, little bit of imposter syndrome. Like, maybe they'll figure me out today, but keep pushing, keep learning. And then, hey, when. When I clock out, I do my very best to. To, you know, take that off my mind and focus on my family, focus on my kids, because it's, you know, that's the most important thing to me. And I. Every day is a, you know, bring something new with. With two little growing kids. So whatever routine I've set for myself probably breaks on a. On a weekly basis. I'm constantly adjusting and constantly making it. So it's, you know, I mean, it's. Last year's really put pressure on all of that, but it's been fun, man. I feel really fortunate, really lucky that I get to do what I do, you know, fortunate for my, you know, for everything I've got, for all the people I've got to meet. So it's been. There's really not nothing I can complain about. So just keep on keeping on. You know, life's. Life's really short, man. We just gotta enjoy what we're doing.

Yeah, that's. That's for sure. Serge, thanks a lot for being together with us. If people would like to get in touch with you where they can find. Finding.

Yeah. First of all, thank you for having me on. It's really nice having a conversation about all this and send my best to Juliana. People want to find me best places on LinkedIn. Unless you're pitching me something, then don't. And second is if you want to check out Crossrope, just go to Crossrope.com. you can learn all about our weighted jump rope system or app pretty much right on the homepage, so feel free to connect. Ping me. Always excited and interesting to meet new people, especially in the space. Or if you like jumping. I'm always up to talk about that. So yeah, that's me.

Excellent. So Serge, thanks a lot for being together with us and thanks everyone for listening and we'll see each other next Thursday. Until then, keep on keeping on to code a master in this.

Thank you Valentin. All the best.

Bye bye.

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