♨️ 2-min Product Marketing Insights from Sequoia Capital, Glance, Swantide, Valuize
November 2022, Part 2 Release
📈 4 MICRO [PRODUCT MARKETING] CASE STUDIES
[1] Check if customers love using your product by studying your cohort retention curve.
You can graph the cohort retention curve by looking at the 'retained percentage of returning customers over time.' According to Sequoia Capital, your product is healthy if your graph flattens at a high retention percentage.
[2] Improve product usage by incorporating 'visual engagement technologies' in your B2B onboarding process.
Most of the little help a user gets while using a B2B product - ex: website, app - is through online user manuals, training videos, and feature tips. Glance suggests you embed the option to communicate with experts into the product - live video chat, co-browsing, etc. This lets the user get the precise help they need and stimulates continuous learning after the initial onboarding.
[3] Use a data warehouse as your single source of truth and only push select insights to your sales teams.
A data warehouse allows you to centralize data points from point solutions specifically bought for teams like customer success, product, marketing. Per Swantide, a data warehouse is better than extending your CRM to do everything. Additionally, you can choose the data you want from other sources for the sales team to consume through the CRM.
[4] Build a customer health scorecard around 4 key categories to develop sustainable retention strategies.
Valuize highlights 4 categories of metrics crucial to create an easy-to-digest customer health scorecard. These categories are (i) engagement health, (ii) product usage and adoption, (iii) lifecycle stage, and (iv) customer value and customer perception.
📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS
“It Pays to PLAY: How Play Improves Business Culture” by Kristi Herold
[1] Main Thesis - "An investment in play leads to happier, more productive employees, a stronger organizational culture, and greater profits."
[2] MIT Sloan Management Review - "A toxic corporate culture is by far the strongest predictor of industry-adjusted attrition and is ten times more important than compensation in predicting turnover."
[3] Ask your employees the following question every month: How happy are you at work on a scale of 1 to 5? Aim to maintain a score of 4 and above on this KPI since it impacts everything from customer retention to company growth.
🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES
[1] Why Everything Looks the Same: How economic globalization, generational transition, and technology converge to flatten the consumer experience
[2] The Rise of Influencer Capital: How social media, celebrity promoters, and banks looking for a quick buck transformed the markets.
[3] Finding Product/Market Fit with Network Effects
[4] When not to use surveys as a primary research tool
[5] “Nobody could have known”: inclusive behaviors to counter short-termism