startups – Siddharth Deswal's Blog

On Recognizing Good Engineers

Who am I writing for?

Marketing, sales, product (business people) and engineers/programmers who need to work closely with each other in technology companies.

What’s my key point?

Find and work with engineers who are actually business people but solve their parts of the problem through code/engineering.

I’ve been working with engineers for a few years now. Some are an absolute delight to work with… you feel this sense of camaraderie where two people get together to tackle a problem, one with their engineering skills, one with business skills.

And then there are those who thought of marketing or non-engineering work as drudgery

Behavioral traits to look out for

They ask for the end business goal of the project right off the bat… usually by saying something like “so what are you trying to achieve?” That’s the good ones. The incredible ones will also ask “and for whom?”

They take time to understand the actions and processes needed to meet that goal, not just from engineering, but from all other departments. An engineer like this knows that any large project will need multiple teams, people & departments to work together to succeed, and they’ll plan accordingly.

They’re able to suggest alternatives to the approach you’ve thought of. Shows that they can think for themselves about business problems.

They include the project’s outcome in your overall reporting infrastructure/solution. Good folks know that post hoc reporting forms the basis for future, better action.

If you find people like this in your organisation, then management is doing something very right. But you rarely find engineers like this.

Why No One Responds To Your Customer Success Managers

Who am I writing this for: people who are building or managing a Customer Success function.

What’s my key point: your CSMs need to provide value, and for that it’s better they specialize based on industry (or business-type) versus round-robin or regional distribution.

Our experience with the Hubspot CSM

When we bought Hubspot as our marketing automation platform, we were assigned a customer success manager (CSM). Our CSM did everything right; she got the entire marketing team and the CEO on a call, asked us questions like what will make us successful, what does failure with Hubspot look like, what our goals were, and more.

Then she gave us links to all of Hubspot’s training videos and said she’ll get back to us with a preliminary marketing plan that’ll help us get started. So we waited. When we got the plan we realized she didn’t know that we were a SaaS product. Instead, she mistook us for a marketing agency. It could mean that our website at the time did a shitty job, but I invite you to have a look for yourself.

After we corrected her, she got back with some other campaign ideas which were all a variant of:

Create an ebook
Add a bunch of automated, follow-up emails

Unfortunately, there was zero context of SaaS, about our goals, about how a visitor signing up for a 30 day free-trial is better than getting back to us to talk to Sales. We felt like she had very little understanding of who we were, of martech, or of the SaaS business model.

And Hubspot had 24/7 phone support for our plan level, has all their KB and documentation on the web, has all their training videos available in the Academy, so basically we soon had no need for the Customer Success Manager. That’s a good thing, when customers have everything at their disposal that they don’t need a human touch.

But it’s bad because we had zero need of the CSM. We knew she couldn’t really help us with our key goals. We knew getting on a call with her was not going to bring us much value. Soon enough, we just completely ignored her. And it wasn’t her fault. I’d put it on the person who planned that CSMs will be distributed region-wise without getting the ability to gain experience and expertise in any one industry.

Our experience with the Google Adwords rep

Our experience with the Google Adwords rep has been worse. While the Hubspot CSM just checked-in once in a while if everything was okay, the Adwords rep seems intent on getting us to run more campaigns and campaign types, tweak settings to what we know isn’t optimal for us (they might be good for Google though), and make us spend more budget in general.

She’ll make promises about doing some competitor benchmarking and give us best-practice recommendations, or going through our account and telling us how to optimize, but invariably those aren’t relevant and I now actively avoid getting on calls with her. In fact whenever anyone in the company or in my network asks me about talking to their Adwords rep, I discourage them from it.

So what do I think is the solution

Context. To be valuable, the Customer Success Manager needs to know and understand my problems, and be like a consultant who has seen these same problems and solutions at so many different clients that they can give me useful feedback, leading me to trust and respect them. In fact, the best case scenario would be if I pay extra to get a few more hours of their time every month or quarter.

After all, it’s their expertise that’s valuable, not the fact that they’re easily available.

Other reasons why industry based specialization is valuable

Content marketing: Something written by a CSM who is basically an industry expert is extremely valuable and immediately appeals to readers, because in their language, in their suggestions and in their content resonates the voice of the customers.
Product development: I’ll wager that they’ll end up giving more valuable product feedback than even Sales to your PM team because while Sales will close a deal and move on, it’s the CSMs who then work with customers to actually understand and solve their problems.
A new revenue line: CSMs so valuable that customers pay for their time and help. Like the Forresters, Gartners or ZS Associates of the world.

In SaaS, the problem shifts as you move to the enterprise

Who is this for: startup founders who’re building SaaS tools.

TL;DR: when you’re a ‘tool’ the problem is a tactical one that’s solved by the product, but as you start adding features, increase prices and become more than a tool, the problem you’re solving tends to move towards your customer’s ‘success’ and you solve it through services, support, marketing and Customer Success Managers (CSMs).

When Visual Website Optimizer was a tool

When I joined Visual Website Optimizer in 2012, it was a tool that helped people A/B test web content. Marketers had long wanted to do that but the capability was restricted to companies which were willing to deploy their engineering resources on it, or buy extremely expensive enterprise solutions.

Visual Website Optimizer bridged that gap on Dec 14, 2009 by giving the average marketer a visual, WYSIWYG editor that would allow them to A/B test basic stuff like button and text colors, font-size, images and form fields. All of this without touching code and at a perfectly reasonable starting price of USD 49 per month.

VWO as a solution

As VWO started being bought by more enterprises, it became clear that just allowing marketers to A/B test website content wasn’t going to cut it. We had to help them become successful with A/B testing. That’s a completely different, and larger, problem.

Here’s how we’re going about solving that problem

Being successful with A/B testing means the entire team in a large company needs to be trained on the product, so we need CSMs and Customer Marketing to work on a training module, which the CSMs deliver.
A/B testing campaigns involve a lot of front-end coding, so we have Technical Support for technical queries, and a Services arm to implement tests for customers.
People need to be able to understand our statistics to make the right decisions, and a graph can’t always help you do that, so that’s where content marketing comes in.
Customers need on-going help with test planning, ideation and strategy, which is where the CSMs come in again.

Wrapping up

The product lies at the center of solving the problem, but as you move upmarket you’ll need to solve the problem of making your customers successful, versus just giving them a few features and capabilities. That requires a mix of education, training, services, support and content to achieve.

Create new communication channels

Want to create an incredibly successful startup and make the world a better place in the process? Create a communication channel for businesses to reach their potential customers, and they’ll pay you handsomely for it.

Your approach to creating the communication channel doesn’t matter as long as you acquire a large enough user base with some spending power. There’s only one caveat: the users have to stick.

Let me explain what I mean with examples.

Facebook

Facebook did this by creating a social network where it gave people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. Then it built an ad platform so that businesses could reach out to all these potential customers. The hard part was and still is acquiring and keeping people on the platform because the day they leave, so will the businesses, and so will the revenue.

Based on their Q4 2015 and Q1 2016 results, Facebook is doing a damn good job of keeping consumers on the network. Where it’s stumbling is getting new users from the “Rest of the World” category (the developing world). And they need new users to continue their growth rate. The desperation with which they need these users was evident in how they went bat-shit crazy trying to defend Free Basics (Internet.org) in India. Read more about that on link 1, link 2, link 3 and link 4.

Instagram

Instagram is interesting. They acquired users but didn’t give businesses access to these users for a long time. Smart brands quickly found a way to still get to consumers through some women with large followers. Instagram is making no revenue out of that and recently launched the Instagram for Business service.

Youtube

Youtube is slightly different from the pack because others are responsible for creating the content that brings in users, but they share some of the revenue with original content creators who attract and keep potential customers on the platform.

B2B industry news websites

Take for example iEntry, which owns WebProNews. They churn out “technology news” and somehow convince people to visit their website and signup for their email newsletter. Then these two channels are provided to businesses to advertise to their potential customers. Almost every B2B niche has its own news website where others can advertise.

Chrome push notifications

Google was concerned that unlike native apps, websites had no way of engaging mobile users. It responded by allowing websites to send push notifications through the Chrome browser installed on user’s Android phones. Firefox soon followed suit.

While Google was responding to a different threat, some smart people immediately figured that a new channel for businesses to talk to customers had just opened up. And now you have a whole bunch of SaaS products (25 as on date of publishing) that basically bring marketing automation capabilities to website push notifications.

This channel is similar to white-hat email marketing, where businesses have to build their own personal email database.

Google Search

The largest “business to potential customer” advertising channels because of one reason: relevance. Think of every search query as a person looking for an answer to a problem. Google lets businesses bid for access and priority in the advertising channel with appropriate measures in the system to promote relevance.

Chat bots

“Facebook’s big announcement at its annual F8 Developer conference, was to make Messenger, its 900-million-user messaging app into a full-fledged platform that allows businesses to communicate with users via chatbots.” – 3 trends driving the chatbot revolution, VentureBeat

How to search for flights with Skyscanner’s new Facebook Messenger bot – Skyscanner

Wrapping up

The hard part is getting and keeping users. Businesses will happily come after you’ve acquired users.

Or you could simply provide the means to the communication and let businesses build their own audiences… like website push notifications or email marketing software.

Think of all the interesting ways in which people have acquired users and then made them available to businesses: Chat bots, Amazon, Linkedin, Zomato, Yelp, Woot, mobile games, content and news websites.

The difficult part, as always, is a product that attracts and retains users.