I noticed through working with a number of SaaS companies that no one product's customer journey is the. Your attribution model has to fit your business, not the other way around.
To start with, attribution is a data integration problem. How do you unify all actions taken by leads & prospects (and tie them to a company if B2B), apply the logic of your attribution model, and sync to your reporting tools? This becomes a challenge, particularly unifying events across different channels, people (within the same company), and time frame.
Great question. The short answer is: the sooner the better!
In engineering, you can still afford to have generalist but for goto market teams, you should shoot for specialists early on. With competition increasing every passing year, after initial market-product fit, startups fail to scale, not because they have poor engineering or product, but because they haven't found scalable and repeatable goto market channels. This means you need to crack only one or two goto market strategies but you would be able to do only via specialists.
So, for example, if partnerships is the way to go, hire absolutely the best BD person you can hire who has experience of cracking partnerships of your type. If outbound sales is the way, assemble a small team, but make sure it consist of specialists in nurturing, calling, closers, database builders, etc.
You really don't want to do a bit of social, a smattering of paid, generic sales demos. You'd want to pick a few things and do killer execution on them.
If you can't afford or find specialists, pay consultants to guide your generalists. But don't have generalists figure out everything as then they (by definition) do a mediocre or good enough job at many things, but that isn't enough to thrive in today's hyper-competitive world.
Thanks for asking these questions, Mariana. My responses:
1. What has been your biggest challenge in building a team of 200+ people in the last several years?
The biggest challenge has been in hiring. People usually say hiring the right people is important, but I'd add that knowing which positions you should be hiring for and what to look for in those positions is even more important. The challenge isn't just about hiring people who have the necessary skills and are the right culture fit, it's also to develop enough clarity on what would success for that role look like. This mistake becomes worse is you start hiring for generic labels like 'product marketing' or 'content marketer' or 'backend engineer' without exactly knowing what business results are you expecting to get from this position in next 12-18 months.
Having the right people do what they're best at is a very big level in business success.
2. Can you describe 3 of the milestones you had on the way to reach 6k customers in 90 different countries?
The first milestone was the first 10 paying customers for VWO. It's my strong belief that if you are able to get 10 people who you didn't know before to pay you, you definitely have gotten something going.
The second milestone would be the decision to build a sales team. As an engineer-founder, I didn't fully appreciate the role of sales and significantly under-estimated its potential to scale revenue until we got around to hiring first few sales rep.
The third milestone would be a successful launch of our second product (PushCrew) after VWO as it reinforced SaaS fundamentals in my mind as now I could compare my VWO and PushCrew experience (I always doubted that the first one - VWO - could have been a fluke!)
1. What does it feel like to lead a team of leaders in an organization?
2. How do you identify a leader?
3. Can you share instance(s) where you had to take tough calls which you knew won't be received well by your team?
Another great post - love the content you guys put out.
Although I have to admit, the formatting absolutely kills me. I'm sure you've done your split tests for time on page, engagement and so on and so forth but...
For anyone who can actually focus and has reading capabilities beyond the third grade - paragraphs would really help :)
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I noticed through working with a number of SaaS companies that no one product's customer journey is the. Your attribution model has to fit your business, not the other way around.
To start with, attribution is a data integration problem. How do you unify all actions taken by leads & prospects (and tie them to a company if B2B), apply the logic of your attribution model, and sync to your reporting tools? This becomes a challenge, particularly unifying events across different channels, people (within the same company), and time frame.
We wrote about how we've seen teams at Pollfish, Drift, Lengow and more solve multi-touch attribution modelling here: https://www.hull.io/blog/multi-touch-attribution-modelling/
Hi Andrew,
Great question. The short answer is: the sooner the better!
In engineering, you can still afford to have generalist but for goto market teams, you should shoot for specialists early on. With competition increasing every passing year, after initial market-product fit, startups fail to scale, not because they have poor engineering or product, but because they haven't found scalable and repeatable goto market channels. This means you need to crack only one or two goto market strategies but you would be able to do only via specialists.
So, for example, if partnerships is the way to go, hire absolutely the best BD person you can hire who has experience of cracking partnerships of your type. If outbound sales is the way, assemble a small team, but make sure it consist of specialists in nurturing, calling, closers, database builders, etc.
You really don't want to do a bit of social, a smattering of paid, generic sales demos. You'd want to pick a few things and do killer execution on them.
If you can't afford or find specialists, pay consultants to guide your generalists. But don't have generalists figure out everything as then they (by definition) do a mediocre or good enough job at many things, but that isn't enough to thrive in today's hyper-competitive world.
Thanks for asking these questions, Mariana. My responses:
1. What has been your biggest challenge in building a team of 200+ people in the last several years?
The biggest challenge has been in hiring. People usually say hiring the right people is important, but I'd add that knowing which positions you should be hiring for and what to look for in those positions is even more important. The challenge isn't just about hiring people who have the necessary skills and are the right culture fit, it's also to develop enough clarity on what would success for that role look like. This mistake becomes worse is you start hiring for generic labels like 'product marketing' or 'content marketer' or 'backend engineer' without exactly knowing what business results are you expecting to get from this position in next 12-18 months.
Having the right people do what they're best at is a very big level in business success.
2. Can you describe 3 of the milestones you had on the way to reach 6k customers in 90 different countries?
The first milestone was the first 10 paying customers for VWO. It's my strong belief that if you are able to get 10 people who you didn't know before to pay you, you definitely have gotten something going.
The second milestone would be the decision to build a sales team. As an engineer-founder, I didn't fully appreciate the role of sales and significantly under-estimated its potential to scale revenue until we got around to hiring first few sales rep.
The third milestone would be a successful launch of our second product (PushCrew) after VWO as it reinforced SaaS fundamentals in my mind as now I could compare my VWO and PushCrew experience (I always doubted that the first one - VWO - could have been a fluke!)
Very nice post Steven, I have some information to consider about it more here https://www.cleveroad.com/blog/how-much-does-it-cost-to-develop-an-app-like-instagram
Thanks for this AMA, Paras.
1. What does it feel like to lead a team of leaders in an organization?
2. How do you identify a leader?
3. Can you share instance(s) where you had to take tough calls which you knew won't be received well by your team?
Another great post - love the content you guys put out.
Although I have to admit, the formatting absolutely kills me. I'm sure you've done your split tests for time on page, engagement and so on and so forth but...
For anyone who can actually focus and has reading capabilities beyond the third grade - paragraphs would really help :)
I'm very glad my article helped you Victor! :)
This article served as a great motivator for me. Thank you SO MUCH for sharing!
Opteo loks like it just for adwords... What about if im also running facebook, pinterest, instagram, programmatic media buying, email marketing, etc.
Nothing out there that can tie all that together in a single dashboard while including budgets, spends per channel and CPAs?
Great Stuff! Check the latest list of best ATS software of 2018 at https://www.softwaresuggest.com/applicant-tracking-system