Empower your Hospitality business with product qualified leads for Hospitality

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hi i'm derek school etske CEO of sherlock you can find us at Sherlock's core calm excited to be part of this product led conference here summit today I'm going to talk about a count based product engagement what that is why it's important and how you should really be doing it in order to operationalize and optimize your SAS operations so let's jump right in one of my favorite Sherlock quotes is there's nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact and the obvious fact that we'll talk about today is at SAS businesses our account based business this sounds very obvious if you have a SAS business I'm sure resonates with you you are not building or selling a consumer app where one user is the account you're sewing two groups of people in a business that are going to use your product and it's essential that a critical mass of those people use your product in order to get any value from it I'm sure sales to use your sales teams in any kind of b2b software team have known this forever they when they go to sell a deal they're selling into a business and that business consists of a group of people they even have different personas for the types of people they're selling into gatekeepers and buyers and decision makers and influencers I'm not sure what that guy is but these is the point is that they are always viewing a deal as a collection of people that they have to work with in order to get it done and that's why every CRM in the market organizes all the contacts and leads into accounts because that's how business software sold took a little while but marketing is also caught on to this perspective this is just showing the amount of Google searches for account based marketing so you can see they're just kind of middled 2015 or just kind of exploded but account based marketing is obviously one of the hottest trends in marketing today and any b2b software has to take this kind approach that's because sass is an account based business but where we've really kind of lacked and I would say mister is the point here is on the product engagement side and that's where we really need to start assessing product engagement at the account level in order to really be able to operate our SAS business correctly and that's because obviously in SAS accounts sign up accounts adopt your product accounts convert accounts pay you on a monthly basis accounts expand and obviously accounts churn this is all done it account level because in SAS users may come and go but the accountant is what stays forever until it doesn't and that's kind of the nature of SAS and I think if you're not looking at product engagement from an account basis from an account perspective you're really missing an essential piece of your if your SAS operation and if you do do it you're gaining an advantage look at that here so first before I go into the advantages that I mentioned what what is a count based engagement what am I really talking about here obviously at the highest level it's pretty simple pretty simple it's really is organizing your user engagement around the couch a very kind of fundamental level you've got a bunch of users that are using your product and an account based engagement tracking really just organizes that usage into the accounts that they belong to as opposed to those users being kind of their own little islands but more than just organizing the data its aggregation of the data which is important when you're looking at a count based engagement tracking so instead of looking at each one of those users again individually on that account you're going to aggregate out that usage and be able to report on that and understand at the account level at the account level and when you do that you get to do you can do a lot of things with that not only can you just see that kind of uses data but you also can get a sense for the scoring you can use a scoring model to score the engagement you can then move one step further and look at trends in engagement at the account level you can track at the account level their activation product progress as they start to a doctor product you can understand that has that group of people is using your product how that activation is going and you can start organizing those accounts in all kinds of different ways by tenure the age of the accounts by size the accounts all kinds of different things obviously pretty obvious this is really important to have all that data organized and aggregated and at the account level in order to do this kind of stuff and I would argue it's really an essential perspective for your SAS business again if you don't have it I think you're missing something we've always looked at our SAS businesses and asked about engagement at the user level for my best users what is what users are doing this feature how is that feature being adopted by users but when you are able to shift your perspective and it won't aggravate that data at the account level now you can aggregate or you can change your perspective to have all those questions not only the user level but also at the account level which is much more in line with the way you run your business so that's great so we you get that new perspective you can see some of the benefits of doing that but really where's the business value for putting in the effort to get this account based engagement I'll highlight four here just to go a little bit more in depth with these four but first of all I just mentioned account activation if you have a SAS product certain if you have a trial signup or a freemium offering but even if you don't account activation is an enormous part of short operation you have to get those accounts from sign up to activated which is first value if you want to call it that and you have to do that at a rate which makes sense for your business otherwise you're just kind of throwing marketing dollars into either so for your SAS product release as part you may have a kind of an activation criteria that looks something like this they've created an account they've integrated data inviting three or more team members to the account they've assigned three tasks and they've completed those three tasks with our products so at this point we're gonna say that that account is activated and we can then put some sales up effort against that have a CS effort against that whatever but this isn't all these things are not done by a single user from any of these products and of your products right these are these are things that are completed by different users you may have one user come and sign up and she may need some help getting that data integrated so you have another user doing that she may come back and actually invite some team members to the account one of the team members she invites is the one that's actually going to be doing the operational work in your product assigning these tasks and then obviously there's going to be different people that come in and actually do the work you complete those tasks so in this example here you have four different users completing these five different tasks to get an account to an activated stage so if you're not tracking your accounting product engagement at the account level there's no way you're going to be able to determine whether or not an account is activated and there's certainly no way you're going to be able to track your progress or your success with your activation of your accounts and I would argue more importantly you're never going to be able to easily identify those accounts that are stuck or haven't got there and these are the accounts that you have to take some kind of operational action once whether that be in an automated way or a high-touch manual way the point is you've got to be able to easily identify where those accounts are so that's activation the second real kind of business values is being able to better manage your mature accounts so obviously once they're past activation adoption maybe they've converted to paid now you've got to manage those accounts by aggregating this data at the account level you're going to be able to assess health at the account level if you mark aggregating that data there's no way for you to tell whether one count account is good without is bad similarly or you know right off of that you're never going to be able to identify your expansion opportunities accounts whose engagement is going up with how sort of added three new users in the past sixty days and their engagement has gone up to 20% these are expansion opportunities accounts who have started to use some different feature sets a new product maybe maybe they tried a beta of a feature set that's at a different tier and what they're paying now these are expansion opportunities and again if you don't have that data at the account level you'll never be able to easily identify them on the flip side the at-risk accounts obviously accounts whose engagement has gone down over you know past 30 to 60 days accounts will have seen some users go inactive on it these are at-risk accounts these are accounts you need to know about you need to be learning about what you need to take action against again if you have this data at the account level when you look at feature adoption for your existing features and especially for new features you're looking at adoption at the account level you want to know how many accounts are using this this feature how many user you are using it or adopting it it's fine it's good but you really want to know what percentage of my use account base is actually using this feature and again you need to have that data in the account level to get there and finally you know highest level value here is you have a customer success team you have an account management team without this data at the account level it's really really hard for them to prioritize their daily work they're doing a lot of hunting and pecking in your admin interface trying to figure out which accounts need attention which accounts need the certain special type of attention and without that data aggregated they just they just have no way to do that the third kind of business benefit from this approach is on the marketing side I know it sounds a little silly but bear with me here stick with me for a minute I think you can actually refine your acquisition efforts by having this product engagement day data at the account level correctly first every marketing department wants to know who's my target market whose what type of company is gonna get the most value out of my product and not allowing to do more targeted smarter marketing programs well the richest source for that answer is the activity engagement of your existing accounts by enabling weighing being able to see engagement of your existing accounts and knowing which account is actually performing the best you can start to refine who you're going to what type of company what type of customer you're going to go out there and try and acquire look-alike campaigns building off of that look like technology is really kind of an essential part these days of any kind of marketing program you know whether that's Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn or Google now being able to take an existing set of customers and having those technologies try and find you others like that is you know it's common now you just have to have ain't doing that kind of thing so again the source for those effective look-alike campaigns are those users and accounts that are most engaged with your with your products right now there's no one who's going to be a better target market than the people that are already getting the most value case study candidates and I would also argue you know any kind of advocacy program these are always driven by the people that are getting the most value from your product so if you aren't aggregating that data at the account level you're not going to know which accounts are going to be your best candidates who you should reach out to for case studies and any kind of advocacy or referral program that's on the marketing side and you finally will switch to the sales side and why this is important on the sales side any modern SAS business needs to especially those that have a free trial or a freemium offering the sales team needs to understand how the engagement level of those accounts that are in that stage that are kind of pre conversion pre-sales the movement is called pql so these are product qualified this is the evolution of the marketing qualified leader in the sales qualified lead now product qualifies leads are becoming an essential part of the sales operation process what that means is they may meet some marketing criteria to be a qualified lead they may make some sales criteria qualified leave but if they have they sign up for a trial have started to use your product in any way if they don't reach a certain gauge Minh trouble or activation level then they're just not qualified and you shouldn't be spending your time your your sales time and efforts on those accounts until they get there so this PQ our process is all about prioritizing that sales those sales efforts right you want your sales team spending their time on the highest quality leads they can because that's when you're gonna get you know better conversion rates that's when you when you're going to get more cost efficiency on your sales side and the only you know in this day and age those product qualified leads are the highest qualified leads they can go after so this this process is it's essential to this process to have that actor sorry that activity or engagement data aggregated at the account level in a way that your sales team can make sense of and actually take action so just in summary these are just four ways there are more but I know I don't want to go on too long I could probably talk about this all day but here the four kind of main ways that main business operational value you can get out of having that account based engagement data it's really about understanding driving account activation better managing those mature accounts driving that lifetime value you can actually refine your acquisition efforts with this type of program and optimize your sales process to finally get that pql process in place that you've been talking about for the last two years so it sounds great I want to do it let's get going how do we actually execute on this and make it happen so here's a few steps for you first thing you need to do is you need to be able to organize all your users by account so that means you need to take their meeting able to have their product activity their product engagement data just organized around accounts and this gets a little technical but if you're using segments this is actually segment group call but any tool that you're going to be using to do this needs to be able to have a way of programmatically assign users to accounts so like I said this is if you're using a segment which we highly recommend this is how they do it you make a call called a group call and every one of you user your users it's sign a group ID that that correlates with the account that they belong to and then into tools on the other end of that data can organize around that group ID so super important first step is you gotta organize by account now the second step is to actually score the engagement of the user level again not at the account level yet at the user level you need a way of mechanism to be able to make sense of that activity data for Sherlock that's kind of core to what we do so this is kind of how we do it but if you're going to build a system yourself you're gonna have to do something similar which is we take all the important events or activities that your users do in your product and you just weigh them between 1 and 10 based on the importance of those features and then from there you can then score every one of your users you can take the number of times they did any of those specific events in a time frame multiplied by the weight that you've given those events and you can then get that to an engagement score so then you'll go from every user in their usage or activity in your product and then you can convert that into an actual score which makes gives it a lot more context and makes it more usable and scalable across so once you score that engagement at the user level and you've got your your users organized around accounts now you can roll up that engagement to the cat level you've got those users organized with their scores and now you can aggregate this stuff up and now you've got an actual score for the account that then can be ranked and played with and the next step is you now got all that data aggregated in a nice account profile where you've got all that information that's a central rule of about that account engagement in one place and from there you can do all kinds of segmentation and all the important things you need to really operationalize all this stuff but this is this is where you want to get to I know it sounds a little daunting in this quick presentation especially if you haven't thought about it yet but this is what it looks like in Sherlock you get that data aggregated at the account level again this is this is kind of what the product was built to do so I know a lot about this I know it sounds like a lot but I want you to start thinking about if you haven't started thinking about it I mean if my goal here today is then to get you to think about it and to get you to think about it for not too long to actually start taking action about it on it because if you're not if you're not if you're not aggregating this data at the account level and able to take action I think you really like I said before I think you're really missing a piece of your SAS operation so I hope I hope I helped clear some things up or maybe open your eyes to some things here today or at the very least I hope we made this obvious fact a little less deceptive with this this conversation again this is kind of what Sherlock was built to do we'd be happy to talk more about this if you have any questions our team is always available on chat or if you want to sign up for a trial again we can help you start thinking about this and actually happen hope you start taking action on it I shouldn't say thanks again