Getting Marketing basics Right (for First Timers) by Pallav Nadhani, FusionCharts #SaaSx3

Marketing for beginners
The morning of the SaaSx3, saw a round table by Pallav Nadhani, CEO of Fusion Charts.
And I was one of the few lucky people who managed to find a seat at this already cramped round table.

PallavatSaaSx
Pallav, kick-started the session with a question:

Who are you & what will the world miss if your company dies in 10 years?

The question (although slightly morbid) did its trick.
It gave us an idea of what we had in store for the rest of the RT and beautifully set the context for what we could expect. And what we had to do if we had to market a product.

Interspersed with quirky humour, anecdotes, and important questions to ponder, the session was definitely interesting and novel.
Here are some key takeaways:

Aligning Product with Marketing

We usually talk about our product, our goal as a company. But Pallav stressed on the importance of flipping the question and address the problems of the customer.

It’s only when marketing defines product, will the product shape into an answer for the customer’s problems. And you’ll be building something that customers will get value out of.

He asked us to put a “why” to the problem that we were trying to solve for our customers.

An example he cited from some big companies that asked this question:

“Why shouldn’t you have access to your files, whenever/wherever you want?” was Dropbox’s question before they started building their product. Similarly, ask yourself that “why” to the problem you’re trying to solve.
Quoting Simon Sinek’s TED Talk on the Golden circle, Pallav went on to discuss the important questions of the purpose, the process and the result
– Who to reach
– When to reach
– How to reach

Who to reach?

Identify the three personas you have to sell to: Influencer, buyer and user
Depending on the nature of your product, decide who has to be engaged to ensure you’re able to sell to them.
Figure out “Why” should that person use your product? Everybody has a different reason, but what’s that persona’s reason?

If you’re asking somebody to switch from an existing product to a new one, how seamless is migrating? If it’s a new product, how will you sell him the need?

Tip: Ensure you’re asking the same “why” as your customers. Pallav cited an example here. Every time there’s a new download, they send an email to the customer asking the purpose behind the download. This way, they made sure that they were delivering on what customers expect from them.

When to reach?
Collect as much information on your customer (in a non-stalky way, of course!). The information should include the information that they consume on a daily basis, and how do they consume it. And how do you make sure you are in those media, so as to make an impression?

Pallav's RT at SaaSx
A classic example of this that he quoted was the billboards. He asked us to recollect some of the latest billboards, and then tried to delve into the reason behind it. We discovered that we see the billboards that we choose to see. If you’re hungry, you remember a restaurant’s board, or a car if you’re looking to buy one etc.

Tip: Make sure you actively hit customers that are seeking for your product. Identify where your customers would be, and then hang around to make an impression.

How to reach?
We discussed various ways of doing the actual marketing here.

One of the classic marketing strategies is The Sniper Approach vs Carpet Bombing approach to marketing.
Swearing by the sniper approach to marketing, Pallav said that, rather than trying a wide casting net approach with different experiments, try a laser-focused activity with precision, to ensure you nail the sell!

And the only way to do this would be to, Know your user, see if you understand a DILO (Day In the Life Of) your customer (creepy, but highly insightful) and see how you can fit into the picture.

Also, can you partner with someone to push your product? Or can you poach any partners of your competitors?
Tip: Unless you discover who you are, and why you exist, nothing can help you explain it to your customers.

Here’s a quick summary of all the major points:

  • Find that key problem that you’re trying to address and make it your goal.
  • Identify your ideal user & study the various personas.
  • Now ensure you “marry” the your goals to the user’s needs.
  • Work towards creating an experience, so your prospects take action.
  • Collect as much information as possible on your customer, so you know when and how to hit them with your product.

Happy Marketing!

Freshdesk at #SaaSx3

The story of how Freshdesk grew 500% in revenue in 12 months, and how Girish Mathrubootham and team went about telling us how they did it at SaaSx 2016.

“How many of you recognize this man on screen?” Girish Mathrubootham, CEO of Freshdesk, asked the room. He was gesturing to a picture of a man with thinning dark brown hair, a wide forehead, and a familiar crooked smile. A lot of hands went up even as people called the name out. Quentin Tarantino, people murmured, the eccentric filmmaker.

“Today’s presentation is going to be like a Tarantino movie.” he announced. “There will be different characters in it, narrating different stories that were happening at the same time. Hopefully, you’ll be able to put everything together in the end.”

There was a ripple of laughter as Girish turned to the four other people with him. They turned out to be co-panelists; early employees of Freshdesk who were going to join Girish in sharing inside stories from way back in 2013.

Panel-Freshdesk

The last presentation to round out SaaSx3, a full day event for founders of subscription-based startups, Girish’s session was literally what everyone was waiting for. The session was supposed to take the attendees through Freshdesk’s journey from a $1 million to $5 million in a year. For the people who’d attended SaaSx2, this talk was the sequel to Girish’s presentation the year before about going from $0 to $1 million.

But before Girish slipped into the nitty-gritty details, he began with a disclaimer. “I’m going to be sharing some real numbers,” he said. “Learn all you want. Just don’t take pictures. And please don’t put anything up on social media.”

If the Tarantino joke hadn’t gotten the attendees to sit up, this sure did.

Chapter 1 – The First Million

Girish was true to his word. In typical Tarantino style, the first slide read “Chapter 1 – The First Million”. The year was 2013, he told us. The month, January.

And then, he was off. The next few minutes were a blur of anecdotes and insights, numbers and theories.

One of the highlights of this section was his “n-1 theory of pricing”, where he explained the reason behind adding a fourth “Estate” plan, at $40, to Freshdesk. The Estate Plan, he told us, went live with just one additional feature a few months before. This was intentionally done to make the cheaper “Garden” plan, at $25, look more attractive to customers. This decision, according to Girish, played a significant role in accelerating Freshdesk’s revenue.

Then, just to prove that he wasn’t making it all up, he showed us an actual investor report from January 2013. The report read that Freshdesk had crossed 84400 in MRR, which meant they had over a million dollars in annual revenue at the beginning of 2013.

But where were they going to go from there?

Chapter 2 – Happily Clueless

At the beginning of the year, Girish admitted with brutal honesty, his team had no clue about their target for 2013. Everything was up in the air; they were flying by the seat of their pants. He had a number in his head, a number he’d had, ever since he’d learned about Twilio and Sendgrid’s growth at Bessemer’s Business of API hackathon. But it was in his head and no one else knew about it.

Until this point, Girish was the only one actively talking, explaining and expounding. This was when his team jumped in to elucidate just how clueless they’d been. There were some candid stories about targets being set on a whim and how people would bargain with “G”, as they fondly called him, for more realistic numbers. As they spoke, we began to realize just how normal and confused Freshdesk had been before they had decided to go after the five million target. I’m pretty sure more than half the people there could relate to this because most companies go through something similar when they’re small.

However, Freshdesk was on the right track during this turbulent period even as they wavered over their targets. They moved to a freemium pricing model, offering three seats on their lowest plan, “Sprout”. An attractive offer, it helped them double their customer count in a month.

By this time, it was already end of March, however, and the team closed the quarter at an ARR of 1.4M.

Chapter 3 – The Big Dream

By the time Girish finally seeded the 5M dream in his team, it was April. A quarter had galloped by and there were only 9 more months in the year. Nobody believed it could be done. But try, they did and quite a few changes were done to spur them on.

  1. Monthly targets were changed from “no of seats sold” to monthly recurring revenue to make sure that the sales team knew where they were with the annual target. The small team was split so that there was one sales rep per geographical region and given their respective goals.
  1. The digital marketing team worked backwards from the 5M goal to create projections for the number of leads they needed to generate every month. This was done using assumptions based on existing numbers for conversion rate, ARPU and seasonality.

The team admitted candidly that the 5M target was the first time the sales and marketing team’s goals were aligned at Freshdesk. A lot of experiments were run to make sure they were doing it the smart way and not the hard way. Every 15 days, they’d check their course to make sure they were doing everything they could to reach the target.

As they began ramping up operations and aligning goals, the Freshdesk team realized that they needed more people to take care of the increase in leads. And they needed them immediately. Girish jumped in at this point to explain how they’d solved this problem by hiring “freshers” right out of college and put them in customer facing roles.

“It’s important to match people with work they will enjoy doing. I believe that you can’t put in something that God intentionally left out of someone.” He explained, emphatically. “So, when we hire a candidate, we look for talent. We know that we can train them for skill later. That’s why we look for people with good communication skills, who can interact well with your customers. Everything else can be taught.”

This was also when the pre-sales team came into being. A team dedicated to helping customers with their evaluation, pre-sales reps spoke to customers, understood their requirements and helped them fit the product to their needs. A one-two combo, reps would prep leads before they passed them onto sales to increase chances of conversion.

By end of Q2, the team had achieved an ARR of 2.1M.

Chapter 4 – Escape Velocity

While the aligned goals of sales and marketing gave them quite a boost, the team still had to look at other ways to scale their growth in a sustainable manner. The right, and obvious, thing to do next was to align the product to the business goal.

This was done, Girish explained, by splitting engineering into core development and customer development. A decision taken in tandem with his co-founder, Shan, this would ensure that while the core developers focused on building important functionality, the customer developers could take care of bugs, feature requests and migrations.

When this was put in place, the core team started working towards making the product attractive for bigger deals. With input from sales, the product team started adding features to the $25 Garden and the $40 Estate plans to support the business. Meanwhile, the customer development team worked on making sure that existing customers were happy and their revenue was safe.

At the same time, they also realized the importance of upgrade revenue in SaaS. Girish showed us numbers detailing how their free or low-value customers were upgrading on their own by buying additional seats. Without any effort from Freshdesk, the accounts were growing. As businesses grew, they stuck with the solution that had helped them out when they were small. It had an even bigger effect on revenue, thanks to compounding.

Girish referred to it as “the advantage of SaaS” and stated that every founder at SaaSx has the opportunity to take advantage of it.

When Q3 rolled to an end, the team was at 3.1M ARR.

Chapter 5 – The Last Mile

By this time, Freshdesk was running like a well-oiled machine. A lot of new processes and ideas were in place and the team continued to see the benefits of the changes they’d made in the previous quarters.

But as Girish put it, “Life doesn’t stop at 5 million. You will have investors asking you what’s next and you have to look for things beyond your current target.”

So even as they were busy chasing their target, the team had begun working on some long-term projects for the next year. This included the beta launch of their second product – Freshservice, a channel sales program to find resellers in upcoming markets and raising more money from existing investors in an internal round.

He also had an important lesson to share about the effect of high targets on team morale.

“If we’d gone from $1 million to $4.5 million (instead of $5M),” he explained. “It’d still have been a great achievement. When you set targets, you have to make sure that salespeople don’t feel disappointed while the rest of the company celebrates. It’s important to manage their expectations and make sure their morale isn’t affected.”

Chapter 6 – The Fifth Million

And then, it was finally time for everything to come together.

For his final chapter, the end of the year, Girish simply pulled up an investor report from January 2014. At that point, Freshdesk had crossed 408,566 in MRR. This meant that that their ARR, multiplied by 12, was approximately $4.9 million.

Had the Freshdesk team really not met their target? Was this whole presentation an elaborate hoax?

The room was hushed and still as Girish, channeling Tarantino like never before, explained that, in their hustle for the target, they’d forgotten to include one of their revenue streams in their numbers – the humble day pass, which teams could buy to allow temporary agents to log into their account for a day. This worked out to about $8500 a month and helped their overall revenue cross the 5M mark.

There was silence and then, wild applause.

Girish and his team ended the presentation with a question that they asked themselves in the beginning of the year. It left us all in deep thought about how we should be running our startups.

“Are we aiming high enough? Do we want to be happy with 25% YoY growth or do we want to chase 5x in 12 months?”
By the time the team wound up their presentation, it had extended to a little over an hour and a half, twice as long as it was originally supposed to be. But no one had really noticed the time.

Any audience who’d sat through a full day of sessions would have been tired by 8 PM. An audience that had travelled from different cities to be there on a Saturday would have been exhausted.

Despite that, Girish and his team got a huge round of applause, a standing ovation and even a short Q&A session.

“What is your current payback period?” Someone asked when we opened up for questions. “Join us for SaaSx in 2019,” Girish remarked with his trademark wit, “-and I’ll tell you then.”

As I joined everyone to laugh and cheer for his reply once again, I realized the talk, like Girish had claimed earlier when he’d begun his presentation, had something for everyone – actual numbers, funny anecdotes, attention to detail and authentic storytelling.

All of it, combined with Girish’s genuine interest in sharing his experiences with the attendees, had made it special. I found this to be true of pretty much every session I’d attended at SaaSx, where the community was really helpful in sharing best practices and also on what to steer clear of.

Having said that, next year’s SaaSx has some pretty big shoes to fill. And going by the standards, the one after that, even bigger.

SaaSx3 is here!

It’s that time of the year when some of the most passionate founders of promising startups meet, connect, learn and engage.

It’s that time of the year, when the SaaS quotient of Chennai shoots up the sky.

SaaSx3 is back with a powerful line-up of sessions, and this time we head to the beach.

Saasx3Here are some of the interesting events you can look forward to at SaaSx3:

3 Playbook RoundTables with SaaS CEOs, a must attend session for new founders. This is one of the greatest ways to get some expert pearls of wisdom from some of the finest SaaS leaders.

Round Table #1 : Hands on Workshop on SaaS Metrics, hosted by: Suresh Sambandam, Founder & CEO KiSSFLOW
Round Table #2: Getting Marketing basics Right (for First Timers), Hosted by Pallav Nadhani of Founder/CEO of Fusioncharts
Round Table #3: Going from $1,000 to $100,000 MRR, Hosted by Krish Subramaniam, Co-Founder & CEO, ChargeBee
The One Thing series, a brainchild of SaaSx2 makes an appearance in this edition as well. Watch out as founders talk on the one thing that they would do all over again, the one thing that was the turning point in their startups’ growth, the One Thing that made a difference,

Product Tear Down is a one of a kind event which debuts on the SaaSx this year. A great opportunity for new startups to have their product analysed by an expert panel from various angles such as Opportunity, UI/UX, Funding etc.

Another session you can’t miss is the Inside Story is where Girish talks about how Freshdesk grew from $1m to $5m.

With a Startup Comedy event(yeah, startup) and some fun Networking Games, this edition of the SaaSx3 won’t disappoint.

And not to mention the dinner, drinks and networking.

So here’s the detailed agenda for the meticulous folks.

Register for a spot if you would like to be a part of this fun filled, unconference!

Product Market Fit – Pre Event playbook by @Avlesh @WebEngage & Arvind Kumar, @attunetech

The morning of the SaaSx2 event saw a great pre-event playbook at the Attune Tech’s Office.

Playbook by Avlesh

Avlesh from WebEngage, Arvind from Attune Tech. and Suresh from KiSSFLOW came together to host the session and anchor the round table.

With a casual round of introductions, Suresh kickstarted the entire roundtable discussion with a question:

Who is your ideal user?

Identifying the ideal user for your product is the key to your entire product. Is it a product for developers? Is it for CEOs? Is it for mobile users? Is it for users of spreadsheets?

Once you identify your user, identify the ‘buying title’ and the ‘influencing title’. The ‘buying title’ would be the shot-caller whereas the ‘influencing title’ would play a major role in influencing the shot-caller to buy your product.

Sometimes, if your on-boarding process is straightforward, you can sidestep your segment. Figure out what’s happening, is your product gaining traction, etc., And then iterate your product.

Aligning Metrics – The key

This is when Avlesh (Webengage) (he was lost in the land of Chennai, damn the cabbie) joined the discussion. He stated a very crucial point, that sometimes entrepreneurs forget during their journey of building their product.

“Try aligning your product to your users’ metrics” was a great insight from him.

If you’re launching a second product, run it by your current customers.

Try answering these questions:

What’s that one thing that your user can relate to? What does he/she get out of this? What are you improving for them?

These are very practical and a data-driven points to consider before taking that step forward towards your market fit.

Instant Gratification -Connecting the dots

Arvind, connected these points to the psychological concept of ‘Instant Gratification’.  What pain point are you trying to address? What’s that ‘wow’ moment they get when they start using your product? Something as simple as what they do everyday and how you can help them do it differently. If users get an immediate result from your product, they would be hooked to it.

Stickiness. The sole determiner.

Suresh mentioned a very simple but powerful point to elucidate product market fit.

“People who like your product will help you in scaling your product. But people who love your product will be your early adopters. Will be your referrers. Will be your evangelists. And they will help you achieve your product’s market fit!”

He also spoke about how product fit is not necessarily a price fit but much more than that. If users love your product, they really wouldn’t mind shelling out some extra money to buy it.

If you had noticed, all these points have something to do with user engagement.

Users see. Users love. Users buy. Users stick on.

Product Market Fit: The process

Product Market Fit isn’t a destination you aim to reach, but it’s a continuous journey.

Here are a few pointers to follow before you set out to find your fit.

  • Understand your market.
  • Estimate the market size.
  • Don’t go after a broad range of things. You can’t be everything for everybody.
  • Identify your segment. Your niche. That sweet-spot!
  • Then, iterate your product. Strip/add features to suit the market.

Mohit from Jombay, who had some thoughtful points to add on to the entire discussion, mentioned about how it’s important to know what to focus on! Positioning your product is a prerequisite in obtaining a market fit.

Are we there yet?

When do you know your product has obtained a market fit? To understand the answer, ask this question. Are more strangers paying for your product? (not just your mom’s friends or cousin’s colleagues). Are you solving your users’ problem?

Sean Ellis answers this beautifully, in his blog.

“I’ve tried to make the concept less abstract by offering a specific metric for determining product/market fit. I ask existing users of a product how they would feel if they could no longer use the product. In my experience, achieving product/market fit requires at least 40% of users saying they would be “very disappointed” without your product. Admittedly this threshold is a bit arbitrary, but I defined it after comparing results across nearly 100 startups. Those that struggle for traction are always under 40%, while most that gain strong traction exceed 40%.”

Takeaways

Some quick points to sum up my takeaways from the session:

  • Product market Fit isn’t a destination, it’s a journey.
  • Understand your market.
  • Know your customers.
  • It’s not about the product. It’s about how you position it.
  • Keep your product sticky.
  • Align your products to your users’ metrics.

Avlesh’s sense of humor, Arvind’s sarcasm and Suresh’s guffaws helped maintain a lively atmosphere for the discussion 🙂 It was a great session overall with some brilliant takeaways from all of them.

Guest Post contributed by Anusha Murthy, ChargeBee