Transcript: Bonus episode: Guy Rozman | Mediaflowzz | Why kick off Self-Service in B2B SaaS?

Intro: why self-serve in B2B SaaS at all

Eyal David: [00:00] Guy, what's up?

Guy Rozman: [00:01] All good, Eyal, how are you?

Eyal David: [00:03] Great. Today we're going to talk about self-serve. Why should you do self-serve at all? Who is it for?

Guy Rozman: [00:09] Tell us a bit. Go ahead.

Eyal David: [00:10] So basically today we'll talk about self-serve for B2B SaaS products. We've thought about it, and we've run into a lot of companies ourselves that started with a sales-based go-to-market, and then at some point decided to develop a go-to-market that's also based on self-serve. And we wanted to explore the topic: why they do it, who should do it, how you do it, basically who it fits. So maybe we'll say in a word, so you really come from the marketing and demand side and all that, and I come from product, so that's basically the basis for this conversation. And it's worth saying that we've done these things many times and we look at companies from the outside, so it seems like a really interesting phenomenon that's gaining momentum and worth talking about.

Guy Rozman: [00:53] So basically, why is it good?

The benefits: scale, cost and the Atlassian example

Eyal David: [00:55] So first, there's basically another way here to create a scalable engine for generating revenue, and another way to reach customers who aren't necessarily the customers the company is currently going after. We have an example we can give, a company like Atlassian, which has many products, one of them is Jira, which a lot of people probably know. That's basically an example of a company that started with a sales-led go-to-market, and at some point they probably saw there was demand for their product from other types of customers too, and they decided to create a funnel that could fit all types of customers, not only enterprise customers, and then they went and built their self-serve, which has several advantages. So first of all, like we said, it really is scalable. You build a product, you build a funnel, people come into it, and there's less reliance on sales and on very long processes. It can also be much, much faster. Besides that, there are also certain customers and people who prefer this. They prefer to come in, try the product, and if it fits them, buy it right away and roll it out in the company, instead of going into very long sales processes. And overall, if the conversion rates are good and the product is good, people come and sign up, it can be very cost effective, because again, you don't have the overhead of a very large sales team and the whole process, and a lot of customer service that comes with it too, and a lot of customization you need to do to the product. You basically take your product, simplify it or don't simplify it, but give some version of it that can fit a very, very, very wide range of customers and a lot of use cases.

Guy Rozman: [02:32] Totally. And they actually also dove into it, it's a great example, Atlassian basically dove into this idea of, hey, we work with development groups, let's bring in a few people from the development group, let them try it, and once there's critical mass, suddenly I can break into the company, and I can also collect good leads that way, and the companies can basically grow over time and become enterprise customers, right?

Eyal David: [02:55] Totally. So the scalability here is also at that level, that you can reach a very small team, start from it, and then as the team grows, it grows together with the product. And let's think about another scenario: a team even from a big company, a company like Microsoft for that matter, comes in and starts using the product. So okay, tomorrow another team from the company can also use the product, so it's a good way to penetrate all kinds of companies. And another element, which maybe we'll also talk about more later, the self-serve itself can also serve as a very significant lead-gen engine, where in the end big companies that do come in can eventually move over to sales and grow into bigger deals here. That's maybe also really if we look at it from the demand side.

What makes a successful self-serve funnel

Guy Rozman: [03:38] Maybe in a flow like that I'll start targeting keywords from a different place, ones that are more relevant to the use case, more relevant to the individual user, and the landing pages and the experience too, like you said earlier, would basically fit that tailoring. Yes, so I think here we can basically get into talking about what makes a successful self-serve funnel. There are several elements here, some related to product and some related to marketing. Let me ask you, everything related to product, how do you see a successful self-serve that can work for an organization?

Eyal David: [04:10] Look, first of all it really depends on the company itself, what its internal processes are like and what the ecosystem looks like, but for a lot of companies it's a great fit. From my experience, in the end we go in, my team and us, we look, we do very deep market research, we understand who we're up against and where our place to come in actually is, and what we can offer that has value. We probably have something, like technology, like better support service or enterprise services, that we need to use for end customers too. Just for example, if we have a better refund policy or cancellation policy than what's being offered, because we want to enter the market and we can, we'll ride on that. And of course we also have our name, which companies usually have. So usually there's an opportunity for a lot of companies like these, from what I see and from how we work. And then broadly, once we understand the product promise and our value proposition, we of course look at it from the demand side too, which is basically where you come into the picture and check whether this machine is even feasible.

UX as the replacement for the salesperson

Guy Rozman: [05:12] Right. So let's take a step back for a second, talk about what a good self-serve funnel actually looks like, and then maybe talk about how you build something like that and how to bring it into organizations properly. On the first thing, what makes a funnel a good funnel, in my view it's first of all experience, right, the UX. Because what actually happens to a company? There's some technology product they're used to selling to enterprises or companies through salespeople, and so they're less bothered by what the funnel looks like or how the path happens online, okay? And a lot of times the experience of the product itself isn't amazing. Suddenly the product matters, right, inside the conversion. That's basically what you're saying, the product itself needs to sell, it's basically supposed to replace the salesperson. Okay, so suddenly UX has much, much greater importance, both in how the product looks and also, and this connects it to marketing, all the way to the product. So that means we need to create a kind of customer journey here that starts, for example, from some ad, which leads to a landing page, and the landing page usually leads to some onboarding, and then the onboarding brings you to the product, which also needs to look good and slick and also compete with what's out there. We'll talk about the competition soon, but if there's no good UX, you won't succeed. So you also need a bit of B2C thinking here.

Ad, landing page, personalization and lead capture

Eyal David: [06:38] You're very right. It's also lucky we both came from Fiverr, so we have that thinking. But I'll say one more thing we may have forgotten: even an enterprise customer who comes to you and who you catch through this machine, the very fact that they'll experience your product and be able to play with it and get some value from it, they'll already arrive as a warmer lead to the salespeople later. Yes, you just need to hook them and start the process with them from a completely different place. So when we plan this UX experience, we also think about it as part of the thing. So again, as I said, first of all we want to match ourselves to the industry benchmark. We don't want to be inferior to anyone, we also need to come with something new that's much better. Usually we'll really start from some ad that's very relevant, very focused on something specific, a specific use case. We'll want to carry the same messaging into the page we land the user on. We'll probably need a dynamic page and landing pages tailored to those use cases, and probably also media and assets that accompany it, and also, for that matter, different pricing factors. And basically the adjustments along the flow, the more the better. Of course we don't want to overdo it in the first stage, but the more personalization the better. Basically Guy, I think we both also agree that usually the best practice is to first collect the lead. First of all, explain very clearly on the landing page what you do here, what we offer, blah blah blah, which really is something the company usually isn't used to. We have people who mediate this along the way. And then we'll want to collect the lead. From there we'll probably want to give them some free value, so they understand why they're here, why it's good for them. After all, they're probably doing some window shopping between us and other products they saw ads for, we need to stand out. So we'll want to give them something for free and get them hooked as much as possible, so we don't just collect their lead, so we can maybe learn more about them while they wait for us to generate something for them or give them some value. Maybe it'll give us more information about them, about the company they work at. Maybe we can infer from their email domain whether this company is relevant to us, or maybe we already work with them, maybe we can expand the scope of work with them.

The two goals of onboarding

Guy Rozman: [08:48] So yes, I think you're touching on a lot of things here that are relevant to onboarding. Because basically when you do, like, I think onboarding has, let's say, two goals. One goal is to take the person, who just clicked an ad and came to us and decided they want to start, through an experience that will make them want to use the product and start getting to know it and explore it more deeply. And on the other side, we want to understand things about them. Right, we want information, maybe about the company, information about the team, information about who we're working with, and also behavioral information. That is, what they clicked on, which pages they reached, what interests them more, so we can basically steer the product accordingly.

Eyal David: [09:28] Exactly. And it's also worth saying that when we plan this UX, we also need to wrap it, not just... of course, and in B2B companies this usually isn't that straightforward, we also need to wrap it with emails, with something that accompanies it, to bring them back, to basically bring them, B2C elements basically, in order to convert them. We want to wrap the experience as much as possible to bring them to conversion. Other things I usually see are, beyond simplifying the messages, also aligning that self-service experience with the design and the existing elements of the company's main website, which is an issue in itself. We'll also want to simplify the pricing, we'll want to explain simply what we give, what the differences are versus enterprise, what you'll usually get for free, so the user moves forward. We also understand that we'll suddenly run into traffic that's less educated about this specific vertical, or that's very educated and wants to know exactly what they're getting, and there's no salesperson in the middle to mediate that.

Guy Rozman: [10:33] Yes, that's another thing it makes you think about. We really talked about demand, so in the end there are all kinds of, let's say, things people search for. There are things that are the product, or the product name, software, and there are things that are more like a lead. So once we start bringing in demand from outside, everyone arrives with somewhat different expectations. And then on one hand you want to create, like you said earlier, an experience that's very personal. If I searched for some specific feature I know we have, we want to talk about it in this customer journey. And on the other hand you can't create personalization for everyone, so you also need to go for the things that are big and that everyone is interested in.

Eyal David: [11:19] Very true. I'll take it from here, I think another thing that came to mind is, first, we'll really start broad, but with a few use cases we know have demand, and we'll want to start from them and anchor them, and if something doesn't work, let go of it. Another thing that's very clear to us: we'll run a lot of tests. We'll want this thing to be very dynamic, so we can update copy, update assets, all those good things we mentioned, and learn from it. And everything also needs to be measurable to an unusual degree, which, again, B2B companies usually come in without that dimension, and we usually anchor it. And this whole thing needs to be in perfect alignment and a perfect feedback loop with marketing, who need to optimize on your side, basically need to optimize the whole process.

Recap: UX, product-marketing alignment and measurement

Guy Rozman: [12:03] So I think, let's say, if we want to sum up for a moment what in our view makes a successful self-serve funnel, which is the things we talked about: one is excellent UX, two is a very, very strong connection between product and marketing, and three is measurement. Because measurement is basically what enables that connection, and lets you generate insights both about what's happening in the product and connect it to demand. Meaning, where people came from in the end, what they searched for, or which platform they came from, or which ad message they saw. And then based on the insights that come up, you use that to improve conversion rates, improve the product, improve the whole funnel basically.

Stakeholders, a champion and C-level backing

Eyal David: [12:39] That's it, it's really like the weapon end to end. And I'll say one more thing that maybe isn't so trivial. At the end of the day, and maybe we'll really touch on this later, there's the matter of stakeholders in the company. You need to rally a lot of stakeholders to drive a move like this. There needs to be some champion leading it, it's some buy-in from someone at the C-level who also backs this thing. There's probably the CMO, who needs to see how the whole brand supports this, and probably also gives it a place on the home page, everywhere else, in the messaging and so on. Also legal's view and all the other sides that need to be addressed. And there always has to be support from R&D and product for this.

Guy Rozman: [13:18] Yes, that's first and foremost, that's true. That there needs to be someone who's the leader of this thing in the company, and they'll also probably always run into resistance, because if the whole company is now geared toward sales, they'll need to come and recruit the resources, okay, and recruit the attention for it. From our experience we know that things like this always run into some resistance, because people are used to doing what they're used to doing. And also the question of who leads it, whether it's someone from product, someone from marketing, someone from the business. Here too I think we've seen a lot of examples where each time it can be someone slightly different who takes it from a slightly different angle. What do you think about that? Like, who do you think is the right person to lead it?

Eyal David: [13:59] So look, I think, like I said, C-level backing probably has to be there. Someone needs to budget this thing, give it the backing it needs, like I said, and also clear the objections and remind everyone why we're doing it and why it needs to be done, and as simply as possible at the start. You probably need another person in the company who'll be a kind of Champion who drives it, like I said. And another thing we see is that inside the company, because everyone has a different agenda, and the company's focus is currently, the eyes are on a different ball, the bigger ball. To drive something like this you usually need someone from outside who'll look at the thing, research the markets non-biased, understand it in depth. When we go into a process like this, as I mentioned, we do very comprehensive research. Very comprehensive, which even takes a few weeks, just to understand where we're even playing. We also come with understanding from other markets.

Guy Rozman: [14:50] So I think if I take that for a second, you need to find someone full-time whose job this is, who's non-biased, and who also has the product understanding, and also the product marketing understanding for that matter, and also knows how to tailor the UX/UI, and also knows how to look at the thing from a business angle, and build a plan for this whole thing that makes sense, probably combined of course with demand. In the end I think it's a bit like, you know, bringing someone from outside so they can give me that perspective, because otherwise it's very, very hard.

In-house or outside help, and the danger of half-strength

Eyal David: [15:19] So yes, so like, bringing someone from outside to help build it, that can definitely be a good solution, so as not to burden the existing resources, which are always maxed out anyway. So let's maybe talk about how this process works, like how we usually approach this project, what we start with, what comes next.

Guy Rozman: [15:39] Yes, good idea. It's important to say too, you can do it in-house, you just really need to come with that mindset, you need to come with that expertise, and you really need to come with those resources. Because in the end, in the end you need here, I'll just finish this and then we'll dive in, but you really need all those perspectives I mentioned, and I haven't even talked about R&D, to estimate how much this whole party is going to cost.

Eyal David: [16:02] So like, in the end you need to rally a whole lot of people. And by the way, also from cases we've seen, let's say, it's very easy to do a project like this, say, at half strength, and not succeed. Because the fact that there's some product-market fit and we need to sell to enterprises, now we want to go after SMB and sell them the same product, the same technology we know is good and that we're very successful with, the company doesn't always know how to make it accessible to that other segment of the audience. And even if the technology is very, very good, it could be that the UX isn't good enough, and there are other competitors doing something pretty similar for much less money, for example, maybe the pricing doesn't fit, or the competitors' experience is much better, and then there's some kind of mismatch here. So those are things you just need to be careful about, not to invest too little or try to stitch something together really quickly, and then it'll just crash.

Guy Rozman: [16:56] Yes, but you know what? From the clients I've worked with on this, and also from other companies I see, in the end it might be a healthy maturing process, that the company tries it alone, or forget alone, tries it at half strength. There's a learning process here. In the end time and money, time and money, I agree with you, but it could be that to bake this thing properly, you need to go through that process along the way. I don't know, maybe it's because we're Israelis, and the company, it's true in some way. But again, if you can bring in outside forces who have already done it and will save you the time and money and heartache, then that's better. Of course, even when you work with someone from outside it doesn't necessarily succeed, right? Things can always...

Eyal David: [17:36] Exactly. In the end I think you just need to plan it right and try, when you know you're investing enough resources in it, and not do it at half strength, because then the road to failure is pretty fast.

Guy Rozman: [17:47] Yes, although if we're talking about money, let's be fair, in the end if you bring in someone from outside they have a cost x, and if you take this whole team from inside, they're not currently working on something else that might be more important, and then you have x+y.

The work process: demand and competitor research

Eyal David: [18:02] Okay, we wanted to talk about what a working process actually looks like. It really is a kind of blueprint you can follow. So we basically divide it into a stage of a plan with recommendations, after we've done very deep research on the market, on the demand, on the different products that exist in it, on the users. Let's maybe dive into the research. Let's maybe say what you do in the research and what I do in the research. So you can start.

Guy Rozman: [18:27] Happily. So I think when I come at it from the demand and marketing direction, then first you look at what competitors are doing, right? When a person searches for the solution we want to promote, what results come up for them on Google, who shows up there. And then we start to understand a bit of the language, a bit of how things look, and also which keywords the competitors are going after. It's a kind of keyword research combined with competitor research. Like, that's the first thing I'll start with, to see what the search volume is, how many searches there are on the keywords relevant to the product, to see what the level of competition is, both in quantity, like how many competitors there are, and in quality, meaning whether the competitors are well-known companies or not well-known companies. In a lot of fields there are tons of competitors who maybe aren't well known and nobody knows them, but when someone searches on Google it all looks similar in the end. So that's something we focus on, and then we try to look for the angles. Where we can offer something that's maybe a bit more special, in what way our technology, our product, is better than the market. Like, which things we already know about the product we can highlight and go for, in order to get both the click and the conversion in the end. Right, it'll start from a place I know, and I also think that maybe from past experience, maybe you can, even if they haven't done B2C, you can basically learn there. Right, like maybe I've targeted this specific use case, maybe I can actually know something.

Product research, benchmarking, scoping and risk management

Eyal David: [19:57] On our side, first of all we feed off that to understand what people search for, which people search, and so on. But in the end, what our process looks like is that we come from scratch. Even if I know this category, we'll do deep research, because the way you operated in B2B, and those types of customers, don't necessarily reflect that same SMB or that same person who's now working at, say, Netflix. So we'll try to understand the market really well. We'll look at your competitors, we'll see who your competitors are, analyze a lot of competitors, try to understand how they do their pricing, what they offer, how much it costs, what their marketing messages actually are, who they're aiming at. And we also analyze a lot of testimonials data. Every piece of information online that you can read about competitors, and about you too, we'll read it, and we'll get some picture of, again, what you're good at, what you need to offer, and what others are doing. In the end you'll be compared on Google against these things, that same window shopping we talked about. From there we'll dive in, and we'll take a few specific competitors we do want to use as a benchmark, for one reason or another, we'll talk about that now. I'll move ahead for simplicity, and we'll compare ourselves to them. We'll look at the flow we'd want to plan, that we already have, and how we can basically compare. Maybe they offer a free sample, again, I said give value, maybe not. Maybe they offer a subscription, maybe not. We'll really understand that offer, and we'll tailor our flow to at least match it. And then we'll look for where we can shine, where we can improve ourselves in that respect. And beyond that, we'll start defining a list of features, of recommendations, that we want to make happen. This thing, a big scope, because there are all kinds of things I want to do in the future, there are things I want to do now, and those are the critical path. We'll scope this at a product level and understand what the most important things are. Where there are big rocks right now in terms of development that can eat into us, and maybe we can bridge them. We'll do some risk management to understand what can go in now, what later, and if not, how we deal with it. For example, maybe our experience in the setup will be less good, because the technology doesn't allow a fast response, say, to some input the user gave. So maybe the fact that we already have customer support working 24/7, maybe we'll pop up the chat, which others don't do, and suddenly we'll support the experience at a much better level. Just an example, I don't know if it's a good one, but an example. And this list of recommendations, in our research we'll also include a look at how much it costs us in development, so we can really scope very well.

Quick wins vs. the critical path

Guy Rozman: [22:33] The process continues from here, if you want, because you finished the research. How much it costs in development, and also what the impact is, right?

Eyal David: [22:41] Exactly.

Guy Rozman: [22:41] We're always looking for quick wins in these things. How do you usually, say, find quick wins? How do you think about that?

Eyal David: [22:50] To be honest, like, to make a move like this, I'm not always aiming for quick wins, because then I'm very careful about making a move that... listen, we're going to invest here, you know better than anyone, a ton of marketing budget, and we're going to do something that's a quick win? So okay, where's the line? In the end we understand there are things on the critical path that have to be tightened to an excellent level. When someone lands on you, they have to understand quickly: is this thing clear? Is it understandable? And it should steer them as fast as possible to signing up and leaving a lead, and from there to leaving credit card details, or whatever we decide. So the critical path in my view goes... I don't compromise on the landing page, on the assets in it, on the experience itself I don't compromise. I can compromise in places where the effort is really holding me back, and then I'll find a creative way to get around it and give a good experience.

Guy Rozman: [23:40] Actually I think a quick win isn't necessarily compromising, it's just finding opportunities and taking advantage of them. I'll give an example actually from a conversation we had with a founder not long ago, where he basically said: listen, I want to create some funnel here. And he showed us an existing funnel where, he says, in the end a person who comes to buy currently reaches a pricing page where three options are shown to them. But actually, there's one option I want them to choose, I don't want this shown to them at all.

Eyal David: [24:04] Yes, I get what that is.

Guy Rozman: [24:05] So that's, say, a very obvious kind of quick win, right? Of basically, okay, you want a person to buy a certain package, take them straight to checkout, or take them to some page that explains that package, but don't confuse them along the way with all kinds of irrelevant things you don't want them to go to.

Eyal David: [24:21] I get what you're saying, but look, in the end you're talking about an existing funnel here. I went with a situation where there's nothing.

Guy Rozman: [24:27] You're totally right.

Eyal David: [24:28] Probably what we'd start with, with an existing funnel, first of all we'll define well which metrics we want to optimize first. We'll go there and really try to find that quick win that'll cause a jump in that metric for a second, so we see we're smelling oil, and now let's build more things around it. Exactly. But again, that's when there's something existing. Otherwise, if I'm just putting up a landing page that isn't connected to anything, it's hard to create quick wins in it.

Guy Rozman: [24:52] We're always ROI-led of course, and we're metrics-led. In the planning you do too, you touched on it, in the end you maybe have some kind of roadmap where you say: okay, these are the things we build first, right? Because we believe this will bring the most impact at the start. And there are things we plan for later, some we'll do, and some we probably won't, because you can't always get to everything.

Eyal David: [25:12] Exactly, bro. But in my view that's less a quick win, it's basically scoping. Very good scoping of what this first move is. It's that risk management we also talked about. There are things I'll take out.

Guy Rozman: [25:24] Yes, there always are. I think you call it scoping, I also just look at it in time frames. Like, there's the short-term plan, the long-term. Exactly. In the short term I know I need to bring in what's called quick wins, which basically means bringing in sales. Exactly, that's basically what will give the fuel, and also the enthusiasm in some way, for the team to keep investing, and like, to invest in a balance of resources. So you know, everyone who builds a funnel like this takes into account that okay, it'll take time, and within a year we'll see revenue and so on, but honestly everyone wants to see revenue fast.

Eyal David: [25:56] Exactly, of course. Okay, it's less quick wins, but yes, strategic quick wins you could say.

Bringing it down to earth: R&D, integrations, legal and brand

Guy Rozman: [26:01] Totally.

Eyal David: [26:01] And I think now the next stage, after we really have this roadmap, is to bring it down to earth. You need to start talking with different parties in the company, mainly R&D, in the sense that there are a lot of integrations to do. Just for example, if I'm now capturing a lead and asking questions, I want to stream that into Salesforce, or HubSpot for that matter, wherever I manage my leads. Or alternatively, if I have security or privacy elements, I need to talk with legal and with whoever's responsible for that. And of course R&D, and also product. It's worth saying, I need to have some dialogue to understand really, really well what things I can lean on and can surface as part of this service I'm offering, and where we might have problems. There may be products that don't have ready integrations, and then this whole move might take longer, because we basically need to do some hack around what exists. So that's also a point to think about.

Guy Rozman: [26:55] I'll also give maybe the marketing angle, because in the end you need the whole move, and all the look, the messages, all these things, to connect to the brand in some way. I think when you create self-serve, it is a place where you can be a bit more flexible and try more things. In the end you'll have to, like, experiment, so you can't be very strict about the brand and the messaging and all those things. I, as someone who deals more with performance, will always try to test the boundaries, but in the end there are certain guidelines, or there's a certain language, and it needs to connect. And not only at that level, but also at the more operational level, of what happens when someone arrives at the website. Wait, where do I send them? Do I send them to sales? Do I send them to self-serve? And even if someone has already entered the self-serve funnel, I always need to have some mechanism that knows how to take them out to sales too, and knows, you know, to raise the flag when needed, based on information we get about them.

Everyone through self-serve, with a path to sales

Eyal David: [27:54] That's it, so look, we touched on this earlier, I think. Again, I'm in favor of moving, because you have a good experience, I'm in favor of moving everyone through self-serve, with the option to always reach out to a human representative who can take it from there, right? That's a much better experience than leaving a lead and now waiting for them to get back to me, because I can also get value, and I can also talk to someone quickly if I want. I think from the best practices we see, honestly on most websites, most services, I have contact sales, I have get started for example, or whatever it is, and that already leads me into the funnel. I really believe in having one sign-up for all the... for lead collection, and also the sign-up for self-service. In the end I'll tag the user and take them from there. And I want to direct to one good experience basically.

Guy Rozman: [28:43] Yes.

Eyal David: [28:44] Here maybe we'll talk, we said less, about what the process looks like, and maybe just sum it up. It starts with some research of product, of marketing, of the market basically, of the competition. We defined scope, built an MVP, built a roadmap, brought it down to earth, developed. It's also something we want to develop pretty fast, and it might be worth considering, we don't offer a development service, but it's also worth considering an outside arm that can deliver this faster, and certainly not necessarily lean on the existing resources and burden them. There's also a DevOps element here, IT, maybe it really is worth considering. I think another thing we haven't talked about is what happens from the moment I've now started running the thing. Now there's basically very, very good measurement too.

After launch: user testing, measurement and the feedback loop

Guy Rozman: [29:27] No no no, that's exactly where I was heading too. We said, okay, we launched, we did all the scoping and all these things. Let's go, we're starting, live, the campaign is running. Like, how do you see this work process and everything that happens from now on?

Eyal David: [29:39] As I said, so first of all at the product level, we have to have very, very good measurement of everything. And we already need to start learning from things. And I also didn't mention something important before the launch, I want to go back, okay? Before the launch, it's very important, we always do this, we do a lot of user testing. Again, the messages we imagined, that we drew basically from research, that we talked to customers about, talked about inside the company, I still want to run this whole thing through deep user testing. Both users I bring from outside who are very relevant, I'll make sure to segment them, and also customers of the company or representatives in the company who already know the thing, can give me inputs, and I'll refine based on that. Copy has a very strong significance here, and so does the flow. From all these things we'll go out, we'll launch this thing. I won't even dwell too much on all the elements of a launch, because it's an event in itself. We'll start measuring from there. We'll do very good measurement of every step in the flow, in the funnel for that matter, and we'll of course share it and correlate it together with Guy here, and we'll really understand which channel works best for us, with which message works best. In parallel, on the product side, we'll now start creating... we created a backlog throughout this whole thing, more requests or more things we want to do will be added, and we'll keep prioritizing them, and now start preparing the plan for the next stage basically.

Guy Rozman: [30:58] Yes, so cool, so that's basically what happens on the product side. On the marketing side something similar happens. We of course also measure, see results, things click, we reach certain insights based on the data, and then we start playing with the campaigns. It can be with the different marketing channels, it can be LinkedIn or Google or whatever. So we'll start maybe moving money from here to there, start playing with messages, see which messages work better, which messages work less, which features we want to put up front, okay, and to pull people in from them, what people search for, and in the end from which keywords people search for we manage to bring users and sales, okay? And based on that we'll also know how to give feedback to product. Because we may again see certain trends, or things we see working very well, and we'll tell you: hey Eyal, listen, people who search for x, y, z convert at a higher rate. Let's maybe create a funnel for them that puts this up front, so we don't send them to some generic funnel, but tailor a funnel that's already a better fit, also in terms of communication with the emails along the way, which will bring them to what they're looking for much faster, from the moment they reach the product and look around for themselves.

Eyal David: [32:16] Exactly. I'll also say one more thing: I really like, in funnels of this type, to start from day one with some segmentation that I collect about the customer, even if I didn't get it from marketing, so we can close the loop, and then we can give you a signal afterwards, Guy. We know, you'll probably know it, but we'll basically know, no matter which ad the user came from, we'll know which industry they came from, or some indication about them. We'll be able to close the loop for you from the other side too, and maybe you can optimize the ads accordingly.

Examples: Slack, Atlassian, Riverside and wrap-up

Guy Rozman: [32:47] Cool.

Eyal David: [32:47] I think maybe on the self-service side it's important that we also talk about a few cases that really succeeded, that we've seen. Maybe we'll mention, just do a bit of name dropping, what do you think? Let's go. So just for example, we saw that at Slack it worked great. We saw Atlassian, which we talked about. We also saw it in products that are more for podcasters, just my world, so we really saw Riverside doing it right. A lot in the transcription space. We know many, many companies that basically go from B2B to B2C.

Guy Rozman: [33:15] Yes, totally. I think I also had, some of the companies I worked at basically had a very, very strong sales-led motion, and they also knew how to come... they had sort of unique reasons, but it doesn't matter, they had the business case to do it, and they really came and did it, and it served some very important and relevant business goal for them. So every company, you know, can come at it from a different approach and a different angle and for slightly different reasons. But in the end it's something that can, again, serve some very specific use case, and basically open the product up a bit to more audiences, and in a pretty scalable way, because once you build it, that's it, you basically have an asset.

Eyal David: [33:59] Yes, exactly, just like that. So do we have anything else to add, in your opinion?

Guy Rozman: [34:03] No, I think we can wrap up. We can wrap up. We talked about why it's worth doing and for whom, and we also talked a bit about how you do it, how you do it with internal resources, external resources, a bit about our process. So from my side, you know, we covered the topic, we wrapped it up.

Eyal David: [34:22] Cool. If anyone has questions, of course you're always welcome to ask, we'll be happy to answer, for free, of course. We're eager to help on this front. It's simply an engine every company can create, almost every company can create, there are some criteria, but you really end up with an asset. And then, we also didn't talk about how you can pump it with SEO, and in general build infrastructure for this whole thing, to maybe lower costs. Guy, thanks so much for joining, it was really fun.

Guy Rozman: [34:47] Thank you, Eyal, bye.

Eyal David: [34:48] For now, bye.