AMA: InVision Former Director of Product Marketing, Kacy Boone on Self Serve Product Marketing

Great question—thanks for asking! One thing to get out of the way first: Most products will have both users and buyers and those users and buyers can live across self-serve and enterprise. Users: Individuals that get value from your product (either actively or passively) but don’t have the power or need to purchase. Buyers: Get value from your product and also have the power to purchase–buyers can exist both in self-serve and enterprise plans. Now to get into the nuances… Customers, no matter whether they live in self-serve or enterprise, need to be led to value in your product, it’s really their needs that differ. Self-serve customers typically have less complex needs. Perhaps they have a smaller team or fewer security or setup requirements. They could even just be using simpler versions of your product! Their needs can be delivered on with a hands-off product-led approach. Enterprise customers have more complex needs—whether that be the need to manage thousands of users, integrate with their tech stack, or if their using products that require a hands-on setup and success process. There should be significant, incremental value of having an account team in order to support them. It’s critical that the move to Enterprise financially makes sense—the company should deliver enough incremental value to the customer so they are willing to pay a higher price point that covers and exceeds the additional overhead required to service them.

Great question! I’ve sat in product marketing roles at both consumer/product-led companies and B2B companies so I’ve seen both. In a B2B setting, product marketing is making its impact on revenue and user growth by enabling Sales. Well, in a self-serve world, your end goal is the same but the methods by which you do that are different. Let’s take monetization and generating revenue as an example. With B2B, you’re arming the Sales team with killer decks with just the right sizzle and proof points to close the deal. In self-serve, you’re still trying to “sell” your users but you’re doing that through broad communication channels, like email, in-product messaging, and ads to help users realize the value of paying for your product. You’ll be investing in more lifecycle marketing, growth marketing, and (if your company has it) deeply involved with your product growth team.

I’ve consistently joined companies when the product marketing team was still small and establishing its influence and what I think it comes down to is providing unquestionable, unique value to the team—most often through delivering actionable customer insights. Product marketers are acutely aware of the customer, they should be living, breathing customer research and keeping a close pulse on the trends of the market. I think product marketing really starts to earn their way into the product roadmap process when they can provide a well-informed and strategic perspective of where the company and product needs to go in order to drive further market adoption.

Oh, I love this question! I’ve been tasked to overhaul many onboarding programs and customer insights are integral to my approach. I believe the best insights are validated through multiple sources so here are a few methods I’d recommend using to inform your strategy: 1. Customer Interviews: Talk to your customers! Make sure you’re not just talking to the successful ones either. While they might be harder to get in touch with (and you may need to offer some $$), interviewing customers who churned early in their lifecycle can open your eyes to challenges or missed expectations—which then become opportunities for improvement. 2. Support Tickets: In particular, looking at support tickets that customers file in their early lifecycle can help you proactively hedge off any painful experiences by providing help or training content in onboarding. 3. NPS & Satisfaction Survey Data: Take a look at your promoters and understand why they’re happy while also understanding how you could have improved the experience for your detractors. I would look at this for all users and also narrow in on the early lifecycle to see if there are things you can address in onboarding that would put someone on a successful path with your product. 4. Product Data: Working with your Data Science team, you can uncover key actions that correlate to higher success with your product. If you can identify those key actions, then the onboarding path’s job is to lead users to taking those actions. With a bit of a strategic lens and synthesizing from these sources of insight, you’ll want to answer some of these questions (which you can also ask a customer directly): * What expectations did they have when they discovered your product * What were they trying to accomplish when they first signed up for your product * What challenges did they run into * What surprised them * Were they able to accomplish what they set after? Why or why not? Ultimately, we want our customers to find success—so understanding what success means to them and figuring out how your product helped (or eek! hindered) their success is what you’re after. Once you understand that, you can curate an onboarding flow to support them.

To the contrary, I always like to share and align on KPIs with the product team. Bonus points is you can also align that with key partners in other functions as well, like growth marketing. The more you can stay aligned from the top, the more naturally everything else will fall when it comes to prioritization and resourcing of projects. Now, some KPIs will vary widely based on the lifecycle of the product and the context of your company. Here are some examples to get your wheels turning: * For new products: Adoption (X% of users are using a product) and monthly/daily active users of the product * For products later in their lifecycle: Activation % (how many new users become activated users), Virality (if your product can be shared, is it being shared and how often)