AMA: SurveyMonkey Director of Product Marketing, Mike Greenberg on Self-Serve Product Marketing

Marketing fundamentals are the same whether your growth strategy is PLG or traditional outbound marketing (and the two are not exclusive!): you still need to understand your target market, develop effective messaging, and get in front of the right people at the right moment. At SurveyMonkey, we engage in both PLG and traditional marketing as part of our overall GTM strategy. With PLG, we are thinking strategically about how the product itself can act as a channel for delivering our message, convincing customers, and driving product virality. Using SurveyMonkey as an example: * When somebody sends a survey, we can grow awareness with brand impressions made through email invitations, on survey pages, and even through the content we decide to display after a survey is taken * A freemium, self-serve pricing model and try-before-you-buy tactics help grow acquisition * Customers who want to leverage their own brand, instead of ours, can upgrade to a paid product directly through product-driven purchase flows — one of many levers that can drive paid conversion * Strategic feature investments, like in-product collaboration, paired with good promotion at the right moment, increase engagement and ultimately drive expansion and retention outcomes Lastly, consider how PLG and traditional marketing channels can be used together to increase effectiveness, and make sure that both product and marketing teams have access to key signals about user behavior so that you can reach them with consistent messaging across all of the channels available to you. For example, if someone hits a paywall in your product but doesn't convert in-the-moment, traditional marketing channels can take over to reinforce your message / convince even after they've left your website or app.

As a partial answer, it's helpful to think about some of the things that Sales and CS roles might typically contribute to the customer journey or your understanding of customers, and how you can obtain that value in a proactive or self-serve way that's scaled and repeatable. As a self-serve PMM without the benefit of those roles, you need to be considering: * Do you have all the pieces in place to help people through the pre- and post-purchase customer journey without human intervention: Is your website clear and compelling? Are your conversion points helpful with decision-making? Do you have the right onboarding and tutorial content to drive engagement? Is your free > paid conversion rate healthy? Are you monitoring at key points to know where engagement is falling off? And so on. * How are you staying close to your customers and target market so that you can deliver valuable insights to your product team and optimize your GTM approach? Are you set up to measure customer satisfaction, solicit product feedback, etc., so you'll know what to do next? Remember, you can't go ask Sales. * Is your GTM strategy (and personal bandwidth) optimized for scale? Self-serve SaaS products tend to be at the lower end of the cost spectrum, so volume and virality are your friends. If my goal is self-serve business, I don't spend a lot of time thinking about webinars, for example, because they don't tend to attract enough viewers to move needles on a product that's priced at $50/month. PLG, SEO, and other scaled and efficient strategies are more effective at attracting the volume of users you need to sustain a self-serve growth machine at sub-enterprise price points. * On the topic of product-led growth tactics, work with your product team to develop a PLG strategy that puts your product and users to work for you driving awareness and expansion, and to ensure that your messaging reaches people at their moment of need.

Great question — it's all too easy for self-serve marketers to get disconnected from customers, especially if you're used to gathering this feedback through customer-facing orgs. As a leader at SurveyMonkey, I'm going to be a bit biased here, but I'll provide some general guidance on choosing a feedback solution, and you can guess what product I'm recommending: * Research teams are great — we have an awesome one — but lots of orgs don't have dedicated product/market research functions, or those that do have extensive backlogs. Sometimes you need to be able to get insights quickly or set something up yourself, so choose a survey solution mere mortals can use. It's no good to you if you need a PhD to work it. * When you're writing a survey, think about the types of insights you're looking for: while it's important not to introduce bias in your questions, I always think about what my ideal results look like and how I plan to leverage them internally or externally, and that helps quite a bit with determining what questions to ask. * Survey templates, pre-written questions, and even generative AI can provide really solid starting points that will result in actionable feedback. * Make sure your feedback solution supports industry-standard methodologies for getting the insights you want to uncover: If you want to know whether customers love you, make sure you can measure NPS. If you're looking to uncover customer and market preferences, MaxDiff can be a useful tool. You don't want feedback scattered across a dozen different platforms, so pick one that's proficient at everything you need. * Surveys are a touchpoint for your brand and should reflect it when they're sent to customers, so pick one that can leverage your brand guidelines across the survey itself, email invitations, etc. Certain free tools really fall short here and are not cut out for customer-facing duty. * Ask both quantitative and qualitative questions. The quant will tell you what is happening. Qual will tell you why it is happening. * With a great feedback platform, you won't feel like you have to extract insights from your surveys — a great solution will give the insights to you so you can focus on what to do about them. Sentiment Analysis is a great example of technology helping here: in the old days you would have to manually sift through open-ended feedback and categorize it yourself before you could make sense of it. Now machine learning can do that for you and sort responses into Positive, Neutral, or Negative sentiment, so it's easy to see where you stand and dig into "why" with a couple of clicks. I'm incredibly excited about the future of AI when it comes to helping people uncover interesting segments and insights from survey responses. I hope that's helpful. With a solid feedback platform and a plan to capture feedback on a regular cadence, a self-serve business leader can easily keep well informed when it comes to what customers are thinking and feeling.

The right team structure is going to be highly dependent on your business, so there's no one right answer. I've been on teams that have been organized by product, vertical, customer segment, and GTM motion (self-serve vs. sales assisted) with equal success and equal lack of success. Company-level priorities can provide a great North Star to align your team's structure and accountability to. For example, if one of your top goals is to improve NPS by 10 points this year, you might do well to have a PMM whose job it is to think about customer engagement and retention strategies. One thing that's been very successful on my team is bringing on a PMM dedicated to competitive intelligence, which is not a role that sits on a lot of product marketing teams. Our observation was that even though competitive insights are a core part of our job responsibility, PMMs get so busy we they really only go in-depth when a project or launch requires it. We wanted to drive more ongoing competitive visibility across the org, but also to be more agile in our response to competitive threats, so placing that role at the intersection of product influence, internal enablement, and GTM execution has really accelerated impact.

Great question. There's still a lot of internal enablement involved in self-serve GTM, as we need our website creatives, email marketers, social media managers, and so on to be well versed in our product and value messaging so that they're empowered to drive awareness and sell through digital channels. In a perfect world, if we do our jobs right, outbound marketers are able to do this without too much PMM intervention, which frees our team to focus on high level GTM strategy, delivering market and customer insights to influence product roadmaps, segment and persona development, future product launches, etc. Additionally, at SurveyMonkey we have both self-serve and sales assisted businesses, and so we do enable our Sales and CS partners on what's going on with the self-serve side of the business, because customer-facing teams need to be able to speak to shared features as well as differentiation between (all) our products, and because our self-serve business ultimately feeds leads into our sales org, so the two are closely tied. Where self-serve PMMs save some time in not producing collateral that's more specific to sales-led motions (pitch decks, one-pagers, white papers), as well as lower-volume demand gen activities, you'll see us shift that bandwidth to PLG and e-commerce oriented efforts like lifecycle marketing (engagement/retention), abandonment, upsell, churned customer strategies, and other efforts that need to be addressed by digital marketing teams in the absence of live customer touchpoints with sales and success roles.

Thanks for sharing that article! Though I can’t speak directly to Slack’s land-and-expand tactics, we follow a similar strategy at SurveyMonkey, and I'm happy to share some insights into what makes it work. In a bottom-up SaaS expansion strategy, the end goal is typically to get to the IT buyer by growing an installed footprint in an organization that’s too large (for IT) to ignore. This is how Slack has grown, and it’s fundamentally different than a top-down strategy where you’re more typically targeting departmental buyers directly with a sales-assisted motion (though you can certainly do both!). Some thoughts to this end: * A freemium, self-serve model helps if you want your users to bring your product into their office environment (usually as an alternative to something that is too expensive, too complex, or simply not provided): your product should be as accessible to people as possible (“land”) * Leverage surveys, interviews, and other feedback to know your users and use cases deeply so that you can tailor your messaging as you make the case for growing your product’s footprint in their department, and then their organization * Influence your product org to adopt PLG tactics and inherently viral features in your product roadmap, and drive adoption of these as a key part of your marketing strategy: collaboration and sharing features are a great way to use your product to drive expansion * If you don’t already offer one, consider a self-serve, multi-user offering that sits between individual accounts and an organizational (enterprise) deployment to encourage adoption by small teams: create an expansion “ladder” of offerings your customers can climb as their usage matures toward companywide adoption * Maintain and make available great data on organizational usage that customer-facing teams can leverage to make the pitch for shifting from self-serve/ad-hoc to IT-led organizational adoption: for example, a sales or CS team should be able to speak to how many self-serve users are in an organiation, how active they are, and even how much money the organization is currently spending on self-serve / “bring your own” users * Package your offerings smartly so that organizational deployments add value for both end users and IT buyers, so that the entire organization benefits from moving up the ladder. * Remember that end users and IT buyers don’t care about the same things, so you’ll need to adopt your “expand” pitch based on the audience: end users care about value that makes their job easier. IT buyers care about buying down risk and maximizing ROI from their technology spend, and may never actually be end users of your product. Your messaging and teams will need to be adept at speaking both languages. Hope that’s helpful!

This sounds like the classic "leaky bucket" problem: your bucket is leaking (users), and you're not sure why, so it's hard to figure out what to do about it. Solving this requires a combination of quantitative and qualitative insights. As a starting point, make sure you understand exactly where and when in the customer journey you are losing engagement with users. This might be really granular: if people are signing up for your service and then never come back, there might be an issue with your post-purchase email communication. If people sign up and you can get them to log back in, but they don't go any further, the answer might be somewhere in the user experience. Having great data and being really specific about this can help you narrow down what is happening and where the journey is falling apart, so you can come up with the right strategy and the best channel for re-engaging users. Of course, you also need to know "why" users aren't continuing, and that's where asking questions comes in. These can be helpful: * Why did you stop using the platform? * How well does the product meet your needs? * What are your expectations for the product / what are you hoping to accomplish? * How would you rate the onboarding experience? * Are there any specific features you found lacking or missing? * How easy is it to find help? * Is there anything you would improve? (Self-promotional warning:) if you're stuck, SurveyMonkey has a "Build with AI" feature that will craft a survey for you based on your prompt. Try asking it, "Why aren't customers returning to our product after signing up?" and send that survey to your customers. Gather a mix of qualitative and quantitative responses so that you understand what you need to address, and capture some benchmarks so you'll know if you've fixed it. Whether the answer is better onboarding, product improvements, or something else, this type of insight and feedback will get you pointed in the right direction. Good luck!