Loading summary
Transcript18 lines
- [00:00]
A
Foreign.
- [00:11]
B
Welcome to another episode on the product Led podcast. Today we are going to be continuing going through the process component for the product LED system and today's all about acquisition. So how do you actually understand where do you focus in your acquisition engine, how do you get more signups and and what you're going to learn today is a process, a weekly 60 to 90 minute meeting you can do for your business every single week to improve not just your acquisition, but also your engagements. The number of people who monetize throughout this. Now, for the purposes of this podcast, we're going to be diving deep into just the acquisition side because you'll learn so many cool things you can do to really understand what how to actually pull some of those great growth levers on the acquisition front and how you can pull them every seven days between this meeting. So today we have Laura, director of content at Product Led co host on the podcast and we're going to be digging into this topic. So stay tuned for how you can do it in your business.
- [01:12]
A
Thank you, Wes for the introduction. Yeah, this is a really interesting podcast today because it is going to be a little bit different in the sense that we'll go through this process ourselves so you can actually get some good ideas that are happening and how to do it at the end. I think you're going to have a good visualization in your mind on how this works. So before we kind of dive into the process in just like one minute, Wes, can you just give a recap of what this meeting is and why you need to have it every week and what it consists of.
- [01:38]
B
So the weekly growth meeting, this is a meeting you're going to have every single week with ideally your entire leadership meeting or everybody who's involved that is like a go to market leader. So they touch whether marketing, sales, even the overall engagement of the products. Like you want to make sure all those people are there, the CEOs there, everybody who can make a big difference on the go to market front. Now with that said, you still got to keep this under seven people. So if you have a ton of leaders on your team, keep it small, ideally on this end. And so that's kind of the overview of the meeting. The reason we have these meetings is because it's basically like a sync for your business every seven days where you can now prioritize and identify like, hey, like what is the big bottleneck in your business and what are some of the things we can do in the next seven days as a team to collectively tackle that and what's different about this. And why I love this process is because it's not about, all right, we got a content issue. We have, like, not enough users. All right, Laura, this is on you. This is only going to be you solving this like this, not what this is about. This is about entire team focusing. Okay. This is the biggest bottleneck in the business. How can we all support you to better solve that faster? And so that doesn't mean everybody's like, drops everything and just, okay, this is the only thing we do. But no, we're all going to be focusing in this one direction. And so when do you do this? Every single week. You just solve your problems way faster and you create new bottlenecks. And I think that's the fun thing here too is like, you will have a bottleneck at all times and it's just you get to move it. It will be a different one at some point. So that's a high level overview. But what we're going to be doing on this podcast is really digging down how do you actually run this for the acquisition side of your business?
- [03:24]
A
Yeah. So let's break that, that part down because this is where it gets super juicy and where you get to actually brainstorm a ton with your team. So in terms of getting started on the acquisition front and how that even works, so you look at your data and you realize that this is a big challenge for us. You know, we're looking at the data and we're seeing that a thousand people are coming to our site and we have two people who are signing up. So how does this process work? From there, you've identified one big problem. What happens next?
- [03:56]
B
For a lot of companies listening, it won't be that obvious. Luckily, like, one of the students, we went through two examples in our product led academy with different companies, and it was actually very obvious that they needed help getting a lot more signups.
- [04:11]
A
And.
- [04:11]
B
And it always makes great for a case study because it's like, okay, good, you got to focus there. But a lot of times in companies especially that are a bit more established, it's not that easy. So usually the first step is you just got to, like, try and pinpoint what is that bottleneck. So in this case, one of the clients, they had about 7,300 people coming to the website every single month, and four of them were signing up. So there was a massive kind of like, opportunity there to get more people to actually sign up for their product. And so Pinpoint was actually pretty straightforward because we were like, okay, we identified this is a really big opportunity. And we can easily agree and prioritize this as this is the top opportunity for us to focus in on for our business. And so that's really what you'd be focusing in on for that first part of going through that in that meeting. Because, yeah, you want to make sure, like, as a leadership team, is that good. Go to market team. Like, do we agree, like, this is where we gotta apply the leverage. Once we solve this, this will basically help us double the business grow much faster. And so that's really the. The first stage of this process. The next piece.
- [05:19]
A
Well, I'm gonna. I'm gonna stop you there because I just want to ensure that we have clarity over this. So say. Because a lot of the time times it actually isn't so obvious. And maybe you realize that you have like four or five different challenges, like, big opportunities that you have pinpointed are the issue. How do you choose which one you should actually work on before you even move into the solution aspect of it? How. How do we choose the most important problem? Obviously, in this case, it's obvious, but if it's not so obvious.
- [05:57]
B
Yeah, and thanks for stopping me, because it's like, I think it's easy to miss this part too. Now, there's a lot of ways to do this. There's, like, more subjective ways. Like, all right, think it's this. My favorite way is always to, like, double each of the metrics on their own. So let's say if we double the number of users, would that double the business if everything else stayed the same, like all our other conversion rates, but those core six metrics we each we tracked earlier in the data component. You can go back to previous podcast episodes and listen for what those ones are. But if you doubled that one metric, would that double the business or would that have a really big impact? So in this case, if we doubled it, the number of users goes to like, 14,000 and we have eight signups. So it's like, no, I don't think it's that. But, like, if we doubled the amount of signups on its own, it's like, wow, okay, like, now things are starting to move. That's actually easier to do. It's way easier to double that than it is to double the number of users on the website, at least for this business. And so it's kind of a combo of both. It's like, let's play around with the numbers. See, we can add the biggest impact. And let's also be realistic about what is our ability Here, like doubling the amount of traffic as we know is, is a lot harder than potentially just improving the conversion rate on some of these things. Especially when you're looking at like small numbers, like four signups. Oh man. Like this business could triple, quadruple easily. And they, that's still not even like 1% conversion rate. So there's a lot of opportunity to be had on that. And I think that's the other piece is like, what's the potential upside if we really just like install some basic best practices? There's a lot of margin to improve on that end.
- [07:36]
A
Okay, thanks for clarifying. And this is where, when your team is going to debate a bit too as to where the biggest opportunity is as well. So healthy discussions are always, always warranted here. Okay, so once you have chosen your top priority or top opportunity, what's the next step?
- [07:53]
B
For sure. So it was really fun doing this one in our cohort for Product Academy because we had a lot of people generating a ton of solutions. So I'm just going to start scraping the surface here as relates to acquisition, but a little precursor here. Whenever we generate solutions, we use something known as the PCR kind of test. And it's a fun one. Not one of those nasty nose PCR tests that we all hate. This one is you break it down into three buckets of solutions. So P stands for product solutions. Think of anything. It's like, oh yeah, like how could we get more signups in this case with a product solution it might be, okay, let's give people a free snippet of what our product does and we'll do it ungated. Like an example would be the website grader till the HubSpot came up with great idea, product solution for solving this. Then there's content solutions. So it's like, okay, out of all the traffic we have, what are people actually searching for? So, okay, if they need to do something that's relevant to what we, we actually do for our product, it's like, okay, maybe we create some more content on that because right now we don't have that. Then there's resource solutions, which is like kind of the catch all. It's everything else. It's like it's a quiz. Potentially it could even be, we need to talk to some of these people, offer them like a free audit or something, something like that, whatever that could be for your business. You're just trying to think out of the box. And so PCR is awesome way to really think bigger than just a lot of times like product teams Will think product solutions and so pushes the bounds a bit. So at this stage once you identify the core bottleneck, you're going to let your team go a little wild. So you're going to task them with going with at least like five or ten solutions each ideally. And you'll give them anywhere from like two to kind of three minutes to kind of brainstorm on their own, list out all of the ideas. And so just as an example, for one of the companies we helped, they came up with like oh yeah, like sign up with like Google or email. That would just make it way easier. Instead of like a Microsoft account as an example, adding little one liners like simple things like no credit card required after try for free simple. But you know it's effective because people might be thinking it's an opt out free trial which most people hate. And then we have also like have a test kazak that like people can see like what this product actually looks like. There's tons of things like even showing the pricing option one screen just making it easy to scroll down if things are feeling busy. It's like how can we make that simpler? So some of these things as I'm going through them, they're just simple stuff and that's awesome because we're just trying to get as many potential ideas as possible. And so I really do like the generating the solutions part because you're just going to tap into everybody's brain. They're all going to think of things from different angles. Which is why you want your entire go to market leadership team there because you're going to get that exposure to solving this in so many different capacities. So that's basically to recap the generating solutions step which is next.
- [10:51]
A
Yeah, and I just want to add a little tip in here because I think it's really helpful just to set a timer while your team is brainstorming. So just two, three, four minutes, whatever you think is appropriate. And then just have everyone write down possible solutions in the chat. Like it doesn't have to be a huge deal, it's just very simple. Everyone just brainstorms. Brain dump. Don't overthink it. And then the next step, which is what Wes will talk about is when you actually choose the two priority, prioritize those solutions. So I'll let you speak to that. But I did want to just add in a little bit time stamp here because you don't want to spend your whole meeting just thinking through solutions that are there.
- [11:31]
B
Yeah, I know for a lot of people myself, I'll Put myself in this bucket too. When there's a timer, there's like got to actually generate ideas. And for a lot of people, it actually works better for brainstorming. So fun fact, now when you generate all those solutions, once you feel like you have like a good amount of them, this is where we start to actually prioritize them. And so there's a ton of theory out there on what is the best way to do it. I'm not going to like drone on about like, oh yeah, you got to use the ICE Score framework or no, you got to use my new one I created. We're more or less impartial with like the best way to prioritize this because it also could be, oh, we're going to align this to what is our strategy, what are we going to lean into? So when it comes to prioritizing your solutions, the basic, basic, basic way is start with, okay, what do we think will actually have the biggest impacts and what might actually be the easiest to roll out in your business? And so I would start there. Obviously you could get a bit fancy with like, okay, we're going to add a little more confidence to this. And most people, when they do confidence, you don't do it right because you're just like one to five. And everybody has a different subjective way of saying, what's one in five? Like, if you're actually going to do it, like list out what is one, what is five is like five. Like you got any evidence around it, you could get fun there. But my number one word of advice when it comes to this for the first time, don't be cute, keep it basic, keep it simple when you're prioritizing these solutions. So in this example, like what we came up with with this company is we just said, okay, making it easy to sign up with Google is going to be one of the best things, easiest things to do. We kind of pick that. Now when it's your first time you go through this and if this is a really big bottleneck, one of the questions we got was, should we like consistently do like the really easy stuff first or should we, you know, hold off and wait and do these multi week endeavors that, you know, they might work, they might not work for our business. And so I loved this question because it is about like you do as a company, want to be making some big bets and you also do want to be taking all these quick wins if you can. But if your company is always just doing those quick wins, you're probably just going to be Optimizing in business, which is for a little while is fine, but a long time, that means you're going to lose out on big innovations and all those things that do take a lot of true work to put out. And so yes, when you're prioritizing, when you first do this, I'm going to say just stick to the easy stuff, get the momentum, stick to everything where it's like, okay, we could probably do this in seven days, let's launch it, let's get momentum. Because when you first do this, you are probably going to have a lot of low hanging fruit that you can easily just execute on for your business. And so start there before you start making some of those big bets in your business. So that's kind of the next step. Once you generate all the solutions, prioritize them, pick a few. It depends on your team's bandwidth also how big your team is. But you want to make sure everybody can understand that they have like a solution they can prioritize for here.
- [14:37]
A
Awesome. And then what happens at the end of this, the next day or next week? Do they re, you know, look at the results of it or how does that work? What's the next step after you know, this process?
- [14:50]
B
So once you prioritize them, that actually goes into like the, the next week's or that current week's priorities. And so like you actually prioritize it, actually build it out ideally in those seven days and then then after that part, yes, you do actually review. See, okay, what worked, what did not work, what do we have to reevaluate here? What should we change? And a lot of times actually I'll get back to the prioritizing solutions, like the big bets versus small ones. Ideally you can chunk a big bet into something where it's like, it's a seven day experiment. Like you launch it, you can see quick wins. Like, oh yeah, like that's showing us a positive signal because you chunked it down enough. And I was like, okay, great, like let's invest another week into the next part of that next phase. So in some cases it might be okay, let's double down. Other cases it's going to be like, let's kill it. Other times it's going to be like we actually need to wait maybe a month or two months to actually get good data on this, to actually have like a clear like go, no go on this experiment. And so that's really what is next for, for that stage.
- [15:51]
A
Awesome. Well, I love this and I loved going through this process on the Coaching call because it's seeing it in action was really fun and I know that you'll be surprised at how simple and how massive, how much, how many solutions you can brainstorm at once. So any final thoughts, Wes, before we end today?
- [16:12]
B
Yeah, I think for any company doing this, start off with this. But there's one kind of precursor like homework item that is actually really important for this. We mentioned it in a couple podcasts ago, which was creating your value engine. And so the reason that's really important and I would recommend you still do that first is because whenever you create your value engine, you map out exactly like how do you create value in your business? It makes it a lot easier to actually pinpoint the problem. Also prioritize potential solutions because a lot of times we're actually going through this right now at product that too. When you map out your value into like how do you create capture value in your business? You start to automatically notice like, oh yeah, like why are we doing that? And you're like, I don't know. And then it's like, well, let's, let's make it make sense. How about. And sometimes there's just these really basic things. You're like, yeah, no, we gotta switch that up. So please do the value engine first. Map out the current process, like everything from how you acquire people, engage them, monetize them, because you're going to learn so much. And then when you get to running this growth process, you're going to be armed with, yeah, we probably know what we're going to be doing for the first three to four weeks, but just cleaning up this mess and building an ideal value engine, not just the current one. And then you can get a bit more fancy with some of these other experiments for how you can improve this. Here's what the next step is. If you've learned anything from this podcast episode, you actually want to implement it more inside your business. We got some exciting news. We are opening up our wait list for joining the product LED academy. So everything we're discussing here is a part of our program. It's actually a specific week where we build this out into your business every single week. And so this is one of the coolest programs I think, where you can actually build out and scale up your product, that business with other folks who are doing the same thing. And so at the very beginning of May, we're going to be opening this up for three, four days really quick. Just let everybody in who wants to join for the next year long program. And so make sure to get on that waitlist so you can join and you just have to go to product led.com forward/academy and then you'll be able to join the waitlist really quick and hope to see you in the next cohort of the program. And that is all for today. Happy growing, everybody. Have a great day.