How Keap CEO Clate Mask grew Keap to $99M revenue and 45K customers in 2024.

quick context this was recorded March 28th and 29th so a couple weeks ago at my live event SAS open.com we had a thousand software CEOs there if you missed it we hope to see at the next one September 5th and 6th in New York City SAS open.com but for now let's jump into the recording today uh what I'd like to talk about is how keep has used onboarding as a part of what uh learning from from Wes's talk I would I would call an integrated plg approach in here I'll call it a hybrid because I didn't have the terminology that we just learned from Wes but we'll walk through talking about like the decisions that we made on that how we went about those decisions and then if if it would make sense for for your business but before we get into any of that like uh they talked about in in the kickoff I want to walk you through our Revenue growth and just as a a little hint I I I I joined ke about 2011 2012 and about 2017 is when I left I don't know if you see any correlation no I'm kidding it's not me it wasn't me that that drove that um but one of the things that's been interesting for for me now that I've been back is what led us to this incredible growth and then the struggles that we had after that well it wasn't me joining and leaving that that wasn't the difference um we changed our recipe we had decided that that not only were we going to shift who we were going after but it was also shifting what our product was and what we were solving so we had originally focused on sales and marketing software for million-dollar businesses and we went down market and said oh there's a lot more Downstream let's go after that so he shifted to a simple CRM for startups our competitor set increased exponentially over that time period about 8.5x we went from a paid onboarding to a free onboarding and then we had our our moniker of personalized automated followup and shifted that to talk about a simple one step and that's all that was needed but it missed the point of the problems that our customers were were experiencing and we decided uh over that time period where where things kind of teetered off that our human connection wasn't as important as we thought it was so we started to eliminate that in in the process now what we're starting to see is is growth picking back up and I'm super excited at at the results that we're we're seeing from from customers and the experience that they're having um and wow thank you no I'm kidding uh the but the return to growth really comes from us being able to redefine our strategy and our Target and then focus on usage and paid onboarding to be able to restore the human connection and then our Focus now is on what we call business automation so I'll walk you through kind of how we went about that and and the elements in my mind that helped us the most was one being able to identify who our customers uh ability was and what they could actually do the problem set and the complexity of the problems that they were struggling with and the need for humans in our process so what we what Wes just talked about in in trying to like steal some of your words here Wes I would call it an integrated plg in here I'll call it hybrid because I didn't have that that knowledge of of what Wes just uh just gave us here but if we looked at our customers we had been in that downturn focused on startups and solopreneurs this is you know plotted based off of growth of of customers excuse me of small businesses and their biggest hurdles you can see shift over time it goes from them not having enough time to then being able to say no I need systems I need structure and I need to be able to actually uh get my teams built up in into the place that I need and when we shifted our Focus down Market we saw a struggle we saw an uptick in the amount of customers but they weren't sticking around they weren't able to invest the time that they needed and they weren't getting the results that they were looking for so recently we've shifted our Target back to million-dollar businesses and in my view the the sophistication of customers actually come into play as to what type of onboarding experience is necessary for them and then in in the case of what I would call Universal reality uh sanjie talked about a little bit um we we heard it earlier today that there is power in simple or more Point solutions that solve a very specific and discrete problem and then there's value in platform solutions that have a more robust or or complex problem set that they're dealing with and in our case when we stepped back and looked at and said hey are we going after the the low end of the market those more simplistic customers or the the more sophisticated customers that have uh different sets and needs and challenges but what about our our problem set is our problem set more on the the the simple side of complexity or on the far side of complexity and so for us when we recognize that we realized that we needed to be able to support our customers in their onboarding and how they were getting in so if we take those two things and kind of put it together you can see where I would say keep sits we sit in this top left quadrant so if we look at the high high complexity problem to low complexity problem or the Soph sophistication of customers when when we kind of broke down and said what is it that different types of customers need and and for us what we saw was in the in the lower sophistication but the high complex problem they needed Human Assistance through that process and as much as possible we were trying to build things in the product but we wanted to recognize that perhaps people can make a big difference there um and and in our case and we'll actually show you I'll show you here in a minute how it actually performed for us but I'd like to break down kind of our experiment uh I love what Wes talked about the importance of high impact experiments and I'll walk you through a very specific one here in just a moment and then how we unified the the strategy to get closer to the product Le organization a and then integrated that experience using humans as a part of that process so the experiment that we ran we we basically took uh and had this hypothesis that if we were able to specifically identify a a goal that customers were trying to achieve in our product and then help them in reaching that very discreet and specific goal that we would see an increase in our month M4 retention and obviously M4 is an indicator of future retention right so we wanted to start with that and say what's what's the thing that we can figure out and over a six-month period we took 705 customers and took them through a different type of onboarding where in the past we would have customers come in and we'd basically say okay here's how you get set up and then and then if they needed something they would ask us in this case we were trying to be much more intentional I love that word that you used intention in our process to be able to say no no they're here to accomplish something what's the goal they're trying to accomplish and how do we help them in that process and of those we took our Baseline and said a blended average across all of our customers so these were customers that either worked with partners and were able to get onboarded or or coached or assisted and then any of our customers that came in through free- trial and different things along those lines we had a blended average of about 75% then in this set of customers where they came through a specific Channel and set them up with hey you have a goal that you need to accomplish we actually saw a downturn in that for for the ones that didn't achieve a goal but if you think about that that only makes sense right if I'm coming in and I have a specific goal I'm trying to accomplish but I don't reach that goal it's a higher likelihood that I'm going to I'm going to bounce and we actually want them to bounce earlier in the process than later in the process we don't want them to stay in the system if it's not actually helping the long-term objectives of the company but on the on the flip side the ones that achieved the goal we saw a big uptick in them actually staying staying on and our M4 went up to 86% we'll look at that more here in a minute but let's talk about the things based off that experiment we said what can we do to help integrate this across the system and make sure it's a unified effort across the organization so from our marketing efforts we created an assessment that we leveraged where customers coming in could get get oriented to what they were trying to accomplish and through that assessment we could identify what is the goal that they need to accomplish then in the sales conversations at point of sale we started saying hey let's make sure they get set up and that they're joining with the expectation of going through the onboarding and that that onboarding would and would be able to set them up for success and then on the on the coaching all of our coaching efforts shifted from uh a generic response to a very targeted conversation around the goal that the customer was trying to accomplish to make sure that they achieved that goal and then from a product standpoint we started to build out capabilities to support everything up the stack so that the experience that they received in the conversation at the beginning bled down through through from marketing to sales to the coaching...