How Keap Used Paid Onboarding and Human Coaching to Drive a Return to Growth (Interview with Product Leader Ammon Curtis)

Event Context and Introduction

Nathan Latka

00:00Quick context. This was recorded March twenty eighth and twenty ninth. So a couple weeks ago at my live event, saasopen.com. We had a thousand software CEOs there. If you missed it, we hope to see at the next one, September fifth and sixth in New York City, sasopen.com. But for now, let's jump into the recording.

Ammon Curtis Opens: Keap's Onboarding Journey

Ammon Curtis

00:22>> Today, what I'd like to talk about is how Keap has used onboarding as a part of what, learning from from Wes'talk, I would I would call an integrated PLG approach, and 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

Revenue Growth History and the Recipe Change

Ammon Curtis

00:49>> for your business. But before we get into any of that, like, they talked about in the in the kickoff, I wanna walk you through our revenue growth. And just as a little hint, I I I I joined Keap 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. But one of the things that's been interesting for

Shifting Down-Market and the Consequences

Ammon Curtis

01:15>> 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. 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

01:43>> 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 we shifted to a simple CRM for start ups. Our competitor set increased exponentially over that time period, about 8.5 x. We went from a paid onboarding to a free onboarding. And then we had our our moniker of personalized automated follow-up and shifted that to talk about a a simple one step, and that's all that

02:11>> was needed. But it missed the point of the problems that our customers were were experiencing, and we decided, over that time period where where things kinda 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 the results that we're we're seeing from from customers and the experience

02:36>> that they're having. And wow. Thank you. No. I'm I'm kidding. The

Return to Growth: Redefining Strategy and Target

Ammon Curtis

02:43>> 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 kinda 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, ability was

03:11>> 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, just gave us here. But if we

Customer Sophistication and Problem Complexity Framework

Ammon Curtis

03:35>> looked at our customers, we had been in that downturn focused on startups and solopreneurs. This is 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, get my teams built up in into the place that I

04:03>> 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

04:31>> necessary for them. And then in in the case of what I would call universal reality, Sanjeev talked about it a little bit. 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 step back and looked at and

05:01>> 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, different sets and needs and challenges? But what about our our problem set? Is our problem set more on 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

05:28>> and how they were getting in. So if we take those two things and kinda put it together, you can see where I would say keeps sits. We sit in this top left quadrant. So if we look at the high high complexity problem to low complexity problem or the sophistication of customers, When when we kinda broke down and said, what is it that different types of customers need? And and for us, what we saw was in the

05:54>> 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. 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. I love what

The Onboarding Experiment: 705 Customers Over Six Months

Ammon Curtis

06:18>> 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 led organization, and then integrated that experience using humans as a part of that process. So the experiment that we ran, we we basically took, and had this hypothesis that if we were able to specifically identify a a goal that customers were

06:48>> trying to achieve in our product and then help them in reaching that very discrete and specific goal, that we would see an increase in our month m four retention. And obviously, m four 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

07:15>> 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, intentional 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

07:35>> 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

08:01>> 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 gonna I'm gonna bounce. And we actually want them to bounce earlier in the process

Baseline Retention and Goal-Achievement Results

Ammon Curtis

08:22>> 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 m four 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

Unifying Marketing, Sales, and Coaching Around the Goal

Ammon Curtis

08:44>> 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 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

09:13>> 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 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

09:37>> 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 into the product and what they were seeing. And after after Wes'talk, I would change this to an integrated PLG approach, because I I I loved how you articulated that. At the time, I didn't have that that verbiage, but in our view, it was kind of we

10:04>> were kinda looking at a hybrid, but I do think it's it's more accurately posed as an integrated version of of PLG. So from a from a product standpoint, we enabled a couple things. One, we enabled our coaches to actually build out and walk through what the customer was trying to accomplish and build out different sets of information instructions that would be injected into the software so they could they could interact with what we called, my playbook.

10:30>> But it basically create a set of checklists that they could go through that the coach would customize based off of the goal they were trying to accomplish and the needs of that customer. Because in our case, when customers come in, sometimes they need help with materials that they're building. Other times, they don't. And so the the coach could actually customize what that checklist is for those customers, and then we would inject other things that would assist

10:54>> the coach in that effort in specific instructions or or capabilities.

11:00>> So this might not be right for everybody, but I do wanna walk you through some of the some of the data that led us to this and what the results are of that, because I think it becomes very very interesting. And, Wes, when you were talking about being intentional, the way that I was thinking about it or what struck me was that's exactly what we've done. We took all those learnings from the things that we've built

The Coaching Guarantee and Outcome-Based Model

Ammon Curtis

11:24>> to then say, alright. How can we, by design, inject humans at the right time, at the right place to interact with customers so that they can get the results that they're looking for? And there's a couple things that we we did in relation to that. One, we made sure our coaches were oriented to to the goal that's set by the customer. And then two, we also offer a guarantee. So historically, our coaching was set up where

NRR Results by Onboarding Tier

Ammon Curtis

11:48>> the the customer would come in and they have an allotment of five hours or what what whatever it was. Instead, we said, hey, why don't we guarantee that they'll be able to reach the goal? We'll set the goal upfront, but instead of giving just an allotment of five hours or ninety days or whatever the case is, we would say at the end of ninety days, if you don't reach the goal, we'll continue to coach you and

12:10>> make sure that you you get to to the goal that you you intended. Now how did it impact NRR? Well, if we break it down for those customers that came in, and kind of went through the the the guided do it yourself or the do it yourself, we were seeing a a 41% net revenue retention. Earlier, we were looking at unit retention. Then those that we did it with them, we saw it bump up to 52%.

12:37>> And we also built out capabilities to do a lot of the lift for customers so we could not only build it out, but then instruct them in that process. And in that case, we saw it bump up to 73%. Now what gets even more exciting to me than just just how that being able to integrate that in so that not only the product led growth elements, but the product led organization and the overall focus on the

13:03>> customer yield yields the success for the customers that we look for. When we look at our business and complement this with other initiatives, what we see is the 41% like we talked about, 52% the the done with you, the done for you at 74%. And if you couple just the coaching, completing coaching with the other initiatives that we've integrated in the business, it bumps up to a 106%. So for us, it's made a seismic move in

13:33>> not only what we're doing with customers, but also the results for the business on how we're how we're performing. So over the over the last twenty minutes, we basically covered how we evaluated and looked at our integrated PLG approach and the decisions that went into that and then the impact. Now just to tie a bow on the experience that I had, with with skiing, about a week ago, went snowboarding with my family for the very first

Snowboarding Analogy: The Value of Foundational Instruction

Ammon Curtis

14:02>> time. And this time, we took a slightly different approach. As you can imagine, those individuals that were my friends that were the expert skiers, we don't really stay in touch. But there are other friends that I have, and we met up with a friend and went out to go snowboarding, and my wife and I decided, hey, we're gonna go get some instructions. So the first day, we spent the half day going going on this bunny slope,

14:28>> getting instruction. And one thing that the instructor said that stood out to me is he said he said, snowboarding is hard to learn and easy to master. Skiing is easy to learn but hard to hard to master. And I thought, I don't know what that says about me since I never figured out the skiing thing. But

14:48>> we spent the rest of the day as a family out there. The end of the first day, as you can imagine, bruised. I think my tailbone is still a little out of whack. I had a lot of wrecks. But at the end of the second day, I was riding the lift up for the second time on a blue with my son, who's 11 years old. And I said, hey, How do you like it? He said, I

15:09>> love it, dad. Now mind you, this is the child that the day before was yelling at me halfway down the mountain saying, get away, dad. Don't even talk to me. And I think it was because we spent the time to get some of the foundational pieces in place with a professional instructor, and then later spent the time with some of our friends who were just providing us little tips and tricks along the way. And as you

15:32>> think about your business, oftentimes, our customers, I believe, find themselves in a situation where we throw the skis or the boots at them and say, go figure it out. Many times, it takes a little bit of laying the foundation work for them to make sure that they have the basics in place and then investing the sufficient time so that they can be successful later. Thank you. Awesome. Thank you so much. Yep. That's awesome.

Nathan Latka

15:59Hey, folks. If we haven't met yet, my name is Nathan Latka. I launched and sold my first software company back in 2015 and went on to write a book about it, which you guys made a Wall Street Journal bestseller purchasing over 30,000 copies. Thank you so much for that. After the book, I launched this show and one went on to create founderpath.com. I raised a large fund to do non dilutive deals with B2B software founders. So

16:26far, we've invested in over 400 software founders totaling $150,000,000 Here in 2024, we're doing three to four new deals per week. So if you're looking for capital and don't wanna give up equity, go sign up at founderpath.com for free to get your offer.