Shaping your funnel – part 2

Here we’re going to pick up on the funnel at the action step. This is the place where your customer takes action. If you remember from the hook framework, trigger, action, reward. With this action step, we’re looking to minimize the amount of work that your customer has to do to buy your product and get some kind of reward. If you’re, if you sell through a contract, have your attorneys put everything but the kitchen sink into it, and does it require a lot of negotiation and mark up every single time? If so, see if there’s a way to streamline that. If you’re losing a lot of users in your online sign up process, look at why.

Obviously, this is a terrible place to lose a customer because they have already demonstrated substantial interest in your product.

With Enable Quiz, maybe there’s a couple of steps. Maybe Helen wants to talk with Frank or Francine, the hiring manager, and make sure they’ve bought into the idea of using the product. And then, there’s some kind of sign up, which we want to make as easy as possible for Helen. If there are other things that she may need to do, maybe we can layer those in later, after she gets some initial rewards from using the product.

So, the quantitative metrics that you’re going to look at on action, are things like If you’re using a CRM and you sell direct, maybe you look at how many customers enter a contract negotiation versus exit it. If you’re doing online sales, it’s entering that sign-up and then making sure they exit it, and looking at your drop-offs. Your bounce rate on that sign up page. And then the next step we have on boarding. This is the process where the user gets, there’s sort of two parts, in the first part we really want to look at what the user has to do to get some kind of initial reward from using the product.

Now we think that with enable quiz, Helen’s got to create the first quiz to screen a candidate. If we can give her some other intermediate reward though, that’s definitely going to help us with our funnel. Because we’ll get her engaged sooner and more reliably. Maybe we can do something like at some point she can upload her job description and we automatically parse terms and make some suggestions for her to help her. Either tighten up the job description or automatically pair it with a quiz, and she likes that. It’s something she can share and collaborate with her managers on.

And then the second step is onboarding is sort of everything we need to do to make the user a habitual user of our product. So, for example, with Facebook maybe that’s going and finding all your friends and maybe making sure that the user is logging onto Facebook whatever they think is a good amount, once a day, twice a day. If this is a Enterprise software product, we talked about the 30 day mark. Are users engaged by using the software after 30 days? And with SAS, this is a really important step because if they’re paying monthly, they’re kind of just trying this out. And if they’re really not fully on boarded, they’re likely to drop off and eventually cancel.

Not surprisingly, Salesforce is the first company I ever saw doing this, where especially to a big customer, they would send in people often for free to actually look at on boarding. Is the customer Engaged? Is their customer continuing to use the product?

If on boarding is still not working and you look at user activity. You often see something like this in you cohorts. So people that started at time t1, you know there curvy coms and then it sort of drops off and then you know, maybe they leave. And then people that sign up here, you know we have the same thing happening. And this is obviously bad, something’s happening here that’s making these people not be as active and you need to find out what that is and fix it because we’re really far into the funnel here and we need to understand the problem. If we look at it from this perspective, we kind of want to work backwards.

We have a certain product. Are they finding the product hard to use? Or do we not have the adequate sort of functional space that they need to do what they want to do? Or is the proposition really not that compelling? Or are we solving a problem that doesn’t really exist? As a product manager that’s how I recommend kind of debugging this and unpacking it.

And finally at retention. This is sort of a catch-all for everything that happens once the customer is a habitual user of the product. One thing I really like to think about, at this point, and I talk to students about, is your engine of growth. And this is something that was actually part of the original Lean startup book. The idea is that there are these three engines of growth. Paid, which means that we pay X for media or advertisements or leads that lead to a sale, so we’re kind of looking at. You know, our cost of acquisition versus our the life time value of our customer how much do we make from a customer, and do those economic work?

How do we how do we lower this cost of acquisition and raise this lifetime value? Sticky, is where you know maybe we going to we going to some how spend some extra money on support and keeping the customer and super deeper happy. Because it’s the longevity of the customer relationship that we’re really focused on. So purchase and repurchase. Zappos is famous for this really going the extra mile in customer care, because they’ve seen that it helps them create really loyal customers. This looks like it says stinky, but it says sticky. [LAUGH] And then the final engine of growth is viral or organic.

And this is where we’re looking at people, their propensity to share. The viral coefficient. You know, if we get one person, do they share it? How likely are they to share it with somebody else? We kind of propose that implicitly with Enable Quiz where we saw Helen view a post on LinkedIn. And then make one at the very end when she was happy with Enable Quiz. Another way to kind of back up from this funnel and look at the even bigger picture that I also like to use sometimes is growth, engagement, and monetization. So what are our engines of growth, how are bringing in customers? What are our engagement processes?

So, how do we, sort of once we’re here, how do we keep people engaged and increase their use of a product? And then, finally How are we monetizing that? How are we making money, which are very close products. Those are few ways to unpack and look at the final, I think you will find if you are not sure about users are. Where you want to focus on packing list and looking on what’s going on or how you break it in the side, with pieces that are not only. More workable for you is the product manager but more workable for your collaborations and interfaces with the rest of your interdisciplinary team.