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Three sales playbooks to accelerate your business growth.

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to speak at the Product Led Growth Summit. As the current CEO and long time leader at CloudApp, I have seen our company grow to over 4 million users. In this keynote, you will learn how CloudApp has used the exposure of a freemium product, combined with a seasoned sales team, to accelerate business growth.

Check out the full conference video below.

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Sales playbook #1 Build Relationships Through NPS

One of the very first things that we did at CloudApp was ask our customers a simple question: Would you recommend CloudApp to a friend?

We get a simple result from 0 to 10, a 0 being NOPE and a 10 being a resounding yes!! We also frequently get a comment back to us specifically describing their experience, and how we could do better.

I read every single one of these NPS feedback surveys, and I’ve been in the habit of reading these for years. It feels like one of the closest ways for me to understand our customers, and also, it’s been a magical way for me personally or our company to develop relationships with prospective and current customers.

One specific example I wanted to share — we got a NPS feedback that we should consider adding a feature. That feature was Single Sign On. But the weird thing was — we actually had that feature. So me and one of our sales reps, replied to the user, and that user introduced us to their IT team, and that one simple email turned into a HUGE deal and upgrade for us. One of our fastest deals, and one of our largest deals, all from making a simple to use product and asking people about their experience

Sales playbook #2 # of Users at Domain

A second playbook that we frequently use at CloudApp is pretty simple. How many people are using the product at a company? There’s a lot of complex ways you can think about this but one of the simplest is — how many people with the same email domain are using the product at the same company.

So for example, there are 200 people at Acme.com using CloudApp or there are 10,000 people at Xerox.com using the product. Those aren’t real numbers but you get the idea.

We then do more analysis around WHO is using it (role/title), how FREQUENTLY, and we start to develop relationships with those users. We invite them to do case studies with us, we invite them on webinars, we learn about their company purchasing process. They help us navigate their buying process, just as we’ve helped them navigate great software easily.

One of the magical parts of this process too is that once you realize that the more people using your product at a company, the higher likelihood they are to buy, you start to think about the Product Loop of — well how do we get more people at more companies like this one using the product.

Sales playbook #3 Leadscore customers

The last PLG Playbook I wanted to share from our adventures in SaaS at CloudApp is one that we actually heard about, and picked up from a number of different companies.

I first wanted to share an anecdote again about my time at Parse. Parse was a developer tool that you could easily sign up for, like Twilio. So every day we had hundreds or new users. Many of them had email addresses that looked like ‘@gmail.com’ and we just had no idea who they were. So we would ask in the product during onboarding, and we’d get a few people to answer. We’d also scan the list, and see the email address domain of the user, and get excited. OOOOH someone from Disney!!!! Or someone from Salesforce!!! Then we’d reach out, manually, and try and set up a call with them to understand their use case and to see if we could line up a huge deal. This was really painstaking.

4 years after that experience, I started to talk with some growth minded folks at Gitlab and Segment. They mentioned they were using a combination of tools to automatically handle replying to, engaging with, and starting demos with all of the signups they got everyday.

This playbook involves quite a few pieces to it — but if you want to break it down very simply — once you get some information about your customers using email enrichment through products like Clearbit, and once you understand who tends to buy and who doesn’t, you can build a Lead Score. You can then create triggers in email tools like Customer.io, or Outreach, and reach out with an automated email that includes an automated link to schedule a demo.

I remember when we kicked off some initial testing for this and we went from 0 calls per week to 70. It was insane. They weren’t all great, but imagine if we hadn’t ever done this? What information and intelligence we would have missed? Oh and deals.

What next?

  1. Test 1 Playbook with a sample of customers
  1. Watch for Improvement in Key Metrics (Pipeline, Bookings, Meetings)
  1. If successful, scale it out to a larger group of your customers
  1. Clearly communicate with customers through screen recordings and screen snippets

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