ProductLed Podcast

Over the course of a few months, Wes Bush and Ramli John have been working on the Product-Led Certification Programs. In this episode, they discussed all you need to know about the programs.

Wes is the author of the bestselling book “Product-Led Growth: How to Build a Product that Sells Itself.” Wes is best known for challenging how SaaS leaders approach growth. Wes is also the founder of the Product-Led Institute and one of the hosts of the Product-led Summit podcast.

Ramli John is a Product-Led educator and consultant. He is also the host and founder of the “Growth Marketing Today” podcast, where he has interviewed experts like Hiten Shah, April Dunford, and Rand Fishkin. Ramli also helps SaaS companies optimize their retention rates and their user onboarding flow.

In this special episode, Wes and Ramli tackled all there is to know about their Product-Led Certification Program—the reason they split it into two, quick overviews of each program, and the benefits of applying as a team, among many others.

Show Notes

[01:28] Why they split the program into two

[03:59] A quick overview of the Product-Led Transformer Program

[06:24] A quick overview of Product Onboarding

[10:02] How they determine the right fit for the programs

[11:34] How their calls and mastermind sessions are typically structured

[11:59] Their program’s big differentiating factor

[12:36] What their “Expert Series” is all about

[14:00] The benefits of joining masterminds

[15:20] Estimated time people will spend on the program

[16:40] How the certification program is different from the book on Product-Led Growth

[18:04] The benefits of applying as a team

[23:39] Other things they want to touch on regarding the program

[25:15] How people can reach out to them if they have questions

Links

• Patrick Campbell, Founder and CEO at ProfitWell
• Jaqueline Cook, Chief Strategy Officer at Vendasta

Profile

• 6-Week Product-Led Certification Programs 

If you’re interested in product-led sales, you’ll definitely love this episode. Today’s guest is the founder and CEO of Dooly, hailed as the fastest way to update Salesforce, take sales notes, and effortlessly manage all deals so nothing slips through the cracks. Today's guest is no less than Dooly's founder and CEO, Kris Hartvigsen. In this episode, Kris shares how he transitioned from sales to founder of Dooly, how he sees product-led growth fuelling and helping enterprise sales, and what happens when a product qualified opportunity comes through.

Show Notes

[00:45] How his progression from sales to founder happened

[03:58] What Dooly is all about

[05:27] How he sees product-led growth fuelling and helping enterprise sales

[07:10] How he defines product-led sales

[08:55] What PQO stands for and what it’s all about

[09:15] Why 5 is the sweet spot for them

[11:58] Why they get sales involved relatively early

[13:00] What happens when a product qualified opportunity comes through

[15:51] What he’ll tell organizations that claim they are product-led

[16:59] What the hand off to the sales team looks like

[21:09] His advice to organizations that are transitioning to product-led

[23:13] Where people can find him online

About Kris Hartvigsen

Kris Hartvigsen is the CEO and founder of Dooly, a computer software that captures and actions customer conversations, solves challenges that affect customer-facing teams, and analyzes and acts on them. From administrative work like Salesforce updates to deal supporting tools, Dooly automates the sales process by moving information to and from the customer in real-time. Dooly was built with the users in mind and its end goal is simple: provide users with the freedom to sell.

Links

• Vision Critical
• Slack
• Zoom
• Salesforce

Profile

• Dooly
• Dooly on LinkedIn
• Dooly on Twitter
• Kris Hartvigsen on LinkedIn
• Dooly's Email Address: [email protected]

Unifying product, growth, and marketing is no walk in the park but today’s guest makes it look easy. Vivek Balasubramanian is the director of growth at Wave, an award-winning financial software designed for entrepreneurs. In this episode, Vivek shares how he became the director of growth at Wave, what FAE means, how he got the executive team’s buy in, and the experiments they are currently conducting. 

Show Notes

[01:03] What Wave is and what it does

[04:03] How he became the director of growth at Wave

[08:33] How he made sure the executive team knew what he was doing

[10:23] How he makes sure what he presents is predictable

[11:41] Metric he’s accountable for

[12:34] What FAE is and why is the aha moment not enough to define somebody as activated

[17:16] How the FAE for invoicing is related to the FAE for payments

[18:24] How people can figure out their first activation event for users

[20:21] How he got the executive team’s buy in

[22:04] How the product team has changed now that they’ve embraced the FAE framework

[26:02] Number of times they get together to review the metrics

[26:42] Changes and experiments they’ve implemented

[32:40] Interesting thing about data and metrics

[36:11] The experiment they are running

[37:47] How they figure out who needs guidance

[40:19] His advice for growth teams

[43:10] Where people can find him online

[43:43] Where people can find out more about Wave

About Vivek Balasubramanian

Vivek Balasubramanian is the director of growth at Wave, an award-winning financial services software company with more than 250 employees. They are serving entrepreneurs and freelancers around the world. As director of growth at Wave, Vivek is accountable for business activation, monetization, and retention. Some of his specialties include revenue and demand generation, funnel experiments, marketing data management, and leading functional teams.

Links

• Starbucks
• H&R Block Canada
• Shopify
• Zoom
• Trello
• Paul Marshall on LinkedIn

Profile

• Vivek Balasubramanian on LinkedIn
• Wave Website
• Wave on Facebook
• Wave on Twitter
• Wave on LinkedIn
• Vivek’s Email Address: [email protected]

When it comes to optimizing the customer experience, today's guest is a pro. Shareil Nariman is Sprout Social’s program manager for customer onboarding and life cycle. Sprout Social is a software that helps organizations of all sizes become better marketers and create the world’s most beloved brands. In this episode, Shareil shared how the onboarding process at Sprout Social has evolved, what their onboarding experience looks like now, and his advice to marketers who want to improve their onboarding experience.

Show Notes

[00:41] What Sprout Social is

[02:01] What the onboarding was like before they improved it

[03:58] First few things they focused on when they improved the onboarding process

[07:38] What a successful onboarding looks like

[09:06] How they defined value for customer onboarding

[11:36] What their onboarding experience looks like now

[13:14] The evolution of their onboarding process

[14:43] What their webinar looks like

[16:17] Some of the things he optimized in the program

[18:23] What qualifies a customer to be reached out to for those one-on-one calls

[19:54] The mechanics of their onboarding guild 

[21:15] Things he wished he knew about customer onboarding

[23:04 His advice for marketers who are looking to improve their customer onboarding

[24:34] Where people can find out more about him and Sprout Social

About Shareil Nariman

Shareil Nariman is Sprout Social’s program manager for customer onboading and customer lifecycle. He has spent the last 9 years exploring the customer experience to set people up for long-term success. He has also built programs, hired and managed teams, and worked closely with product organizations and marketing to ensure the customer experience is positive and consistent all throughout.

Links

• Instagram
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Pinterest
• Booking.com
• Pendo

Profile

• Sprout Social
• Sprout Social on LinkedIn
• Sprout Social on Twitter
• Sprout Social on Instagram
• Sprout Social on Facebook
• Sprout Social on Pinterest
• Sprout Social YouTube Channel
• Shareil Nariman on Twitter
• Shareil Nariman on LinkedIn 

Today’s accomplished guest is a self-taught entrepreneur who ran and grew a marketing agency for 10 years before starting Hull, a powerful customer data platform designed for high growth companies. Firms that use Hull orchestrate their marketing stacks and growth by collecting, enriching, and synchronizing customer data across all their services in real time. In this episode, Romain shared why they decided to offer free trial, the experiments they did and how it affected their marketing, and why they chose to offer free trial as opposed to other options.

Show Notes

[00:50] What Hull is and why he decided to start it in the first place

[04:11] Why they decided to offer free trial

[06:59] What the first attempt looked like for Hull

[11:55] How he identified the end value

[14:00] The main driver behind people not understanding their problems

[17:59] How the experiments they did affected how they market their product

[19:19] Why they opted to do free trial as opposed to freemium or some other hybrid model

[23:19] How they help people get to a conclusion faster

[27:46] What he’ll do differently if he’ll launch the free trial again

[31:20] His thoughts on free trial and product-led growth

[33:14] How he makes decisions

[37:10] Where people can find out more about Hull and what he’s up to

About Romain Dardour

Romain Dardour is an entrepreneur, self-taught developer, designer, and problem-solver. He is also the co-founder and CEO of Hull, a customer data platform that helps brands create meaningful relationships with their customers by understanding who they are, what they do, and revealing novel insights that can help them personalize experiences at scale.

Links

• HubSpot
• Amplitude

Profile

• Hull
• Hull on LinkedIn
• Hull Blog
• Romain Dardour on LinkedIn
• Romain Dardour on Twitter

The entrepreneurial journey of today’s brilliant guest has been an interesting one—from product manager to founder and chief strategist of ProductPlan. ProductPlan is a roadmap software used by thousands of product teams at the world’s leading companies to power their product roadmaps. In this episode, Jim Semick shared what the journey of starting and scaling a product-led company has been like. He also covered other engrossing topics like product-market fit, the role of pricing, and how product management has changed over the years.

Show Notes

[00:33] Why he founded ProductPlan

[02:47] What his WHY was for starting the company

[05:18] How has product management changed over the years

[08:41] His market validation process

[13:00] His definition of product-market fit

[18:56] What the transition to self-service has been like 

[21:18] The biggest challenge they have encountered

[24:20] One thing he’ll do differently knowing what he knows now

[27:07] The role of pricing in a product-led business

[28:56] When they decided to have someone in sales

[32:02] How they went about hiring their first sales person

[34:31] How they are different compared to the traditional sales-led companies

[36:50] How their compensation model has changed

[38:29] Where people can go to learn more about him and ProductPlan

About Jim Semick

Jim Semick is a mentor, speaker, and entrepreneur. He has also written books on Product Roadmaps, Product Leadership, and Product-Market Fit. Jim is also the co-founder and chief strategist of ProductPlan, the world’s leading roadmap software. ProductPlan makes roadmapping collaborative, transparent, and easy. Today, leading companies like PBS, Nike, Intuit, and Alaska Airlines has been relying on ProductPlan to guide their product decisions daily. 

Links

• GoToMyPC
• GoToMeeting
• GoToWebinar
• AppFolio
• HubSpot

Profile

• Jim Semick on LinkedIn
• ProductPlan
• ProductPlan Blog
• ProductPlan Resources
• ProductPlan on Facebook
• ProductPlan on Twitter
• ProductPlan on YouTube

Creating a great customer experience for Jungle Scout users has been challenging but Danny Villarreal makes it look easy! Danny is the director of customer success and experience at Jungle Scout, the all-in-one platform for selling on Amazon. Danny is responsible for the training, onboarding, adoption, and retention, among many others. In this episode, Danny shared how they addressed the challenges they encountered, the metrics they looked into, and his advice to other product-led companies to improve their onboarding and customer experience.

Show Notes

[00:42] What Jungle Scout is and what his role there is

[01:36] Challenges his team encountered when new users logged in for the first time

[03:26] How he figured out the aha moment for each of the segments that signed out

[05:23] How they customised the experience for the different types of personas that were logging in for the first time

[06:47] How they delivered the live instruction

[07:46] How big the calls were

[08:40] How they got hundreds of people to sign up

[11:06] What the structures of the calls look like

[13:46] Other aspects they’ve experimented to improve

[16:27] Metrics they took into account

[19:08] When their onboarding is completed

[20:32] When they realised the need to translate the onboarding experience for the Chinese market

[23:01] Results they got after they translated the onboarding for the Chinese market

[24:57] How they tweaked the onboarding for the Chinese market

[26:49] His advice for those product-led companies in terms of improving their customer experience and onboarding

[28:13] Where people can find out more about his work and Jungle Scout

About Danny Villarreal

Danny Villarreal is the director of customer success and experience at Jungle Scout, the all-in-one platform for finding, launching, and selling Amazon products. Trusted by 400,000 Amazon sellers, the platform also offers step-by-step guides and exclusive tutorials that teach you the ins and outs of Amazon.

Links

• Amazon
• Pendo
• Alipay
• WeChat

Profile

• Danny Villarreal on LinkedIn
• Jungle Scout
• Jungle Scout on Facebook

For today’s guest, a culture of experimentation is the key to agility. Jon Noronha is the VP of Product at Optimizely and he believes that to move faster, they need to experiment more. At Optimizely, Jon leads a team of product managers to determine new ways for companies to conduct experiments across apps, websites, and every level of the stack. In this episode, he talked about all the essentials of product experimentation—from the metrics to focus on down to building a culture of experimentation—he covered it all.

Show Notes

[00:43] How he became the VP of Product at Optimizely

[05:29] How they go about building a culture of experimentation

[07:33] Metrics teams should take into if they want to experiment

[10:37] How to figure out what metrics to focus on first

[12:10] Best practices around prioritising experiments

[14:42] How to run experiments when the traffic is not sufficient

[17:09] How to structure product experiments in a more scientific way

[20:46] His thoughts on the first principles of experimentation

[23:27] One of the most important things when it comes to democratising experimentation

[27:06] Where people can go to find out more about him

About Jon Noronha

Jon Noronha is the VP of Product at Optimizely, the world’s leading experimentation platform. Optimizely is designed to enable businesses to deliver continuous personalisation and experimentation across mobile apps, websites, and connected devices. Prior to joining Optimizely, Jon was the PM of Image Search at Microsoft. Jon has a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science from Harvard University.

Links

• Microsoft
• Bing
• Netflix
• Amazon
• Slack

Profile

• Optimizely
• Jon Noronha on LinkedIn
• Jon Noronha on Twitter
• Jon Noronha on Medium

Hailed as the first conversational marketing platorm, Drift is also considered the new way businesses buy from businesses. In today’s show, Drift’s head of product lead, growth, and lifecycle shared how the platform built a product that acquires users. Matt Bilotti owns Drift’s entire self-service business unit and is responsible for retention and sales figures on a monthly, quarterly, and yearly basis. In this episode, Matt talked about the importance of market alignment, the metrics the product team focuses on, and his thoughts on product channel fit, among others.

Show Notes

[00:30] How things are in his end

[01:24] What Drift is

[02:16] Why market alignment is important

[04:32] How product co-owns the website with marketing and how it works

[07:32] How their team dynamics work

[09:15] On the metrics the product team focuses on

[13:18] How they’ve evolved into a more unified team

[15:38] What their quarterly planning looks like

[17:40] His thoughts on product channel fit

[23:00] His take on building APIs that people can build on top of

[24:39] The impact of having an end goal in their sign up process

[27:14] The purpose of the last two tasks

[28:46] Piece of advice he’d like to leave the listeners with

[31:06] How people can get in touch with him

About Matt Bilotti

Matt Bilotti is employee number 9 at Drift and he helped make the product a reality. From product manager, he’s now the head of product lead, growth, and lifecycle of the company. Drift is the first conversational marketing platform that emphasized the value of human connection and interaction. The brand is trusted by over 50,000+ businesses to create pipeline and drive revenue. Some of Drift’s valued clients include Smartling, Keap, ConnectWise, Aventri, and Marketo. 

Links

• Drift
• Dropbox
• Airtable
• LinkedIn
• Spotify
• Duolingo
• Evernote
• TikTok
• Shopify
• Salesforce
• Brian Balfour Website
• Pareto Principle (80/20 Rule)
• How I Built This Podcast with Guy Raz

Profile

• Matt Bilotti Website
• Matt Bilotti on LinkedIn
• Matt Bilotti on Twitter
• Matt Bilotti's Drift Profile
• Growth with Matt Bilotti Podcast

While making the transition to product-led growth can be very beneficial, it can also be tough. In today’s show, we talked to May Habib, Qordoba’s co-founder and CEO and found out what their experience has been like. Qordoba manages over 2 billion words every day for customers including Sephora, Conde Nast, GitHub, and the NBA. In this episode, May shared how she got everyone onboard the product-led bus, how the transition has affected their approach to selling, and her advice for those who would like to make the switch. 

Show Notes

[00:34] Why she decided to found Qordoba

[01:21] Problem they’re solving

[03:55] How they traditionally made sales and why they decided to offer free trials

[06:46] Where the fork in the road came for them

[08:36] First steps they did to ensure what they want to do is viable

[10:51] How she got everyone on the product-led bus

[13:36] How their whole approach to selling has changed 

[16:56] When their sales team steps in

[21:31] Why they end up going down the path of usage-based free trial

[24:07] Her thoughts on the cost of a free user

[26:10] The benefits she’s seeing 

[27:39] Her one tip for founders and companies that are making the switch

 [32:50] Where people can find her if they want to know more

About May Habib

May Habib is the co-founder and CEO of Qordoba, a machine-learning based solution designed to help brands define and scale a consistent brand voice. Qordoba’s platform also integrates with over 100 marketing and development companies and fits them seamlessly into the developer stack. Based in San Francisco, the company is backed by Rincon Venture Partners and Upfront Ventures. To date, Qordoba has helped companies like VISA, Marriott, Postmates, GitHub, and Sephora optimise and release new product copies across marketing, product, and customer support.

Links

• JPMorgan Chase
• How Qordoba launched a successful free trial by May Habib

Profile

• Qordoba
• Qordoba 14-Day Trial
• May Habib on LinkedIn
• May Habib on Twitter
• May Habib's Email Address: [email protected]