On this Keepin’ it 100, Trinity is joined by Stephanie Cox, VP of Sales and Marketing at Lumavate, a low-code platform that enables marketers to quickly build and publish mobile apps without needing code.
“When we think about B2B versus B2C or this experience of product-led versus sales-led, in reality, it's really thinking about what would an average consumer do with it. Sometimes I think we forget that we're all that person.”
If you’re wondering what to do with your user experience data, listen to Stephanie Cox explain the importance of empathizing with your customer. With over 15+ years in marketing and sales for B2B, B2C, and B2B2C companies, Stephanie pulls from her many experiences to share easily applicable advice to understand your customer better.
Stephanie has more than 15+ years of marketing and sales experience in B2B, B2C, and B2B2C. She's experienced with launching companies, brands, new products, geographic expansion, and more. She's driven phenomenal growth, spoke at conferences around the world, led incredible teams, and more.
Trinity: Welcome to the First 100 Days, a show for revenue practitioners by revenue practitioners, giving you unscripted access and exclusive resources to help you navigate any new transition or initiative. I'm your host, Trinity Nguyen, from User Gems. Stephanie Cox is the VP of Sales and Marketing at Lumavate, a company that recently switched from sales-led to product-led growth. Today's episode is a sneak peak, only a 10th of the great insights and tips that Stephanie shared. We're releasing a full interview next week, where Stephanie will share in-depth learnings about this transition from sales-led to product-led. So come back next week to get your full PLG cheat sheet. Back to today's episode. What are some of Stephanie's tips for those considering product led growth?
Stephanie: We need to stop thinking about them as B2B marketers and think about them as consumers. What would you do? I tell my marketing team all the time, how would you respond to this email?
How would you respond to this ad? What would you do if you were in product? Don't think about it from the perspective of a company, think about it from the perspective of you as a user, as a person, because I think that's the one thing that sometimes when we think about B2B versus B2C, or this experience of like product-led versus sales-led, in reality, it's really thinking about what would an average consumer do with it.
Sometimes I think we forget that we're all that person. One of the things I told the team is.... When we first quietly rolled out product-led growth on the website, we didn't tell anyone. We just put it on the website just to kind of see what would happen for a little bit and do some learnings and see if there were any issues that we might run into.
The team was like super fired up because we had all these accounts that were being created and some of them were creating apps, and some of them like weren't even logging in. Right. And everyone's like, what's going on? Like, something's wrong? And I was like, no, how many times have you created an account at 10:00 PM on a Tuesday and then never do anything with it.
And they were like, I mean, well, yeah, right. Like we don't think a lot, like our first reaction was like, Well, what's, what's wrong? And I'm like, but you do this. How many times do you sign up for an email newsletter and then never read it. How many times do you go to a website, or look at a pair of shoes, or download an app, and then never really use it more than once.
We all do that as consumers, because we all have a lot going on both personally and professionally. So putting ourselves in that situation, I think is so critical. If you can do that, I don't think it matters if you have B2B or B2C experience, because it allows you to be able to empathize with consumers and where they're at. Then your goal is how do you make it easier, and constantly asking yourself, what can we do to make this better? And the thing I will tell you is surprisingly, you don't get a lot of direct feedback from free accounts. Utilize feedback from paid customers, but customers that are just using a product from a freemium or they haven't converted yet, they don't necessarily tell you what they're feeling. They're not going to fill out your surveys. They're not going to always ask support, need help. You're going to have to look at the data and data is so important, more so than anything else, of how they're using a product to figure out where those challenges are and to figure out what the challenges are that people don't realize exist yet.
Right? Like, no one would have told me that one of the challenges was they kept adding and redirect URLs, and that's why they thought like the product didn't work. We had to find that ourselves by looking at the data. Like, why are all these abs published and why are they redirecting to people's websites?
Then we'd go in and look at them and we were like, well, they built an app and they put, Oh, right! Like the user of our product didn't know that there was a problem. It's just a different way of thinking about it. And if you'd like solving complex problems, product-led growth is a lot of fun for that, because no matter what problem you solve or what hurdle you overcome, there's always more, because as you add more to your product, there are more things and more ways that people use it that you wouldn't have expected. No matter how easy you make it – I tell my team this all the time – our goal is that anyone can build an app. Right now, our product is for marketers to build apps, but our goal is anyone can build an app. That means my mom can build an app. I love my mom. She is the most wonderful person in the entire world, but she also, I swear to you, calls me to ask me where is the paper quote, to attach something to an email because she swears her computer doesn't have it. So, like, my goal is if I can get her to build an app by herself at 10 o'clock on a Tuesday, like, that is winning to me. And until we're at that point for all consumers, we're not done yet.
Trinity: Do you have notes of encouragement or insights to share? Email me and we'll get you on the show at podcast@usergems.com. Thanks for listening.
