CHAPTER 12: Where Do We Go From Here?Retention is the most important thing for growth.- Alex Shultz, VP Analytics and CMO at FacebookGreat businesses are built on high customer retention. It’s not about everyone hearing about a product—it’s about those who use it successfully. A great onboarding experience is a foundation for high customer retention.I had to learn this the hard way while consulting for a SaaS company a few years ago. Maybe you can relate?My team and I were spending thousands of dollars on ads and taking hours (and even weeks!) to build content for SEO.We were getting a ton of signups, which was awesome.But very few signups converted into paying customers. (So few that it was downright embarrassing.)I started digging into the data and realized that new users were getting stuck… but where?In the onboarding!That’s when I immediately started to optimize it as best I could. And, surprise, surprise, as soon as I was done, we saw a HUGE uplift in free users turning into paying customers. Not only that, I realized that users who completed the user onboarding process stuck around much longer than those who didn’t. I had to know if I could carry out the same optimization process for other companies and achieve the same excellent results. That’s when I started working with Wes Bush at ProductLed to see if this was a repeatable framework. Sure enough, it was!One of our clients doubled their trial-to-paid conversion rate. This drove a 315% increase in MRR in six months, just by removing one step in their user onboarding!It was clear Wes and I were onto something. And after seeing the results from our techniques time and again, I started documenting them so that I could share our discovery with others one day.That’s how the EUREKA framework was born:   Establish your onboarding team: To deliver an effective, immersive, and seamless onboarding experience for new users, your approach needs to be collaborative across functions and departments. Onboarding can't just be quilted together from the work of different departments. It must be holistic. If it's not, users receive a fractured experience.  Understand your user’s desired outcomes: The best way to get users to perceive, realize, and adopt the value of a product is to figure out the reason they signed up in the first place. Particularly, you need to define what value means to your users. Refine your onboarding success criteria and metric: Your team needs to have a clear picture of what it means to successfully onboard new users.  Evaluate and optimize your onboarding path: To minimize the time it takes for new users to experience a product’s value, you have to map out your user’s journey and determine which steps should be delayed or eliminated.  Keep new users engaged inside and outside of your product: To help guide new users to experience your product’s value, consider using triggers inside and outside your product. These could include product tours, welcome messages, progress bars for in-app triggers and onboarding emails, SMS and app notifications.  Apply the changes, analyze the results, and repeat: User onboarding is a continuous process and you need to continue to iterate on the onboarding experience. Congratulations! You’ve made it through the EUREKA framework to improve your user onboarding. One final tip: the most successful teams don’t look at improving their onboarding as a one-time action item. It’s a cyclical process that becomes vital to the success of your product. That’s why the EUREKA framework must become part of your product design and development process.When the onboarding experience is seamless, it feels like magic. It’s hard to revert to the way tasks used to get done. Get user onboarding right, and new users experience a “Eureka!” moment and embrace the product into their lives. All thanks to a better onboarding experience!

CHAPTER 11: Sales-Assisted User OnboardingApproach each customer with the idea of helping him or her to solve a problem or achieve a goal, not of selling a product or service.- Brian Tracy“What do I need to do for you to try out a car today?”That sentence makes me cringe. It’s the stereotypical sales tactic of the used car salesperson. A few years ago, my wife and I were shopping for our first car together. We headed to a local car dealership. When we arrived, I made it clear to the sales rep that we didn’t intend to buy anything that day. But the salesperson persuaded us into his office with free popcorn and mochaccinos (who can resist!). Then he showed us the best deals of the day. We sat in uncomfortable chairs for the entire afternoon while this fellow disappeared, emerging time and again with a new, lower price written on a sheet of paper. After several rounds of this, we thanked him for his time and reminded him that we didn’t intend to buy a car that day. We excused ourselves, with a piece of paper in hand, sealed with a promise that the price was good for the next few days.Well, you can imagine what happened next.A couple of days later, we caved. I phoned him up to tell him I was ready to buy and would be over shortly. I believed it would be an easy transaction, with my shiny new car waiting for me! No more need for haggling. or so I thought.But when I got there, the same salesman told me the price was no longer available! Apparently, the manager who approved it made a mistake—at that price, the dealership would be losing money. I left furious over the bait-and-switch and arrived at another dealership that offered the car the price I wanted. Chances are you’ve also run into a bad experience with a salesperson as well, whether it’s buying a car, furniture, or even software. We often remember the bad experiences more than the good ones. But not every sales experience needs to be painful.Good salespeople can add a ton of value to the buying process. As we’ve seen in Chapter Three, when compared with a low-touch, product-led onboarding approach, sales-assisted onboarding can increase conversion rates by 3.5 times. Surprisingly, this can be true across all ranges of deal sizes for free trial B2B products.In this chapter, we’ll look at how the sales function can complement a PLG approach to user onboarding. My intention isn’t to provide an in-depth focus on sales in a PLG model. I’m sure someone could write an entire book on that topic. My goal is to show you: How adding salespeople benefits the user onboarding process How the role of a salesperson differs in a PLG organization When and how a sales team should reach out to users Just a quick note—if you don’t think you could ever benefit from a sales-assisted onboarding approach due to your product, target customer, or the market you serve, feel free to skip this chapter. Can you imagine Netflix hiring a bunch of salespeople to sell subscriptions? Me neither!How Sales Can Complement Self-Serve Onboarding"But we’re product-led. Our product is self-serve. Visitors can sign up and purchase it without the need of any salespeople, right?”I’ve heard this too many times to count. This isn’t always the case. Let me be clear—being product-led doesn’t automatically mean you’re anti-sales.In this product-led era, we have a desire to move away from sleazy sales tactics, don’t we? But good salespeople don’t use unscrupulous methods to manipulate someone into buying something they don’t need. When done correctly, they can add a ton of value to users in a PLG model. They make the product experience better.In general, there are three primary reasons to add salespeople to self-serve onboarding: 1. Direct users to experience the value of your product Sometimes even supposedly simple products have hidden hotspots that make it difficult for users to achieve their First Strike. This is where the “sales” team can be helpful. I place quotes around the word sales because this frequently looks more like support and customer success than sales. But the goal is the same: get the user to experience the value of your product, so they purchase it.In a PLG model, salespeople act more like coaches. Going back to the analogy of the bowling alley, coaches guide users to hit more strikes consistently. Above all, coaches identify where users run into limitations and find a solution to overcome those challenges. When free trial users get stuck installing the Appcues code snippet on their website, they don’t talk to support on the phone. They speak to an account manager, who connects them with the right people to solve their issues.2. Facilitate product penetration or expansionThis is the approach in the early days of Slack. Their sales team didn’t send out cold emails that tend to pile up in an inbox: “Hi, if you need intra-organizational communication assistance, you should check out Slack.” Typically, one team within an organization first adopts Slack into their workflow. The role of the “Account Manager” (pssst...it’s a salesperson) is to help get other teams within that organization to use Slack.This is an example of the “land and expand” strategy. After you “land” a few users within a large company to sign up for a product, you “expand” by selling more seats and additional features for the organization. Often, this requires a sales team to make persistent, deep connections with high-level decision-makers. Salespeople work at the account level, not the user level.3. Guide users in the buying processFor mid-size and enterprise companies, the buying process isn’t always straightforward. For large companies, barriers often exist to purchase a product. This could include security audits, sign-offs from the procurement team, and requests for customized Service Level Agreements. Whatever the reason, some users may want to talk to someone from your company. You could wait for them to schedule a meeting or book a call with prominent CTA’s like “Contact Us” or “Contact Sales” on various pages on your site. But smart product-led companies anticipate the needs of certain customers. They have sales teams armed and ready to reach out to these users before they run into barriers. Product-led onboarding is not about removing the sales function. It’s about supporting new users. They don’t badger, nag, or hound users with phone calls, emails, and text messages. Instead, they’re consultative and helpful.How The Role of a Salesperson Differs in a PLG OrganizationConsultative selling (also called needs-based or solutions-based selling) is the key to how a sales function can complement a PLG approach. This approach shares many similarities with a product-led mindset. Both practices: Put the needs of users front and center throughout the customer journey, instead of running through a list of the latest bells and whistles, hoping that something grabs the prospect’s attention Maintain a clear focus on helping users achieve their desired outcome instead of trying to close a sale at any cost Deliver a purchase experience that’s more about being heard than about being sold to You’re probably wondering, “How is this different from what good salespeople do in a sales-led organization?”Indeed, PLG doesn’t upend everything we know about sales. Many parts of the sales job remain the same. A deep understanding of the different stakeholders in the buying process remains important. There are still budget discussions to be had. And, of course, there is still a quota to hit.But there are some subtle yet important differences in the sales process of a PLG model:1. The salesperson shifts from chasing leads to coaching users In a traditional sales model, the salesperson explains, shows, and demonstrates the value of the product or service. Prospects might not even have a clear understanding of their problem and your solution yet. In a PLG model, users have already shown interest in a product. They’ve tried and tested out the product already. Hopefully, they’ve experienced the value of it. In this case, salespeople act more like coaches. In the analogy of the bowling alley, users are now familiar with the mechanics of bowling. They’ve achieved their First Strike and desired outcome. Coaches guide users to hit more strikes consistently. Above all, coaches identify where users run into limitations and find a solution to overcome those challenges. 2. The salesperson needs to frame the product in different ways to different audiences. In a PLG model, salespeople need to reframe the product’s value and benefits for the end-user and the department heads and executives. This is a subtle but important difference. What end-users value might be different from what executives value. To the end-user, they might be using the product to save time and perform their job better. For department heads and executives, they’re likely looking at the expected ROI of the product. Salespeople need the ability to pivot from one frame of reference to another quickly. They need to understand the pain points and opportunities for different stakeholders.3. The salesperson has to leverage product engagement data in the sales process. In a traditional sales model, salespeople usually qualify leads based on two factors: High-value interaction with marketing materials where leads become a Marketing Qualified Lead ( MQL) Customer or company fit based on a checklist of the most common attributes someone needs to embody to become a successful customer for your offering. If they meet this requirement, leads become a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)  After leads pass the qualification process, the sales process begins. It finishes when the prospect becomes a paying customer. Soon after, the user onboarding process starts.In a PLG model, an MQL could still exist. But since there’s a lower barrier to product-entry, the primary CTA for an MQL is the signup. Once users achieve meaningful value in the product, they become a Product Qualified Lead (PQL). Based on product engagement data and customer fit, the lead becomes an SQL, and the sales process kicks off. We’ve already briefly discussed PQLs in Chapter Seven. Let’s go into more detail in how a PQL fits into sales-assisted onboarding. PQLs and SQLs in the Product-Led SalesThis one sounds obvious, but for a long time, the most qualified leads for a software product have never even used it before. PQLs are important to a consultative sales process. These are the users who are ready for a more in-depth conversation–they’ve already engaged with a product. Traditional qualification criteria for PQLs include marketing activities (e.g., downloading an eBook, attending a webinar, etc.) or firmographic attributes (e.g., company size, industry, company, revenue, etc.) that imply an interest in the offering.Nothing says “interested” like engaging with a product. So the more PQLs generated, the more consultative conversations a sales team can have.Defining Your PQLWhat makes a lead product qualified?Generally speaking, a PQL is a measure of each new user’s engagement with a product. This is a combination of: Activation: Has the user completed the Straight-Line Onboarding? If not, how far are they from completion? Engagement: How often are they using the product, especially the core features?  Here’s how to find the answers to these questions for your SaaS business: Set up a system to measure product engagement Define your PQL criteria Rank users by product engagement 1. Set up a system to measure product engagementTracking product data is an integral part of qualifying leads based on product usage. Focus on the key milestones in your Straight-Line Onboarding. The goal is to know which users have not completed certain steps so the sales team can respond accordingly.2. Define your PQL criteria A PQL could involve multiple product engagement metrics including, but not limited to the following: The number of times the user has returned to the product The number of other features the user has tested How soon after signing up the user tries out additional features  The exact criteria that go into defining a PQL will vary by company. But as a rule of thumb, a user who has completed the Straight-Line Onboarding and achieved their First Strike is a good indicator of a PQL. As mentioned in Chapter Seven, if you look at a continuum of user engagement–where one end indicates the moment a user signs up and the other end is the moment users achieve the Product Adoption Indicator–the PQL could manifest anyplace in the process.3. Rank users by engagementOnce you’ve evaluated the product engagement metrics that make up a PQL, create a segment of users who have: Completed the PQL criteria Not completed the PQL criteria Better yet, determine how far along users are in the PQL criteria, so you can rank them on how close they are to being qualified (a.k.a. a product engagement ranking model). This is how the sales team starts moving. Doing this is not a simple task. Product events need to be based on how important they are. Then it’s quite the job to keep up with each time an account uses important features over time. Though tools like Sherlock Score can help.If you’re selling a B2B product, where multiple stakeholders in a company make the purchasing decision, the PQLs are accounts, not users. The SQL in a Product-Led Sales JourneyChances are, you don’t want the sales team to reach out to every single PQL. Some might not be a good fit. Can you imagine Canva’s sales team reaching out to a student who only wants to create graphics for her class presentation? Focus your energy on PQLs who fit your ideal customer profile to make it worth the sales team’s time and effort.To find the ideal customer profile for your offering, create a list of specific attributes that an account needs to be successful with the product. This could be: Company size Industry Annual revenue Role of contact Employee headcount — company-wide and within key departments Budget Geography Technology they use Size of their customer base Level of organizational or technological maturity Next, find the common attributes of your best customers and create a list of them. Think of accounts that understood the product quickly and have now become raving fans. If they could, they’d give your product a Net Promoter Score of 11! Find commonalities such as: What’s the size of the organization? (Measured in revenue, number of customers, number of employees, etc.) What’s the size of the relevant department? Do certain job titles exist in the organization? Which industry or niche are they serving? How long have they already been in business? What’s the number one reason that would prevent them from buying your solution? What’s the number one reason that would make them decide to buy your solution?  What makes your offer appealing to them? What goal do they want to achieve with your solution? How are they currently trying to achieve this goal?  Now, in a product-led sales journey, SQLs have two components:  They’ve engaged with your product enough that they’ve become a PQL They fit your ideal customer profile  Once these are defined, leads who fit both criteria are ideal for sales-assisted onboarding.If you map out product engagement on one axis of a four-by-four matrix and customer fit on another, you get the Product-led Qualification Matrix:  Users who have high product engagement and are a good customer fit are the SQLs. Engage them in the sales process. PQLs are users who have high product engagement and are not a good customer fit. Offer support to them, but there isn’t any need to engage them in the sales process unless they contact your team directly. Users who have low engagement but are good customer fit are known as the “heartbreakers.” They’re the dream customers, but they aren’t engaging with the product. Nurture these users and offer support if they reach out. For users who have low engagement and are not good customer fit, feel free to ignore them.  When and How Should Sales Reach Out To UsersIt’s a bit tricky to know when to get a salesperson involved once a lead becomes an SQL. An overly aggressive sales team could turn off prospects who only want to use the product and be left alone. Instead, the goal is to recreate the kind of experience we’ve come to expect from the Apple store—a friendly environment filled with experts who are ready to answer your questions, teach you about products, and help you solve your problems.With that in mind, sales outreach in a PLG model generally fits into two buckets: hand-raisers and proactive campaigns.Hand-raisers are those who ask for help. Maybe they’ve filled out a form, asked a question using the in-app chat, requested a high-value feature, or sent you an email. In these instances, sales reps should act more like a customer success team. Their role should be seen as a coach who works hand-in-hand with the customer to resolve blockers. They need to have a strong grasp of the product and customer use cases to cater to the distinct needs of different audiences. These team members should be motivated by understanding the product in a deep and meaningful way, not just crushing their quota. On the other hand, proactive campaigns are manual or automated outreach to current users that generate demand for paid or higher-tier plans. The focus is on high-value accounts that fit the ideal customer profile. The key is to find ideal moments in the user onboarding journey so that a sales outreach is welcomed: After signing up: sales can help users set up their accounts correctly and use the product to its full extent. This entails anything from implementing a complicated integration to guide the account through a proof-of-concept for a broad company-wide rollout. Celebrate wins: when users achieve something meaningful, such as completing their First Strike or setting up their account correctly, sales should show them some love and congratulate them. It’s an opportunity for sales to offer additional support by guiding them to the next step or showing a demo of other helpful product features.  Going top-down: once enough users sign up from one company, sales can initiate an outreach. The pitch should be tailored to the executive pain point. Ideally, lead with personalized insights based on the usage behavior of existing users from that account. This is what a communication tool for companies, Yammer, did to layer sales on top of their freemium offering. They prompted users to invite their coworkers. Once enough workers joined, their sales team would reach out.  Whatever you do, make sure the sales team adds value to the product experience. You don’t want them to add more friction than necessary. I’ve provided sales outreach email templates you can use in Appendix 2.What Comes Next?My goal with this chapter was to show you how sales can complement your self-serve onboarding. When building out a sales-assisted onboarding process, we’ve barely scratched the surface. Hiring a sales team, paying commissions for sales, and building product-led sales playbooks are all important factors to think about. For that, you can check out the following resources: Predictable Revenue by Aaron Ross and Marylou Tyler The Sales Acceleration Formula by Mark Roberge Spin Selling by Neil Rackham And of course, we’ll be creating more content about product-led sales on productled.com.

CHAPTER 10: Apply the Changes, Analyze the Results, and RepeatI have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.- Albert EinsteinA few years ago, the designer and engineer Peter Skillman held a competition to build the tallest possible structure in 20-minutes with the following items:  20 pieces of uncooked spaghetti One yard of transparent tape One yard of string One standard-size marshmallow The marshmallow had to be placed on top to win the competition, and the entire structure had to remain motionless for three seconds. After running this challenge with more than 2,000 people from various backgrounds (from some of the top universities like Stanford, the University of California, and more to boot), Skillman was surprised by the results. Business school students performed the worst. What was even more shocking was that the best performing group were not engineering prodigies or physics majors. They were kindergarteners. What happened?The business students were talking and thinking strategically. They examined the materials. They brainstormed ideas, debated the best options, asked savvy questions, and honed in on the most promising ideas. It was professional, rational, and intelligent. The process resulted in a shared decision to pursue one strategy. Then, with five minutes left, they divided up the tasks and started to build. The kindergartners took a different approach. Instead of strategizing, analyzing hypotheticals, debating, proposing, and asking questions, they simply start building. They rarely spoke to each other, and when they did, it was in short bursts, “Here! Now, here!” By the time the 20 minutes were up, they had experimented with 8 to 10 different structures before landing on the most stable one. Figure 10.1 The kindergartners in Skillman’s design challengeIn dozens of trials, kids built structures up to 26 inches tall, while business school students built structures less than 10 inches (on average). Kindergartners also beat out teams of lawyers (who built towers that averaged 15 inches), as well as teams of CEOs (22 inches).The lesson here: multiple iterations usually beat a commitment to the first idea and making it work. It’s best to learn by doing.This is an important principle to apply to user onboarding. From my experience, most teams do big launches to improve their user onboarding. Then, they iterate just once or twice a year. It’s much better to analyze the results, reiterate and implement changes quickly than to overthink and strategize about it for months. We’re now at the final step of the EUREKA framework. It’s time to apply changes to your onboarding experience. In this chapter, we’ll discuss how to run rapid-fire experiments that will produce compounding wins.The Growth ProcessCompanies that grow the fastest are also the ones that learn the quickest. They use this as a massive competitive advantage. That’s where our “Triple A” sprint comes in. It focuses on rapidly identifying problems, building solutions, and measuring impact. The process follows a one-month sprint cycle to identify and deliver an improvement to a product. It consists of three A’s: Analyze: Identify inputs that drive the outcomes you want for your business Ask: Answer these three questions: Where do you want to go? Which levers can you pull to achieve the desired outcome? Which inputs should you invest in? Act: Choose an input and implement it.  Then, you go through the Triple A cycle again, considering any learnings from the previous iterations to future ones.I use this process when working with ProductLed clients. But you can use any iterative growth process such as Sean Ellis’ high-tempo four-step process, Brian Balfour’s six-step growth machine process or Growth Tribe’s G.R.O.W.S. process. You’ll notice that most of the work you’ve completed for the EUREKA framework contributes to the Analyze and Ask steps of the Triple A process.By now, the majority of the ideas to improve user onboarding should have emerged from the previous steps in the EUREKA framework. Those steps are focused on holistically analyzing your data and gathering insights as a cross-functional team. Prioritizing Onboarding ImprovementsFrom my experience, the problem in the growth process doesn’t lie with Ideation but in the Prioritization of growth ideas. For that, I use the Action Priority Matrix:Here’s what this means: High-impact, low-effort are low-hanging fruits and quick wins. Start with these ideas. High-impact, high-effort could be big swings and transformational. These are major projects that require assessment and planning.  Low-impact, low-effort are momentum builders. These ideas are good as morale boosters but result in incremental improvements. Low-impact and high-effort ideas are ones to avoid. Split Testing Growth IdeasIdeally, you want to split test any onboarding changes. Let’s say you want to validate that your Straight-Line Onboarding performs better than your current onboarding experience. You can send half of your new users through the new onboarding and the other half through your current process. After a few weeks, compare the week-to-week retention rate to determine if the retention curve has improved. At this stage, it’s critical to iterate quickly. If you’re stuck at this step due to engineering bandwidth, consider tools like Appcues, Pendo, and UserPilot to implement Product Bumpers. Userlist, Intercom or Drift can enact conversational bumpers.Socializing Learnings Another step that teams often miss is ensuring the learnings from each growth experiment are shared across the whole organization. Since changes in the user onboarding impact so many teams, it’s really important to share the process, progress, and learnings with them.Sharing with teams needs to become a habit. Doing this will accomplish a few things. First, it excites your teammates (and the executive team) about onboarding. It’s also a great way to create teamwide empathy to remind everyone that their work has a real impact on everyday lives. Finally, sharing the successes and impact of onboarding will ensure that you can continue to dedicate company resources to the project.How you communicate this is entirely up to you, but here are a few things to try: An “Onboarding Wins” email that’s sent out to the onboarding team and other coworkers who have expressed interest in the process A dedicated Slack channel where you share test results and discuss upcoming tests  A slide deck in a shared folder (or in your company dashboards) An ongoing lunch-and-learn program Monthly or quarterly meetings Beyond The Initial OnboardingAt this point, I want to stress once again that improving user onboarding is a continuous process. As your product evolves to the market it serves, the user onboarding experience must adapt to those product changes. To that point, the process of onboarding users never ends.As new users complete the initial onboarding and become regular users, your onboarding team can (and should) help them adopt new capabilities and use cases of the product. You can apply the same EUREKA process to various steps in the user journey. Here are some common places to consider: Different entry points to your product will require a different onboarding experience. The journey and knowledge of someone who signed up from an ad will likely be completely different from someone who signed up through a Google search or a webinar campaign. Different Customer Jobs will also require personalized onboarding.  Invited users should be treated differently. You’ll need to give them more information about why they’re being invited and why they should use your product. New UI and product changes for existing users should be communicated thoughtfully. You’ll find the most engaged users will be the most resistant to change. How can you implement the principles you’ve learned in the EUREKA framework to help them adopt those new changes? Generally speaking, after the initial onboarding is completed, you can onboard users to go deeper or wider with your product.Going DeeperFirst, go deeper by educating new customers about advanced configurations and features to help them do a Customer Job more effectively. For example, for sales executives who signed up for Calendly to meetings with prospects, the First Strike occurs when a prospect schedules a meeting using their Calendly link. For the next onboarding iteration, you could inform them about advanced features that would help them close more deals, such as: Embedding Calendly on a landing page Sending SMS notifications to prospects so they don’t miss meetings Automatically distributing meetings to their team based on availability, priority, or equity Integrating Facebook pixel code to the Calendly page to launch retargeting campaigns for those who viewed the Calendly page but didn’t book a meeting Going Wider The other option is to go wider by introducing solutions to different problems that your customers face. For example, there are many reasons why people sign up for Hubspot: To generate leads with landing pages Nurture and close leads with email workflows Set up a company’s website  Manage social media Track the ROI of Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Google Ad campaigns with precision Create and share links to book meetings with leads Make, log, and record calls Manage the sales team Live chat with website visitors with a chatbot Let’s say you know that a new customer signed up for Hubspot specifically to generate leads with landing pages. After achieving that objective, you can educate them on using social media to drive traffic to that landing page. If they have a sales team, you could also let them know about the benefits of subscribing to Hubspot Sales along with Hubspot Marketing.What’s Next?Before we wrap up, some final thoughts. So far, I’ve covered the steps to improve your user onboarding without any assistance from anyone in your team. But sometimes it’s best to have some help. Next, we’ll look at how sales and high-touch support fit into the user onboarding experience. 

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CHAPTER 7: Refine Your Onboarding Success CriteriaIf you do not know where you are going, every road will get you nowhere.- Henry A. KissingerGoogle Maps can be quite a marvel. The vast majority of the time, it gets us where we need to go without having to think about it. We just plug in our destination, and boom, we’re there. So many of us have become so reliant on it that when it fails, everything goes awry.I experienced this firsthand with my wife Joanna on a road trip from Toronto to Montreal. Unfamiliar with the streets of Montreal, I relied heavily on Google Maps to find our hotel. Low and behold, my phone lost signal after exiting an underground tunnel, and I received that unbearable error message, “GPS lost signal.” We ended up driving over a bridge that led to the US-Canada border. That’s not so bad if we both had our Canadian passports, but we didn’t!Immediately, we both started freaking out. How are we supposed to explain to the Canadian Border Agents that we’re not illegal immigrants trying to sneak into the United States of America, a.k.a. the land of the free?Of course, we completely overreacted. The Canadian Border Services Agency officer we spoke with was understanding. After showing him our Ontario driver’s license and explaining the Google Maps failure, he laughed it off. All we had to do was exit on a ramp that led us back to where we needed to go. This is a harmless story, where not knowing your destination can lead you down the wrong path. But it doesn’t always end well, especially with the cross-functional, highly-visible effort of improving user onboarding. By now, you should have a clear picture of what your users’ desired outcomes are along with the functional, emotional, and social jobs they are hiring your product for. You should also now know the four progress-making forces that influence the decision to adopt or drop the product. The next step is to define what success looks like for your user onboarding experience. There are two moments that matter the most to measure onboarding success: When users experience the value of a product for the first time When they begin to use it consistently These two success criteria are tied to key milestones in the user onboarding: the Moment of Value Experience and the Moment of Value Adoption.Success Criteria #1: The First StrikeThe first onboarding success criteria is helping users achieve their desired outcome, or Customer Job, as quickly as possible. In Wes Bush’s Bowling Alley framework, this event is called the “First Strike.” In 10-pin bowling, this happens when all ten pins are knocked down with a bowling ball. (We’ll go in-depth into the Bowling Alley framework in the next chapter.)In user onboarding, the First Strike is a necessary product action users must take to accomplish their desired outcome or Customer Job. Let me give some examples. For Canva, it’s exporting or sharing a finalized design  For Zoom, it’s hosting or attending a Zoom meeting For eCommerce stores, it’s the first purchase of a product  For some companies, this First Strike isn’t so obvious. Think about Facebook. What’s their First Strike? Is it a user liking, sharing, or commenting on posts?Since those actions require users to have a few Facebook friends, the most important product action is to add a friend. That’s why Facebook prompts new users to connect with friends as quickly as possible. This happens early on in their onboarding process.For “all-in-one” products that solve many problems, recognizing the First Strike is even more tricky. Imagine identifying the First Strike for a Swiss Army knife. Is it the knife, pen, screwdriver, compass, scissors, saw blade, fire starter, or laser pointer?Many all-in-one B2B SaaS products can essentially be considered digital Swiss Army knives. How do you determine the First Strike in these cases? This is where context and segment matter. Depending on the context of use and the segment, there could be different First Strikes. For example, users can accomplish a lot with Intercom:  Guide customers through their first steps, as well as highlight what's new with product tours Build mobile carousels to onboard new app users Create smart bots to qualify visitors on a website Connect with website visitors and answer their questions in real-time Manage customer support requests and questions Make it easy for customers to serve themselves by sharing relevant help articles  So, what is Intercom’s First Strike?It’s hard to decipher at first glance. But by segmenting Intercom’s users, you learn that users hire Intercom for three core Customer Jobs, all aligning with their three product lines:  Conversational Support product: provides human, self-serve, and proactive support to increase customer satisfaction. A possible First Strike for this Customer Job is the first time users respond to and resolve a customer request. Conversational Engagement product: increases the engagement and product adoption with targeted in-app and outbound messages. A possible First Strike for this Customer Job is the first time users respond to an in-app or outbound message. Conversational Marketing product: acquires new customers quicker by responding to questions from prospects in real-time. A possible First Strike for this Customer Job is the first time users respond to a question from a website visitor. As you can see, the First Strike is closely tied to your product’s Customer Job (or Jobs, for more complex products). It’s the first measure of success that new users are on the right track.Success Criteria #2: The Product Adoption IndicatorThe second measure of success is the moment users start using a product consistently. One of the end goals of onboarding is helping users embrace new habits with a product. Habit-forming user onboarding requires users to experience the value of a product more than once. If new users have used the product enough times, they’re more likely to continue with it going forward.For Slack, a team is not successfully onboarded until they’ve sent not one, not 10, but 2,000 messages. It’s at this threshold where they’ve found the teams who are likely to continue using it.Since this onboarding success metric is a leading indicator of user retention and product adoption, I call this the Product Adoption Indicator, or PAI for short. It’s an early but strong signal that users are likely to continue using a product going forward. They have embraced the product and are very unlikely to return to their old habits.This concept is not new—others call this the “magic number.” Here are some well-known examples: At Facebook, users who add seven friends in 10 days are more likely to continue using Facebook  In the early days of Twitter, the rule “Users who follow 30 people” was a retention and growth driver  At Dropbox, users who added a file in one Dropbox folder on one device were more likely to add more files to their Dropbox Notice that the PAIs for each of these products are closely tied to retention.Once users reach this point, you’ve set them up for success. They’re now ready to take the next step in the product’s customer journey. They’ve completed the initial loop of the user onboarding process: they’ve perceived, experienced, and adopted your product for the first time.Good PAIs have a few common characteristics: PAIs should be leading indicators of user retention: The PAI is the onboarding team’s “canary in the coal mine,” which means it provides early warning signs for miners of dangerous gases in a coal mine. With PAIs, you can predict with some confidence early on of the likelihood of users sticking around to continue using a product. In other words, they’re a strong signal that users have started forming a habit of using the product.  PAIs should focus on the repetition of one key product engagement action: One of the goals of user onboarding is to help new users build habits using a product. Since repetition is key for building habits, users need to use the product a few times before it finally clicks for them. The PAI is tied to the product’s desired outcomes or Customer Jobs (i.e., when a team has sent 2,000 Slack messages).  PAIs should be easy to understand and communicate with others: PAIs should be simple enough to remember and communicate with the entire company. Facebook employees “talked about nothing else” but seven friends in 10 days; it was their single, sole focus. Instead of layering several user actions into the PAI, such as the number of likes, comments, and status updates, the company emphasized simplicity so it’s easy to remember and share within the organization. PAIs should be time-bound: Ideally, you want users to complete the PAI within a specific timeframe. With Facebook, it’s adding seven friends in 10 days. Slack’s and Twitter’s PAIs are not time-bound. But, having a timeframe can help your team identify if new users are off-track so you can adjust the user onboarding accordingly.  PAIs should come early in the user’s journey. You want the ability to identify whether new users are on the path to success as early as possible. Ideally, users should be able to achieve the PAI on the same day they sign up for a product. If the PAI occurs weeks later after signing up, you’ll have fewer data points since many of those users will have already churned.  The Five Steps To Determine Your PAIThere are five steps to establishing a company’s PAI. I’ll be using Whatsapp as an example for this exercise. All data used below are fictional and used for instructional purposes only.1. Get a baseline measurement of your retention.As previously discussed, one result from good onboarding is a lift in retention rate. Before making any changes to the user onboarding, you’ll want to first define what retention looks like. One way to do this is to perform a cohort analysis using a retention chart and curve. This reflects the percentage of users who come back and perform any action with a product several days or weeks after signing up.With analytics tools like Mixpanel or Amplitude, you should have readily available reports to visualize a product’s retention curve. You could also calculate this metric by manually using Excel or Google Sheets.For example, let’s say 12,481 users downloaded your app on January 1, and you want to calculate the retention rate for the first seven days. You need to track: New users who signed up on January 1. This is Day 0 in the retention chart. Users from January 1 who were active from Day 1 to Day 7. Next, you need to divide the number of returning users by the total number of users, then multiply by 100. Out of the 12,481 users who started on January 1, only 3,506 end up returning on January 2. Day 1 retention is: (3,506/12,481)*100 = 28.1%. Repeat the same process for the remaining days to calculate your retention table:Plot this on a chart, with the days on the horizontal axis and the retention rates are on the vertical axis. By doing this, you can calculate the baseline retention curve for your current user onboarding experience.2. Create a PAI hypothesis.Once you’ve identified the baseline retention curve, it’s time to create a hypothesis about your retention indicator. It should look something like this:If new users perform at least X number of [the one key product action] during the first Y days/weeks of signing up, they’re more likely to continue using our product after Z days/weeks.To create your own, let’s back up to break it down:  Perform at least X number of [one key product action]: User onboarding is about building habits. Habits are built with repetition. That’s why users need to perform a minimum number of “strikes” for the PAI. The one key product action, or First Strike, for Whatsapp is to send a message. Set a target for new Whatsapp users to send three messages on the day of signing up. During the first Y days/weeks of signing up: For most products, the day new users sign up is critical. You want them to accomplish the key product action by then. For B2B products like HubSpot, it might take a week to accomplish the one key product action since it requires time to set up.  Continue using our product after Z days/weeks: For this, take a look at your retention curve and find the point when it starts to flatten out. In this example, only 5% of users continue to use it after 21 days. But the retention rate holds steady after those first 21 days. Therefore, our PAI hypothesis would be: to drive users to continue using Whatsapp for 21 days because that’s when they’re likely to continue using it. The final hypothesis for this example is: If new Whatsapp users send at least three messages on the day of signing up, they’re more likely to continue using it after 21 days.3. Gather data to validate your hypothesis. What we’re looking for here is to maximize the overlap between the following two segments: Users who continue to use Whatsapp after 21 days Users who have sent at least X messages on the first day of signing up Another way to visualize this is by using a Venn diagram. The idea is to maximize the surface area between the segment of users who continue using Whatsapp after 21 days and the segment of users who have sent at least X messages on the first day of signing up.If you take a look at the segment of users who have sent at least nine messages on the day of signing up, many might continue to use Whatsapp after 21 days. But there could be quite a few retained Whatsapp users who don’t meet that number. In this case, the threshold for the PAI is too high. This is because we want to identify the minimum number of messages that also correspond to users who continue to use Whatsapp after 21 days.On the other end, most users who send at least one message on the day of signing up did not continue using Whatsapp after 21 days. In this case, the threshold is too low. The goal is to find the sweet spot that maximizes the overlap between these two segments. To do this, we want to gather data for three segments: Users who continue using Whatsapp after 21 days, but did not send at least X messages on the day of signing up. Users who continue using Whatsapp after 21 days and send at least X messages on the day of signing up. Users who did not continue using Whatsapp after 21 days but did send at least X messages on the day of signing up. This process is repeated for one, two, three, and so on messages sent. Here’s what you’ll see if you set this up in a table on a spreadsheet.Here you can see that users who sent at least three messages on the day of signing up have the biggest overlap with users who continue using Whatsapp after 21 days. That’s why Whatsapp’s PAI is: three messages sent on the day of signing up because they’re likely to continue using it going forward.You can further visualize this using bar graphs. From this visual, it’s clear that this has the biggest overlap between the two segments.4. Compare the retention curves and validate the PAI.Next is to verify the PAI by comparing the retention curve of users who sent at least three messages on the day of signing up with the baseline retention.The retention curve indicates that the retention rate of users who sent at least three messages on the day of signing up is almost double the retention rate of your baseline rate for all users after 21 days.If you’re up for it and have the data chops, you can do a Logistic Regression. This is beyond the scope of this book and requires a level of understanding of correlation and regression analysis. 5. Communicate your PAI.Finally, once you've explored the data, ran some regressions, and verified that your model works, you’re ready to explain it to others. The intention is to make it dead simple to talk about. Communicate this to the marketing and sales teams to ensure they’re not just pursuing signups. They should also focus on reaching the Moment of Value Adoption and achieving the PAI. Also, ask the sales and customer support teams to offer a higher level of support and care for these users.This is exactly what Wave, a company that provides financial services and software for small businesses, did. After identifying their PAI, the whole organization adopted it as a measure of user success. Other teams joined in, including the demand gen team, to focus on channels and acquisition strategies that increase signups to reach the PAI. It’s important to note that PAI is just a term. Other companies may call it differently. Wave calls it the first activation event or FAE for short. Others call this “tier one” signups or leads. Whatever you end up naming it, make sure it’s communicated often and adopted by your entire organization.Product Qualified Leads and the PAIIt’s worth touching on how the PAI relates to a product qualified lead (PQL). Are the PAI and the PQL the same metric?Unlike Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), which base buying intent on arbitrary factors like email opens, whitepaper downloads, and webpage visits, PQLs are users who have achieved meaningful value in a product. It’s often used as a way to identify high-value users to help the sales and support teams discover which users they should focus their efforts on. Whereas the PAI focuses on one key product action so that it’s easy to communicate within the organization, the PQL could involve multiple product engagement metrics. This includes but is not limited to the following: The number of times the user has returned to a product The number of other features that the user has tried out How soon the user try out the other features after signing up To answer the question, yes, a PQL could be the same thing as a PAI, but it doesn’t have to be. It really depends on the organization and whether the resources are available to provide high-touch support to more leads. If the resources are there, consider lowering the requirements for a PQL and set it for the moment users achieve their desired outcome for the first time. (We’ll get into PQLs and the sales-assisted onboarding process in Chapter 11.)Let’s circle back to Slack for a minute. By now, we know Slack’s PAI is when a team sends 2,000 messages. If there are only a handful of sales and support personnel at Slack, they could set the PQL equivalent to the PAI. But if they went on a hiring spree of sales and support folks, they could lower that bar and set it to the first time a team sends ten messages. At that level, there will be more PQLs the sales team can pursue.Visually, if you look at a continuum of user engagement within your product, where one end is the moment users sign up, and the other end is the moment users achieve the PAI, the PQL could be anywhere in between.Implementing a Product Analytics ToolEverything we’ve talked about in this chapter assumes that you’re measuring and tracking key product engagement metrics. This means going beyond a basic Google Analytics (GA) implementation. GA was built to analyze marketing spend and was never meant to accommodate the depth and sophistication of a modern customer journey. Unless you define and implement events ahead of time, you can’t measure product engagement. Even then, GA aggregates the data, so it’s not possible to determine the value specific users are receiving from a product.To measure the success of your onboarding experience, it’s important to collect deeper insights and actionable information from your users. This can only come from detailed knowledge about how they interact with what you’ve built. When you have evidence regarding the specific actions of users and what they like best, you can engage them longer, further upsell them, and keep them happy so they come back again and again.Whether it’s Mixpanel, Heap Analytics, Amplitude, Pendo, or another product analytics tool, it is important to track meaningful product events and metrics.For example, the key product engagement metrics for a B2B productivity tool could be: Projects created Tasks completed Team members added Comments left Files uploaded Projects completed For a social networking application, key product engagement metrics could be connections made, published content, posts liked, and comments made.The point is that your product is unique. Identify the key product engagement metrics that are important to your product. Then implement a product analytics tool to track those metrics for each individual user. What’s NextOnce you’ve identified the PAI, the next step in the EUREKA framework is to evaluate your new users’ journey. We’re about to break down the user onboarding experience step-by-step to identify anything that could be limiting users from achieving your product’s PAI.

CHAPTER 6: Understand Your New UsersMake the customer the hero of your story.- Ann HandleyThere’s a saying that “hope is not a strategy.”It’s actually unclear where this phrase originated, but it’s been popularly exclaimed by leaders such as Barack Obama, James Cameron, Vince Lombardi, and many others.Regardless, if you’re like me, then this feels pretty intuitive. Well-planned and thought-out action is often the best strategy… not hope.When you hope for something, it feels like unfounded wishful thinking, with no action or a plan to back it up. Any of the following sound familiar? “I hope my teacher gives me a better grade this semester.” “I hope my boss won’t get mad at me for coming late again.” “I hope traffic won’t be bad this morning.” Hope is not a strategy.But, it’s such a powerful force to bring about change. Hope is a belief that your current situation can get better, no matter how big or small.This is the reason why signing up for a new product is an expression of hope. When users sign up, they’re opening themselves up to the possibility that things could be better.Whether that hope ends in disappointment or excitement ultimately boils down to how well you understand what exactly they’re hoping for: what is it about their current situation that motivated them to sign up for your product? What were they hoping to achieve with your product that they couldn’t already do? If you fail to realize this, that sense of hope can result in disappointment. You’ve lost a potential user. With each churned signup, your overall CAC increases. And for users, they’ve just wasted their time and effort trying out your product. For this reason, it’s critical your onboarding team has a crystal-clear picture of what exactly your users’ desired outcomes are. This is the second step in the EUREKA framework.If you get this step wrong, everything else will fail. Because once you’re able to fully understand what users truly want, you can design a reliable onboarding flow that turns hope into excitement.Before you think about an onboarding redesign by adding another product tour or rewriting your onboarding emails, you need to first understand your users.A Better LifeWhen you boil it down, onboarding is really about changing someone's behavior so that they can experience a better life. Users are frustrated or annoyed with something, and they sign up for a product to make their lives easier.Remember, the primary goal of user onboarding is to help users become better versions of themselves. If we go back to the Super Mario analogy, onboarding shouldn’t focus on the product (the fire flower) or its characteristics (green stem and easy to pick up), even though they are important. It should focus on creating a better life.It doesn’t matter if you sell lip gloss, copywriting services, or software; people are buying a better version of themselves. Let’s say your phone is a distraction during the day, to the point work is placed on the back-burner. To combat the intrusion on your productivity, you buy a timed lockbox to keep the phone hidden. What you’re really buying is a better way to avoid distractions from your mobile phone during work hours.Another way to put it:Upgrade your user, not your product. Don’t build better cameras – build better photographers.- Kathy SierraYour Product’s “Job Interview”The idea of “upgrading” a user’s life is at the core of the Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) theory by Clay Christensen, innovation expert and bestselling author of The Innovator’s Dilemma. JTBD is the process consumers go through whenever they aim to transform their existing life-situation. To enable a life transformation, customers “hire” products to solve a problem or to satisfy a need. This is known as a Customer Job.For example, a Customer Job could be: “When I’m hungry, I want to cook raw chicken so I can eat it and satisfy my hunger.” So, you could “hire” a stove to make fried chicken or a grill to barbecue it. Or you could “hire” an oven to bake it. There are three implications of the JTBD framework.1. Customer Jobs are solution agnostic. Notice how with cooking raw chicken, the Customer Job is independent of the solution (the stove, grill, or oven). When thinking about a product’s Customer Job, make sure it focuses on users’ needs and problems instead of the solution. You can’t start by looking at the product or what they’re currently using. You have to dig to the root of the problem that caused them to start looking for a solution in the first place. What were the circumstances around a person’s life that led them to start looking for a solution?2. The circumstances in people’s lives lead to “job openings.”In the JTBD framework, understanding the circumstances and pain points in users’ lives are more important than the product features and customer characteristics.For example, after several comments from my wife that I looked like a high school student with my current laptop bag, it was time for an upgrade. So, I bought a professional bag to bring to conferences and client meetings. You could say the reason I started looking for one was to impress clients and people at conferences. But in actuality, I started to think about leveling up my wardrobe soon after I received a promotion.While out shopping for it, a lot of information was thrown at me, ranging from the durability of the materials to the ergonomic qualities and features of the bag itself. But what actually sold me was the marketing message. This bag was made for “my grown-up work self.”So what’s the point here? To build a great user onboarding experience, it’s important to know: What are the circumstances in users' lives that triggered them to start looking for a solution like yours? What is their desired outcome? What does success look like? What’s holding users back from achieving their desired outcome? What else did they consider or try, and why didn’t it work for them? In other words, people try out products because there is a gap between their current circumstances and their final aspiration. Successful onboarding experiences are like a sturdy bridge between that gap so users can safely cross over to their desired outcome.3. User onboarding is the Customer Job “interview.”If users are hiring a product to do a Customer Job, then the user onboarding is the “interview” process. To nail the job interview, you have to first know what job you’re being interviewed to do. Do you think you’d be successful if you prepared yourself for a product management job interview if the job posting was actually for a sales development representative? I think not! To nail the job interview with users, you must first know what job a product is being hired to do. For that, it’s essential to understand the three interconnected reasons users could be signing up for a product. The Three Components of Customer Jobs1. Functional When someone talks about Customer Jobs, they’re usually referring to the functional component of JTBD. Functional jobs involve specific outcomes the users experience after working with a product. Back to the example with Super Mario: the functional job of a fire flower is to make it easier for Super Mario to destroy barriers by using a new fire-spitting ability.Another famous example is from Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt: “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!” The quarter-inch hole is the functional job the drill must do.We can take that analogy even further by describing the purpose of the quarter-inch hole. Maybe it’s to hang a photo or build a shelf. That would be the true functional job of the quarter-inch hole. It’s important to look further than what appears on the surface.Here’s another example with a SaaS business, Canva, a graphic design platform that's great for making invitations, business cards, Instagram posts, and more. At the surface level, Canva’s functional job is to help people easily create custom designs. At a deeper level, it depends on who is using the product: For a paid ads marketer, Canva’s functional job is to quickly create high-converting, on-brand visual assets for a social ad campaign. For a teacher, Canva’s functional job is to create engaging visual aids that help teach abstract concepts to students. For a local coffee shop business owner, Canva’s functional job is to create, download, and print flyers to help drive foot traffic. Functional jobs are as complex as the number of market segments served. Segmenting and personalizing the user onboarding experience for different customer jobs is one of the low-hanging fruits of improving onboarding. This is exactly why Canva asks new users what they’ll be using the app for during the user onboarding:Segmentation is an important concept for the remainder of the EUREKA framework. But for now, think about the desired outcomes that users want to receive when they sign up for your product.2. Emotional The second component of a Customer Job is emotional: how users feel (or what they want to avoid feeling) after they’ve accomplished their desired outcome. Products meet an emotional need for people who use them, and it’s a big reason why they end up purchasing.You can see this idea front-and-center in one of Revlon’s breakout magazine advertising campaigns from 1952, Fire and Ice. The brilliant ad campaign makes it clear that Revlon isn’t selling lipstick or nail polish; it’s selling a “better you.” The ad barely mentions any product. Instead, it prominently features a picture of model Dorian Leigh. You need to look closely to notice lipstick and nail polish, both located near the bottom of the page.This ad was designed on purpose to amplify the emotional component of Revlon’s Customer Job. In the factory we make cosmetics; in the drugstore we sell hope.- Charles Revson, founder of RevlonWhen it comes to your product, what emotions do you want your customers to feel or avoid feeling as a result of using it? For Canva users, it could be to stimulate creativity without any design training or natural visual skills. 3. Social The third component of a Customer Job is social. When we invest time and effort into a product, we do so in a social context, whether that’s at home with family or at work with colleagues. We communicate our values when we make a purchase, but we also signal to others how we want to be perceived.Once our physiological and safety needs are met, we look for additional ways to feel loved, connected, and accomplished by others. Take, for instance, one of Canva’s social ads, which reads, “No design experience? No problem. Canva makes it easy for anyone to create professional designs that are sure to get you noticed.” This ad makes Canva’s social job obvious: it’s to help create professional designs that your boss and co-workers will take notice of, even with zero design training or experience. You might hear them say, “Wow! This design is beautiful. I didn’t know you were so creative. Good job!”For your product, how does it impact how your customers are perceived by others? Are they seen as more knowledgeable? Do you make them look more professional? Do you help them become the hero in their workplace?The Progress-Making ForcesUnderstanding a product’s functional, emotional, and social jobs help produce a clearer picture of what your user’s desired outcomes are. So how do you bridge the gap between their current circumstance to the desired outcome?For that, you need to recognize the four progress-making forces that influence people to stick with the status quo or take the leap forward with a new solution: The push to find a new solution due to current problems The pull from what could be achieved with this new product The anxiety around the risks of moving to a new product The inertia of not wanting to change To onboard customers successfully to a complex product, you need to understand the push, strengthen the pull, calm anxiety, and overcome inertia. When we look at Canva, the reason for subscribing could involve the following forces: The push to find a new solution: “We want to experiment with different types of creatives for our Facebook ads. But we can’t afford to continue hiring a freelancer to update the creatives for our Facebook ads.” The pull of a new solution: “If we use a tool that provides us with templates for Facebook ads, we can get variations of creatives for our ads without having to deal with finding, hiring, and paying for a freelancer.” The anxiety of what could happen: “What if Canva doesn’t have any Facebook ad templates that we like? We’ve tried three other tools for this job, and none have been good enough.” The inertia of not wanting to change: “We’ve already got a good working relationship with one of our freelancers. Sure the cost and availability might be a problem. But will the designs in Canva ever be as good as a qualified designer?” During user onboarding, Canva’s team needs to amplify the pain of their current situation (the push) while at the same time explaining the benefits of the product (the pull). They need to provide guidance for complicated tasks, which helps calm anxiety while also overcoming the inertia of not wanting to change. This approach to user onboarding helps new users deeply understand the value a product can provide, while defeating the emotions that stand in the way of moving forward, no matter how complex it is.JTBD InterviewsSo how do you determine a product’s functional, emotional, and social jobs, along with the four progress-making forces?The best way to uncover valuable insights like this is through user interviews. It might be tempting to skip this step. After all, 65% of marketing and product teams rarely do audience research. Some find executing user interviews too time-consuming. For introverts (like myself), it’s a sweat-inducing experience. Whenever the ProductLed team does onboarding workshops, we have at least one person asks, “Do we really have to do user interviews?”The answer is always, “Yes!”Companies that invested in customer research grew two to three times faster than companies that didn't! Understanding your users through customer research is the key to improving user onboarding and retention. Find the patterns in the stories of people who understand your product and understand what got them so excited to continue using it. The main focus should be to attract and create more “core users” who have fallen in love with your solution.To do this, talk to your most active users and ask them questions: What prompted you to sign up and try out our product in the first place? What did not meet your expectations, or what was hard to figure out? Why did you return to give the product another chance? What worked the second time that made you use it more frequently? These useful insights can help the onboarding team deliver a more engaged, relevant, and impactful user onboarding experience. The product team will have a better idea of which features and product actions to direct new users to. The marketing, sales, and support team can better craft messaging and prepare responses to your users’ anxieties and objections.If you get this step right, you have a higher chance of creating massive improvements in the overall onboarding experience.On the other hand, if you get this step wrong or skip out on it, it’ll trickle down to the remaining steps in the EUREKA framework. You can’t help new users perceive, experience, and adopt a product’s value if you don’t know what value means to them. Value is not determined by a company and definitely not by the expansiveness of the feature set. Value is determined by users based on their context of use. Whether you’re a seasoned pro at user interviews or just starting out, the ProductLed team provides a step-by-step guide to help you do them. Just head over to productled.com/user-interviews. There, we provide samples and templates to get you started. We also supply you with strategies to summarize your research into actionable insights that we’ve discussed in this chapter.What’s NextWhen it comes to this EUREKA step, be sure to involve your onboarding team, so everyone is on the same page. Summarize your findings in the User Success Canvas we’ve created for ProductLed clients, which you can download for free at productled.com/user-success.Next up in the EUREKA framework is refining your onboarding success metric. This is a tangible data point you can use to define what it means to be successfully onboarded. For example, Slack’s onboarding success metric is when teams have sent 2,000 messages because they’re 93% more likely to continue using it moving forward. I’ll help you identify a similar metric your team can use. It signals when new users have likely adopted your product, and the initial onboarding is complete.

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CHAPTER 4: The Framework to Improve Your User OnboardingBuilding a good customer experience does not happen by accident. It happens by design.- Clare MuscuttAll users are lazy, vain, and selfish.It sounds harsh. But I didn’t say it. Scott Belsky, Chief Product Officer at Adobe, did.It’s an observation that before users feel invested in a product, they’re all looking out for number one first – themselves. Think about the last time you tried out a product. What thoughts and questions came to mind first?  “How will this product help me?” “How is this product better than what I’m doing right now?” “How will I look if my friends or colleagues found out I’m using this product?” “Why would I want to drop what I’m currently doing and replace it with this?” First, these questions show we are lazy. We don’t have the time or energy to figure out what a new product is or what it’s not. We want to know now. We have no patience to read long directions. We have no time for steep learning curves. Our default is to find the easiest and quickest path to what we want.Second, we are vain. We care about how our friends and colleagues perceive us. Once our physiological and safety needs are met, we look for ways to feel loved, connected, and accomplished by others. Whether it’s social apps like Instagram that help us receive more “likes” or a visual reporting tool to help us create presentations at work, products tap into our social needs.Finally, we are selfish. Even when we’re trying out a product that could help the team be more productive or protects the environment, we want to make sure we’ll be rewarded immediately. That’s why assisting new users to achieve quick wins is critical, regardless of a company’s long-term vision.That’s the real challenge with onboarding—we’re dealing with lazy, vain, and selfish new users. They want to know how a product can solve their problem. And they want to know now.Time-to-ValueFor this reason, one of the most impactful tools at your disposal to improve user onboarding is to minimize the time-to-value (TTV). This is the amount of time it takes a new customer to realize value from a product. In a sales-led business model, you can get away with a longer TTV since, in most cases, the customers paid upfront, and they’re usually stuck in an annual contract. If something gets delayed with the deployment and implementation, it may take a considerable amount of time from purchasing the product to experiencing its value.In a product-led world where users are easy-come-easy-go (because there is usually no upfront cost), the tolerance for delays and frustrations is much smaller. If your TTV is too long, new users will leave… for good. Process over PrescriptionSo, how do you improve a product’s user onboarding to reduce the TTV?To make it very simple, I could give you a list of best practices and attributes of bad versus good onboarding, like below:But adopting the wrong best practice could do more harm than good. Being too prescriptive dismisses how unique a product, market, team, and users are. For example, some users love heavy-handed product tours, while others find it annoying. Some might feel overwhelmed with too many onboarding emails, while others might want more tips and resources. Instead of explaining what you should and should not do with user onboarding, my goal is to provide a framework and process to help your users perceive, experience, and adopt your product. The EUREKA FrameworkAlong with Wes Bush and the ProductLed team, I’ve worked with dozens of organizations to improve their user onboarding experience from the very first touchpoint. Called the EUREKA framework, this six-step process will shorten the TTV for more new users to be successfully onboarded to your product:  Establish your onboarding team: To deliver an effective, immersive, and seamless onboarding experience for new users, your approach needs to be collaborative across functions and departments. Onboarding can't just be quilted together from the work of different teams. It must be holistic. If it's not, users will receive a fractured experience. In the next chapter, I’ll help you form an onboarding ‘A’ team. Understand your user’s desired outcomes: The best way to successfully onboard new users is to figure out why they signed up in the first place. Particularly, you need to know what value means to users. In Chapter Six, I’ll help you figure out how to do that using the jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) framework.  Refine your onboarding success criteria and metric: Your team needs a clear picture of what it means to successfully onboard new users. In Chapter Seven, I’ll help your team identify the onboarding success metric using data. We’ll also define Product Qualified Leads (PQLs). Evaluate and optimize your onboarding path: To minimize the time it takes for new users to experience a product’s value, you have to map out the user’s journey to discover which steps should be delayed or eliminated. In Chapter Eight, we’ll do just that with Wes Bush’s Bowling Alley framework. Keep new users engaged inside and outside of your product: To help guide new users to experience a product’s value, consider using triggers both inside and outside of the product. These could include product tours, welcome messages, progress bars, onboarding emails, SMS, and in-app notifications. In Chapter Nine, I’ll help you determine which “Product Bumpers” and “Conversational Bumpers ” to use for user onboarding using the BJ Fogg Behavior Model. Apply the changes, analyze the results, and repeat: User onboarding is a continuous process. In Chapter Ten, I’ll help you analyze the results and apply the learnings into the next iteration of your onboarding experience.  Ready to experience your own EUREKA moment? Let’s go! 

Transcript: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1A3HHVeZjE3zIjUvqcDcOPSWmE0rmU5ZtFAlro2ydwrs/edit#heading=h.jco5qalut5epCHAPTER 2: The Crux Of The Product-Led Growth StrategyFree the child’s potential, and you will transform him into the world.-Dr. Maria MontessorriThe first few years of a child's life are crucial. They are the foundation that shapes children's future health, happiness, growth, development, and learning achievement. Children need proper nourishment, care, and love to blossom into their true potential. After all, these early years lay the foundation for future success and prepare them to become contributing members of society. This is what Dr. Maria Montessori discovered in 1907 when she opened a school in a slum-ridden district of Rome. Montessori’s “school” was just a few rooms in an apartment building intended for poor families. Her students were a group of three to six-year-old children who had never stepped foot inside a classroom before. Most expected her to fail.Montessori got to work to implement the educational materials and methods she developed. She replaced the heavy furniture with child-sized tables and chairs light enough for the children to move. She brought in low shelves so the children could access educational materials on their own. Montessori also gave her students the freedom to choose and carry out their own activities at their own pace and following their own inclinations. Thanks to her methods, the children started showing extraordinary understanding, activity, and confidence. By working independently, her students became autonomous and self-motivated. News of these remarkable children began to spread. People around the world began to visit the classroom. No one could believe the children’s transformation until they saw it in person. Even Queen Margherita of Italy’s royal family made her way through the slums of San Lorenzo to see them! And it all started with Dr. Montessori’s belief that a child’s potential can be unlocked early on with the right methods and materials in place.Much in the same way, the earliest stages of the customer journey are crucial in setting new users up for long-term success. By treating them with intentional care during the user onboarding, you lay the groundwork for everything to come. As discussed in the previous chapter, user onboarding directly impacts the future growth of a product, and it starts during the first steps in the Pirate Metrics Framework.In this chapter, you’ll learn the three reasons why user onboarding is so important in a product-led growth (PLG) go-to-market approach and why it’s often overlooked and neglected by companies. We’ll also look at the five signs of bad user onboarding experiences.Three Reasons Why User Onboarding Is Important Data doesn’t lie – user onboarding is the crux of the product-led growth strategy. It’s where it all starts. Here’s why. 1. User onboarding is a retention leverNo matter what industry you’re in, the best customers don’t abandon you after their first purchase. They come back time and again for more. Though it’s an often overlooked metric, retention plays a significant role in boosting revenue. That’s because it increases the customers’ lifetime value (CLV). Retention starts with user onboarding – and the numbers prove it.ProfitWell studied about 500 different software companies spread between business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) companies. They found that customers with a positive onboarding experience were more likely to stick around than those who weren’t happy with it. Hubspot saw this first-hand with Sidekick, an email tool for salespeople. After making positive changes to the way they nurtured new customers in Week One, they saw a 15% lift in retention during that week. This catapulted into a 50% increase in retained users after ten weeks. What happened at HubSpot Sidekick is not an outlier.InnerTrends saw similar data points: users who completed the initial onboarding process were 38% more likely to return one week later. But it goes even further than that. The effects of user onboarding are even more pronounced once users hit Week 12. For those who completed InnerTrend’s onboarding process, the retention rate is almost three times higher. When someone first signs up for a product, they’ll either love it or leave it. Those that are successfully onboarded see the value from it and are more likely to stick around, even years later. This is especially true for SaaS companies: In working with a number of SaaS portfolio companies, I have found that there are two causes of churn that occur more frequently than any others. They are: failure to successfully onboard the customer and loss of the champion who drove the purchase.- David Skok, General Partner at Matrix Partners2. User onboarding is a revenue multiplierA truly fabulous user onboarding experience converts to a revenue multiplier. This is a direct result of improving retention. We have the numbers to prove it (get ready for some math!). Let’s go back to the example from HubSpot, where they saw a 15% increase in retention across ten weeks as a direct result from improving user onboarding. How much did their revenue increase because of this change? Let’s say they started with 1,000 users and charged each user $5 per week without a free trial period.Here’s how the original retained users and revenue would break down (assuming user retention is proportional to revenue retention): If you add up the revenue across all ten weeks, it adds up to $21,275. Assuming the revenue and retained users remain the same for the rest of the year at $750 each week after Week 10, the revenue totals $52,775 in 52 weeks.Now let’s compare that to what happened when they nurtured new customers properly with an improved experience:Revenue from Week 0 to Week 10 adds up to $26,425.Even more remarkable is if the number of retained users and revenue remain the same for the remainder of the year after Week 10. That’s $78,925 in annual revenue, which is a striking 50% increase.All thanks to a better onboarding experience!Imagine this is for one cohort of 1,000 users. Let’s assume that they can consistently get 1,000 new users to sign up each week for the rest of the year. If we assume their new signup growth remains flat at 1,000 new customers per week for one year, the improved user onboarding experience would account for a massive increase of 49% to the monthly recurring revenue (MRR)! So you see, small improvements in treating new customers with care can result in enormous growth.Plus, those who have a positive onboarding experience are more willing to pay.The point? User onboarding really does set the stage for future success and has a huge impact on your revenue growth.So it comes as no surprise the biggest weakness in growth stems from that initial first impression:The real growth problems start when people land…and leave. They don’t stick. This is an onboarding problem, and it’s often the biggest weakness for startups.- Casey Winters, Chief Product Officer at Eventbrite3. Good User Onboarding Leads To Lower Customer Acquisition CostsIf having an incredible user onboarding experience is a retention lever and revenue multiplier, bad onboarding can lead to higher Customer Acquisition Costs, or CAC. The CAC is easy enough to calculate. Divide all the costs spent on acquiring customers (a.k.a. marketing expenses) by the number of customers acquired in the time period the money was spent. For example, let’s say a company spent $100 on marketing in one year and acquired 100 customers in the same year. Their CAC is $1.Let’s revisit the previous example of Hubspot Sidekick. To recap, here’s what the number of retained users look like in the first 10 weeks for each experience:Let's assume it costs $2,000 to acquire 1000 new users and, in this scenario, there's a seven-day trial.After one week, they have 600 paying customers with the original onboarding or 750 customers thanks to the new onboarding. That amounts to a CAC of $3.33 for the original onboarding or $2.67 for the improved onboarding.A 15% increase in retention means CAC went down by 20%.Which one would you prefer to see in your company’s own metrics? Alright, let’s put this another way.Perhaps you spend $1 to acquire new signups, converting at 1%. That CAC is $100. But, if you optimize onboarding and increase the percentage of active users who become paying customers from 1 to 2%, that CAC cuts in half to $50. Excellent onboarding has an abundance of payoffs: it leads to higher activation rates and, subsequently, a lower CAC. If you’re losing 60% of your new users after the first session, it doesn’t make sense to spend a ton on acquiring signups or your CAC will be high. The unit economics will not work out. - Francois Bondiguel, Growth Lead at CanvaThe Ugly Duckling of Growth – User OnboardingHelping new users to perceive, experience, and adopt a product’s value is critical to long-term retention, revenue, and profitability. This doesn’t just appear out of thin air. It takes a well-thought-out strategy to make the magic happen. User onboarding is often treated like the ugly duckling of growth. It’s largely ignored or assigned as a low priority task to the product or customer success team.But if it’s so important in a product’s growth story, why don’t the majority of teams invest their resources to improve it? After working with several dozen product-led companies, we’ve found a few answers to this perplexing question. The ProductLed team has identified five challenges you might face when trying to improve this experience. Note: In a later chapter, I’ll provide a framework to help you overcome these challenges.1. No clear ownership of user onboardingWho is responsible for the user onboarding experience? Is it the product team or the customer success team?If no one owns it, then it won’t be prioritized and falls through the cracks. As a result, it takes weeks or even months to see any boosts.2. Only the product team works on improving user onboardingThis happens because companies believe the first two onboarding myths: that user onboarding starts after a user signs up for the product and ends when users become paying customers. To deliver a seamless onboarding experience, improving it needs to be a cross-functional effort that involves a variety of teams: stretching from sales, marketing, product, and customer success. 3. Misaligned definition of user onboarding across teamsImagine a dragon boat team where each rower is out-of-sync. Even worse, they’re rowing in different directions. Good luck getting anywhere in a timely and efficient manner. This is what happens when a product team views user onboarding differently from how other teams see it. It’s important to ensure each team has a clear, aligned understanding of what user onboarding is.4. No clear quantitative criteria for successfully onboarded usersIf you don’t know your destination, then good luck getting there. You need a clearly defined success metric to determine if users have been successfully onboarded or not. Now the big question is: how do you know when a user has adopted a product into their life or workflow? More on this later.5. No clear strategy to continuously improve user onboardingYou can’t just slap on a product tour, send a few onboarding emails, and believe you’re going to move the needle. That’s risky behavior. It would help if you had a specific strategy in place based on user research and data. Otherwise, you risk losing users with annoying product tours or spammy emails.Furthermore, you can’t just work on improving your user onboarding once a year. As you introduce new features to your product, you have to seamlessly integrate these to your onboarding without it becoming bloated.Five Common Signs of Bad User OnboardingIf you’re reading this and have had a few “Eureka” moments of your own, then good! You’re acknowledging the pitfalls within your own company. A lack of strategy or ownership is two key elements you won’t want to ignore for too long. Because if you do, you risk stifling your company’s growth. Like a detective, you should always be on the lookout for signs and symptoms of bad user onboarding. Not sure where to start? I’m about to give you some clues. Here are five common signs of bad user onboarding: 1. Users don’t complete your signup process.If new users jump through hoops during the signup process, you’ll lose them even before they try your product. Examine your analytics to determine if new users are getting stuck in the signup process. Are you asking them for a bunch of random information that has nothing to do with their initial use of the product? These are called non-essential fields. They can consist of questions like, “How many employees do you have?” or, “What are your CRM systems?” Each company will have a different definition of what non-essential fields are. It’s your job to determine if these questions are hindering your signup goals.These aren’t only hurting your completion rates. It’s biting into the profit margin, too. Marketo found that a few non-essential fields in the signup process increased their cost per lead by up to 25%. The lesson here is that every field in a signup form could be losing you new users. So be sure to consider whether each question justifies the risk of loss.2. Users sign up and don’t come back.According to Intercom, 40% to 60% of users who sign up for a free trial use it once and never come back (this happens to be true for the majority of software products). Mobile apps have it worst: 73% of mobile apps are used only once before they are deleted for good. But if you deliver a stellar first product experience and help users experience the value of your product, they’ll likely continue to use it. This is critical. It doesn’t just involve product tours, either. Get creative and use external triggers like emails, browser or app notifications and SMS text messages to convince users to return to a product.3. Users don’t upgrade to a paid account.Ideally, once users perceive, experience, and adopt the value of your product, they’ll start paying for it. If most users don’t upgrade, it could be a sign your user onboarding needs some love. So, what’s a good free-to-paid conversion rate? For freemium businesses, aim for a rate of 2% to 5%. For sales-assisted accounts that include products with free trials, aim for a 15% trial-to-paid conversion rate. For self-serve, unassisted users, this rate will sit a bit lower, at 4%. Though, this will depend on the annual contract value (ACV) – the higher the price point, the more difficult it will likely be to convert users.Of course, other variables come into play here, too: the size of the industry, the stage of the company, and whether or not users are required to provide the credit card information to start a free trial. 4. A high volume of new customers leaves after paying their first invoice.Have you ever continued to pay for something while not using it? Let’s go back to that lovely New Year’s resolution you made to hit the gym. Gym owners are very aware some members don’t stick around, so they usually require a long-term contract.It’s very rare to be forced into a long-term contract for product-led businesses. So, if users are still skeptical about the value of a product, they might pay the first invoice to extend their free trial and then cancel after that.This is what Jonathan Kim found with Appcues when they had a 14-day trial. Because their price point was relatively low, people would hit the end of the 14-day trial period and buy the product to extend their trial. Unfortunately, they found that most of these users didn’t end up fully testing out their product and churned.If you’re finding that a high volume of new users leaves after paying their first few invoices, it could signal users are not finding enough value during the user onboarding to continue paying for it.5. The customer acquisition cost (CAC) is high or continues to rise.If good user onboarding leads to lower CAC, then the opposite might imply a user onboarding problem. One reason for this could be “The Bad Onboarding Death Cycle.” If you ignore user onboarding for too long, most new users won’t stick around. As a result, growth flattens or dips. Instead of identifying and solving the root cause of the problem, teams fall into this cycle because they believe it’s the easy way out. They opt to acquire more users at all costs to make up for the flattening or dipping growth rate. This is deceiving. A first, growth starts to pick up. But since you’re not investing in showing them the value, they leave. An increasing CAC is a result of this. Don’t fall for the Bad Onboarding Death Cycle.If your CAC is high or continues to rise, investigate if user onboarding has issues before continuing on.Treat New Users With CareInvest in those early moments with your users. By providing a stimulating learning environment, nurturing their growth and development, and treating them with care, you can increase their likelihood of success. If users continue to find value in a product, they’ll stand by you and continue paying for it for years to come. Get it wrong, and it’ll open Pandora's box. A whole host of growth problems will arrive at your doorstep: poor retention rates, decreasing revenue projections, and high CAC. This is why user onboarding is so crucial and has such an outsized snowball effect on growth – it allows users to unlock the inherent value of a product.