Better Product Weekly: Building Growth Teams Around Customer Retention with Krista Martin

Episode Transcription

Anna Eaglin:

Welcome back to another Better Product Weekly episode. This week, I think it'd be really good to start, Christian, you released a really interesting video, article. There was one other way you could consume it, I can't remember from the email.

Christian Beck:

Yeah, it's not out yet.

Anna Eaglin:

Oh, okay.

Christian Beck:

It's going to be a podcast coming out in a couple of days. Ellie McCandless, our community manager, pulled up a lot of the key insights that we've been learning. What are we done? Six or seven of these BP Weekly? Which is the name of the show, but let's be honest, it's the COVID-19. She gathered up some of the key insights and made a deck. It's really cool to look back on what we've learned. As expected, we've learned a lot in a really short amount of time because everything is changing constantly right now.

Christian Beck:

You and I were talking a few days ago in our leadership meeting about how a lot of the product leaders, I think when all this happened, the first reaction in general was this, "Let's figure out a way to get our product in the hands of people cheaper, pretty much for free." 30 day trials, you've talked about that a few weeks ago, extending trials, some companies like exercise apps updated with free at home type things. That kind of felt like phase one, which is March and part of April.

Christian Beck:

Lately, I feel like we've been hearing a lot of people doing the Marie Kondo phase of product cleanup where it's all these little things that we ignored over the last couple of years during high growth, let's fix them. I think products in general aren't doing a lot of new forward-looking features right now, so it's a good time to just look back on the product and clean up those things that you forgot for a while.

Anna Eaglin:

Yeah, that's interesting. What impact do you see that having on the product world right now?

Christian Beck:

It's a funny question because I thought about that briefly yesterday and I didn't really finish the thought, but as far as I got thinking was maybe this is going to create even Better Products because now everybody had to reset and press pause. For me at home, probably going to start cleaning out the garage. We already redid the playroom and redid my daughter. We've been cleaning everything up, so when we come out of this, our house is organized, all the stuff's ready to go to Goodwill, so we're going to be highly optimized house.

Christian Beck:

Maybe the positive side of this is that all these products are going to be well architected, a lot of things are going to be cleaned up. I don't know, as far as my thought went on that was maybe this giant pause button we just pressed is giving everybody time to catch up their products. The question is, how long are we pressing the pause button? I don't know.

Christian Beck:

I think at some point, and I think we're seeing it now and as have Krista Martin from Boardable on today, who was heading up product and is now shifting into overseeing growth, I think we're seeing that people are starting to think about what the next features are going to look like. It makes sense that people haven't been thinking about it because on the show we've had people talk about how you have to think short term, what can you do now, and abandon your longterm roadmap. It didn't make sense for people to start prioritizing features when they don't know what the market's going to look like. I'm hoping as people start returning to work now it starts to become clear to people, okay, these are the things we need to start doing to grow our customer base again.

Anna Eaglin:

Yeah. It's an interesting trade off to think about solidifying your infrastructure. But a lot of times you get your infrastructure right because you know what you're going to continue to build on top of it. How does that change how you manage what you've got when you're not necessarily knowing what's coming next? Is it just hardening everything?

Christian Beck:

That's a good way to end this intro segment as we welcome Krista Martin.

Anna Eaglin:

Today we're talking with Krista Martin, VP of Growth at Boardable. Krista, always awesome to talk to you. Thanks for being with us today.

Krista Martin:

Yeah, glad to be here.

Anna Eaglin:

Just to start, tell us a little bit about what Boardable does.

Krista Martin:

Sure. Boardable, we help nonprofit leaders and the meetings they run be more organized, impactful, and fun. We are a subscription software service, mainly we're serving nonprofit boards all across the world.

Anna Eaglin:

It's funny, we ask this question every week and the time gets longer, and longer, and longer. It's been about two months since the world kind of shut down, what has life been like at Boardable in these last couple of months?

Krista Martin:

Life has been interesting. Just like many businesses we've had to adjust to being completely remote. Previously, we always took Tuesdays as a work from home day and so we did a really good job of taking Tuesdays as just head down work, not trying to have meetings on Tuesdays. Now transitioning to fully remote, we've adopted some new technology on our own team. Using [Privily 00:05:10] a lot as a virtual office, we're using Miro to get more of that visual collaboration piece into our day to day, and then obviously using things like Slack and monday.com actually to project manage.

Krista Martin:

Ourselves, we've had to adopt a lot of new tools and that has definitely made us think about our users in a whole new light because even though we've been remote one time a week, this is a big change. Sometimes when you're remote, you don't have as much awareness of what is going on, so you have to be a lot more intentional with what you're sharing across the organization. That's been really inspirational in how we've started thinking about Boardable as a product.

Krista Martin:

What's interesting, a lot of boards are remote, they have remote options, so if you're a national board, often you have a call in option. But many of our customers, they ran their first virtual meeting a couple months ago. They had to completely get used to video conferencing, they had users that had never dialed in before. March 16th, we started offering a 90 day free trial of our product to really just try to partner with organizations that are tackling this new problem.

Krista Martin:

We've definitely had conversations with nonprofits across the U.S. that sometimes it's hard to adopt new things. We've really been a partner with them and it's been so rewarding to learn how many good things they're still doing in such a really unknown climate right now for them.

Anna Eaglin:

You extended that free trial, the 90 days, really, really early into this shut down and everything that's going on, quite a bit sooner than I think many companies did. Tell me a little bit about that decision and what drove that.

Krista Martin:

Yeah, we did. We made the decision really early. We actually jumped in on a weekend and the leadership team sat down and we really thought, "What is the mission of Boardable?" We want to serve and help as many nonprofits as possible and during a crisis, having one central place for communication is crucial. We wanted to make that available to organizations that may not have the budget to afford something like Boardable right now.

Krista Martin:

Previously, just in context, our free trial was only 14 days, so very different to then extended out to 90 days. In that 90 days, we're offering our professional feature set, so all of the power of our product. We're offering unlimited users, we support every trial via chat, email, 24 hours a day.

Krista Martin:

We knew that this would be a lot to take on, but we have helped over a thousand people sign up for this free trial and we really do see more meetings happening. We see it having a positive impact for maybe some organizations that wouldn't have had the opportunity when it was only 14 days. It was really part of our mission of our organization. We want to help and it's more than a job for us. Technology can often be a vehicle to move things forward, especially in crisis.

Christian Beck:

When you think about the future of the thousand people signing up for their trial, are you thinking now about what their conversion path will be eventually to become paying users? Are you just saying, "Let's not even worry about that for the time being?"

Krista Martin:

Yeah, we're thinking about it. It's different. It's a different type of usage, often you're going to have people who come in and they just want to check out the product and they're going to leave, maybe it wasn't the right fit for them. Now having those type of customers that are now in our database for around 90 days, we have to start looking at them differently.

Krista Martin:

We use PQL scoring, so product qualified lead scoring, and obviously the way we scored it previously in a 14 day time period, we had to really update it to look at what does success look like in 90 days, or really what is our hypothesis that success looks like in 90 days. As we come to June, which is our big month of these trials starting to end, we're going to be experimenting a lot, we're going to be learning a lot.

Krista Martin:

I would say there's definitely a risk in this move we've taken, but the return has been really positive. Especially just in sparking the trust and conversations we've had with organizations across the U.S., it's been beneficial to find the value to a new audience.

Christian Beck:

Sounds like we need to have you back on the show in June then and see how it's all worked out.

Krista Martin:

Yeah, that would be fun.

Christian Beck:

It's something that I think about a lot because we've heard a lot more product companies going with free models and it's a tough balance because you want to do it to just be helpful, but I think it's okay to admit there's strategic reasoning for doing that. As you said, your scoring mechanism, figure out who these are qualified or how do we bring them into paying customers might change a lot in ways you hadn't expected. Is there anything that you suspect is fundamentally different? Are you getting different people? Are they behaving any differently?

Krista Martin:

Within the 14 day period, typically halfway through the trial, we drop your score pretty significantly if you didn't log back in, because that 14 day period, you're probably testing maybe just a small group of people. Now with a 90 day period, you actually have opportunities to hold multiple formal meetings within that time period. Say I have a board meeting coming up in two weeks, I log in, I set up my meeting, I invite everyone. I'm really on top of it, so I have it all prepared. We hold the meeting, two weeks later, and our next meeting is not for another three weeks.

Krista Martin:

Now we're starting to look at, depending on your natural meeting frequency, we can't make you have more meetings. In that 90 day period, you're just starting to see not only a bit more of people's willingness to try out a product within very formal meetings, but then also seeing when there are downtimes, how else can we help these customers engage with each other?

Krista Martin:

We have supplemental features that we've produced to try to help that natural frequency grow when you're getting into our product. When people are just kicking the tires, how do we make sure they're realizing that value without a customer success dedicated resource, without the urgency of buying a product. We're really thinking about onboarding, we're really thinking about getting to that aha moment even faster. Which, when you look at that 90 day lens, it just puts more emphasis on the fact that if your first couple of weeks aren't successful, 90 days, because it's longer, is not going to save that customer. Although we were thinking about all these things previously, I do think that's definitely refocused us.

Christian Beck:

That makes sense.

Anna Eaglin:

I'm curious, so you mentioned growth, obviously the fast growth of the team, you, yourself are the VP of Growth. What does growth look like at Boardable and have your plans changed at all with what's going on?

Krista Martin:

Growth is really new at Boardable, our team is about three weeks old. This is something new to me. We've been thinking about forming a growth team prior to COVID. I think we sped up the timeline of it a little bit, just due to new opportunities we're seeing. Growth looks like really just how do we work across the company and find opportunities for experimentation to ultimately drive net growth.

Krista Martin:

That could be driving revenue or product growth. Often, hopefully, anything you're putting into the output will be revenue. How this is a little bit different of what we were looking at before is growth is still under the product umbrella. Our organization, we have a product team. In that product team we have our growth team, which is myself, we have a product marketer, we have a UX designer, and we have a senior data scientist. Then we work very closely with the rest of the company. The other side of the product team is just the engineering side of the business.

Krista Martin:

Right now, how we're kind of thinking about product is how do we start really refining what we already have and optimizing the value that we know is there. That's where we're looking at the big difference between growth and product how we used to see it. I would say it's more of an evolution of how we're doing product at Boardable. We're still a company of 23 people, so a title is important here, but I'm also wearing several different hats. I'm still the primary product manager here. That's still a big part of my world. Anything else I need to jump into, I will do. But having the focus of growth has really opened up new lanes for our company and to start doing small experiments across departments to start really unlocking growth.

Christian Beck:

That's really great to hear. You say growth is new, and I know you're really learning this role too. I think it's awesome to talk to you in that journey because it's one thing to take advice from somebody who's heading growth at a multibillion dollar company, who's been doing it for years. I think a lot of companies are more at your stage of where Boardable is. I get the sense that as we emerge in this next phase of going into end of Q2 and Q3, there's going to be a lot of product teams also trying to figure out this growth thing and maybe carving out space for that as they get ready to ramp up again. As we end this talk, I'd love to hear what's one thing you've learned so far that you would advise somebody in a similar position, who's trying to carve out a growth team and a scaling SaaS team?

Krista Martin:

Just finding the opportunity for growth. I took this Reforge Growth Series, actually our VP of Marketing and I both took it, which was really great. It's a series around really building a growth system within your organization and it starts from the inside out. Really focusing on retention and engagement, that's where you have to start. If you aren't retaining your customers, and when you think about a customer, think about your free trials even being baked into what you consider a customer. Really looking at that refined core value you're trying to produce and what habits are you trying to drive your users to adopt?

Krista Martin:

I think one of the most interesting things is we've been around now for three years and we've built a pretty robust product. We really have been churning out great new features for the last three years with a very lean dev team. I'm really proud of the work we've done. But, being in that phase of the business, when you're building, building, building, often, you aren't able to extract as much value from each feature as you could if you were in a different phase of business, which we're entering, in terms of growth. Really getting that product engagement, product retention to the highest level.

Krista Martin:

Thinking about that core metric and just having a place of opportunity to start, we had a team that could focus just on this. What is the value we think we could start bringing to this business? One big opportunity for Boardable is way back when, when this business was first started, a big hypothesis is that if you serve on a board, typically you serve on multiple boards. Or maybe you've served on one in the past and you most likely will in the future. A big part of how we thought this product would grow would be a viral word of mouth component. That just hasn't grown as much as we thought it would. That viral piece has been a piece that we've just not been able to unlock and is really, really important for us to figure out to get to our next level of growth.

Krista Martin:

As we identified that as one of the biggest problems in our business for opportunities, that's when we started talking about a growth team. A team that could work across department and that can partner and start, really from a product mindset, teaching experimentation and ways that they can start looking at how to bring value to what we're already doing.

Krista Martin:

My first piece of advice would be find that core value and habit you're trying to get your users to perform and really take a look at the systems that are driving it. Is it the loop or are you still working in a funnel? Do you have people that are just, they have that trigger to just come to your product and retain your product for long periods of time. That was a huge catalyst for why we built this team.

Christian Beck:

One core metric to focus on, I think that's a great way to end this talk. I think it ties a lot with what we've been hearing with people about retaining customers during this time and be interesting to use that as your inspiration for building new growth teams. Appreciate you sharing your journey as you're in the middle of it, Krista. I'm sure we will check in with you in some way with Better Product. Thanks for giving your time today and sharing the things that you're trying with Boardable.

Krista Martin:

Absolutely. I appreciate you guys taking the time

Anna Eaglin:

That was Kristen Martin at Boardable, really awesome conversation. She had a lot of really interesting thing to say, I think. Starting out with her take on growth, I thought was very in line with what we've heard from the PLG in general, but different from what we've heard from other people because her growth focus is focused on the existing product. Which is really, I think, an interesting lens. Just very different from the company growth we've been talking about.

Christian Beck:

I think she had a really simplified version, she's learning a lot from it. I think she also went to the PLG summit that you and I went to last November in San Francisco, which was great. It is hard to apply what the big companies are doing. It's one thing to go, "Dropbox grew this way, okay. How do I apply that to boards management software?" It was really nice to hear from someone like her who's in the process of doing it. I thought that her focus on customer retention was perfect, and I don't think that's true for everybody. If you're just starting out and you don't have customers to retain, it might not be the metric. But for a company like theirs, where they're past a seed stage of investing, they've got a decent amount of ARR, it makes a little more sense.

Christian Beck:

What I thought was particularly relevant was customer attention, tied to what we've been hearing on this show over the last six weeks, is people are really focused on their existing customers. It was cool to hear her talk about retention because that would dovetail nicely with where everybody's at right now. How do we retain these customers and getting those metrics in place, and understanding what makes a qualified lead, and all these sorts of things becomes a lot more relevant now.

Anna Eaglin:

But then how are you growing your existing customers, and consider your free trial users as your existing customers? I think her focus on free trials and what they're learning from this extension, how they're seeing when and where people are finding value beyond the 14 day trial, I think was interesting. It sounds like they're learning much more about the, what's the acronym?

Christian Beck:

PQL.

Anna Eaglin:

PQL.

Christian Beck:

Product qualifying, yeah.

Anna Eaglin:

Yeah. How they're updating that in regards to how people are finding value through a free trial, I think is interesting and will probably help them drive those retention numbers.

Christian Beck:

Here we are talking about acronyms like PQL, who would've ever thought back when I was in my SQL class in undergrad that someday I would be talking about this. I don't think they're related though, I don't actually know. I like learning about the growth side and the metrics side for me is not something I've always excelled at, the analytical side. I liked her description of growth as she comes from product and is moving into a head of growth.

Christian Beck:

We see a lot of different types of people in how they move into the growth. It's like where product was a few years ago, what makes a good product manager? You and I have talked about your own journey from UX to user research, a product manager, I'm very curious to see how the growth managers and what maybe the best path is there. Maybe there isn't one. But we see people come from marketing, sometimes they come from sales. It was interesting to talk to somebody who comes at it from the product side, because at least for me, the translation is a little bit easier. I literally understand what she's talking about a little bit better. I think that that was useful.

Anna Eaglin:

It's Boardable putting a flag in the ground. They're taking someone who's basically still running their product and putting her in the growth function. It's an interesting way to organize people and organize functions to say that she's part of growth when she's also pretty much head of product as well. It is an interesting stance.

Christian Beck:

Yeah. I would love to watch their journey and I'm sure we'll check back in with her. The only question I wish I had asked her was how do you get on a board? Because I'm not on any board.

Anna Eaglin:

Oh my gosh.

Christian Beck:

I don't know how to get on a board. Do I have to be important?

Anna Eaglin:

It seems so hard to get on a board.

Christian Beck:

But people are on them.

Anna Eaglin:

I know, people who are on like, five boards.

Christian Beck:

I just meet people who are on boards, but I'm like ...

Anna Eaglin:

Maybe you just have to ask, I don't know.

Christian Beck:

Is there a Craigslist for boards?

Anna Eaglin:

Can I speak to your manager? I would like to be on board.

Christian Beck:

To the Better Product community, if you have any suggestions for the podcast or you have any great boards that Anna or myself should be on, please let us know because we don't know where to find them.

Anna Eaglin:

Follow up with, what does one do on a board?

Christian Beck:

That's another great question. This was a great conversation and a great wrap to the episode, tying together growth with customer attention and just where a lot of product people are during this time. I hope this provided you all with something useful, at least from us and definitely from Krista Martin.

Christian Beck:

It's a good segue because in the next couple of weeks, we're going to be sort of restarting the series approach that we had on the Better Product Podcast where we start featuring product led growth. We've got a lot of great brands, I won't say what they are right now because I don't know what order the episodes are coming out in, so I don't want to leave anybody hanging. Just know, really big brands that you've heard of are going to be talking about growth on the show in the next few weeks. Stay tuned.

Anna Eaglin:

Manipulative cliffhanger.

Christian Beck:

Yes, but that's all I'm going to say. Yeah, if you haven't joined the community already, go visit betterproduct.community. Not .com, .community. Sign up for the community, get connected with other product leaders. We're going to have more content, we've got a lot of cool things that are going to be rolling out in the next month, so sign up there. If you want to connect with Anna or I on LinkedIn, please do so. Send a note, so I know that you reached out from the podcast. Or email us at podcast@innovatemap.com. Thanks again. I'm Christian.

Anna Eaglin:

And I'm Anna. And thanks for listening to this week's episode of Better Product Weekly.