Good product & great sales success doesn't make your business grow! Product usage does!
Your customer using your product to the best of its ability will make your business grow. 📈
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I grew my startups from bootstrapping to $11m gross revenue, I had a series of challenges to overcome to become profitable.
A good product won't make your business grow.
A good sales success won't make your business grow.
Your business may grow a bit, but your business will struggle....
What will grow your business? Your customer using your product to the best of its ability will make your business grow. 👈
Product Usage
Product usage will help you reach Product-Market Fit and refine better.
Product Usage => Market Fit ⇒ Product Usage => Market Fit ......{continue} 👍
You establish the product experience from the user feedback and analysis.
While most teams may celebrate sales success and how their product is good but ultimately, "usage" & "experience" should be your "prime" thing to celebrate across the organization.
Coincidentally, I read a few things last week and found these 2 paragraphs from the book 'The 1-Page Marketing Plan' fascinating to share with you.
If I've owned a treadmill for a long time but I haven't lost any weight, does this prove that treadmills don't work? This is obviously a ridiculous conclusion. For my treadmill to "work" I've got to turn it on, run on it for a while, sweat and repeat the process on a regular basis. Buying it is just the first step. Putting it to its intended use is another. While this may seem obvious, a big part of the battle you'll fight is getting people to do what they need to do to achieve results with your product or service.
Some business owners feel like following through to implementation is not their responsibility, that their customers should be responsible for getting results with the product or service they've bought. However, this is shortsighted. We live in a world that's fast-paced, with a lot of things competing for the time and attention of our customers. Our goal is for our customers to achieve results. A customer who buys a product or service and doesn't use it or implement it correctly is highly likely to write it off as something that doesn't work and that's the last thing we want. At best, it ends up being a one-off sale, and at worst, it ends up being labeled a scam. As ridiculous as is someone calling a treadmill a scam because they failed to actually use it, a consumer can do the same with your product or service.
So, your job is to find a way to sell what your prospects want but also to give them what they need. To get them to take action and do what they need to do to get results may mean that you have to package things in a certain way. You may need to cut the process up into manageable, bite-sized pieces so that it doesn't seem so daunting.
You need a wide range of tools and process to measure and facilitate usage.
👉 🛑 Product Usage data ≠ Product Analytics
How do you measure usage?
The answer:
Is your user able to use the product easily?
What benefits your product offers?
How do you ensure benefits are measurable?
How do you track benefits?
How do you record customer interactions across organizational functions?
Usage data = Product use interactions + Sales acquisition interactions + Marketing engagement interactions + Customer success interactions
Product use interactions
For digital products, you can find a wealth of information around usage using product analytics tools (Mixpanel, Heap, Pendo, Amplitude and more).
Product usage analytics can help you figure out: (Source: Mixpanel)
Which features are the most popular
Overall product performance
How engaged users are
The type of users that use the product most heavily/often
Whether users find value in a product/service/plan
What friction points or issues users are running into
The stickiness of the product
Effectiveness of engagement strategies and campaigns
What a user workflow looks like
How adoption or retention vary across user segments
When and how you need to communicate with your users
The results of A/B testing on user behavior
✋ Note: Usage analytics is not documenting or just data collection, but to iterate product-market fit and find adjacent needs/pains.
However, product analytics is useless; read this brilliant piece on why: https://heap.io/blog/analysis/product-analytics-is-useless
Sales acquisition interactions
Your sales team has tons of data while interacting with your customer to acquire. These data from CRM systems will offer you excellent insights.
Similarly, your inbound acquisition via website/app has tons of data, which is captured via your marketing analytics.
Marketing engagement interactions
Your user is interacting with your campaigns and contents in various channels. How are you making use of the same?
Customer success interactions
Customer success is interacting with your customer during pre and post-sales/acquisition on an ongoing basis. How are you collecting these data from various software and plugging back into your overall usage analytics?
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There are more interactions such as your own software data, third-party software, outsourced support systems, automation and more. You can build your own solution to integrate all data or use Segment, Tray, Fivetran, etc. and use BI solutions to derive insights further. Measuring usage is an evolving challenge!
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How do you grow usage?
Simplified onboarding /offer assisted setup for enterprise solutions
Great user guide
Community user/member support
Ongoing product training
Engage customer in your product development iterations (voting /most painful need, etc.)
Refining your solution(product) to remove unwanted features & complexities
and more such activities that are applicable to your product/business.
I will leave you with a thought for your startup:
The purpose of growth is to scale the usage of a product that has a product-market fit. You do this by building a playbook on how to scale the usage of a product.
Casey Winters, Chief Product Officer at Eventbrite