How product usage data can help customer success departments drive success
Play Video about Melissa Lee @Perpetua- How product usage data can help customer success departments drive success [Music] [Music] welcome to founders friday this is a tell all for revenue obsessed folks we invite experts that are responsible for driving revenue to share their experiences and to help educate and entertain remember to share your secret sauce keep your responses on team let's have some fun with it 00:00:26 My guest today is melissa lee she's responsible for revenue operations at perpetua melissa brings over six years of revenue operations experience at perpetua and prior to that at hired she's been working in the sas industry in both recruiting and the ad tech space over these past few years melissa thank you for joining us for this ponderous friday episode this afternoon uh look forward to hearing about your insights 00:00:50 Uh maybe you could just start us off by sharing your career journey and introducing yourself to the audience yeah thank you for having me this is um career journey my favorite question all the time this is a really good question because anyone's career journey especially in the space of revenue operations can come from a variety of backgrounds so i'm always very excited to hear how people stumbled in to revenue operations in 00:01:14 General uh personally for myself i actually started in a operations coordinator role so what that means was that it was an extra set of hands that could dip my way in and out of different functions get exposure to all these different teams and that really helped me narrow in on where i wanted to be and slowly i moved into the revenue operations team as an administrator and 00:01:39 Then slowly start doing more work like commissions work and forecasting work doing forecasting calls um which really led me to where i am now really enjoy what i'm doing and i love working with a lot of different teams yeah awesome so so uh working with different teams tell us a little bit about what teams does uh revenue operations support at perpetua what's kind of the scope of responsibility that you and your team are responsible for 00:02:06 Yeah so um the revenue operations function here at perpetua we work it mainly with the revenue team so what that means is that the sales team the marketing team the customer success team um as well as our finance team so we coordinate i guess um we orchestrate all these different efforts that are happening at the same time and we make sense of how it really fits into the business as a whole understanding all these different drivers really makes 00:02:34 Sense um of data is what the team is responsible for yeah perfect perfect so you know when i looked up perpetua it's described as a growth infrastructure for e-commerce to help our audience understand that a little bit better like what is it exactly that perpetua does and how does it help e-commerce companies grow yeah so perpetua is a tool that 00:02:58 Leverages ai algorithms to help e-commerce businesses optimize their advertising campaigns and efforts and in turn this really helps grow the business by driving up their sales which is revenue um we work with a lot of amazing brands and we started off in the amazon space amazon advertising is huge um so that was a no-brainer to start off and in the past year we've actually launched into instacart walmart and target as well um so optimizing businesses and 00:03:28 Growing with them is our our end goal very cool um and you know you you mentioned to me in the past that uh from a business model standpoint perpetua is set up as a consumption-based model uh it's not very well known or well understood in the industry today so could you take a moment and help folks understand what does that mean and particularly in your context in the perpetual context what what does that exactly mean 00:03:54 Yeah so the consumption model like you said is there's not a lot of documentation or articles out there that companies are producing best practices for and something that i've picked up at perpetua because of the nature of our business which is advertising dollars that flow through our system it's very interesting to see how people's businesses grow in terms of their advertising dollars and so in a 00:04:20 Sense we're actually forecasting businesses from a bottom-up view where we're looking at our customers and we're seeing the trajectory of their businesses um variable pricing is something that a lot of companies have recently adopted as well and it's very hard to get right first of all but our customers love that because it's you pay what you use right and that is something that has been becoming more and more popular over time and so 00:04:49 Trying to get that sweet spot of getting the right pricing as well as the consumption features that users are actually making use of and love i think that is what we're driving toward eventually yeah very cool and um you know so obviously when you think about consumption pricing and customers of course love it because it's they pay for what they use uh but as part of this you probably have to measure what that usage is so can you 00:05:17 Share a little bit about how does the product team uh measure how you know what the product usage actually is and how do you then like what are uh what are some of the things that the customer success team needs out of that data to figure out you know what that data means for different purposes in their different parts of their organization yeah that's a really good question so here at perpetua we are actually a 00:05:40 Product let company so um what we like to do is build what customers need or or help the business with so our product team for example leverages a lot of product usage data to tell them whether a certain feature is being adopted whether there's engagement with that feature or if it's not being adopted then on the flip side why is it not being adopted maybe it's not a good fit for that customer type maybe it's not a good fit for just a business model in 00:06:07 General so that feedback loop is really important for the product team and then for the more client-facing teams so the revenue team we like to use that data more as signals and indicators so for example if there is um a group of users that are not really following best practices in terms of how our products should be used we can kind of predict that they're probably not going down a good path and they're very likely to churn um and on 00:06:36 The flip side if if there's a set of customers that are following best practices we've laid out so many guidances and if they're following every step of that likelihood of them being successful on the platform is really really high and so that really plays into the retention strategy how we use user tracking data um is to signal the team like hey this customer is going really well maybe send them a survey check in get feedback from them if 00:07:02 They're going down the path that is not so positive then we're going to want to throw someone in there to talk to this customer and try and figure out why they're not following what best practices are for our product so indicators and signals are more like for the customer-facing team yeah got it so so melissa you talked a little bit about it from the lens of customer success and then how do you uh you know how do you drive 00:07:26 Or address potential attrition issues or customer health issues and so on can you share a little bit more from a sales standpoint you know on the front end of the sales process or pre-sales process is there a role for product usage data in that context as well 100 that's actually that was my first my first thought whenever i think of how to make more money from a customer um so as a business for the past two to three 00:07:54 Years from 2019 to 2020 we've double our customer base and then 20-21 we've doubled again in our customer base and a lot of um a lot of the strategy behind this really big customer base we have now is how to retain these people but because of the nature of perpetual we have different product lines so there is a new business element in there apart from complete net new business we also try to cross sell and upsell customers as well 00:08:22 Into other product lines and how we can do this is to see what they're clicking on what they're looking at or seeing other parts of their businesses whether we can optimize a different area with a different product line and support their growth in their e-commerce business yeah got it and these are low-hanging fruits i would say yeah now uh do you offer a free trials process on the front end for your 00:08:46 Customers or if our customers just wanted to try out the product for a short period of time uh is there some uh version of the product available for them to try that out we currently don't have a free version but we do have a pilot version which is a discounted pricing of our full pricing model and we we like to give that to customers just to test out our products so they're not locked into like any annual contracts before they even 00:09:10 Understand the product i think advertising in general is a very complex product in its nature and so the strategy might not work for every customer and that's why we're trying to grow our product to try and fit as many different customer types and customer needs um and so we offer this like two to three months pilot period for customers to really try our product and if they don't like it it's a month to month they can just 00:09:35 Cancel got it got it uh very cool so now you know i'm going to shift the conversation a little bit away from the business models and the pricing models to understand what are some of the tools and technologies that you're using today to measure uh product usage to you know you know your crm footprint for instance for your customer facing teams uh help us understand that footprint a little 00:09:58 Bit better yeah so right now we have um quite a few triggers set up from the product um and this is this goes into our crm which is salesforce so if there's any um area for example if a customer is requesting a demo for a new product that we just launched that goes into salesforce to alert the account manager or the ae that's prospecting that account um and from there to have a discussion have a meeting see whether it's qualified 00:10:25 Whether we're a good fit for them and then in terms of the customer success retention team we also have we also have signals like i mentioned earlier that go into your crm and say hey this person is interested maybe it's not quite so much like a request a demo type of hand raiser but it's um it's still interest and still shows customer intent and so that flows into our crm as well to alert um our customer success team we have other tools that we use to 00:10:55 Make it more engaging so obviously slack is our tool of messaging and we have some alerts that go straight into there because sometimes just really distracting with all these different tools so we like the message to go directly to the person so slack is also a really big one that we use mixpanel is something that we use on the product side we've talked a little bit about this it doesn't it's not quite as robust as i would like it to be but it does 00:11:21 Track the key activities that we have like goal creation goal editing campaigns all of that so it's um we're getting there we don't it's not super robust yet but we're getting there especially um after we've chatted with your team and marsa i think we have a lot of things coming down the pipe which will be exciting very cool uh yeah i mean i think the crm footprint and the product sort of instrumentation 00:11:47 That you've already put in place uh you know for most startups you're ahead of the curve in particular because you're driving a consumption-based pricing model now when we connected last year you know you you obviously saw an immediate need for immerses why we're here today uh but help me understand some of the use cases that were kind of top of mind for you as we as we walked through what immersed i could do and you know obviously like you know i could see 00:12:08 The light bulbs going on so share a little bit about what are the use cases that that are kind of the top top of mind use cases for your uh organization yeah so earlier i mentioned a couple of things um for example a customer base growing so quickly i think another metric that we really like to look at on top of this is ltv so how long a customer is going to stay with us and how high that ltv is 00:12:31 What's the value that this customer is bringing to us right and in order to do that we need we want to drive that up and how we drive that up is to make the product more sticky um and the cross-selling upselling is something that we are huge fans of because the more products that a customer is engaged um with us the more likely that they're going to stay with us so this ensures a higher retention rate right um and then in terms of just strategy in general we 00:12:59 Do earlier i talked a little bit about as well the user behavior of things we have a set of best practices that users should follow should they want to go a certain trajectory and this is based on historicals of other customers that have similar profile types similar size similar segments and similar verticals because we're we're in the advertising industry and so we have a lot of this data and what we've done is we've kind of 00:13:26 Aggregated everything to see to tell customers that this these are the steps to follow if you want to see success on our platform we've also built our platform in such a unique way that customers can really do a lot of things so it gets very uh overwhelming i would say and so that's why we need these guy um these guidebooks to follow so we use this to really look at user behavior and to 00:13:52 Track um who are all delinquent users or who are champion users so um this ties back into identifying the contact roles within each of our customers we like to know who our decision makers are we like to know who our power users are the champion users um in general i think this feeds us a lot of information about an account so when we know something's about to go wrong we know exactly who to reach out to we know what was done on the platform 00:14:20 Why things are going wrong and just having all those insights really helps you predict your business as well as your relationship with the customer yeah got it uh very interesting and very forward leaning i might add in terms of how you're thinking about empowering your customer facing teams with with this usage data now um you know obviously when you when you think about it investing your time and effort and 00:14:44 Resources into deploying some like mrsa or one of the you know uh revenue operations platforms that are out there how do you what what's the roi framework how do you think about the expected roi out of uh a tool like you know a revenue operations platform like a mrsa yeah i think that's a really good question and to answer it in um a general sense of tools i think tools in general is supposed to save you time right because time at the end of the day 00:15:09 Is money if you're not using a tool to do um a certain task you have a human actually doing that certain task so a tool is meant to come in to automate all all this human work that can be automated by a robot or a machine or a software and that frees up your time for your humans so this ties back into resource allocation we do head count planning so when we're trying to think about the tools that we're implementing we're also trying to see what kind of 00:15:36 Work we can push off plates off of people to let them do higher level work and a tool like a mrsa really takes away a lot of the granular work that people have to do digging into a lot of data running queries trying to figure out what this means or what that means and that's a lot of work and a lot of time spent so when you don't have the necessary tools to have visibility into your product 00:16:02 Data um you're really just throwing spaghetti on the wall and seeing what sticks and that's not a good use of our time that's just actually just a waste of time to be honest um you're not allocating the right time to the right customers if their customers at risk you don't know that and you don't know to bring forward that meeting and have a sooner chat because time kills deals right at the end of the day like if they sit in that state long enough they're 00:16:26 Likely going to churn so we want to be preemptive about what we're doing and we also want to be wise with our time while we're doing that got it got it uh very helpful uh you know to think about it from that lens melissa now um you know we've of course been now working for a few weeks together uh any any uh feedback that you can share with us or what's your experience meant with team mrsa so far yes a hundred percent my team loves 00:16:55 Immersa we really enjoy working with the immersa team we're fans um i think a lot of that comes from how solid the people in the mrsa are you understand the industry you understand the roles and how it fits into the bigger picture and i think providing that thought leadership is something that any team will appreciate right like we're not going to say no to help and we're not going to say no to learning 00:17:21 Best practices because at the end of the day that's going to help scale our business um and so my team loves mrsa and we can't wait to get started on even more it's very exciting well thank you so much and uh you know it's it makes our lives and our jobs a lot easier when we have somebody on the other side uh so forward leaning and thinking about how they want to leverage all of this you know interesting data sets to drive 00:17:45 Their business so uh it is a it is a mutually beneficial relationship and a partnership we absolutely love that um thank you so much um now i you know you've built obviously a very successful career in revenue operations is quite apparent from listening to you that you have a very well thought out point of view on revenue operations uh what advice would you have for someone who's just starting out 00:18:10 You know fresh out of college thinking about uh this particular area as a potential career path any advice or words of wisdom you'd offer them yeah i think having a very curious mind and i know this record has been playing over and over again i think having a very curious mind never stop asking why it's probably my number one advice to anyone because once you box yourself into 00:18:36 A certain barrier you you don't look at every single piece in the puzzle and you're going to miss out on some very low hanging fruits or some really fun exciting projects that can really skyrocket your business and understanding the drivers in your engine of whatever vehicle you're driving could be a car it could be a truck could be a motorbike understanding all the drivers that fit into that engine and why it does what it does is so important to 00:19:04 Understanding the business as a whole and seeing which areas bring in revenue and what you need to tweak to really skyrocket everything yeah well that's uh that is very sage advice coming from someone who's uh obviously been there done that um melissa i just want to thank you for uh for your time today you've been uh super helpful in not only helping immersa uh figure out how we can engage with perpetua and where we can add value but 00:19:33 You know the discussion today uh clearly benefits all of our audience in terms of your point of view on uh why product usage data is so critical and so important for all of the customer success teams uh how to start to leverage that data preemptively that is a theme that i heard pretty recurringly throughout the conversation today uh and be more proactive and predictive about it i think you you kind of established pretty early on that time's the most 00:19:57 Valuable currency that we have as uh as people as businesses and and so it's all about how do we drive our businesses uh much more efficiently in that regard um anything else you'd like to add in terms of just kind of synthesizing your point of view before before we wrap up today yeah i think that when there's so many tools in the world so many endless um like for uh for a cab ride i have five on my phone and i think 00:20:25 Sometimes it might be very uh distracting for a person to evaluate the tool so most likely people are going to be the mo to go with the most well-known or the most heard of but there are a lot of emerging tools that are coming up and there are new players in in the game now and people really have to evaluate and understand their own business first before they implement another tool because stripping out a tool can be a lot of work once you've done the 00:20:53 Implementation understanding how your business fits with another tool not just because other a ton of other companies have done it um understanding that from your lens you're the best person in the company and making that match made in heaven i think is is really really important due diligence to do yeah yeah couldn't agree more and i think that is what kind of continues to drive the entrepreneurship engine and the 00:21:19 Innovation engine for a lot of the tech industry is when uh you know folks like yourself are willing to step forward and take a chance with uh early stage startup like us so uh so thank you for that partnership and thank you for your time today and for for sharing your perspective uh i understand of course you can reach out to melissa on linkedin uh and of course if there's you know if any of you have a point of view on uh 00:21:43 Data on how to leverage data to drive revenue we'd love to hear from you we'd love to talk to you and we'd like to advance the conversation in the industry melissa thank you so much thank you esteem it was great chatting with you thanks [Music] you
“Immersa takes away a lot of the granular work of digging into data, running queries and trying to figure out the insights available in the data.”
Melissa Lee
About The Guest
Melissa Lee is a Revenue Operations professional with over six years of experience. She has worked for Perpetua and Hired,Inc., and brings a wealth of knowledge to her current position. Melissa is always looking for new ways to improve the revenue operations process, and she enjoys helping others learn and grow in their careers.
Perpetua creates advertising tools that unlock predictable, sustainable growth for anyone who sells online. They leverage AI to enhance human creativity – not replace it.
They believe that for a company to grow, it needs two things: a great product and effective marketing. That’s where they come in. Their team is obsessed with growth, and they’re driven by the challenge of helping their clients succeed.
What We Cover
As a revenue operations professional, you know that product usage data is critical to your success. But what you may not realize is just how much impact it can have on other areas of the business as well.
In this episode, we’ll look at why product usage data is so important and outline some of the ways it can benefit different parts of your company. We’ll also share tips on how to collect and analyze this data in order to drive results.
When you’re looking to grow your customer base, which metrics should you be tracking? We’ll outline three key metrics that can help you improve your customer base. We’ll also share why each metric is important and offer some tips on how to improve them. All departments within an organization should all be tracking these metrics in order to get a better understanding of how they’re impacting customer retention and growth.
In order to make data-driven decisions, it is important to have the right tools in place. At Immersa, we believe in using product usage data to drive sales and improve customer retention. Our revenue operations platform uses product data to provide insights that help businesses make informed decisions about their products. We’ve seen first-hand how powerful this type of data can be and are excited to share it with you.
If you want to learn more about how product usage data can impact your business or are interested in trying Immersa, please reach out. We would be happy to chat with you!
What You Will Learn
The benefits of measuring product usage data
How to measure product usage data
Why it’s important to analyze the data collected
How to use the data to improve your products
