Ep 5: Ramli John
Ramli John is the Managing Director of ProductLed, the leading community for product-led growth professionals. Ramli is also the author of Product-Led Onboarding, a new book that helps growth professionals level up their brand’s user onboarding experience, and turn them into raving fans of your product. You can pick up a copy of Product-Led Onboarding here.
Ramli hosts a podcast of his own called Growth Marketing Today, of which I was a guest back in 2017. Prior to these recent roles and projects, Ramli has held growth leadership roles at several high-growth companies and has also been a teacher of the trade throughout his career. His enthusiasm is infectious, he loves the growth space and if you ever get the chance to meet Ramli in person, you’ll quickly see why he’s someone I’ve enjoyed getting to know and learn from over the past few years.
In this episode, Ramli dives deep into why he wrote Product-Led Onboarding and discusses how some of the fastest-growing brands are helping their users onboard into their product(s) with product-led growth principles. 40-60% of users leave an app forever after signing in once, and my own studies have shown the positive (or negative) impact on retention that user onboarding has on your business. Needless to say, onboarding is a massive hole in many businesses growth, and Ramli shares some great tips you can use to improve your own onboarding experience on this episode.
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Audio Transcription
Bill King 0:00
Hey everyone, welcome to episode number five very excited that we made it this far. My guest today is ramly john Remley is a managing director at product lead.com. It is a community training and amazing resource for people who are trying to learn how to do product lead growth at in house companies. ramly is also a best selling author of a book called product lead onboarding, which hyper focuses on how companies take you from initially purchasing a piece of software to then getting active, being successful using the platform and doing all this while using products instead of people in sort of outdated old school processes. Think of all the amazing companies out there like Slack, Canva, HubSpot, etc. They all build amazing experiences that are all built with a product motion. I'm really excited to talk to Randy today. He gets into product lead onboarding and why he wrote his book and some of the tips that he's learned from doing product lead onboarding and being an expert in this particular area of growth. If y'all could go ahead and share like, subscribe, we would do a lot for helping this show. If you were really excited about the music on the intro, which a lot of folks have asked about there's actually a link to the artist if you could support him that would be amazing. Without further ado, here we are with episode number five with ramly. JOHN, let's go.
Ramli John 1:40
Liu Sahni. You sound like you have a radio voice. I'm not sure if anybody ever Kaplan actually
Bill King 1:45
said that. He was like us. Like, I think this is your calling man. I was like, I was like, well, I feel that everything else. I don't remember.
Ramli John 1:53
Your voice being so like radio talk show. I mean, I swear. Right? Yeah, you can do voiceover work if you wanted to, honestly.
Bill King 2:02
Well, hey, you know, I have a face for radio ramly. But that is for sure. So that if anything I've learned in my life. Yeah, exactly. Dude. That's right. That's right. All right. I am here with the legend. ramly john, who is the partner at product lead. Also, we got connected because I was on your podcast growth marketing today. Then you and Joanna came to visit Boston, we got to hang out and like walk around. And I'm like, wow, not only is really an amazing guy, like he's, he's like a very thoughtful, awesome person. And since we met, I've been like really excited to talk to you first of all, and hear like what's going on with you. But also, not only is he got a new job, but he's also got a new book called product lead onboarding, which I got an advanced copy of. And let me tell you, it is a deep dive on an area of growth that I think is not as sexy as acquisition, like, everybody's focused on getting that new customers. And everybody's like, let's build some retention loops. And those are like the things that a lot of people talk about. But having worked, I work currently at a product lead business where we do have a sales motion, but like, it's very small piece of the business. But the majority of our customers come through sign up, never talked to any of us. And it's a huge part of the funnel. So first of all, thank you for coming on rambley it's it like we were saying before we started recording, this feels like we have come full circle because one of my like, one of my awesome like opportunities was to talk to you on growth marketing today. And now you're a product lead. So first of all, welcome to the show. And tell me a little bit more about what is product lead and like I like I have a basic understanding of what it is but like what what made you join the team? And like what do you see that they're building that, like that is so special?
Ramli John 3:47
Yeah, this is something that we've gotten a chance to really think about in the last few weeks as we're planning out the quarter and really like if I could sum it up it's it's this phrase that work challenging status quo and what I mean by status quo at the moment, the way that we that software has been traditionally sold in the last five to 10 years in the b2b space is Bell you got you got to hit request a demo you got to talk to your sales dude and you before you even see the product they want to their gatekeeping they are like like the bouncer at the club. And really like there's a shift in how we sell software that's what gets me excited about the team about the company itself but the team is great like I work with West Busch the other product lead growth he's such a good good dude and getting the chance to grow the team from from scratch and really build out expertise as well as my my knowledge around this and a team around challenging status quo when it comes to yard sales lead versus product
Bill King 4:48
lead. Very cool. So you guys are creating basically like training courses for folks who are in this like, super clunky like old school model and want to go to more of a product lead and don't quite know how is that as essentially what you guys are building
Ramli John 5:02
that yeah that the training is like, further down the funnel so to speak, we have a community and we have books and training, I guess you're going to hear at first I'm, I'm looking to shoot a documentary next year, no rah, rah around this. So really like it's the training is like the backend. Like really we have this community of over 7500 folks who are interested in product lead growth, we have the books which are not expensive, like we you don't have to join a training program to really learn about it. But we are we're we're excited about is being an evangelist from wrong product lead growth, and bring it out about it way if you have to say what is product lead as a company? Yes, we are. We're an education company, helping people level up with their knowledge of that.
Bill King 5:44
I love it. I love the fact that like, you know, I feel like I'm going to age myself here. But I do this all the time anyways. But like, when I was a, you know, coming up in digital marketing, and this and that like to learn this stuff, you literally had to go hunt people down and like, ask them what they're doing. And like, there was no place to go. Like I learned everything literally just out there in the wild and seeing what business models were. When I was at HubSpot, they were in a very traditional kind of like, you know, sales process. And then they move to a product lead business. Like while I was there, that was my first exposure. It just didn't know what to call it. Right? It was like, right, we knew that we had friction in the funnel, the team was working on making things more seamless and more easy to use as an end user. And I don't think it like had a name. But basically, we're talking about instead of using people and processes, and humans, you're talking about replacing that with products. And so explain to me like, what exactly, I understand product lead growth, that is like the overarching theme of product lead, you're saying we're taking, we're going to build products that replace these human assisted areas of the funnel, so acquisition, onboarding, retention, etc. product, lead onboarding is all about how to turn users into lifelong customers. Now, what exactly is product lead onboarding? Like? How would you define that for people who are listening?
Ramli John 6:58
For sure. I mean, I just want to also make it clear, I hope people don't listen to this, like product lead is trying to replace you. It's it's like a there's just a shift shifting resources and their resources and people now, it's really about how do you create a great first experience for first time users. And that's really the dive home of the product product. Lead onboarding is like, how can we guide people through the product the way that they want to and most people the way they want to, is the way that they shop at Costco. When you when you go to Costco bill like you they check your card, they hopefully do what a smile. They welcome. How are you doing? They ask you, Bill, what are you trying to look for today? Right? They're not going to grab your hand, they're not going to point at everything. Oh, I'm looking for fried chicken, oh, I'm not sure toilet paper. And they there are key to that aisle, or you come across like this food, this fuel usually to giveaway samples. So I was like, hey, Bill, do I if they knew your names, I'll be kind of weird, but like, Hey, dude, I'm
Bill King 8:00
very friendly with the samples, as you can tell, you know that the pandemic had a very, very negative impact on on my, my overall physical condition, but samples.
Ramli John 8:11
So I love it too. I have I've had a whole meal just samples at Costco for be honest, to give you a sample, and the second Do you like this or not, and you like it, you buy it? The reason why that works that experience. And then when you cash out by the way they you can pay with cash with credit card, whatever it is, so they don't make it hard for you to cash out. The reason why that works. In that sense is the riskiest part of the buying process is will I find this valuable? Will I actually like this? And in the traditional sense, would would you have to request a demo that happens after you've already purchases? Often it's a year contract, more than five, six figure annual contract value. And by the time that you haven't getting there, it's like, this is not great. How do I come back? Now it's a little too late. So to define what product lead onboarding is, is like really focusing on getting people to your products value as quickly as possible, hopefully on their own. Because, you know, that's that's what most people want to try. But in certain situations, I do include it in one of the chapters. Some people want to talk to sales, the athlete, that is one thing that I want to very make very clear is that product, lead onboarding is not anti sales, that is about getting delivering the experience that people want it to be. And if people want to talk to sales, let them let them talk to somebody because they're maybe they're just way too busy. So that's how I would think I would look at product line onboarding is that delivering great first experience for new people coming in
Bill King 9:43
overpraise. We've actually run quite a bit of tests, we've been looking at the funnel, and we offer both of those tracks because we've also realized that, like you said, Some folks prefer to talk to somebody and not everybody's an expert in this tech that we're that we're using. So sometimes it does help like we've run some experiments where we've noticed If we offer both a sales and a product lead motion, the initial conversion from someone who visits the site and becomes an active user is higher. But sometimes the monetization of that user isn't as high. But if we work in both a combo model where we offer the ability to talk to somebody, that is actually the best recipe, and we only found that in through testing and trying out these different a little bit different models. And yeah,
Ramli John 10:24
you're so I want to jump on that a little bit. Yeah, sure. Yeah. I love what you said combo, and you finding It's the best. This is actually the best situation like there's actually data around this weird first point VC. Somebody there did research around like 500 or so b2b SaaS companies. And they found that ones that do what you just talked about, the conversion rate is around 15 to 20%, from free to paid, versus just pure product, lead self serve motion is around two to 4%. So like, if anybody's gonna ask me around, are you do you think product light onboarding, just pure by itself is the best, I'm going to be straight up and say, actually, it's not the best in a b2b SAS world, the best of what you said, and you call it a combo. And the combo is usually what's best in the boxing world. And it's also the best here and proper selling, selling onboarding world, I guess, so to speak.
Bill King 11:18
Yeah, 100%. Like, I think, you know, there's probably some folks who might be like, Oh, this sounds interesting. So could you actually have a great example of what a product lead onboarding experience would actually mean, in the real world scenario? So you have like, you have the flywheel here, you look at you know, somebody visits, the website, their request a demo, you know, they've got to get qualified from that sales development rep who books the meeting with you? And then it's like, oh, how much money do you have? Like, why should we even give you the opportunity to try this product in like me, as the person who's trying to buy this is completely infuriated with this process. And then, if we're lucky, we have passed on to an account executive, who's going to shake you down a little bit more, try to make sure that you're a good fit board, then maybe you make, you know, to the point you get to a demo. Cool. Now you sign the contract. Now you have negotiation, period, procurement, etc. You get onboard with customer success Rep. And then maybe if you're lucky, how long later, you actually get to use the product like, Yay, that's exciting. So what is what? Like, how would you take that exact example and then flip it on its head and say, here's what exactly a product lead motion is? Because there's nine steps in this graphic I'm seeing on your website, like what what is product lead doing to that exact process? For sure.
Ramli John 12:30
I mean, I love how you broke that down bill. I really love it like you're seeing like, where like, when is the riskiest part of that journey. And it's near the end, when you actually tried the product? Well, I actually like this, like, imagine if it was the same thing with Costco or like Bell, you got to buy this first, you come out, you start cooking it out in the parking lot, and it's like, Damn, this is bad, I got to go back and try to get a refund. So I mean, like the, the way that I see it now is like, let's flip that around. And let's do this as quickly as possible for people who are coming in and trying out a product. So what usually happens in ideal in this ideal scenario, if somebody signs up for a free or free trial or sandbox, whatever model you have, where they're experiencing the product, they try it out. They say, yeah, this is great. I got a chance to do this. They do it a couple more times. And somebody reaches out let's say it's bill for this time. You're not account executive bill reaches out to me, hey, Radley. How's it going, man, like you are successful with our product, whatever that is, you're able to say it's kalindi, you're able to book your first meeting would with your if we let's say, we know that there are a podcast hosts, let's say, hey, Ronnie, it looks like you are successful in booking your first guests for your podcast show. Like how personalized is that? By the way? Is there anything that I can help you out randomly? Like, is there anything else I can show you around? Maybe like, if you have multiple guests, you want to limit the number of guests that you have to now the conversation is personalized to dems succeeding at something. And I'm more likely to say yes to that account executive. And I'm more likely to be open to a conversation. And now there's this opportunity for Bill this the sales guy to come in and to nine and expand to like, hey, Ralph, it looks like you're a consultant. Did you know that we also accept payments through calendars? Oh, I said, Well, I didn't know that. Yeah, I use PayPal. It's like, yeah, they're taking 3%. But if you use kalindi, with your, with our future, now you can like pay directly and we only take 2% or whatever that is, take all this good to know. So now you've kind of made you've kind of sold me up to the next level. And this is the journey that we're seeing, even for enterprise companies where they would sign up for it with one employee, and then they invite somebody else, and then a third person and now the sales team can come go to the decision maker CFO, whatever, and say, Hey, now Bill's not a salesperson, you're the CFO, right? Hey, hey, Bill CFO, did you know that 10 of your employees are sign up for our product, they're finding value, they're using it consistently. If you're interested, I can show you how, how you can kind of bring this all together and get feature X, Y, and Z. If you tie it into like a team plan versus like an individual plan. Now there's this opportunity off like this land and expand strategy, where the sales team or the or the sales org team is really taking advantage of the product data and seeing which of our users are ready to have a conversation. And when should we have that conversation, because that increases, not just your conversion rate, in terms from free to paid or even expansion rate, it also increases your chances of getting them on a call versus like a hard, cold email where like they don't even know what your product is all about. So that's that's the ideal journey. When somebody comes in, price it out invites other and now you can kind of expand it with with with a sales team to go even more higher upsell in terms of your your pricing
Bill King 16:08
here. We talked about it before. But I had Alex Bearcat on and he just took a new role as the head of experimentation at workato, which is an enterprise software company. And they're already going through the motions of process hacking, understanding, hey, what's the conversion rate from paid to sign up to like meeting booked? And what are the processes that we have in there? And like, how do we test to see how we can improve that process or getting them to the value of that product as fast as possible? And I think like, a lot of people might hear this and go, Oh, geez, that sounds like something cool that like only a calendly. Or like, zoom can do, right? Because they have like, you know, their business is set up for that. But are you seeing a lot more businesses now that are saying, okay, enough's enough. Like we need to start thinking about placing some product lead bets on onboarding and the overall process? Are you seeing a lot more of that shift happening right now?
Ramli John 16:55
For sure. It's a reason why there's just huge interest just recently in the last year and a half around product lead, and how do we have a self serve motion, it's something that only happens once every 100 years called a pandemic. And that really, like shocked people, organizations where they're in this sales that motion and realizing that having a sales a huge sales organization is really expensive customer acquisition cost is high. And people are people signing up for a year contract, not knowing the uncertainty of how long will this pandemic last right they there's uncertainty around it, the realization, people are crunching their budget around this. And really, that's one of the big reasons why, as a with this, with this experience, you're you're de risking the situation for, for the buyer, the buyer, but at the same time, we're finding even OpenView, who they're the ones who coined the term product lead growth, are finding that retention rates are actually higher through a self serve motion, because they've, you've de risked that situation like I mean, in a sale said you can sign them off for a year contract. But after that year, if they actually didn't use a product, the chances of them renewing for another year is very, very unlikely. So I mean, this is really driving home, the bond, the customer lifetime value is higher, when you see it through this, this motion, they're actually using the product. And as well, as I said, the retention rates are quite higher in terms of when people actually connected value sooner and Innis than later.
Bill King 18:23
That was actually so perfect segue. Like I was around for the inbound motion. And there was a lot of like enthusiasm around like product lead, and you know, inbound and like these motions, because they're exciting, and they're new. But like, there's business breadcrumbs here that lead people to these experiments that are all about this product lead motion. So you talked about retention, you talked about like average lifetime value, if you're the if you're a non growth person, and you're listening to this and you're going to explain to me from a business standpoint, how I would go about framing the product lead problem and like what are you looking for so you're looking for like specific parts of the funnel where you're saying, Hey, I can test that if people go and do this by themselves. One of the things you're when you're looking because you've been you've been in the space for a long time, you see a lot of different businesses What are like the things you look for in a business model that product lead would be a good fit for them? For sure.
Ramli John 19:16
I mean, there's three things that I would look at I mean, the first is take a look at your market. What are think people in your in your competitive space doing? Are you seeing smaller or companies like eating your you know, joining up the small medium business, small and medium companies and really going at it? I'm you're there a bill like with HubSpot, like they were traditionally pursuing enterprise. And they're like, one second, there's this small and medium sized businesses that want to try this out first. We're missing a huge market here. Is there an opportunity for us and that's exactly one thing to look at is they started I'm sure they started seeing other CRMs that are specialized, like offering this is like it If we don't figure this out, we're gonna get our lunch eaten with this. So I mean, that's the first thing that I would look at would be the market. The second thing that I would look at would be around the customers are the customers changing the way they're buying, and particularly, is there a disconnect between the end user, the people who are going to use a product versus the buyer, the one that is holding the credit card or the invoice and if that's the case, then there's an opportunity there to get the end user to try it out first, and get this bottom up approach versus like a top down approach where, you know, if your boss tells you, hey, Bill, you got to use this tool, I bought it, I paid, I paid 100 grand for it for this year. And if you don't use it, like, and you're like, this tool is crap. Like there's not, there's very low chance that you're going to actually follow through unless they force you to do it. Unless the other way around, where now that the end users, you're you're loving this tool, and you're like, hey, there's, I can really see value in this and you sell it up to your manager, and you get help from the team there. And it really does help. I mean, I wouldn't say this is perfect for everybody. Because there are certain situations where your target your buyer is you end user and they want to talk to sales. Think about how people buy airplanes, like people people buy, like, you know, when you're super rich, you want to buy an airplane, you're not going to do a product led motion. I was like, Oh, you should try this airplane. Before You Buy this airplane like the hell do
Bill King 21:24
you worry about what about airplane buying onboarding? That would be nice. Yeah.
Ramli John 21:29
Right. So there's no situation where I can't imagine very specialized, expensive product like an aeroplane where try before you buy it. So the market customer and the very last thing I would look at is I'm already talking about with the airplane is your product, is there a way for you to reduce the time it takes for people to experience the value or the time to value metric? And if it's a long time divided for that particular product? Can you find a future or find a specialized product that can reduce that time to value? Another example and once again, I use HubSpot all the time is with HubSpot. sidekick. They figured that out for us with that before they rolled it out across the different product lines. Because probably HubSpot psychics timeframe is a lot quicker than the other ones they wanted to do is direct the situation first. So that's what they did. So that's what I would look at would be Hey, is your you seeing competitors? Eating at your foot? targeting small medium businesses, the first one your market? Second is your customers like want to try it out? before they buy? Our date is the buyer and the end user different than maybe something to consider about in the very last thing is your product, you'd see that the time to buy is shorter Is it is it long?
Bill King 22:39
There's two things you touched on that I think are really interesting. Number one is they're they're just quantitative aspects of your funnel and your business model that you can start testing and say, hey, what if we change this entire process? What is the potential for my business? If I said, instead of, you know, for six months, I want to run a test where half of my audience goes through a completely touchless funnel, and half my audience goes through a sales funnel, we're going to measure the cost, the payback all the unit economic measurements that you would if you were running a proper business, how quick the payback, what's the overall retention rate? What's the, you know, just the general like economic things you would look through in the funnel. And then there's also the qualitative things you mentioned, which is the fact that some people just literally don't want to ever talk to a person, I am one of those people, I don't want to talk to a salesperson. I know I used to, I started my career selling billboards door to door in Boston getting thrown out of out of places trying to ask for money for four billboards, and it was rough. It's absolutely rough. And like, I don't think most people want to go through, you know, like a sales process unless they have to, I see a lot of folks focusing on customer success, instead of much more of a sales process. They go, here's the product, let's see how you use it, what things you like about it, if you don't cool, no problem, like we'll move on to people who actually do enjoy the product. And then they're saying, okay, instead of you, you know, being forced to buy up front and then experience the value, you're never saying, Okay, you've already used that. Here's this person who's gonna help you get even more value. Oh, by the way, we've also got these other products you haven't used yet. And they also are upgrades, or they cost more etc. And the other thing too, so you something I'm very close to is like the acquisition cost in like over the past few years, the cost to acquire a customer has gone through the absolute roof. And we've seen a consolidation, a enormous behemoth in the room for a lot of businesses now is that there's a tension consolidation. So two people or two organizations control I would say, like 80% of the attention in the world, Google and Facebook. And so you have the monopoly of all these different platforms. And you know, I could go down a rabbit hole here on this but but TLDR as costs have have increased over time. It puts a lot of pressure on businesses, right? Because you have to you have to make sure if you if you're a sales lead motion, and the cost of acquire customer continues to go up, you better convert every single person you've got in your pipeline. Otherwise, you're you're in big trouble, right? So yeah, what product product lead onboarding basically is trying to basically solve for is, number one, improve the onboarding experience, so people can achieve the value quicker. And number two, the downstream impacts are that are that they also stick around longer, your retention increases. And your ability to upgrade and monetize those users is a lot easier because you, you have a lot more data on how they're using the product, what good fits there, etc, is there in your platform now, and, you know, we talk a lot about like the War of the platforms here. Like, you want to make sure you have an amazing transfer from those big platforms to your product. Because if you don't go into get another customer that looks just like you and I pretty expensive, right?
Ramli John 25:49
It is yes. I mean, it's just, it's just good economic sense that if you're spending like to your point, or you're spending dollars and trying to acquire them, and now you got this companies that is now they can set the price, right. Like if you're not like every user that comes into your product is so much more valuable. And you really want to make use of their their time as well as us your your time, you want to make sure that you're connecting them to the value as quickly as as quickly as possible. For all car destroying ended. The analogy that I talked about they use is it's like throwing a big party, you throw a big party, you spend marketing dollars to do due to flyers and share it around the campus in Boston University, or wherever, wherever you're at. And you got like street team giveaway this flyer. So that's what's the marketing, you got the product team, and they created this amazing party, they got the bouncy castle, they got the Ferris wheel, they got unlimited booze, right? Right, you so you come in the doors locked? Nobody Welcome to you, the lights are close, like you're gonna get to the party, and what are the chances you're going to come back to that party? And what are the chances that you're going to invite your friends back to the party very low. If that first experience where nobody greets you, then it's really is that like, that's that that's often what happens when people neglect onboarding is utonium, massive party spending dollars on it, and you're just dealing people out the door, and then Lysa, close, the door is shot, right? Like that doesn't make sense, if you looked at it in that context,
Bill King 27:30
to me, like as a person who's also a consumer, but also works in the space, like, I would prefer to just get the value of the product, experience it. And then you can ask me for money. I want to know if this works, if it fits for me. And if it's something that I want to continue to invest in, I don't want to pay you up front and then find out that it's not, you know, just from a qualitative standpoint, like 100%, if somebody walked in your friend's front door, your store, like you said, it's, it's kind of interesting. So first things first is I would love to hear a little bit more your exposure, you have a lot of exposure to companies who are already doing product lead growth. If you are a like b2b software company, and you've got a huge sales team, and you're like, dang, this sounds pretty cool. Like, what what does it take to go from a model like that, to more of a product lead motion? Like what are some of the things that you see growth teams or like organizations doing to go from one to the other?
Ramli John 28:19
Yeah, that's the challenge that we see. All I mean, that's our specialty. Product lead is helping that that specific transition. And what we're finding the first step is usually this movement, this movement, the product lead starts from the top, usually the CEO or the executive team, or the board of directors. So there's already a little bit of bias and now they're assigned somebody, like let's say Bill Belichick charges a jury to go Okay, now you're gonna figure this out. I like it into an ocean liner if you're if your company's already an ocean liner, a big ship you don't want to be all of a sudden everybody we're turning right? The boats gonna capsize that you don't want that to happen. So you want to do is you want to find usually they start off with a small task quad or Tiger team with somebody from growth, one person from product, one person, an engineer, at least one marker to figure out let's test this out. Let's do small tests. Not not our cash cow, we're not going to destroy our moneymaker. Right? We don't want we don't want to throw it out product lead, because it's working. And if we destroy that we destroy our business. It's our source of revenue. So usually you start off with a small product, either as a future or it can be a small thing that they have and I'm going back to HubSpot again. He started off with HubSpot. sidekick, right it's like this this little feature that is not their main source of revenue and they test it out the motion once they've okay look at this. People are starting to upgrade people are there's this the unit economics make sense. People are coming in, we're figuring out how sales can get involved. Then you then you roll it out to the next next product with the shortest time to value that doesn't require as much change management. And slowly, you're kind of getting people bought in little by little. And usually that's how we're seeing it. And when I say the whole organization, now product A, once again, I'm not saying, Hey, we're gonna get rid of the sales, like the sales is just a shift in the way that there's their sales processes. Now, maybe they have people still doing outbound. But there's now this that in there are people in charge of inbound. But now they have people in charge of this product, lead self serve people who are already in the product and just want to talk to sales. And now your job is instead of explaining what the product is, you're trying to guide them to the next value moment and selling it up to the organization. So usually that that's what we see in that whole process could take a year to two, even three years, just because you don't want to shock the system. And there is that definitely that buying a piece that requires people to make the move.
Bill King 30:57
Yep. So the so like, from a framing perspective, if you're a single product and you're caught your product is, you know, $10,000 a month huge enterprise product. A way to break off this would be to test a sample of your audience, maybe like you know, a few percent of them and say, Hey, listen, we're trying this new process. We'll try to get you through and active without actually talking to anybody and then build it up from the ground up. And then there's the alternative process, which you mentioned. HubSpot sidekick, I was there for drip video, and a lot of those. Yeah, exactly. So shout out math allottee. The, you know, legend was a long time. Yeah, you know, the average revenue of a user of drift video was like, $7, right? Like, very, very cheap, it's very expensive, or I can't remember what the actual price is. But it's very, very low. Getting a salesperson on the phone is in sustainable, because you're talking about, you know, two years payback time. So then the question is, okay, if we want to build this product, what actually think should we do to actually get them to be active? So you sign up for the product, the first thing you see is, Hey, you know, they asked you a few questions. And then they, they get you to the next step, which is putting your name connect your accounts, this and that. Also, now you've got your your apps all connected. The next step is, hey, here's some documents on how to be really successful with using this tool. And here's some examples, etc. We see a lot of businesses do that. We just had Rand on the last episode and spark Toro is very similar model. And I got to tell you, absolutely beautiful onboarding experience, you sign from the product you get in the home dashboard is like, here's how many credits you have left. Here's all the user guides, here's a video from the founder and why he started it. And here's how you can use it and get us a lot of value out of it. I would way rather prefer that from quality perspective, but also like the business, economics requires it. So if you have multi products, if you have an SMB or like a very low ARPU product, you can say listen, let's try to try and test this and, you know, improve the quality of the business. Love it. Are there any other products that like you're seeing where if somebody was saying, Oh, interesting, I would love to test this out. Like, what are some examples of people who are absolutely crushing it with product lead onboarding and or growth?
Ramli John 32:57
Yeah, I mean, the other. Another one is called Vanessa there, this white label marketing tool service that people have just signed up for it for you, traditionally, you had to sign up for a year, but they set out with a small tool that they have. And then you can try it out for for free before you actually go through with that. And interesting that you say you mentioned, Jeff, because it sounds like a playbook over and over again, you want to find a product that you can has low ARPU and, and as easy to understand, easy to get to easy to use, that is the entry point is the beachhead and even designated as a same thing. And that led them to now a land and expand strategy, where they're figuring out Okay, so people are using this tool people using psychic drift video, they're using this Vanessa free version of it. Now the question is, how do we figure out who among these people are now ready to to plug into the main the main meat like it's now I would call it the appetizer? Right? That's the emotion boosh, so to speak. Now, how do we get them to the main course the main course of the product? figuring out that the that motion of when do we when is the right time for sales to talk to those people? Because you're right, if they just remained at that level, the payback period could be two years. But if we get them to a more expensive tier, then the payback period period could be a lot higher.
Bill King 34:24
Yeah, I was checking out the website earlier and looks like you guys have this awesome training course. So if you're interested in learning about how to go about these processes from actual experts, you know, I see our friend our mutual friend here, Andrew Kaplan, who is the PostScript and Wistia and you've got like some amazing companies on here. So hotjar intercom like, you know, PostScript pendo shout out all the folks that I know their buffer soapbox, Vidyard these are all that like the best in class companies where, you know, you never talk to a person and it's just completely seamless. So, first of all, you know, if you want to go learn this stuff, you know, connect with Emily and check out the courses at product lead. So one of the things you mentioned in your book is something called the Eureka framework. Can you tell me a little bit more about like what that is and kind of like how that applies to onboarding?
Ramli John 35:10
Yeah, it's this, it's the same. It's the six steps that we see over and over again to to improve companies onboarding is the same one that we've used. Help out folks that mixpanel at Ubisoft and OutSystems. And essentially, it's like, it's, it's a step by step, the first step, figure out your onboarding theme. And I really do drive home this point, a lot of people listening in might be in growth and marketing. Often what I see is product leading, improving onboarding. And but and then they're like, oh, by the way, we shouldn't have had bill to take a look at our copy or take a look at something is, that's that's not what you want. You want that the people in charge of the front who are involved in the press experience to be really involved. Because the hub inputted there is often why we see copy in product tours that are sold terrible is because it's not written by people who know how to write copy markers, is written by engineers, or product people. So you want to build that team in the fresco. That's the that's the first step, establish an onboarding. The minute goes through all the other steps, the understanding your users, which is super important, because you want to know what success looks like for your user. Because if you don't, you might be driving people to the wrong angle, which is often what happens with product towards that is pointing out everything, because they don't understand what success looks like for the users. And then you want to refine your onboarding milestones, what does success look like for your product, then you want to evaluate your first experience for users step by step you want to audit which step is really required and which ones are not. And you want to keep users engaged with, with stuff inside of your product, as well as your onboarding emails. And the very last thing is to apply, apply this changes and repeat. Often what I see with larger organizations is, hey, we're going to improve our onboarding, we're going to launch a major project, it's going to take three to six months. And and for us growth folks, like Bill your be like, three to six months. Sprint, that's absolutely nuts. Like you want to do small, quick, iterative experiments, as opposed to large people listening into like now it's like, well, it's obvious for me, but the larger organizations that are sales that they're like, this is how they approach it, three to six months onboarding improvement, and it will take them long to figure out what actually works. So we just absolutely crazy. So I mean, that's an acronym. It really is a six step acronym for a process to improve anybody's onboarding experience.
Bill King 37:38
Cool. I love it. Yeah, this book is awesome. I've been diving into it. Since you sent me a copy. The book is available on Amazon. It's called product lead onboarding, how to turn users into lifelong customers, it's really great because I actually started my career in SAS working in customer success. And, you know, we, we were the first point of contact once somebody signed up and bought the product, and it was our job to get them implemented, get them successful, when you're at it, you know, a company like HubSpot, and you've got 1000s and 1000s of customers who are coming over and converting, that is such an important part of the growth process or growing up a business because it's oftentimes the first impression that person has after they, they pay for the product. You know, it's like you're the person that they they they meet behind the behind the product behind all this and it's like, how do you you know, I think, you know, there are some folks who are doing a really good job of hybrid, right, like you you get onboard and you get up to speed really quickly and then it's like okay, what comes next you know, a lot of people will drop off in product lead motions if you don't have some sort of like loops and things that are built into your product to get them back in but the reality is like I'm you know, you can send me as many emails as you want. But you know, sometimes I will pick up the phone or like I will respond to a person right but you know, not everything has to be built in engineered to the nth degree right? Agree All right. So really what do you got going on this year? man you got anything going on over broccoli that people people that people should know about? That you know if they were really interested in learning more about the whole product led motion like what what do you got going on this year?
Ramli John 39:06
Yeah, I mean a few things we got a summit coming up this totally free for people it's happening no July the audio book for product light ongoing. I know people don't like reading they want to listen to and I'm gonna it's my voice. Well, maybe I should still
Ramli John 39:25
You got it. You got it, bro. You got the job. Done. Yeah, we have a six week cohort based program that I'm planning for in August and this is for organization that that is making the decision from sale site to product lead that do want more guidance than trying to do a trial and fail kind of motion is a
Bill King 39:46
good fit for that and that training like who would be who would be a perfect fit if you if somebody's listening right now and you know, they're in marketing or like you know, and they're not sure if this is right for them, like whose home run flat course.
Ramli John 39:56
Awesome and it's if people will call them the product lead. Growth trailblazers, meaning that they already do have, they already have a mandate from from executive to, we need to be product lead this year or next year or a year from now and you've been assigned to to take charge of this or you're part of the team that is introducing product lead, you're part of the product lead growth Task Force. And you want to know now exactly what to do. Those are the big deal people that were coming in, we have people from Mark from marketing, like you said, marketing coming in, because a big part of it, plus it says product growth too are coming in because you're part of that pre plg Task Force. And those are ideal people who want to come in there if they really want to know, a step by step process to make that transition.
Bill King 40:41
Sweet. I will add a link in the show notes so that way people can check out the stuff we got going on anything else that you're seeing like that you're really excited about in the in the in the product lead, like growth space? I mean, we talked a lot about onboarding today. But like, Is there anything that like you're really pumped about that you're seeing out there in the industry?
Ramli John 40:58
Yeah, I mean, I'm seeing more collaboration. This is. And when I say collaboration, it's like this buzzword. One thing that gets me excited, and it's when people do it in a different way. And one example I can think of is monday.com. The way that they release features is that they really said his quads, where it's like customer success, product engineering sales all together in a squad releasing a future together, the traditional way that larger organizations where every team is siloed is has to go away in a product lead motion, I'm seeing product product, people at a company called seven chefs join on a weekly basis sales meetings, product teams are joining sales meetings, and salespeople are joining product meetings. That's so super cool. So exactly what I'm seeing more is more often inter department fill in intentional approach to destroying silos is what I'm seeing, for a lot of companies really a single product buy because silos is a destroyer of product lead, when sales doesn't talk the product who doesn't talk to customers says who doesn't talk to growth, then that's when a red flag comes up. Especially for for growth, right growth, growth, folks really need to be cross cross functional, when there's no silos, then it's a lot easier as a growth person to really like get things going, because now you don't have to deal with too much bureaucracy. With that. That's that's what gets me excited and what I'm seeing more more in companies doing?
Bill King 42:29
Yeah, I love that. I love that I love the fact that like teams are starting to think more holistically about the whole journey. It's not the sales team passes to the onboarding team passes on to the, you know, the retention slash lifecycle team. It's like, Okay, this user, how do we solve for the best possible experience for this particular type of customer? And what are the steps along each process? So if they come through the onboarding cycle, and you know, we're starting to see a lot of drop off? Could we in, you know, include a salesperson or a customer success person earlier in the process? And they're collaborating a little bit more about that? Cool. Well, looks like humans are still be around for a little while, right? We have all they will be replaced?
Ramli John 43:07
No, I can't imagine I can't maybe knock on wood, right? That, that humans, there will always be a space for every every type of customer success. Sales product grows, like, I can't imagine a world where like, even in a product in a product led company where Oh, we don't need this team at all ever.
Bill King 43:27
Exactly. I mean, like, you know, maybe those roles shift, like if you're, if your company shifts to less of a sales driven emotion, maybe you can work on the other side of the funnel in helping customers get through some of those problems. Because, you know, like, as a user, I mean, there's been many times where I've signed up for a product and then dropped off and actually didn't realize how beneficial it could be for me, and somebody reached out and helped me get back in the groove. So I think a lot of teams are probably running experiments, right to figure out what's the right mix at the right time.
Ramli John 43:54
100% I love how you keep going back to this experimentation that really needs to be the heart, like experimentation product lead, that needs to go ahead and now they really do need to find out for sure.
Bill King 44:04
Remember, you're the man where can people find you on the internet and you have anything specific? We already talked about the the things you have coming up, but like, Is there anything you want to you want to let the people know about if they want to learn more about this or find you more about you? For sure. I
Ramli John 44:16
mean, if people have any questions about onboarding, feel free to send me an email. I mean, I I'm surprised I don't get as much fun as I do. sharing my email on the book, currently a product lead calm. I'm also on Twitter. My DMS are open I ran with john thank Dennis Well, I suppose if you're if you want to know more about onboarding and you can check out the first chapter for free at onboarding book calm, and they can just if they liked the first chapter, you can they can go to Amazon and purchase inexpensive Kindle or like paperback or wherever you prefer audiobook face and
Bill King 44:57
I love the fact that you have literally done product lead for your own book. You're the first one to say that. Yeah, that's a book. Okay.
If you can do a product lead on a book, you can do it anywhere. Awesome, thanks Riley. I really appreciate you coming on and everybody I will drop all the links in the show notes. piece. Awesome bill. Thank you.