How should organisations approach customer acquisition in the post-pandemic, digital-first world?
One of the many effects of the pandemic, from a digital perspective, is that people are conducting more research to find the right solutions. There is also an increased willingness when buying to try new things. Therefore, the way we see it, is that organisations should be looking at how they can be as inspiring and genuinely helpful as possible–even in ways that aren’t directly or traditionally tracked.
For instance, we've just completed a major acquisition and we filmed a documentary of the entire process. Are we going to get leads from that? Absolutely not. But it will certainly raise our profile amongst the people we're talking to. Other strategies, such as asking my team to be active on Linkedin and speaking on podcasts across the industry, build that deep understanding of the customer and create content that is going to ensure that our core propositions are coming across to the right people and that we’re inspiring them to believe in us. I wholeheartedly believe if we provide helpful, informative, useful, and engaging content and host in those spaces where people are learning, then, regardless of whether that shows up in any reports or scores, it will be beneficial and give results.
In your view, should empathy play a role in the digital buyer journey? If so, what does that empathy look like?
I like to view empathy beyond just human interaction. I think the least empathetic thing you can do in a deal cycle, is force a 45-minute discovery session or sales demo into a process that someone doesn't want to receive. Empathy is being genuinely buyer-centric and does not necessarily require human engagement. In our space, it entails allowing people the ability to play before they buy.
There’s a massive shift towards product lead growth that includes free demo trials and sandbox environments. We serve 3,000+ businesses and almost all of them have been product lead, rather than sales lead. This movement of product-qualified leads that are coming through trying something in a sandbox or trial environment to sales, is far more efficient for everyone involved. Our sales team can then pick up on accounts that need extra help or require a different plan. I think that a blend of product lead to reduce the friction and sales lead based on the signals you're seeing is really interesting. Giving customers the space to explore and then ask questions so that we can actually be helpful to them, is our approach to being empathetic.
Empathy is being genuinely buyer-centric and does not necessarily require human engagement.
You need to work out what intent means for you.
How important is it to track intent in building a sales and marketing strategy?
You need to work out what intent means for you. Of course, you should use all the tools available to track your customer’s journey and make sure that the key touch points are in a central CRM that your sales teams can view and follow up on. But really, it’s important to understand if there is a pain point that we can be a trusted advisor to. And, if you’re providing useful information to your customers, there will be results.
We found that we’ve had to build our own view of intent so I’m actually divorcing us from some previously used tracking since it doesn’t actually provide a real scope of our impact. One of the first things we did when I came on board was added a “how did you hear about us” attribution field in our demo form. Every day we received feedback saying that they heard about us on a podcast, watched our video or saw someone from our team on LinkedIn. Those things would never be picked up on our traditional reporting system, yet are proving real results. It’s really important to be willing to invest in channels beyond the normal channels that show up in attribution.
Paddle offers SaaS companies a completely different approach to their payments infrastructure. The company describes itself as a Merchant of Record for their customers, taking away of the pain of payments fragmentation and providing a fast, safe, and accesible option. Paddle serve over 3000 software sellers in 245 territories around the world.