Churn Bites Episode 4

ChurnBites - Laura Lewis Interview

Host: Dan Wilson (ChurnBites)
Guest: Laura Lewis (Marketing Leader, Various)

Dan Wilson:

Hey folks, welcome to Churn Bites. Today we're talking with Laura Lewis about how messaging can affect retention. Laura, say hi!

Laura Lewis:

Hey, Dan, glad to be here.

Dan Wilson:

Great, just so the audience knows, what are some of the kind of places you've worked at?

Laura Lewis:

I've worked for a bunch of companies from series A's to a billion-dollar public company in a bunch of different industries, Real Estate to Sales & MarTech. My expertise through all of that is really being able to identify the right go-to-market strategy for a company, whether that's an ABM motion or a product-led growth motion, and then putting in place the systems, the processes to make that motion a reality. Most recently, I led marketing for Adigee, which is a PE-backed B2B SaaS startup. We sold IT device management solutions.

Dan Wilson:

Let's talk about how messaging affects retention. Tee this up for us.

Laura Lewis:

Yeah, absolutely. As I mentioned before, I've worked across a lot of different companies by stage and industry. There's one thing in every single startup that I found, they're not communicating in the best way for their buyer and their customer.

Dan Wilson:

That sounds pretty classic when working with product teams. Give us a little color here.

Laura Lewis:

For example, one organization, when a new product got launched, the team would write a blog post, they'd send an email to customers, and they'd include contact information. Great, so the customer could buy now. Customer would get on the phone with sales, they'd hear about how much that new feature would cost them.

Another organization, there were so many small feature releases happening all the time, and they were communicated to customers in a very technical way. There were webinars, but they would talk incredibly technically and very high level at the same time about the industry. So there was just no customer value that was really happening there.

And then in yet another, retention was really low, around 70%. So there was a massive need to showcase the value of the product to customers to make them stick.

Dan Wilson:

Alright, so we have a lot of content going out, but it's written in a voice the customers don't get. What should we think about here?

Laura Lewis:

It's important to put yourself in the shoes of your customer. We live and breathe our product and our company every single day, but our customer does not. They're inundated just like you are in your life with ads, work things, family drama. When you're talking to customers, you have to get really crisp and clean on what is going to add value for them, and is also gonna lead to the outcome you want as a company, whether that's retention or maybe expansion.

Dan Wilson:

I guess like, if you're going to try to untangle this, what might you do?

Laura Lewis:

We really had to look at it and step back and think about the end goal of what we wanted.

Laura Lewis:

Think about what could we offer the customer that will help them get to that end goal. And you also have to get creative. So if you want expansion, you can't inundate customers with "buy now, buy now." They're gonna think you're money grubbers. They're gonna lose trust in the brand. I actually was in a situation like that. So you have to show value indirectly. And I mean, that's what marketers do, right? That's where we can help.

Dan Wilson:

Be indirect. Now that's not common marketing advice. Let's hear a little bit more about that please.

So when I say indirectly though, people are smart. You can't be too on the nose or they're gonna feel talked down to or like you're selling to them. No one wants to be sold to, right? So you want a trusted advisor who's going to help you make the right decision for you and give you the information that you're looking for. So it's about communicating as this trusted advisor, talking about problems, situations, how to solve them. And oh, by the way, your product can do that too.

Dan Wilson:

Okay, okay, that helps. Now give us an example so we can really understand it.

Laura Lewis:

So at one of the organizations I mentioned, we completely revamped our customer webinar series. They had been talking about niche industry topics. Our customers didn't really care about that though. They had a ton of stuff on their plate. Our product was a small piece of that. So they didn't want to hear about all of these crazy, high-level things going on in our space.

So I led an initiative to revamp those customer webinars. Instead of talking about industry topics, we talked about the things our product could help with. We gave demos of product functionality. We teased our roadmap. We talked about problems and solutions.

Dan Wilson:

Makes sense, so how did all this translate into numbers?

Laura Lewis:

We went from less than 350 on the first webinar to over 800 in just a couple of months, changing this talk track, focusing on what customers actually wanted that would give them value.

And that also let us talk about the specific product features focused on expansion in areas where we wanted more usage or more dollars.

And just by educating customers on one particular expansion product feature, we doubled our monthly growth.

So more money, customers found value and we didn't have to shove it in their face either.

Dan Wilson:

Wow, that's big numbers. I'm sure leadership was happy.

Laura Lewis:

Yeah, think like your customer. You have to provide true honest value that's going to resonate. And I think sometimes people get afraid. If we don't say, "buy today," no one's gonna buy. Or if we don't say, "our product does this," no one is gonna know. But people are really smart.

You don't have to throw it in people's faces. They'll find the value, they'll get more out of your product and what you're doing. And then if they're finding value, hopefully they stay with you for a really long time.

Dan Wilson:

Laura, thanks for stopping by Churn Bites. We appreciate having you today.

Laura Lewis:

Thanks so much, Dan.

Dan Wilson:

And if you have an interesting churn story, let us know on our website.