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Guest-at-a-Glance
💡 Name: Jake Meltzer
💡 What he does: Senior Director of Growth/Lifecycle at Ironclad. Previously Director of Growth/Lifecycle at Slack.
💡 Company: Ironclad
💡 Noteworthy: Jake has worked at some of the leading SaaS companies including Slack, Zendesk, Pagerduty, Navan and Ironclad
💡 Where to find Jake: LinkedIn | Website
Overview of the call
Jake Meltzer has worked at some of the most iconic PLG SaaS companies including Slack, Zendesk, Pagerduty, Navan and most recently Ironclad. In this episode, we talk with Jake about how he helped to build the PLG lifecycle scoring motion at Slack and what went into that. We also touch on learnings from some of his other roles running lifecycle marketing.
He mentioned that the biggest unlock for his team was simple segmentation. They ended up building six different segments based on a combination of product usage (ie. how many users were added) and firmographic markers (ie. how large is the customer). For example, for accounts that hadn’t added a lot of users yet, they would send targeted emails and in product messaging around adding more users.
One of the key learnings from Zendesk was to run a 1-to-many webinar for all sign ups. Jake saw high conversion rates for customers that signed up and attended the webinar. Seems simple, but very effective for larger inbound trialing motions!
We also discussed goal-setting for self-serve lifecycle marketing teams. At Slack, Jake’s ultimate benchmark was self-serve revenue. They would attribute the success or failure of various initiatives against their ability to drive revenue. They would also look at lead creation for sales teams, especially in the enterprise segment.
Finally, we touched on onboarding during trials at Ironclad and how they can influence expansion. Jake mentions that nailing nurture campaigns and handoffs in terms of messaging are key drivers to success.
Full Episode
Key Insights
⚡ Segmentation is critical
As soon as Slack started to segment their self-serve users into buckets based on firmographic, technographic, and product usage criteria they were able to personalize messaging more effectively. Jake and his team created six distinct buckets for segmentation and then pushed different messages to those different audiences based on the objectives for each bucket.
⚡ Tying product actions to marketing touch
Jake sees the highest lift in engagement when you can tie product behavior to personalized messaging to customers. One example is using lookalike modeling from prior successful enterprise upgrades to target audiences that have 5 or 6 of the attributes of success and then messaging them to upgrade.
⚡ Tactics for driving users to plan limits and expansion
Video plus in product messaging was very effective for Zendesk in getting customers to expand beyond plan limits. Jake ran control tests between video and help desk content and video performed much better. This was a key driver in helping to push adoption and upgrades beyond their current tiers.
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