On-Demand Workshop: The $100B Lifecycle Playbook - Session 2

Everything from the August 5th session is here. Recording, slides, and the full transcript.

The premise: I spent about eight months auditing how Slack, Notion, Clay, Apollo, Lovable, Canva, Calendly, and Monday.com move a user from signup to revenue. It started as me being nosy. I did one on Notion, posted it on LinkedIn, and it went further than anything I'd written before. After enough of them I realized these brands were all running the same handful of plays underneath, and the playbook came out of that.

The Perfect Handshake

Most teams treat product UX, product data, and lifecycle marketing as three separate motions. The best ones don't.

The Perfect Handshake is the symbiotic loop between them. Product drives users toward signals. Lifecycle reads those signals and acts on them, whether that's converting a trial, driving expansion, or preventing churn. Without good product data landing in the lifecycle platform, behavior-based programs aren't hard. They're impossible.

Nearly half of PLG software companies don't track when a user hits activation. And per Pendo's data, users who do activate convert to paid at 5x the rate of users who don't.

Worth repeating, because it trips people up constantly: activation isn't conversion. Activation is the exchange of value a user signed up for in the first place. Slack's activation moment is collaborating with a teammate, not paying an invoice.

Every revenue event these companies generate maps to one of five stages. Signup, activation, conversion, expansion, and churn or winback. No user journey is truly linear, but that's the frame the whole playbook hangs on.

Play 1: Fix the Day One Cliff

The Day One Cliff is the users who disappear inside 24 hours. Usually it's blue ocean syndrome. They log in, see a thousand things they could do, and can't pick one.

Slack makes you name a workspace and invite at least one person before setup finishes, so you've experienced the collaboration value before onboarding is even over. Calendly makes you link your calendar and email, then create your first event before setup completes. Canva drops you straight into templates chosen from what you said you wanted to do. Notion leads with education on first touch, then follows up based on what you actually built. Add a database to a page and Notion comes back with fifty database templates.

That last one is the distinction worth internalizing. Linear onboarding is the content every new user needs. Behavior-based activation is lifecycle reading what a specific user just did and responding to it.

Play 2: Stop the clock, start the trigger

Ten years ago lifecycle marketing meant dropping every new signup into the same 15-email sequence, timed the same for everyone, with the same content. Plenty of teams still run exactly that.

These brands run on triggers instead. Slack watches for free users visiting the pricing page and treats it as a high-intent signal, responding across email and Slackbot with a 25% offer. Apollo caps trial features by volume, five saved lists, two sequences, and builds its lifecycle program to drive users toward those caps before converting them. Canva reads which section you entered and reshapes your content from there.

Calendly has a technical prerequisite most teams skip. Click a gated feature and you get an in-app notification on the spot. That only works with real-time data, and paying a bit more for low-latency syncs is what makes it possible. Batch syncs can't do this.

Play 3: Defense wins championships

You can convert a ton of power users to paid, but if they don't stay, that investment disappears. It's incredibly hard to outrun high churn with high acquisition.

Slack uses behavioral data to find users likely to churn and goes aggressive. Not 10% or 15%, but 50%. One note before you take that to your CFO: you don't send it to every user on day 10. The Perfect Handshake is what makes it survivable, because the behavioral data identifies the specific users and the specific moment. Without that targeting it's just margin destruction.

Monday.com offers a self-serve trial extension to users showing inactivity, and the extension flow asks what they're trying to accomplish. That answer flips the lifecycle content from what the platform does to how you do the thing you came for. Canva surveys churned users and turns those responses into winback assets, so when a requested feature ships they have a precise reason to reach back out.

The three-layer stack underneath

None of this works without the infrastructure, and it's three layers.

A data warehouse as the single source of truth, where all the product, user, and customer data lives. CDPs and pipelines as the bridge, moving that data out of the warehouse and into the tools that act on it. Then a marketing automation platform as the engine for multi-channel journey orchestration, so email, SMS, and in-app notifications fire at the right time to the right user.

Slide 27 is the one to bring into your conversation with engineering.

I also walked through where we're headed with AI decisioning models, which replace rule-based triggers with a decisioning brain that holds context on both the individual user and the full campaign library. That's the piece I'm most excited about right now, and it's in the recording.

Where to start

Define your activation event. Not the payment, the value exchange.

Map the golden path leading to it. Where are users showing intent to activate, and are you responding in real time?

Then audit the lifecycle content you already have and ask one question of every send: is this driving activation, or is it pitching a feature? There's a difference between a feature and the experience of value.

The Q&A covered where SMS actually fits, what to do with users who never show a behavioral signal, and how far down the flow to set your activation signal. All of it is in the transcript below.

The slides

The recording

The transcript (trimmed accordingly)

00:06:49

Jon Farah: What we're looking at today is a 45 minute session.

00:07:55

Jon Farah: And we'll use the first 30 to share the materials and then we'll add some time on the end for Q&A. So I hate kind of using an entire hour. My goal is to dedicate 45 minutes for today, which is perfect.

What I'm going to do now is I'm going to go ahead and share screen and jump in. I won't delay any longer. I'm gonna go right ahead and share my screen and we'll jump into the playbook that we're walking through today. And I will also keep an eye on the chat as well, so feel free to jump in with comments as we go.

As you all know, as you saw in the Luma event page that you signed up for, what we're going to be talking through today is we have a workshop, and the workshop will be a combination of digging into real tactical examples that you can apply yourself and also sharing like an overarching playbook, a huge playbook that we'll walk through around exactly how brands like Slack, Notion, Clay, Apollo, Lovable, Canva and so on and so on go about converting signups to revenue within their software platform.

00:09:20

Jon Farah: So before I jump in, I want to take a moment to share who I am, because I think that just about all of us are connected on LinkedIn. I wanted to give some context about who I am and what we do at LifecycleX before I jump into sharing the playbook and tactics.

So we are a full-stack lifecycle marketing agency and we largely work with product-led software companies. Where we really excel is bridging the gap between marketing and engineering, and we'll share kind of some of the engineering and marketing pieces that we gathered from all the audits that we ran at LifecycleX. We largely work with companies doing three to 100 million in annual revenue. We've had the opportunity to deliver some amazing results, like for our client VectorCare who we've worked with for three years, helping them increase their transaction volume, their marketplace platform, by 176%.

So the reason why you may be here today, or the reason why you might be looking for a playbook that gives this level of detail on lifecycle strategy, and this is really common as far as like what we see in the companies that I work with, is we're seeing users sign up, we're seeing them click around, and we're also seeing them disappear, right?

00:10:37

Jon Farah: And this is where lifecycle marketing really comes into play. Ultimately, those users don't convert. And what we see most often is that teams have the tools and they've acquired the users, but there's a huge gap between their product experience, their product data, and their lifecycle marketing driven revenue. So that's really where we're focused today.

And just to give some context around that issue, right? Because oftentimes when I talk to folks, it feels unique to them. But what we've found, what I found, is that it's incredibly common. It's so common that nearly half of product-led software companies don't actually track when a user arrives at activation. And activation is, when we talk about activation, we're talking about the exchange of value, the value a user will experience inside the platform that they ultimately signed up for in the first place. So half of those product-led software companies aren't even tracking activation. And what we also found is that when you do activate a user, they convert to paid, like in a free-to-paid motion, they convert to paid at a 5x rate.

00:11:46

Jon Farah: And what we've also found, what I found, is the difference between the companies that we're about to talk through, the examples we're about to share, and the teams that struggle with this isn't a lack of strategy, right? It is more so a gap between their product data and their lifecycle marketing.

Now to give some context on what we'll be sharing today. We'll be sharing the unified playbook that we uncovered from spending months auditing each of these companies, and then also layering the work that I do with clients.

Now, this didn't start from a place of "I'm going to spend eight months auditing companies and developing insights and applying my own to build a playbook." Where it really started was I started to poke around and start to be nosy around some of these brands, because they're top of the food chain, right? And as a lifecycle marketer, I wanted to identify what are they doing that I can then apply to our work that we do with clients.

00:12:46

Jon Farah: And I did one for Notion and I ended up posting about it on LinkedIn and it went viral. We've posted a few of them now. We've reached like 40,000 people, had like over a thousand people comment on the posts asking to get access to them.

And over the process of doing all of those audits, I realized that there was a ton of consistency within how each of these brands approached their product experience, their product data, and also their lifecycle marketing strategy. So then that's what led to a playbook. So I kind of like stumbled my way into building this and I'm really excited to share it because it's very tactical and it's also the exact playbook that we implement.

Now, what we'll take a look at today and ultimately what you'll walk away with is a few things. We're going to take a look at what we call the Perfect Handshake methodology that these companies use and you can too. We'll also highlight three high leverage plays. So these are the tactics.

00:13:46

Jon Farah: These are the screenshots. This is exactly what the email or notification or SMS message looks like. And then we'll talk through like how to mount it to your platform and how to apply this.

I've got a little bonus today, because we're very much so like on the leading edge of this right now, is how we approach AI decisioning and testing models in lifecycle marketing. Because sure, everyone's using AI workflows to build more content at scale, but how many are actually implementing AI decisioning brains to identify how users move through their lifecycle marketing touch points? So we'll share a little bit about that as well.

I'll take a sip of water before I get to this next section. So let's start by talking high level, because we need the high-level context before we can actually get into the individualized tactics that we'll walk through today.

So the foundation of all of this is what we call the Perfect Handshake. And ultimately what I found is that a lot of teams unfortunately consider like product UX, product data and lifecycle marketing as separate motions.

00:14:50

Jon Farah: And what we found is the best don't. The best create the Perfect Handshake between the product signals that are taking place in platform, and then lifecycle marketing touch points, where it becomes symbiotic. Where product is raising and driving users towards signals and behavior, and then lifecycle marketing is actioning upon that to either drive a trial user to a paid conversion or drive a user to a next action or increase expansion revenue or do things like prevent churn.

So the Perfect Handshake, and we'll talk about it a few times throughout the workshop today, is really essential because without really good product data landing in the lifecycle marketing environment, the CDP, it's virtually impossible to create behavior-based programs in lifecycle.

Now as we look at the overarching strategies that we'll look at across each of these brands and the playbook, I just wanted to ground us in how we think about user progression. Now, this isn't linear, right? Like each user has their own journey, but as we're looking at these strategies, we've aligned them to key revenue events, key activation events that take place across the user's journey.

00:16:03

Jon Farah: And we've narrowed those into five stages. So, naturally, we have sign up, which is our first commitment. We have activation. Now, again, I'll repeat. Activation is really that exchange of value. It's the value in which a user signed up for in the first place. It's the thing they want to do, right?

From there we move on to conversion. So this is our first revenue driving event. Then we look at expansion where we're driving upsells and seat expansions. And then at the later stage we're looking at things like churn and winback strategy to identify at risk users, prevent them from churning or recover them if they have churned.

Now, before we jump into, I'm going to share my screen and show you the overall playbook because you'll get a link to it, but it's big and it's heavy. I want to take a moment here to pause and ask that everyone jump into the chat and simply comment A, B, or C to share exactly where you are in your lifecycle journey.

00:16:59

Jon Farah: Whether A, you're building the foundation, B, you're currently like fixing leaks in the program, or C, you're scaling.

Awesome. We have a lot of A's and B's. Perfect. A's and B's. Great.

Well, this context is really helpful for me to understand where we all sit, because ultimately what the playbook is really good at is creating a map where we can either one, create an overarching structure for our entire lifecycle program if we're going from zero to one if we're in the A stage, or B, mapping our current program against this playbook to identify where the gaps lie.

Now, what I'm going to do really quickly is I'm going to share the playbook just because I don't want to send this link out to you guys. It's very intimidating. I want to give you the context so you can see it first so you'll know what you're looking at. So let me switch my screen very quickly and I will just quickly walk through the playbook before we get into the individual tactics that each of these brands use.

00:18:08

Jon Farah: So, I promise we're getting to the tactics, the screenshots, and the examples that you can repeat. But before that, let's take a look at the playbook.

Now, I know it's huge. It doesn't even fit on my screen right now, but what I recommend doing is starting on the left and moving to the right.

Now on the left side, we're going to see a whole bunch of best practices that every lifecycle program should implement. For example, we're looking at things like global holdout groups. Now, global holdout groups are essential to map incrementality. How much revenue do users who enroll in lifecycle generate versus what's the average revenue per user for those who don't? And we can identify exactly how lifecycle is impacting revenue amongst those cohorts.

Now, if we're looking at a hybrid go to market motion, so we have like a product motion and a sales-led motion, that's where we're looking for product qualified leads and how do we hand those off to the sales team appropriately.

00:19:05

Jon Farah: We're also looking at things like goal and action criteria. How do we build out criteria within our campaigns that make sure that users don't continue to receive nudges to do something if they've already done it?

Now, as we move on from here, we're going to take a look at the key. So, along the top of each section, we're going to see the lifecycle stage and then within we're going to see a whole lot of campaign initiatives. So, these are the lifecycle campaigns that we implement and that we've learned these brands implement based on the user journey stage. And we also have a couple notes just like the brands that we learned this from, in addition to like us learning it from our clients.

And I'll give a couple examples just to really contextualize before we move on and take a look at the tactics. So as we look at the activation and onboarding stage, what these brands do really well and we do with our clients is we consider a standardized linear-based onboarding to be content that every single new user needs to receive and understand.

00:20:05

Jon Farah: Now there needs to be a lot of personalization and segmentation within. However, linear onboarding is something that'll be considered to be necessary for everyone.

But then as we look at trial activation, right? So these are specifically for trial users. We're also looking at behavior, right? So we have behavior-based activation events that we want to drive users to. Now this is relying, I know we already talked about it and I mentioned I bring it up a lot, is that Perfect Handshake, right? The Perfect Handshake between the product data, the signals, and the lifecycle marketing, because these behavior-based personalized touch points that drive users to activation can't take place without that data.

Now, we'll take a look at one more example before I hop off here. Now, as we look at late stage users to the far right and churned users, we're looking at programs, for example, that drive re-engagement and prevent churn. To identify when a user is or is not displaying behavioral signals to potentially churn and use lifecycle to prevent that.

00:21:05

Jon Farah: And then we're looking at other tactics here like after a user has churned, tactically winning them back.

Now something really interesting that we've been doing with the clients that we work with lately. If there isn't a winback strategy already in place, it's really hard to identify when is the right time to engage a churned user to win them back. So what we started doing is ingesting all of the purchase data history to identify what the standard winback time typically looks like for users that are just coming back on their own. Maybe they leave, try a few other competitors, other tools, and ultimately come back. That way we can build kind of a standardized timeline around the right moment to win back users.

Now we're naturally looking at other sources of data or enrollment here, like did they visit the website, or did they complete some other behaviors that we can track.

So along the bottom here we also have always on initiatives. So these are global. These are things like webinar invites.

00:22:03

Jon Farah: These are things like transactional emails, feature updates, newsletters and so on.

So I want to take a moment here right in the middle before we jump into tactics to share this playbook just because I know it's a lot. And again you'll get a link to this after the workshop today. But enough on kind of sharing the overarching pieces to this. I want to jump into the tactics that you can actually apply to your lifecycle program.

So what we're going to look at is we're going to look at three core categories. What are the three things that each of these brands do really well that convert signups to revenue? How do they approach it?

The first of which is looking at the Day One Cliff. Now we call it the Day One Cliff. What is this? Right? It's when users disappear within the first 24 hours. They fail to engage. Oftentimes what we find is this is due to like what we call blue ocean syndrome.

00:23:03

Jon Farah: You sign up for a trial, log into a platform. There's just a million and one things you can do. Well, what should you do now?

Brands like Slack, Notion, Calendly, and Canva use some really interesting tactics to prevent this like blue ocean syndrome that's so common.

What Slack does is really interesting. They activate a user before they even finish their onboarding. Slack's aha moment, their activation moment, is collaborating amongst your team, for workspaces, right? So within the onboarding, within this account setup, Slack is requiring that a new trial user name their workspace and invite at least one person. So immediately from setup, that new user is experiencing the value in which they came onto the platform in the first place.

Now Notion on the other hand takes an interesting approach. If you haven't tried Notion yet, I'm like a Notion power user. I use it for like our whole team. But if you use it, you know that there are a million and one things that you can do inside of Notion.

00:24:10

Jon Farah: You can run your entire like financial structure. You could project manage within it. You can replace Excel, right?

And given that it's very like blue ocean prone, Notion does an amazing job of using lifecycle to take an educational approach on first touch, right? This is like linear onboarding. This is driving users and informing them on exactly what they can do in the platform. But then in addition to that, I know we were talking about behavior based activation strategies, Notion also does an amazing job of following up with event-based activation touch points as well.

For example, let's say I just signed up for a new Notion account. I jump into Notion, build a page, and I automatically add a database to that page. Well, Notion follows up immediately and says, "Hey, we saw that you're building databases. Here's 50 database templates that can make your builds way easier. You don't need to build from scratch any longer."

But that's such a perfect example of like the linear onboarding strategy.

00:25:12

Jon Farah: That's content that every new user needs to know, versus behavior-based activation where lifecycle is reading, using that Perfect Handshake to read what is the user doing inside of the platform and then as a result how can we activate them using lifecycle.

Now Calendly also, kind of similarly to Slack, does an amazing job of compressing the time to value. So, inside of the setup, they're also making users do things like link their calendars and link their email. Now, before a new user even finishes account setup, they're also requiring that they create their first event. So then they don't land in the platform blue ocean, be like, do I do this? Do I do a multi-person event? How do I approach this? They immediately make sure that they've achieved that activation moment before they're even done setting up their account.

Now, Canva does a really good job of preventing the like Day One Cliff by preventing the blank canvas experience, preventing that blue ocean experience, and driving users directly into templates.

00:26:20

Jon Farah: So during onboarding, during account setup, you identify exactly what you want to do in the platform and then you get a personalized experience from there with templates. So they do an amazing job of like removing the friction and driving users to faster value. So that's kind of like how they approach the platform experience to drive users activation as fast as possible.

So you saw a mix of like product experience approaches and also lifecycle tactics to prevent that Day One Cliff.

Now, each of these brands also do an amazing job at what we call stopping the clock and starting the trigger. All of us are in marketing. Many of us are in lifecycle marketing. So all of us know what like a time-based drip looks like. What lifecycle marketing 10 years ago looked like, where every new user just gets dropped into a 15 email sequence that's timed the same for everybody and has all the same content. What these brands do and what we do in our work is really move more toward behavior-based lifecycle marketing using a combination of tool stack and also the Perfect Handshake to do it.

00:27:30

Jon Farah: So let's walk through a few examples of how these brands, like what does that mean? What does behavior based lifecycle actually mean? How can you implement it for yourself?

So Slack specifically, they do an amazing job of measuring and tracking a user's behavior specifically around a conversion event. So this event that we're looking at right now is when you're a trial user and you go in and look at the pricing page. So you're a free user, you're in your account, you look at the pricing page. That's an essential signal and essential behavior that informs multi-channel touch points from Slack. You get an email. Slackbot reaches out to you. You get an offer for a 25% discount. Right? So they're using multiple different lifecycle channels and they're actioning on that behavior which is so essential and can't come together without, you know, the Perfect Handshake that we talked about earlier.

Now, Apollo takes an interesting kind of cat and mouse tactic to this, right? They have a multitude of different features and in their trial, each of those features is capped as far as how many.

00:28:40

Jon Farah: You can only save five lists. You can only build two sequences. Well, their lifecycle strategy is very focused on driving users toward those feature milestones to exhaust the extent of their trial. And then once they capture that behavior, once they capture a user completing the extent of those feature volumes, then they're using lifecycle to convert them on multi-channel, right? So they're driving users to a behavior and then once they do that behavior, it's time to pounce, right? So this is kind of like the cat and mouse approach that they use, which is really interesting.

And then Canva on the other hand. Oh, I got a message here that my screen isn't visible. Okay, other folks can see the screen. I see it. Okay. Yeah. So, if you can't see the screen, feel free to jump out of the call and jump back in. Maybe reloading it'll help, but I'll continue on here.

00:29:44

Jon Farah: So, Canva does an amazing job with behavioral triggers. Now, similarly to Apollo, what Canva is doing is they're taking the most personalized approach possible, both in the lifecycle content that you receive and the product experience that you're walked through.

So, for example, when you sign up for a trial with Canva, and we did this, we did this because we wanted to learn from them, and you go into the section called "Selling Made Easy" inside of their platform. So, that immediately raises your hand as okay, this is a salesperson. This is someone that's creating content for sales. Well, you're immediately going to start receiving lifecycle content and in-product recommendations that drive you toward making more content for sales. So, it immediately starts to personalize your experience.

And lifecycle can't do this. Our emails, SMS messages, in-app notifications, push notifications can't do this without measuring that behavioral data within the platform. So, very much so actioning upon what the user is doing.

Now the last one for this section does a fantastic job of measuring those product milestones and then tactfully using email, in-app notifications, push notifications, using multi-channel tactfully instead of just like using every channel at once to deliver a core message.

00:31:09

Jon Farah: So for example, if a user is already exhibiting a behavior inside the product, and this urgency of data is essential, like paying a little bit more, and we'll talk about tech for this, but paying a little bit more for real-time data is so essential because you can prompt in-app notifications.

For example, I'll give a great example of how Calendly uses this. So, if you're inside of Calendly and you click on a feature that is not included in the free trial, you immediately get an in-app notification saying, "Hey, I saw you wanted this feature. It's not included in your free trial." However, like I'm getting a ringer happening here. Sorry about that. I'm just getting a noise. Okay, looks like it stopped. Let me make sure everybody's on mute.

But so Calendly, apologies for the stop there, I was getting a little ringing in my headphones. But Calendly does an amazing job of driving users and tracking that behavioral data so that when a user clicks on a feature that's not included in their free trial, they immediately get an in-app notification that prompts them to upgrade and identifies that, hey, this feature isn't included in your trial.

00:32:28

Jon Farah: Now, the last section, the last tactic that we'll take a look at here is defense. I always say to my team, I always say with my clients, like defense really wins championships. Like, sure, we can convert a ton of power users to paid. However, if they don't remain for the long term, that investment disappears over time. It's incredibly hard to outrun high churn with high acquisition.

So, there are a few tactics that these teams use really well. Slack specifically is using behavioral data to identify when users are likely to churn and prompting them with a really strong offer. It's not 10%, it's not 15%, it's 50%. And so they go aggressive.

But one note on this about a 50% discount, because gosh, will your CFO freak out if they find out that you're sending a 50% discount to every user on day 10, right? So, what's really essential here is that Perfect Handshake that we talked about. So, you don't send this offer to every user. You look at the behavioral data to identify the right users at the right moment to put it in front of them.

00:33:41

Jon Farah: Now, Monday.com takes an interesting approach to this. If a user is displaying that they'll churn, that they'll fall off from their trial, or they're showing inactivity, they prompt that user with a self-service trial extension. And when that user extends their trial beyond the 14-day mark, it also prompts information like what are you looking for? Like what are you aiming to accomplish?

And they do an amazing job of using the behavioral data to identify what a user hasn't done and then lifecycle content, the emails, the in-app notifications, they transition from "this is what the platform does" to "this is what you want to do in the platform and this is how you do that." So they do an amazing job of using that behavior and contact info to drive users to activation after they've extended.

Now Canva, as we look at like this late stage, this defense wins championships, when a user churns they're not throwing in the towel. Like they're using survey data that will later inform their winback strategy. So whenever a user didn't get inside the platform, right?

00:34:52

Jon Farah: Let's say that Canva has that feature in their roadmap. Well, that's a perfect winback strategy for when that feature is released. So they're gathering contextual data, they're gathering the use case info so that they can win back users even better.

Now, as we looked at all of these tactics, we talked a lot about the Perfect Handshake, a lot about the necessity of product data and lifecycle working symbiotically. Now, on the left here, this is what these teams do really well. They use behavior triggered messaging and all these tactics. We talked about that. They also use real-time product signals that land in their lifecycle marketing platforms and then we talked about like immediacy of data, immediate data syncing and action upon those. And then on technical terms they're using like event schemas that are feeding their CDPs so that they can action upon it. I won't get too far into the nerdy parts I tend to nerd out on a little bit.

But on the right side, this is what we see most often.

00:35:54

Jon Farah: This is like what the teams that can't accomplish this are kind of doing today. They're using time-based drips that are the same for every user. They're managing lists and segments manually instead of automating with behavior data and user profiles. And then they've got a lot of like disconnected tools and data pipelines. So the real gap here is like an orchestration gap. There's kind of a black hole between the product data and marketing platforms.

So I just want to walk through how we recommend teams approaching this. When you get the slides afterwards, this is slide 27. It's going to be really helpful for any internal conversations you have with like your engineering and your product teams to bring this to life, because there's three essential layers to getting from disconnected tools, no behavior based lifecycle, no personalization, into like the program and tactics that we just talked through.

On the left side here we have data warehouses, and everyone, when you talk to your engineering team, this must be, it has to be in place, right?

00:36:59

Jon Farah: This is where all of the product data lives. This is where all the user and customer data lives and ideally customer and user profiles as well. It's our single source of truth.

Now what we use is we use a lot of bridges. So we use CDPs and data pipelines to bridge that data out of the source of truth so that we can then distribute it to platforms like Customer.io where we can use multi-channel journey orchestration to do things like send an email, send an SMS message, send an in-app notification at the right time to the right user with the right message so we can drive them to next best action. We can ultimately drive them to activation and then key revenue events like converting to paid, expansion and churn prevention and winbacks as well.

Now I know I mentioned like a bonus for today and this is a big visual. You'll also get a link to this. It's within the same big page as the playbook I shared my screen on earlier.

00:37:59

Jon Farah: And this is, we're kind of like on the leading edge of this right now. Like I mentioned, every team hopefully is using AI to optimize their process, optimize content buildout and scaling that. But what we're in the process of doing is building out AI decisioning and testing models that do two things.

So this, the block in the middle is the decisioning brain. On the left side, we have all the inputs. This is all the behavioral data. This is all the user profile data. These are all the signals or the enrichment data that's ultimately informing everything we know about a user and their experience inside the platform. So we're feeding that in, right? We're feeding that into the decisioning brain.

On the other side here, these are all of the campaigns. This is every single touch point that we've built out that aligns to key user stages and ultimately what we're aiming to drive a user to.

Now the decisioning brain has context of both.

00:39:00

Jon Farah: So it knows these individual user experiences that are unique to each person and it also knows all the campaign tactics, what works, what doesn't, the context that works, and ultimately it decides which touch point is right for a user depending on all of the context it has about them.

Now what's the difference between like this and what lifecycle marketers traditionally use? Lifecycle marketers kind of traditionally use what we call rule-based triggers. So it's user does this, then do that. User fits this criteria, then enroll them. Well AI decisioning creates a lot of flexibility for that. And with really good machine learning models it can improve over time. So it can have context for what's already worked in the past and improve upon its own strategy over time. Now there are also testing aspects of this so we can do multivariate testing around creative and copy as well, which is kind of built into the whole thing.

So I'll share this so that you have the model. But as you start to look at bringing this into practice, like where do you start? Like there's a lot and it can be overwhelming if we look at like biting off the whole thing at once.

00:40:18

Jon Farah: Now you've got the kind of three layer stack. So you can work with your engineering and product team and marketing team to bring this to life. But this is where we really recommend starting, is at first identifying your activation event.

Now again the activation event isn't converting to paid. The activation event isn't collecting dollars. The activation event is the in-product experience that a user signed up for in the first place. It's that single behavior that we want to drive every user to because as we saw in our data from Pendo, users that activate, users that experience the value, convert to paid at a 5x over those that don't. So we always want to stack the odds in our favor.

From there, you'll map the enrollment moment. So like what are the moments leading up to that activation event that you want to drive users through? This is like our Golden Path journey mapping that's essential here.

And then you'll audit your activation strategy. So look at the lifecycle content you already have in place or the content that you want to implement and identify, are you driving new users to activation or are you just selling them features and are you just showing them what they can do in the platform?

00:41:33

Jon Farah: Right? Because there's a difference between a feature and the experience of value.

So the playbook is yours. This afternoon I'll send out all of the content, the slides, the Figma files, the recording so that you have all the content you need for the tactics, the Day One Cliff, stopping the clock and moving more toward trigger based, behavior based triggers, and then how to approach defense and of course the AI decisioning and testing models.

Now before we get into questions I wanted to call out that at LifecycleX we built this playbook from all of the eight months of auditing we did and then also our own experience, and we also implement it. What we find is that a lot of the teams, a lot of software teams, they don't lack the strategy, they really lack the infrastructure. So that's why at LifecycleX we're one of the only lifecycle partners that brings data engineering as a core discipline so that we can build the entire infrastructure that's needed to build behavior-based strategies that convert. And we see it in the results we've had for our clients, increasing transaction volume by 176% and trial activation by 522%.

00:42:51

[Editorial note: at this point Jon shared a link to a free strategy call. LifecycleX now leads with a paid Lifecycle Blueprint.]

Jon Farah: So that wraps the content that I really wanted to share today. What I'd like to do is welcome you all to either come off mute or jump into the chat with any questions you have. Where can I expand? Where can I jump back into the slides and share more?

If not, I should have mentioned, this is actually the second session because our session was like crazy, sign up super quickly. So we brought it back for a second time. So I've got a couple questions from that conversation I can walk through as well.

00:43:57

Jon Farah: So, I'll pause now. Feel free to jump off mute and ask any questions that you have or add them to the chat.

Attendee: Hey Jon, thanks for doing this. This is a really great session. Really appreciate it. I'm curious, you know, we have not really implemented a ton of SMS-based marketing and I'm curious kind of where you see that fit into the overall strategies that you've seen. Obviously email is kind of king. In-app is king. SMS is kind of where I don't know that we've really found, barely tested it and really haven't found, you know, a place to kind of make it make sense for us. So just curious what you've seen and any thoughts there.

Jon Farah: Yeah, I'm happy to jump into it. I know, you know, we don't want to give away too much context, but can you tell me two things? Can you just tell me like your overarching go to market? Like are you a product-led software company?

00:44:50

Jon Farah: And then what's your current stack? Like I know you mentioned in-app and email are in place. What are you using to orchestrate those?

[Editorial note: the attendee described their stack and go-to-market, including a hybrid motion where smaller accounts go self-serve and larger accounts get a seller involved. Identifying details removed.]

Jon Farah: Yeah. Totally. Okay, that context is really helpful. So, let's talk SMS.

Now, you have two different user groups, right? You have sales-led enterprise opportunities and you also have self-service SMBs that are using the platform on their own. Now, we're going to treat their journeys very differently. For example, on the sales-led side, yeah, we don't want to send, we don't want to implement Twilio and start sending SMS messages to prospects that are halfway through the sales process with an account executive. But what we can use it for on that side of the business is things like lost opportunities in the long term. So, for example, let's say that we lost an opportunity three months ago and we're running a workshop or a webinar that's super relevant for them.

00:46:38

Jon Farah: SMS might be a good touch point to engage them. Now, you're probably going to need to enrich their data because they probably haven't lined up on the self-service side. So, you want to be thoughtful, right, about making sure that you don't degrade those phone numbers, you know, given that you're kind of like cold SMSing some folks.

But on the product-led side, you should obviously prompt those self-service SMB users for their telephone. So, you don't need to enrich it. And then what you can do is use it as a mechanism for engaging users at key moments that are relevant to driving revenue. For example, let's say that we have a paid user on the platform and we think they're going to churn. They're showing the behavioral data that they're going to churn. So what we can do is use SMS to engage them, maybe even like as a customer support person, and say, "Hey, I know you're in our platform, but you haven't been using it recently. You know, I'm happy to connect with you and help you through that."

00:47:36

Jon Farah: What I don't recommend using SMS for is like day one of onboarding, right? Like blasting SMS messages to new users to show them education-based info that every user should receive. What it's really helpful for are those key moments where you're either trying to convert to revenue, you're using behavior for that, or you're trying to prevent revenue loss. And that's also super topically relevant for behavior.

Now, I know we have some other questions. So, I'm happy to chat with you offline, because using Marketo for the product motion, the self-service motion, is going to be really difficult. But there are some better journey orchestration tools like Customer.io where you can orchestrate email, SMS, and in-app notifications kind of all in one journey. And that makes it really helpful to make sure that those SMS messages are landing at the right time versus just like a random webhook that, you know, is set up in the journeys.

Attendee: Totally heard on that. But yeah, thank you. Appreciate it.

Jon Farah: Yeah. Yeah.

00:48:35

Jon Farah: Absolutely. So, let me get into the chat here. We've got a couple more questions. What happens when you download Notion or the other tools but don't activate or give them any behavioral signals? Do they prioritize any features, tackle it in some other way, or stay silent? Okay, I think I know where the rest of this is going. So, essentially, what percentage of users start doing this? No signals.

Okay. So, what's really interesting here is all of these brands use enrichment data. So, for example, I put in my work email. Well, it automatically knows, hey, Jon's the founder of a marketing agency with under five employees. So, it automatically has that context about me. So even though I'm not showing behavior inside the platform that lifecycle can action upon, they do an amazing job of using enrichment data to personalize my experience. And for example, like if a trial user signs up and they're part of a thousand person organization, well that's a product qualified lead whether they're using the product and showed those behavioral signals or not.

00:49:50

Jon Farah: So then sales can reach out to them and start to work that as a deal. So those hybrid go to market motions are interesting from an enrichment data perspective. And then from a self-service perspective, like I think that a lot of PLG teams are kind of under-indexing on the value of that enrichment data. So that's a good one.

Just to recap, what these brands do really well is if a user isn't activating inside a platform, isn't showing any behavior, they use enrichment data to personalize lifecycle touch points, which is awesome.

Next question here. Do I have an example of using the strategy for a B2B service? Like how to implement this strategy for an agency? That's a good question. I think you can pull some pieces from the playbook. Specifically in the playbook, and I'll just kind of speak to it, you'll get a link to it. But when you look at the awareness and consideration stage, there are a few things that you can repurpose for a service business, especially if it's a service business at scale, like a large service business.

00:50:59

Jon Farah: A lot of these nurtures, like nurturing on demo, driving folks to a community, can be really helpful. I don't specialize in working with service businesses, but feel free to take a look at the playbook and kind of see what you can recreate from that awareness and consideration stage.

So there are two questions here. I mentioned Customer.io. Yeah. So, we are platform agnostic at LifecycleX, but we definitely prefer Customer.io just because of the ability, I know I was talking before about creating multi-channel journeys. There are a couple other platforms that we do this in that are good. We definitely prefer Customer.io, but we are agnostic.

Question two, what are the downsides to moving the activation signal up further in the flow? For example, a less meaningful, low value signal than convert to paid. Well, actually, I think that you understand the activation event really well because activation isn't converting to paid. Activation is the value in which a user signed up for in the first place.

00:52:10

Jon Farah: So, for example, let's talk Slack. So Slack makes sure that a new user starts to collaborate with their team before they ever prompt them to convert to paid. So I think you're thinking about this really well in your second question, like you're really mapping those value-based events you want a user to do before you're going to prompt them to convert to paid.

Now I know you asked about Customer.io and some other platforms. So schedule some time with me. I'll also follow up with you on LinkedIn because I'm happy to talk through kind of how that maps for you, identifying some of those activation events before you bring them to paid, and then happy to go deep on tech stack. That's kind of where I tend to nerd out a little bit, is all the tools in the tech stack involved.

Attendee: Thank you.

Jon Farah: Yeah, absolutely. Right. Well, at this stage those are the questions that we got. So, I appreciate everyone jumping on today. I'll follow up like I mentioned with all the materials we reviewed today and I'll chat with you all soon. It was good to see everybody. Thank you.