Insight certainty 4/5 debate potential 2/5

Isford: B2B growth requires direct customer conversations instead of large-scale A/B testing

Lauryn Isford · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · Feb 12, 2023 · at 59:03

Lauryn Isford, former Head of Growth at Airtable, compares execution models between B2C consumer products and enterprise B2B SaaS.

0:00 / 1:00exact quote · 60.3s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“In B to C or in consumer social, as two examples, you can experiment at large volumes, or you can make changes that impact thousands or millions of people pretty easily. In B to B growth, generally you're working with a much smaller set of customers, and also the risk profile can be very different because Smaller numbers of customers that represent larger percentages of your company's total revenue must be treated with absolute care, as opposed to a world where you might have millions of folks coming through your product every day and small changes might not have as big of an impact. In an enterprise organization, it's important to be very careful and rigorous and to prioritize that customer's needs all the time. This means that rigor That customer conversations, that beta testing, that live prototypes and demos are significantly more important, and that FaceTime with the customer is significantly more important than it is in B to C growth.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Lauryn Isford

Insight
Isford: Segmenting onboarding by learning style beats role-based segmentation
“When we started to personalize, generally we found bucketing customers by their learning style and their building style was more effective than more classic segmentation. Like, do you work in marketing? Do you work in product management? Do you work in operati…”
Lauryn Isford Feb 12, 2023 ▶ 21:34 Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable)
Insight
Isford: Growth teams should use experimentation for risk mitigation, not optimization
“Generally my advice is to experiment when you need to, and to primarily see it as a risk mitigation tactic when you're making dramatic changes and to let the product development process do more work.”
Lauryn Isford Feb 12, 2023 ▶ 6:10 Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable)
Insight
Isford: Tying engineering performance to metric movement incentivizes costly over-experimentation
“There shouldn't be, especially in engineering within the world of growth, a culture around having to point to numbers to demonstrate your impact, because if there is, then the team will buy us to experiments all the time. And that's not necessarily the right t…”
Lauryn Isford Feb 12, 2023 ▶ 8:35 Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable)
Insight
Isford: Growth teams should regularly change their North Star metrics
“It's important that growth teams are agile. And this means that north stars, key metrics, focus metrics will change. And if you're working on the same metric forever, there's probably some inefficiency in actually chasing the biggest impact for the business.”
Lauryn Isford Feb 12, 2023 ▶ 32:20 Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable)
Insight
Isford: Software companies should use 'reverse trials' by offering freemium alongside trials
“Personally, I'm in the camp of offering a reverse trial. Funky name. But what that means is offer a trial, but also offer freemio. Do both. And the reason why I like this is you get an opportunity when somebody shows up and says, Hey, I'm going to give your pr…”
Lauryn Isford Feb 12, 2023 ▶ 39:17 Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable)
Insight
Isford: Mapping onboarding to pricing tiers harms user activation
“I find sometimes teams working on onboarding will map onboarding to that pricing or packaging. So for example, Maybe automations to use the same example of the same feature is something that's generally premium. That if somebody uses automations, they're more …”
Lauryn Isford Feb 12, 2023 ▶ 49:10 Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable)
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 300 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.