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A virtual conference product for Customer Success executives

 

Deep strategic focused event on Net Revenue Retention and Customer-Led Value.

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Featured speakers from Google, Oracle, ServiceNow, and many high growth startups.

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Designed to be a high-engagement 2 hour event, attendable for busy executives, agile enough to respond to changing narratives and market conditions in Saas.

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MY ROLE

 

Product Manager - Owned all aspects of the product, from discovery, strategy, development,  GTM, to delivery.

 

BUSINESS OUTCOMES

 

Create a new growth channel for Matchbox Virtual Media's platform that could support its own revenue, and create a beach-head in the B2B SaaS market.

 

THE STORY

 

CS4Rev was an expansionary product for Matchbox Virtual Media.

 

When I joined as its first Product Manager, the Co-Founder Graham Harvey, (an expert in social networks and social networking theory) gave me the most audacious business challenge I had ever heard:

 

"I want you to create an virtual event product that would able to:

 

• Energize a community around a set of ideas, or an interest.

• Be able to generate its own revenue.

• It has to run on our platform Spaces.

• Showcase Matchbox's unique collaborative and co-creative vision for virtual events.

• Feed off existing communities

 

In effect, I want you to create a startup within a startup that could be a recurring client of our own company.  It can be about anything you want.   Music, Video Games, Social Issues, anything.   As long as it meets the criteria. "

 

"If we could make one of these work, we replicate this across other interests or industries, and guarantee us potentially never ending pipeline of business."

 

" I'll give you a team, resources, whatever you need to succeed.  This is your baby to run. Only catch? 

 

"Its got to work!"

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TARGET USERS

 

I decided the focus would be B2B SaaS companies and specifically Customer Success.

 

I had a lot of domain knowledge in CS, knew quite a few executives in the space.  I felt Matchbox's product could have many organizational use cases helpful to SaaS companies in many different facets, but CS was a great place to start.

 

We targeted CS leaders because they would be decision makers to whom we could sell our platform services, as well as potential sponsors.

 

Customer Success folks are naturally collaborative, love to share their strategies, and many virtual communities and micro-communities were forming in the space during the pandemic.

 

CS gave us the best chance of success.

 

KEY ASSUMPTIONS

 

Customer Success executives would care about:

 

Revenue: Retention and Upsells (a high Net Revenue Retention)

 

Would favor strategic content vs tactical

 

Would favor strategic content that influenced NRR:

 

i.e Scale, Efficiency, LTV growth, measuring value, "One to Many" digital CS, Voice of Customer

 

VALIDATION

 

Initially, I reached out to 10 of the top 25 CS executives and consultants in the space to discuss their pain points and test their initial reaction

 

We then invited 100 executives to small group sessions to brainstorm on these issues, and discuss them in depth. (We also used this group as a nucleus to start the event community)

 

FINDINGS

 

Net Revenue Retention was indeed the key metric they wanted to move.

 

Customer Value (being able to discover, measure, and prove value) was quickly becoming the mantra of forward thinking companies.

 

Being able to Scale - CS Ops, having the necessary tech stack to deliver Customer Success at scale was a primary objective for all.

 

Cross-Functional Systems - Relations to Sales and Product generated their most stubborn pain points.

 

STRATEGY

 

Traditional conference events were many days long, were poorly thought out digital versions of their in person counterparts.

 

They often happened once a year, offered a very broad value, we're difficult to attend (nobody had time for 5 day virtual conferences)

 

Using Blue Ocean strategy, we differentiate ourselves by:

 

• Laser focused on revenue and retention

• Would be shorter, easier to attend than large conferences.

• Be agile and responsive to current events

• Have a collaborative design thinking style format, with more round tables

 

Team

Led a cross-functional team of engineers, designers, marketing and operations.

 

METRICS

 

#Attendees

# session duration

# Avg Length of Chat Responses - Our engagement metric, measuring depth of conversation

 

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TAKEAWAYS

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Grew audience 450% in only 4 months

 

Great experience creating a growth channel

 

Had full autonomy to create the vision, strategy and roadmap, and lead the project from delivery to execution.

 

Came away with strategic insights talking to some of the top executives in SaaS