Background

 

Most recently as a Product Manager at Matchbox virtual an event platform that catered to the professional association space.

 

We were experts at creating high engagement events, generating a high volume of chat, and analyzing chat that we could pass on insights to the clients, about how

 

The business challenge we were having was that we knew virtual events the market was changing.

 

During the pandemic, virtual events were a lifeline to organizations who suddenly had to go virtual.

 

Our CEO knew that was eventually going to come to an end, once the pandemic showed signs of easing, events would swing back to in person or hybrid, and the existing value prop of being a life preserver would not be sustainable into the future.

 

My role

 

My role was lead an expansion,  to help us mitigate that risk, expand into the B2B market, by creating virtual event products that could achieve tangible business outcomes for SaaS companies.

 

The Product

 

A scalable, cost-effective, high engagement,  virtual onboarding event designed to motivate your customer’s entire user base towards first value

I led this product from discovery, to validation to MVP and paid trial stages.

 

Key Assumptions

​

Studies show that 23% of all churn in B2B is a consequence of poor onboarding, a "failure to launch" that companies that get a slow time to value out of the gate, don't think they are likely to get the value that was promised and churn.

 

Very often customers are just handed some PDFs and tutorials and just left to fend for themselves

 

My bet was virtual events could be used by post-sale teams to onboard customers at scale, and help them understand key features and workflows that ensured they got value, and got them energized and excited.

 

We called this product First Value.

 

We needed a marketing channel for First Value, so we created CS4Rev, a virtual event aimed at our target personas, which were CCOs, VPs, and Directors of Customer Success.

 

The Team

 

I led a cross-functional team that included a fractional CMO, a Data Analyst and 2 Engineers,  a member of our Customer Success team, and liaison to our operations team.

 

Takeaways

​

Great opportunity to go through the lean-startup phases of going from an idea, to discovery and validation, to MVP.

 

The core value prop of our company had changed, we went from white glove highly customized events and this marked a strategic change to create productize certain event types, that could help clients achieve a particular business outcome.

 

One great way to launch B2B product is with a paid trial, where participating companies are able to take part at a fair price, but we are able to test to see if it moves the needle for the customer the way we imagined, and the customers get additional value in the form of shared learnings.