Customer Interview Series: PQLs with Sydney Lawson

See how Sydney Lawson - Product Marketing Manager at Athennian uses Navattic leads as PQLs and prioritizes and routes leads to her sales and customer success team.

Navattic has been one of the most important tools in terms of bringing product-qualified leads into our pipeline.

We have bundled all of our product tours and created a landing page that we call our demo center, which is basically a hub for all of our product tours. We've found a lot of success in this.

When someone lands on our site and they visit our demo center, they're able to self-select and identify which product they would like to take a tour of depending on the role, industry, or specific company that they're in.

It creates a unique experience for the people who are landing on our website, they're able to explore the platform in whatever way that they find appropriate, depending on what their priorities are for their role.

We knew that we wanted to do some kind of a free trial or at least let Athennian speak for itself. The platform is very unique in terms of its interface and how it compares to the competitors in our space.

We knew that being able to show Athennian without requiring a sales conversation would propel us forward in the market.

We thought about a free trial, but in order for our customers to try out Athennian effectively, it requires migration of all of their data.

We didn't want to spend time or engineering resources to migrate people over to Athennian so that they could have a free trial. We wanted an easier way to let people navigate through the platform in a way that made sense. And so that's where Navattic came in

We did some research on what kinds of other tools are out there, Navattic was a winner in terms of the features that we needed at the time and still today.

We then create unique product tours depending on different use cases, industries, or criteria.

It's in our nav bar, when people click on this link, it takes them to a Hubspot form to track those leads and then once they fill that out, they arrive at this page.

We have a couple of our featured tours. These are top-level, very relevant tours that we think our users might be interested in. For example, corporate transparency and the surrounding text on the demo center gives a little bit of information to what the tour is going to entail.

Then we have a section on what challenges the prospects are facing. This prompts users to think about what their pain points are. This is helpful because in Navattic Analytics we can see which tours a user takes and identify the pain points right off the bat that user is experiencing.

And then we can come better prepared to sales conversations, just from that information alone.

One feature we really like in Navattic and included in all our demos is a checklist. We've changed this button to say “Get Started” to increase engagement with the checklist.

We try to keep all our tours to 15 - 20 steps so checklists help break them up. That way users can navigate to whichever paths they feel appropriate. For example, if they’re not interested in learning about e-signature, they don't have to look at that.

Most of the time we have people clicking on all of them. So they'll go through the entire tour and then at the end, we have a URL that redirects to our demo form.

We’ve also added the step count at the bottom of each Navattic step.

As part of our workflow, we have this integrated with Slack. So as soon as someone clicks to book a demo through our product tours, we get immediately notified.

Honestly a lot of trial and error. First of all, identify what challenges our products can actually solve. For example, managing corporate entities or charts and relationships.

Then a lot of it was seeing where people are going to click. For example, managing equity, for the last couple of months, we've been targeting private equity and asset management firms.

We found when we put this challenge in, a lot of the folks who we were trying to target were clicking on managing equity and taking that tour. That validated our assumptions that, okay, yes, this is a market that we need to be going after.

They're clearly interested and they clearly identify this as a challenge that they're facing.

Once we identified where Athennian can support we also thought about what market areas we want to get into and validated these with the sales team.

Then using Navattic analytics, we've been able to tweak these pages and tours to make sure that people are finishing the entire tour. We can easily see in Navattic analytics where people are dropping off.

We check on drop-off rates monthly. The great thing about Navattic is that we can easily make updates. Drop-off helps us identify if users don't care about a feature and make quick tweaks to the tour.

And again, it leads back to having those sales conversations because now sales are better prepared and can speak specifically to the workflows in Athennian.

It is just a much more productive conversation.

We have a scoring program that I don't manage, that's our revenue operations manager. We score all of our content (our eBooks, our white papers, our case studies) and our product tour is obviously using that program.

What we've found is when a user starts a product tour, they'll get a pretty high score because it shows intent that they actually want to dedicate time to look through the platform instead of just reading an ebook or a case study.

When people start a product tour and they fill out a demo form, it's like they're already qualified.

They're ready to talk to sales at that point and product tours are a really helpful way to get people into that funnel.

They get to explore Athennian on their own time and choose whatever pathway they want. They already know that Athennian solves a pain point that they have.

They know what to expect in the demo. Sales is ready to have those conversations just based on the pathway that the user chooses.

We also use it for our CS team, they get that notification on Slack and can see, okay, this specific customer went through the tour because it's integrated with HubSpot.

They then can reach out to that customer literally that day and say, “Hey, I noticed that you are looking at this feature in Athennian. Did you need more support around navigating that feature”

It also really helps with our customer marketing strategy because we include it in all of our quarterly product releases. We create product tours for net new features. Then our customer success managers can share those with their customers and see all the analytics.

It's a really useful tool for ensuring the adoption of those features and just further enablement for our own internal teams.

Review the Navattic newsletter and product updates because there are so many features that are released. It's been really helpful for us. The second that we think of a feature, like, oh, this would be something really useful I find out that Navattic already has it through the newsletter.

Another tip would be to start small and just hit on those key pain points and just continue to build them.

Our product tours have been built over the last two years now. We've been continuously updating them. We had a good foundation and now we're kind of building it story by story.