Making More Money at June
Problem
We’re a small startup so finding PMF and growing revenue are always top of mind. We needed to understand why our paying customers bought June when they did to help us know what more they need and what June is missing to continue reaching PMF.
Process
Shadow Bob Moesta to understand how to run JTBD interviews
Lead JTBD interviews focusing on our newer paying customers
Dogfooding June to understand customer product usage and setup
Share key takeaways with team and align on problem and opportunity
Competitor research and design inspiration
Explore design solutions and review with team
Share designs with the interviewees to validate or see if needs have evolved. Also helps strengthen the customer relationship by acknowledging their impact.
Every purchase starts with a trigger, a moment when they realized their current situation wasn’t working anymore. This was important to zoom in on this during the process. People don’t buy new products just because they want something new, they buy because their current way of doing things isn’t working.
Learning
Amongst the pushes, pulls, anxieties, habits, and general feedback we learned about. Our biggest learning was around who and how our newer paying customers our using June. We were building product analytics for product people and founders, but learned people closer to their customers like Customer Success and Sales were using June more. These personas were responsible for customer retention and preventing churn.
The pain of losing a high paying account was a problem worth paying for, and June’s company profiles played an important role here. June provides product analytics to understand usage across your product but these profiles focus on a single company. Enabling CS and Sales to have better context of the accounts their managing and coming prepared ahead of calls.
This encouraged us to dive deeper into learning more about Customer Success and Sales, how they work and their toolset such as the CRM and dedicated CS tools like Gainsight, Vitally, etc.
Iterations
Old version of the company profile. Where we initially came from.
Learning from user interviews, customer health composes of a lot of things, not just product usage. What data do Customer Success need to have full context of a customer and their health? For example:
Product usage data
Customer support issues
Customer requests
Call recordings
Billing data
NPS
And how could that all live in June? Should it all live June?
How could we start to add some of this new data into our company profiles? Asset from jamming with engineer.
Rough mockup of a future iteration with ALL THE DATA to give you a 360% view of your customer.
Given all this new data, could AI help here? Could it summarise the data so users can easily understand the health of a customer? What makes a healthy customer? It’s specific to each customer and product usage is just a part of it.
Impersonating multiple customers to understand how they’re using June. What insights are important to them, what data or traits have they set up, looking for patterns.
What we shipped
It is serving Customer Success teams better by:
Bringing in revenue data from Stripe
Introducing new data types for traits and making them editable. This was a big step to bring us closer to dedicated CS tools that CS are already used to.
Enabling note taking albeit lightweight for now
Integrating deeper with the CRM
Introducing new data types enabled us to do things like tracking owners of an account, setting the health status of a company, etc. Must haves to pull CS to June.
Now that we’ve introduced new data types, we have to consider how they effect the wider system, where else do they live other than the company profile, how to edit and manage them, what changes have knock on effects, etc.
Design-wise, the new company profile has created a system that we applied to other core pages of June i.e. Dashboards and Audiences. Enabling us to build and update these pages faster. A win internally.
Craft is important. Designing details and interactions to work across different types of insight cards on company profiles and dashboards.
Product usage data from June plays a big role in understanding customer health. But we learned Customer Success and Sales live in the CRM and so it’s easy for them to miss downward trends in usage, churn risk signals, etc.
Syncing data to and from the CRM enabled these teams to continue using their CRM as before but with better product usage data, and enabling personalised actions from the CRM, reducing the need for June to provide such actions.
This really helped sell June, especially to Sales teams with more budget for spending on tools.
Given the repositioning and move away from product analytics, we redesigned the navigation to highlight the importance of company profiles and audiences, giving them a more prominent place in the product, and making it easier to find what non-technical users need.
Results
Since focusing on Customer Success and Sales and serving these users better with our new company profiles and CRM sync, we increased the ACV of accounts by 4x and increased ARR. These features are pretty much why people buy June, and helped us be clearer on our positioning as a company.
