This is part 9 of our 12-part series “This is Product-Led,” inspired by our conference for Gainsight PX users, Pulse for Product.
We tend to think of businesses as being fairly fixed things, but they change all the time. Consider the dominant player in 1990s video games, Nintendo. We associate it with Super Mario Brothers, but the company was founded in 1889 and has variously sold playing cards, manufactured instant rice, and rented taxis. What inspired each of those pivots was the economic environment of the time.
Anodot, a firm specializing in monitoring companies’ business data, made its own switch during the 2020 pandemic. After being “highly” reliant on high-touch, in-person installations and trainings, it found itself operating in a remote world.
As Yariv Zur, VP of Product, explained in his Pulse for Product Session, it all came down to agility, inventiveness, and tools like product analytics that helped them pivot quickly.
Making Tech Touch Work
For Anodot, face-to-face interactions were core to doing business. “We have an extremely high-touch process. As a company that monitors other companies’ revenue, partners, and costs, the onboarding is intense and we visit customers to learn how their data behaves,” says Yariv.
Then the pandemic hit, and many of their customers were affected. Sales cycles grew longer, and Anodot had to rethink how they installed systems and onboarded users. “The answer,” says Yariv, “Was to go tech-touch and low-touch.”
Yariv and the team developed a theory: That they could accomplish much of what they needed using their product analytics tool Gainsight PX. They identified five pain points they felt were relevant given the pandemic and created landing pages to test them. Then, they built a semi-self provisioning feature.
On the outside, it appeared like customers could provision on their own. But on the backend, Yariv and his team were doing a lot of manual work to assist.
“Before investing engineering resources, we wanted to know that we were on the right track,” says Yariv. “There were points where we’d display a popup telling the user that things were processing and they should go get a coffee.” Really, it was a way of asking them to hold while someone could accomplish the build on the backend.
Throughout each part, they used Gainsight PX to create popups and an onboarding flow. Based on the landing page someone signed up from, such as one for tracking Google Ads spend, they’d go through an in-app onboarding flow based on that need. Through the product chat widget, the team was able to automatically surface articles related to the issue, for hands-free support.
The new flows proved successful. When the manual work proved to be too much, it was a good sign—they had enough successful signups to validate the idea. Only then did they invest in engineering resources.
Creating Your Own Concierge
Yariv calls the approach they developed “concierge mode.” It’s proof that to quickly pivot to tech touch, you needn’t re-architect your entire product. Instead, you can run quick, lean tests to prove things out. And with product analytics, you can afford to be remarkably agile, quickly build several personal-feeling onboarding flows, and use the analytics to see which work.
Curious how it might work for you? Get a free trial of Gainsight PX and see.
