The Importance of Customer Obsession in Product Development
What are your priorities in terms of product innovation to make Act-On an even more competitive platform?
One of the things that I’ve seen in my career is that there is a tendency for companies to focus on too many objectives, and that’s something that I saw with my team when I first came on. I’ve made a change to have us focus on a smaller set of priorities that will have a much bigger impact. For example, as I previously mentioned, this quarter we’re really focusing on CRM integration. We’ve also added the contact search feature so that our customers can easily find individual contacts. We’ve rolled that out as a beta feature to a few customers and plan to continue to roll it out to more over the next several weeks.
There is also a lot of work that we can do to make our platform work more seamlessly. For example, many of our competitors (such as MailChimp and Marketo) charge you for implementing SSL certificates. Not only do marketing teams have to pay for these certificates, but whoever is in charge has to talk to their IT team and figure out a very technical thing — which isn’t something most marketers feel very comfortable doing. As a team, we realized this was a huge pain point for our customers, so we’ve made the SSL certification process much easier to remove this blocker.
Without giving too much away, what things are you gearing your team to accomplish in the next 3 months? 6 months? Year?
In the next quarter, we’d like to move to a more modern contact management system and continue our work on CRM. I’d also love to have a product that has even better funnel reports, revenue attribution reports, and data that customers can use. I think there is also a way for us to use those reports to improve the way that we show the value to our customers — either within the platform or by email.
In addition, I believe marketing automation is the core of what we do, and I want to find ways to make our product stickier with our customers so they can fully leverage all of its capabilities. We’re brainstorming ways in which we can make tasks, such as setting up automated programs, even more intuitive.
On top of adding new features, there are always security and regulated industry concerns that we need to address as we develop the platform.
Can you talk about how we’re rolling out new updates by time zone or our recent work with automating SSL certifications for our customers?
I have a product delivery philosophy of releasing things incrementally instead of waiting six months to get something out the door. When I came on, the team was rolling out to our entire customer base every other Tuesday at 6 PM. In the course of the next few months, I want to get to the point where we roll out on a daily basis. Right now, we are also rolling out changes in smaller batches instead of to our entire customer base, so that we don’t have to do a complete rollback if things don’t work out.
The goal for the SSL certificate process is that it’s out of the box and it just works for our customers. That update is currently in place for new customers. We also have a program that we’re working on with Sarah Moore, our Senior Customer Marketing Manager, to notify current customers that have upcoming renewals of this more streamlined process.