From enterprise to self serve SaaS with Gustaf Stenlund, VP of Growth at Nudge

Gustaf Stenlund is VP Growth at Nudge, a smart content dashboard product. Nudge have been on an interesting transition from an enterprise proposition and lengthy sales journey, to a SaaS based self serve model allowing any business to onboard onto the Nudge platform. 

Gustaf sat down with FINITE podcast host Alex to explore how this has impacted marketing and growth for Nudge.

This episode covers:

• Gustaf’s career and his role at Nudge
• Transitioning from B2C to B2B
• Gustaf’s view of the B2B landscape
• Nudge’s shift from a traditional marketing model to self serve SaaS
• The importance of using product insights across multiple teams
• Transparency for customers in a self serve sales model
• Shifts in Nudge’s overall approach to marketing
• The value of customer feedback
• Is there still demand for a traditional sales approach?
• Evolving growth opportunities within a self serve model
• Using CRM tools for data collection
• Does a self serve model mean a shorter sales journey?

Listen to the full episode below, or find our previous episodes here.

Full Transcript

Alex (00:07):

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to another FINITE podcast episode. Today’s episode is with Gustaf Stenlund. Gustaf is the VP of Growth at the content platform called Nudge. You can check it out at, giveitanudge.com. Nudge helps marketers to track and measure the effectiveness of content. They’ve recently been on an interesting journey from more of an enterprise offering and marketing and sales approach to transitioning towards a more self-serve bottoms up SaaS model, whereby anybody can get started on the platform. We could start to talk about what that’s meant for business as a whole, but also how they’ve approached marketing and some of the learnings there and the work that they’re doing to make that effective. So I hope you enjoy this episode.

FINITE (00:54):

The FINITE community and podcast, are kindly supported by Clarity Performance, the digital agency working exclusively with ambitious fast growth B2B technology companies. Visit clarityperformance.global to find out about how they partner with marketing team and B2B technology companies to drive digital growth.

Alex (01:17):

Hey Gustaf, thanks for joining me.

Gustaf (01:18):

Hey Alex, thanks very much for having me.

Alex (01:20):

I’m looking forward to talking, or hearing a lot about what you’ve been working on at Nudge and this journey you’ve been on more recently in terms of your shift of, I guess, wider business model, but also how you’ve been doing marketing and diving into this kind of transition period you’ve been through. But as we always do, why don’t we start with a bit of background and tell us a little bit about the role you’re doing now and how you ended up here and all that kind of good stuff.

About Gustaf Stenlund and Nudge 

Gustaf (01:44):

Cool. Yeah, absolutely. So, I’m originally from Sweden, but I’ve lived in the UK for nearly six years now. That’s gone quick. My background is very much in marketing. I started off in B2C, but during the past four years been working in B2B specifically in the ad/content tech space. I’d say it’s probably worth noting though, that B2B is now more like B2C than ever. I think consumers just want convenient, positive buying experiences from businesses that align with their values and proves trustworthy. So that’s something that I’ve taken from B2C to B2B. And I’m trying to replicate.

Today though, I’m the VP of Growth at Nudge. Nudge is a content platform that shows the impact of content. So, we essentially enable marketers to improve their content and distribution through measurement and insights. And this is a known problem in the industry. Only 3.4% of marketers say their content is effective. I mean, that’s crazy and I think that needs to change. So data really helps here. It gives you an early feedback loop on how content is received. And so Nudge just gives you that feedback loop essentially, so you can iterate, improve and demonstrate success. So that’s my background and that’s what I do today.

Alex (03:15):

Cool. Interesting. And I think that that transition from, we had a few marketers on the podcast that have gone from the B2C to B2B side. I think I’m always smiling to myself at how few marketers have actually kind of formally studied marketing. I don’t know whether you did in terms of education or not?

Gustaf (03:29):

I did, yeah. I did economics with a specialisation in marketing.

Alex (03:36):

I’m always interested in the education side of things because there’s just so much out there. Do you think that specialisation in marketing helps you get into marketing as a career? Gave you a good foundation?

Gustaf (03:48):

Absolutely. It’s a way to get your foot in first of all. Especially in today’s landscape where there’s a lot of recruiters, they tend to create filters on the back of those things that, by the people hiring or looking for, they’re saying this is the background we’re looking for and that ultimately excludes people who would be good at marketing anyway. So it’s very much a foot in and it gets you ready for terminology and thinking about certain things in more of a marketing mind frame I’d say, but most of what I’ve learnt is on the job.

Alex (04:35):

Yeah. I think that weird filters apply with the B2C to B2B transition too, in that there’s a lot of jobs out there that are like, you have to have experience in B2B marketing, and as you point out, I think that the key difference now is that there’s more people involved in the B2B decision making unit and things are a bit more drawn out and lengthier and considered and complicates in that respect. But ultimately a lot of the things that you’ve picked up from B2C, I think as you say, can be applied. So how did you find that transition and how did you get the first B2B opportunity?

Transitioning from B2C to B2B marketing

Gustaf (05:07):

Well, it’s funny because as you’re saying, it’s not just that you’re boxed into B2C. I was in education before, when I first started, and the job opportunities that show up and that are not truly fitted to you, are marketing within education. So it’s not just that you have to then try and go outside of that box and then another box. But essentially, I tried to look at the market, what is it that I want to actually do longer term, and then just started to talk to as many conferences as I could that I thought could be a good fit for me and then went that way. And eventually things worked out.

Alex (05:51):

Yeah, cool. Let’s talk a little bit about content and the wider landscape before we dive into everything you’ve been doing at Nudge. You talked a bit about how Nudge fits in and what nudge does and how it enables marketers to build that case around content, figure out what’s working. I think we’ve been on a bit of a transition of, a long time ago content being a bit more on the periphery, but the phrase content is king has been around for a long time now. And I think it’s definitely true and probably even truer at the moment when events and all the kind of impersonal stuff that a lot of B2B tech companies use to drive pipeline, aren’t happening. All efforts are focused on website content and SEO. I think it’s a channel that seems to be rising a lot for lots of clients. So, it’s very much at the heart of B2B marketing now. What’s your lay of the landscape?

Looking at the B2B marketing landscape 

Gustaf (06:39):

No, absolutely. It’s definitely something we’ve seen as well in the last five, ten years. Like today, there are so many different content formats it’s really cheap and easy to produce, and those are reasons for why the uptake has been so great. But I think one of the main reasons for why content has moved to the centre of the marketing mix is simply because it works. It’s a proven concept now. You know, when we look at our data, we know that content on average earns 48 seconds of attention, which is more than the average TV commercial,. It has 107%, I believe, higher brand recall than TV. So it’s proven. And also like in terms of driving conversion, I think it drives it 1 to 3%. So all of these things also ultimately mean that the uptick in the adoption of the particular format will be greater.

It’s definitely true that now with COVID, it’s definitely forced a lot of that digital transformation to happen a lot more quickly, but it’s also interesting because a lot of the budgets that were supposedly to be spent on sports this year, sport was supposed to have a really big boom. There were lots of budgets and they have obviously had to transition elsewhere. The sports companies who are content companies (a lot of them are finding that out very quickly) have had to come up with other ways of doing this. There are some very interesting news cases out there now where, you know, FIFA for example, have had pro footballers play FIFA against each other. They’ve created tournaments and that’s a form of content like, all of this has boomed on the back of the current landscape as well. But that’s just a very recent thing, obviously.

Alex (08:32):

Interesting. And I think you mentioned earlier, was it 3.4% or something of marketers feel like that content is effective and also how easy it is and low cost is to produce content now. And I think more than ever, it’s about quality over quantity. I know in B2B, I think that’s definitely true, but I guess that the barrier to entry to producing content is lower than it’s ever been, but at the same time, making content that’s effective is arguably harder than it’s ever been.

Gustaf (08:57):

Absolutely. That’s the tricky part. It’s easy to get started with, but how do you do it well and how do you do it better than the guy next to you? That’s ultimately what you want to be able to do. So that’s also what we’re trying to help our clients to do. To get that feedback loop. What is it that’s working, what isn’t and start building a model that works for you. A model that works for you is not going to work for everyone else because you have the different products, you’ve got a different audience, so you have to take your time and figure that out as well.

Alex (09:37):

Yeah. So let’s talk a bit about your own journey at Nudge, because obviously you’ve been on a bit of a journey of transition from, I guess, more of a kind of bottoms up strategy, or at least targeting a more enterprise approach to sales and marketing into heading toward more of a self service platform where any small business could onboard. And obviously there’s a lot of change that comes with that in terms of how you do your own marketing and approach things, but obviously wider business implications as well. Why don’t you just kind of set the scene, tell us a bit about how it was before and some of the more traditional models of how you were doing sales and marketing in that enterprise space and what really was kind of driving the shift.

Moving from a traditional marketing model to a bottom up strategy at Nudge

Gustaf (10:18):

Yeah, absolutely. So we had a traditional model. We’ve worked mainly with enterprise clients in the past, helping them measure optimised, large scale, branded content campaigns. Meaning content that lives on a publisher site, it could be influencer content, it could be social campaigns. And that was more of a traditional top down model. So the buyer might not necessarily be the user. Adoption requires a longer sales cycle and implementation. And from a marketing point of view, we have had a more traditional model to drive leads further. So you have the context form on the side. So you can request a demo to have a call with us and go over the platform in detail and discuss what sort of needs you have.

What we realised is to grow Nudge quickly and make the impact we want to do, we want to make in the industry, things needed scale. And I think this came at a certain level of maturity, both from the market. So we’ve been talking a little bit about how the content space has matured from a market point of view as well, but it’s also matured internally in terms of our platform is ready to scale now. We know that we’ve got traction in enterprise space. It works really well, and we were confident in that. So how can we now take this and, and help more marketers?

So we’ve essentially taken a bottom up strategy where the platform essentially sells itself now. So we’ve taken the core product of Nudge and made it available to more marketers. So all you need to go and do now if you want to get started, is go to the website, look at all the information, hit get started, and get yourself signed up. There are some really interesting examples out there of companies that have done that really well.

Dropbox, I’m sure most of you are familiar with, the well known cloud storage platform, is a great example of a company that did that really well. They’ve built a community of 500 million plus users. I think 12 million of those are paying customers and their platform was very much designed, not for IT, but for the user. And they didn’t have a platform that was in a walled garden type of situation. It was more an open ecosystem. And I really liked that. Like, I think that really helps. And what happened was, from their standpoint, their user driven approach, it capitalised a lot of integrations across a multitude of SaaS applications that also, you know, helped really push them to become a really successful company in this space. And that’s because of the model they chose.

Canva is another really good example. And it’s a more recent one. They’ve really nailed the bottoms up adoption model. For those of you unfamiliar with Canva, it’s an easy to use online design platform. Again, all you need to do there is go to the site, hit sign up, add your credit card details, and off you go, you’re ready to design. I mean, I’m a buyer for a reason. I really love that platform. I use everyday basically, but they’ve got this really neat content strategy where they’ve mapped up all of their template designs, they’ve got the business card designs and the Facebook posts to cover against two types of landing pages, essentially.

Say one is for people looking for design templates. Let’s say you’re looking for just business card templates, well, that’s the landing page you’re going get. With a simple call to action showing how to get started. The second is around people looking to create. So it’s a small distinction there between looking for templates and just looking for a simple way to create that. And they’ve done that as well. So they’ve got landing page specifically for that. And again, you land on that. You’re good to go. And they’ve done this really well because they also recently capitalised on soon backgrounds becoming a big thing in the last few months, but essentially the bottom line is one search result, you’ll find yourself signing up to that platform. And now you’re a paying customer. And I really like that. That’s a model.

Alex (14:42):

Do they have a free trial model? Or I guess, it’s the idea that you get in there at least cheap if not free. And then the rest of the scaling of that account or prospect happens afterwards. And that’s kind of a similar model to what you’re adopting.

Gustaf (14:56):

Yeah, exactly. So they’ve got, I believe, a 30 day free trial and then it just runs over.

Alex(15:03):

I think you need to be at a certain level of product market fit and have confidence in what you’ve got to be able to do that. It’s interesting because you see some companies that are.. I guess sometimes you transition the other way, they’ve got a SaaS product that’s like $30 a month or something, and they don’t feel like they can actually scale that. So they had more towards enterprise space and they build out more of a kind of account management type offering and it’s thousands a month instead of $50 a month or whatever. But then you’ve also got examples of heading in the other direction. I think it’s, yeah, there’s a lot of nuance and detail, I think which defines, which might be the best route depending on the product and the personas and those kinds of things. But it’s interesting to see, I guess, heading in both directions.

There was a stat that I saw yesterday actually, which just as you were talking, kind of reminded me, which was that I think I saw that Zoom through which we’re talking now, I think over 50% of their hundred thousand dollars a year accounts began with one person signing up for an account or a free account or something. So similar concept, I guess, of like one person in an enterprise organisation wishing to adopt soon, giving it a go and suddenly, I don’t know, six months a year later, that company is spending a hundred thousand dollars a year with Zoom. And again, if you’ve got a great product that does what it says and is effective and delivers the impact, then it will sell itself. Right?

Gustaf (16:27):

Yeah. That’s the beauty of it. And what I really like when it comes to the bottom soft approach, like within seconds, you provision users and track their usage along with their purchasing patterns to gain a full picture of who they are. And that means that you’re piled with a lot more data as well, because you can, on the back of that increase use of value, you can reduce adoption friction, expand across their organisations. As you said with Zoom.

Alex (16:59):

We talk a lot about sales and marketing alignment. And I guess this is almost like a sales and marketing and product alignment in that this is closely in line with the product itself, right? Because you need those insights from the product team and data to come out of the product itself. Has it driven a more unified approach to how different teams work together? And because I imagine that this isn’t just a business decision, this has impacted the product itself as well.

Using product insights across multiple teams 

Gustaf (17:25):

I think if you’re a growth marketer and you work for a SaaS platform that’s looking to scale quickly, you have to work across multiple teams to be able to do that successfully because all of that data will impact, as you said, a lot of different aspects of the business so that it informs product roadmap. For example, it helps, you know, soar out things on a customer service level, but also how do you speak to your audience from a marketing point of view? What sort of services, what sort of features do your audience use when they’re actually a paying customer? Those are the things that you also want to look at and then, you know, reverse engineer back to the type of messaging you might have and things like that. So like how do you know what people like, you might not have known that before you got that greater adoption as much. So it really helps inform the full circle of things within your business, which is exciting to me.

Transparency in a self-serve sales approach 

Alex (18:22):

Yeah. And I think that’s something that a lot of marketers I talk to miss out on is just even a simple conversation with sales or products or account management or whatever it is, can feed back into the top of marketing messages quite effectively and define content strategy. And there’s so much that it can, it can help to shape. I know that, myself as well, when I look at SaaS products and some of them, whether it’s the, I guess the cheaper end, but as you move more towards the enterprise end there’s a lot less transparency around pricing and how much things cost typically, I know that can be quite a frustrating experience for, I definitely find that frustrating myself when you, you do actually have more of an immediate need and you just want to try something.

And I think a lot of SaaS products, it is about the experience to some extent. It’s not just about what it does with the value adds. And maybe this is me a bit more personally, too, but I think if I’m going to pay money to use something, I like to know what the interface is like, how easy it is to use and part of the decision making processes, how is it to actually log into and interact with, and having to be forced through like a two week long? We’ll schedule a call for next week, then we’ll set up a custom demo. Then it can take months.

Sometimes that’s really off putting, I think for me in a lot of situations, and I can understand why some companies go along that route, but it can feel like a really rigid guided, you know, you end up with a STR, who’s got like a script that they just can’t deviate from. And every phone call has to happen in the right order. And every bit of information they need, you can kind of hear them like typing into Salesforce, as they’re asking you the questions. It just feels robotic and too structured and inorganic and kind of just frustrating. I guess that this approach counteracts that right? And it just gives a much more open, transparent access to the product itself. Much more immediately.

Gustaf (20:05):

Yeah. I mean, we speak a lot about transparency to our customers on a daily basis. Like it’s important to have that transparency into your marketing investments. So we find it equally important that buyers of our product have that same transparency into what our product would cost and to how it will work. Obviously that’s something you want to know upfront. We’ve got a pricing calculator on our pricing page where you can just go and slide it across and you see, this is roughly what you’ll be spending, this is your estimate monthly bill, because the way the pricing works for self service, we, we just priced it at 2 cents per cost per view. So any impression that comes to your content will cost 2 cents. So, you know, you might have 10,000 views on your content one month and then you’ll have zero the next, because you don’t have anything to track. Well, that’s gonna, that’s gonna show up on your bill. You’re not gonna pay anything that month. So we’re very much into that idea that you get what you pay for. And it’s completely transparent that way.

Alex (21:12):

I guess, one concern when I’ve talked to other markets about this and the reason for not letting people just kind of self onboard is that they’re sometimes worried about competitors just getting into that product and having a look around. And I’m sure you can see random Gmail addresses and, you know, sometimes it’s hard to know exactly who’s inside the product. Is that a concern at all?

Gustaf (21:31):

I mean, I think it might be a concern for some, but it’s not something that worries us particularly. The main reason for that is because if clients can access Nudge, we just have to presume that it’s something that competitors can too. And the way I think of it is I think it’s just the price you pay for the potential of exponential growth. I just think that’s something that comes with the territory.

Alex (21:56):

A cost and a risk you have to accept.

Gustaf (21:58):

Yeah.

Shifts in the overall approach to marketing

Alex (21:58):

Yeah. And that makes sense. So how has this kind of shifted the overall approach to marketing you’ve got your website? We’ve talked a bit about the price and cost kits you’ve got and some of that kind of messaging stuff that you’ve done. Are there other areas that in terms of how you’ve approached marketing generally, or channels that you’ve used, that you’ve had to shift your approach to them as a result of this transition?

Gustaf (22:18):

Well, obviously it’s impacted everything. So now we need to address the time difference part of the content marketing audience. It’s very different. Like I’d say in general, when it comes to B2B marketing in my own belief, I tend to make bigger changes rather than small changes, you know, AB split test them a lot. Like, especially when it comes to selling premium rate products that have longer sales cycles, you know, instead of making changes to the homepage, like big changes to the signup page, everything that could impact the conversion.

And I think this particular change has been very similar. It’s been a very similar story in that we’ve had to make a lot of changes quickly, you know, to make it relevant to the people we want to attract. So that’s everything from messaging to the advertising that we’re putting out. And I’d say a very big difference has been now we’re looking to increase the lead flow, you know, quite significantly on the awareness stage. So it’s very important to obviously get a lot of people in upper funnel and then have them trickle through. And, you know, you want to get the quality right of that as well. It takes time. But I think that’s where you have to focus.

One way of doing that for us is we have a newsletter that we put up on a weekly basis. And that’s something that’s a lot of marketers really like in this space, we’ve got a couple of thousand on there. Now we want to make that a newsletter four hundred thousand. We don’t want to only have it. You know, some, we don’t want it to be a resource only for enterprise marketers. We want to be for anyone in content. So that’s one way to get them in early, you know, interact with them a lot. And just over time gain their trust, have them try the platform, that type of thing. So it’s, it’s definitely gotten a lot more focused in that regard.

Getting feedback from customers 

Alex (24:07):

Makes sense. I think one key area of this is in terms of kind of figuring out what works and messaging is, is the research side of things in terms of talking to existing customers, talking to potential new ones. I know when we spoke before you mentioned that you’ve been doing both the qualitative side and the quantitative side, I think this is something that people just don’t do enough and I’m not sure what the reasons I think some people are just kind of scared to ask. Sometimes I think sometimes it feels like quite a big, big effort to do, but that kind of feedback is it’s usually valuable. So tell us a bit about what you’ve been doing on that front.

Gustaf (24:39):

Yeah. It’s incredibly valuable. So yeah, it’s exactly what you said. I contacted a bunch of marketers, you know, freelancers startups, midsize to enterprise, did a bunch of interviews with them directly to learn from them. First of all, do they understand what we do by looking at their website for the first time? What sort of questions do they ask? How are they surfing the sites? What features did they deem the most important? All of those things are incredibly important resources as myself as a marketer. Like I can use all of that as firepower. I did a questionnaire on the back of that to like fill in some of the gaps and get more quantifiable data around, what specific features did they actually like, like, not just having seen it for the first time, but when they actually sit down and think about it and yeah, I sat down and analysed all of that mapped out.

And on the back of that, we’re now changing all of our messaging across the sites. We learned that we had to adjust the structure of the site for information to flow more neatly and for it to make more sense from a user perspective as well, but that doesn’t just impact the site. It’s also everything we do marketing wise. I think it’s important to note, as you said though, like it doesn’t just end there. It’s definitely not going to be last time I do that because once these changes have been made, which I know we’ll be rolling out in the next few days, I’m lining up the next number of interviews to see what else we can do. So it’s an ongoing process and it’s one that’s not going to stop anytime soon. And I think it’s important for marketers to do that.

Optimising demand for a traditional marketing model alongside a self serve model

Alex (26:18):

Yeah, definitely. I guess one thing which is probably worth asking is have you had people from the enterprise space that haven’t wanted to actually use self-serve or people that have still got in touch and said, actually, can we have a demo or can we request a cool or that they might actually prefer the more old school route for whatever reason in an enterprise environment where maybe they have to go through procurement and security. And it’s more almost like driven by RFPs and different things. Has that ever happened?

Gustaf (26:45):

I mean, that certainly happens. Yeah. So it’s definitely, it’s really important to have both for us, especially when you have the client like that. I’d say in general, they do want that because as I was saying before, the buyer’s not necessarily the user and there’s a lot of intricacies there, so they might have one person on the call first and then they don’t like the team who’ll be running it. So they might include the team who’ll be implementing the tool.

Like, so all of that, if you’re an enterprise, that root is still a lot of the time preferred because you want answers directly over a call. You might have certain pressing needs that are more complex than the average content marketer. So that still very much happens, but we also see the other way around where, enterprise, they do get a little bit frustrated sometimes with the fact that they can’t just jump on it and use it to play around with the platform. So it’s definitely something that’s helping us getting enterprises onboard earlier in the cycle.

Like for us, if enterprise jump on and they’re able to do that without having to deal with legal in the same way, for example, that taking a lot of time and they’re kind of re realising that actually this is something we want to use. The platform has sold itself and we don’t need to spend time talking to them, well not all in the same way, because they’ve already made up their mind. So yeah, there are definitely two ways there.

Evolving growth opportunities within a self serve model

Alex (28:19):

And so are you thinking more about that in terms of once someone’s in the platform having to segment, who’s kind of a growth opportunity? Because I guess previously once you hand it over the lead to sales and the more enterprise traditional route that was to some extent it was job done. Obviously there’s the communication to do from a marketing angle with those existing clients, but it’s then in the hands of sales to move forwards and account managers or customer success, or however you structure things. Whereas now it’s like, even if someone’s just signed up self service, the job’s not finished of marketing.

There’s a, there’s a growth opportunity there, which I guess straddles both marketing and sales, but what kind of extra work is happening in terms of nurturing other things to kind of grow those people that are self serving?

Gustaf (29:02):

Yeah. So it comes back to looking at all the data, like how can we reduce friction? What kind of features are people actually spending time using? Ultimately it’s our job to see what accounts have the potential to scale up to that enterprise level. We usually say that if you’re hitting around 150,000 impressions to your content per month, you were ready to take that step because you’re already spending the entrance fee for enterprise anyways. So you should make the most of it. You know, there are many ways of lending these accounts up, but ultimately if clients are getting value from the platform, it should hopefully scale naturally.

You know, if there’s a need for them and they’re getting more value out of their own content, hopefully that’s something that they realise that it’s a natural progression. I think it’s also something that obviously we’re doing from an automated marketing setups point of view. So lots of emails educating our clients as they use the tool too. If there are new product launches or feature launches and stuff like that. We also want them to know if things are changing within their platform or within their accounts, like say they have content that’s not doing as well as others. They’ll get an email saying this is something you should take a look at, go into the platform, nudging them along very much similar to what the name is. That’s the name for a reason nudging their own work.

CRM tools for data collection

Alex (30:30):

In terms of the data side from the product, do you feed that back into like CRM? How do you tie everything together? Cause obviously you talked about people using a particular feature and so you’ve got data coming from all the different sources?

Gustaf (30:40):

There’s a bunch of different tools that we’re using to track usage. We even have like, so we can actually see how actual users use the platform. How do they use it?

Alex (30:56):

Like Hot Jar or one of those tools?

Gustaf (30:56):

Yeah, exactly. So like how do they run in, do they run into particular issues? What, what might they be? So we also, that helps inform everything from the knowledge base. So like what sort of questions might they have? We have information around what makes them annoyed. Like we surface, is this a tool you’d, you’d recommend to your friends? And then you can like add extra context around why, why not and stuff like that. So there’s a bunch of different data sources that we’re currently looking at to figure that out, to make it a smoother process overall, and to gain that extra traction and having them use us more like that’s the, that’s the end game, just getting more value overall.

Alex (31:40):

Yeah. It’s nice to see that alignment between everything you’re doing and the product and everything just kind of feels like everything ties together quite nicely and feeds itself. And it’s quite cyclical in nature in how you learn and, and feed that back into marketing. But everything else that in terms of the product itself too, you talked about making things kind of more frictionless and kind of speeding up that sales journey a bit. Have you seen the sales journey come down as a result of everything you’ve been doing in terms of its length?

Creating a shorter sales journey through your website

Gustaf (32:10):

Absolutely. So with enterprise, as I’m sure you’re familiar with, you know, it can take months to get sales through. That’s not our main journey on the site anymore, but it’s still there, but like with the introduction of self serve and if we do our job really well, obviously it will be set to shorten that sales cycle from months to weeks, maybe even days.

But what’s important to note is on our side, we need to make sure that everything’s crystal clear in terms of what the use will get from when they sign up. That that process is easy to follow, that there are simple ways to get help in case they need it. And just that the platform is in fact, delivering value to our customers, both short term and long term and all of those things help drastically decrease sales, uptake, the adoption. And I think the main KPI to look at there, just to know if it’s working, is, are we spending less time with clients as in chatting to them directly, but see the overall value go up? Well, then we know it’s working.

Alex (33:11):

Yeah. Interesting. That’s very cool to hear about everything you’ve been doing. I think it sounds like you’re, you’re still doing a lot and you’re still learning and still gathering lots of insights and moving pretty quickly on all that stuff, which is, which is cool. I guess if anyone wants to check it out, it’s giveitanudge.com is the website address to have a look at Nudge. But I think, yeah, there’s some really good insights you’ve shared there. I think even if you are in a more kind of enterprise space, there’s a lot of learnings there around alignment and I guess the research side of things and insights that you can use to feed back into marketing that still apply either way.

Gustaf (33:42):

Absolutely.

Alex (33:42):

So, yeah. Thank you so much for sharing and giving up your time and I’m sure it’s an episode that people will be really keen to listen to. So thanks. Good stuff.

Gustaf (33:50):

Thanks very much, Alex. And thanks for having me.

FINITE (33:53):

Thanks for listening. We’re super busy at FINITE building the best community possible for marketers working in the B2B technology sector to connect, share, and learn. Along with our podcast. We host a series of online discussions, so make sure you head to finite.community to subscribe and keep up to date with upcoming events.