Here, we're going to pick up on the funnel at the action step. This is the place where your customer takes action. If you remember from the hook framework, trigger, action, reward. With this action step, we're looking to minimize the amount of work that your customer has to do to buy your product and get some kind of reward. If you sell through a contract, have your attorneys put everything but the kitchen sink into it. And does it require a lot of negotiation and markup every single time? If so, see if there's a way to streamline that. If you're losing a lot of users in your online sign up process, look at why. Obviously, this is a terrible place to lose a customer. Because they've already demonstrated substantial interest in your product. With an Enable Quiz, maybe there is a couple of steps. Maybe Helen wants to talk with Frank or Francine, the hiring manager. And make sure they're bought into the idea of using the product. And then there is some kind of sign up, which we want to make as easy as possible for Helen. If there are other things that she may need to do, maybe we can layer those in later after she gets some initial rewards from using the product. And so the quantitative metrics that you're going to look at on action are things like, if you're using a CRM and you sell direct. Maybe you look at how many customers enter contract negotiation versus exit it. If you're doing online sales, it's entering that sign up and then making sure they exit it. And looking at your drop offs or your bounce rate on that sign-up page. And in the next step, we have on boarding. This is the process where the user gets, there's sort of two parts. In the first part, we really want to look at what the user has to do to get some kind of initial reward from using the product. Now we think that with Enable Quiz, Helen is going to create the first quiz to screen a candidate. If we can give her some other immediate reward though, that's definitely help us with our funnel. Because we'll get her engaged sooner and more reliably. Maybe we could do something like at some point, she can upload her job description. And we automatically parse out terms and make some suggestions for her to help her. Either tighten up the job description or automatically pair it with the quiz. And she likes that, it's something she can share and collaborate with her managers on. And then the second step in on boarding is sort to everything we need to do to make the user a habitual user of our product. So for example, with Facebook maybe that's going and finding all your friends. And maybe making sure the user is logging onto Facebook whatever they think is a good amount, once a day, twice a day. If this is a enterprise software product, we talked about the 30 day mark. Are users engaged by using the software after 30 days? And with SaaS, this is a really important step. Because if they're paying monthly, they're kind of just trying this out. And if they're not really fully on boarded, they're likely to drop off and eventually cancel. Not surprisingly, Salesforce is the first company I ever saw doing this where especially to a big customer, they would send in people often for free to actually look at on boarding. Is their customer engaged? Is their customer continuing to use the product? If on boarding is stale and not working, and you look at user activity, you often see something like this in your cohorts. So people that started at time T1, their activity climbs and then it sort of drops off and then maybe they leave. And then people that sign up here, we have the same thing happening and this is obviously bad. Something's happening here that's making these people not be as active. And you need to find out what that is and fix it. Because we're really far in the funnel here, and we need to understand the problem. If we look at it from this perspective, we kind of want to work backwards and we have a certain product. Are they finding the product hard to use? Or do we not have the adequate sort of functional space that they need to do what they want to do? Or is the proposition really not that compelling? Or are we solving a problem that doesn't really exist? As a product manager, that's how I recommend kind of debugging this and unpacking it. And finally, have retention. This is sort of a catchall for everything that happens once the customer is a habitual user of the product. One thing I really like to think about at this point and I talk to students about is your engine of growth. And this was something that was actually part of the lead original startup book. The idea is there is these three engines of growth. Paid, which means that we pay X for media, or advertisements, or leads that lead to a sale. So we're kind of looking at our cost of acquisition versus the lifetime value of our customer. How much do we make from a customer? And do those economics work, how do we lower this cost of acquisition and raise this lifetime value? Sticky is where maybe we're going to somehow spend some extra money on support and keeping the customer, and making the customer super duper happy. Because it's the longevity of the customer relationship that we're really focused on, so purchase and repurchase. Zappos is famous for this really going the extra mile in customer care, because they've seen that it helps them create really loyal customers. This looks like it says stinky, but it stays sticky. [LAUGH] And then the final engine of growth is viral or organic. And this is where we're looking at people's propensity to share, so the viral coefficient. If we get one person do they share it, or how likely are they to share it with somebody else? We kind of proposed that implicitly with Enable Quiz where we saw Helen view a post on LinkedIn. And then make one at the very end when she was happy with Enable Quiz. Another way to kind of back up from this funnel and look at the even bigger picture that I also like to use sometimes is growth, engagement and monetization. So what are our engines of growth? How are we bringing in customers? What are our engagement processes? So how do we, sort of once we're here, how do we keep people engaged and increase their use of the product? And then finally, how are we monetizing that? How are we making money, which will vary across products? Those are a few ways to unpack and look at the funnel. I think you'll find that if you're not sure about users, or where you want to focus. Unpacking this and looking at what's going on will help you break it into soluble pieces that are not only more workable for you as a product manager. But more workable for your collaborations and your interfaces with the rest of your interdisciplinary team.
