Re:catch is an inbound sales pipeline automation and acceleration software for B2B revenue and sales team to double their leads and revenue.
At Business Canvas, after scaling a document software Typed, our team decided to ideate and build a few other B2B SaaS products. I became part of a product squad that was assigned to design a new product in the sales tech space. Our team built Re:catch, an inbound sales automation tool. Initially, the tool was more focused on meeting scheduling. However, I developed product strategies to scale the product into a lead capturing and routing software instead.
Role:
Product Strategy, Product Management, Product-led Growth, Data Analysis, Data Science
Team:
Business Canvas
Duration:
December 2022 - January 2024
Results:
- Gained over 100 paying accounts
- Reached EoY product-led growth objectives
- Won Product of the Week on Product Hunt
At Business Canvas, I had an opportunity to scale Typed, a document and knowledge management software. Starting 2023, our team faced a new challenge of expanding our B2B product lines.
Our product team decided to focus on solving problems in the sales tech space first because our Typed sales team encountered many pain points trying to scale our sales-led growth. Scheduling sales meetings and calls, spending time qualifying leads, preparing sales meetings, and organizing these leads and potential customers all came with some challenges.
To identify problems in the sales tech space especially focusing on meeting scheduling, I conducted customer benefit analyses by interviewing over 20 potential customers whose daily tasks involve scheduling sales calls and meetings.
I first listed customer benefits that were brought up during our research and interviews. Then, I interviewed the potential customers to have them rate each customer benefit based on importance (how important this benefit is to them) and satisfaction (how satisfied they are currently with the benefit). The "Customer Value Delivered" metric was calculated by multiplying the importance and satisfaction metrics, and the "Opportunity to Add Customer Value" metric was calculated by subtracting the Customer Value Delivered from 1, indicating there is an important enough opportunity that has not been fulfilled.
I first selected some of the features and benefits based on the rating as our MVP scope. Then, I scoped out user stories which included the following:
- Users can integrate their calendar and show their own availability on our app.
- Users can drag time slots on the calendar view to select multiple available time slots to send someone else.
- Users can send time slots to others to book meetings with them using their booking page link.
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However, as our sales team was selling our initial MVP to customers, we quickly realized a big challenge as an aspiring B2B: the average revenue per account (ARPA) and the annual customer value (ACV) was too small. After all, a scheduling tool could be a killer feature but had a limit in our customers' willingness to pay. While the one-off scheduling feature can be a good addition to the overall product, it could not be the sole solution.
As a Product Manager, I studied the sales tech market as a whole again to assess if there are other opportunities to be added and re-evaluated with regards to our product positioning. After researching the market and various tools (and getting multiple onboardings from these competitor tools to learn more about them), I quickly drew this competitive landscape diagram and pitched it to the team.
Pursuing the lead routing and qualifying product next was the natural move to expand the current sales call scheduling tool into a greater product that can add greater value to revenue teams. I drew out how our current feature and new features will strategically work together.
While building Re:catch and its product-led growth, the importance of tracking product data and making data-driven decisions to improve the product became more obvious. I took the initiative of building a new product data analytics task force within the product team.
This came with the first initiative of defining user stories to measure and decide with data, then planning tracking events that can help measure the given user stories. Below is part of the tracking sheet I created and managed.
After our frontend engineer implemented the tracking events on the app, I was able to use the given events to create Amplitude Dashboards to track daily metrics.
Then I analyzed the data-driven user stories and their results and shared with the team. For those stories in which did not meet the success metrics, we strategized feature improvements and created Linear issues (tickets) to improve the metrics.
The reason why this user story was important was because the activation point for users was when their first meetings were booked. This meant the product needed to increase the funnel from landing the booking page to completing the scheduling process.
I defined this as the "meeting conversion rate" and set as its success metric.
After defining the story and its success metric, I came up with three tracking events that can measure the metric. With that, I was able to set up a visual dashboard to display the meeting conversion rate constantly.
Our goal was to increase the meeting conversion rate by 50%.
Initially, the meeting conversion rate was at 16.8%, meaning only 16.8% of leads who viewed our users' booking pages actually confirmed meeting scheduling.
With this goal in mind, the design team and I brainstormed a new user flow that warns the users who are attempting to leave the booking page.
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Since the goal was simple -- increasing the conversion in the booking user flow, the hypothesized solution to this was also simple. We decided to add a warning pop-up stating that users "who book a time will be prioritized" in the meeting and scheduling process. After adding this step in the user flow, we measured the result of this extra step.
The first result was to measure how it helped retain the users. As seen above, 6% of the users who were trying to leave the booking page were retained and ended up finishing the booking process. The more important question is how it affected the success metric: the meeting conversion rate.
More importantly, we measured how it changed our North Star metric which was the booking conversion rate. After adding the pop-up warning, it increased the conversion from 16.8% to 33.3% overall, doubling the metric.
Initially, the product grew with the sales motion and initiatives. While it was growing rapidly due to our inbound lead generation motions and channels such as SEO articles, webinars, and more, we needed to shift gears to rely more on the product-led growth to scale further. This meant I had to complete the following steps:
- Self-serviceable sign-up and payment
- In-app onboarding
- Strategic freemium pricing based on usage
- Documentation and knowledge base
Re:catch was one of the first products that I led a true zero-to-one phase as well as turning a sales-led business into a product-led growth strategy.
Three things stand out to me from this experience. One, I was extra obsessed with meeting users and customers. Whenever we were building a new feature or redirecting ourselves, I always made sure that our team was talking to current users and potential customers. Two, I made a lot of data-driven decisions for the product direction. This data-focused method set a good foundation when we were trying to achieve a product-led growth. Lastly, I built a strong understanding of other market players while figuring out what our product positioning should be like. I was able to learn quickly about the B2B sales scene and what stakeholders, tools, and players are involved in the work streams.
