Forming Habits & Word of Mouth

Death to silo thinking

Let’s have some fun with understanding habit and how to maximize the strongest acquisition driver out of it: Word of Mouth.

Act 1: Forming Habit

Users who reached a Habit of using your product are the best monetization target. For product, marketing, and sales. Oftentimes habit is synonymous with having great retention. Retention is money. It’s also notoriously difficult to optimize and manage.

The problem is that our traditional organizational thinking does not play well with it.

The first problem is that our users don’t care where they are. “Am I talking to support, sales, or using a product?” Doesn’t matter, the user has a goal in mind, whatever that is and they don’t care who solves it.

The experience that we give our users though is wildly different from this understanding:

• Support: Here’s a ticketing system and a faceless support agent

• Sales: Book a call ahead and from now on you only talk to me

• Product: Interacting with the other 2 silos is usually an afterthought, it’s hard to find support or sales functions on the page and the user usually has to make a conscious effort to get in contact with us.
  Instead of making it hard to contact support to drive down cost, we should marry it with a product to not even make it necessary to contact support.

It doesn’t matter to the user but it matters a great deal to us. Let’s put support aside for the moment and make at least the friction between sales and product.

Let’s work from two principles:

• User flows are not linear. Whether self-serving through product and then a handoff to sales is necessary or the other way we need to consider all routes and cannot expect anyone to behave rationally.

• Sales is not a one-way street. It’s very common that once a promising lead gets grabbed by sales they don’t let go of it. They take control of the communication and the experience of the lead. There is nothing wrong with letting a user come in through sales and then self-serve all the way to closing the contract without ever talking to sales again.

Let’s DO it

What if we structure our incentivization and targeting framework in our organization like that?

A habit is a synonym for experienced user value in a specific timeframe. This is highly correlated to other metrics. Habit is formed by reaching a Eureka Moment. An extended Value is experienced.

A Eureka Moment can only be reached if the user has an Aha moment. Experiencing the core value of the product once.

Experiencing the product is only possible if you are "set up". Creating an account is a typical setup moment.

In order to get to the setup moment we need to capture users in some form

Creating/capturing a demand with an interesting Value proposition does just that. We assume for this exercise that our Marketing efforts are working well and our value proposition attracts the right customers.

Structuring your functions while focussing on customer success

Visualizing and structuring the user's journey to Habit this way does a couple of things.