If you’re a marketer at a product-led org, you’ll definitely want to read this.
I sat down with VP of Marketing Kristen Bryant Smith to get a behind-the-scenes look at how Help Scout gets customers.
We tapped into how they grew to $30M+ ARR sustainably, predictably by building a content brand, and the importance of customer support and marketing working together to tell their product story.
I can’t wait for you to apply these insights to your own company.
What you’ll read here are words. Some Kristen’s. Some mine.
— Brendan
Below, we’ll explore:
- When it comes to goal-setting, how do we measure ambition vs accountability?
- Why your product story is really what gets customers
- The foundation of Help Scout’s marketing
1. How far out do you plan your marketing in detail, and how has that evolved over the years?
Overall we set a tone on an annual basis, but I think in terms of confidence in the tactics and things that we’re actually going to do, it’s more quarterly.
Our annual planning is basically always in flux *laughs along because we can all relate* but I will say our most recent iteration was the most successful.
We start by setting our revenue targets for the year which come from our board and senior leadership team. Our revops team is exceptional in terms of planning, forecasting, understanding our customer base seasonality, opportunities that arise with our product roadmap, etc.
As a marketing team, we have a strong understanding that a lot of our business is self-service. Close to 70% of our customers (and 50% of revenue) comes from folks who never talk to sales.It’s important for us to set goals that align with that reality and not assume our business model will magically change within a year.
Setting targets that feel achievable but also bring out the best work in people is crucial – but it’s also difficult to pull off. You’ve got to balance ambitious forecasting and not burning out your team. We did several cycles over overly-ambitious forecasting to learn this the hard way.
It’s not just burnout either. People are driven, but when they come up short it feels like a failure. That’s not just burnout, it’s a lack of confidence.
I think it should be less about ambition and more about accountability with goal setting. If you set your goals more conservatively, you’re more accountable to achieving them. If you set this really ambitious goal and you don’t hit it, it’s more “it is what it is” and move on.
2. How many marketers do you have? How has that team changed over time?
We have 14 total marketers now, but when I started there were only 8 with a 3-person growth team, 3 for content with me as the director + SEO + a writer, 2 on product marketing, and the VP of marketing, and we just ebbed and flowed.
We hired a bunch, we had natural attrition, unfortunately, we’re a tech company and have laid people off… A lot has happened over the past few years, but I think with our 14 now there’s a good balance of skill sets across product marketing, content, and creative.
I worked in product for a while and one thing I learned was that product teams can vary wildly from company to company. What you care about, how technical a PM needs to be, how much ownership they have over the roadmap, etc dictates what’s needed from the team.
I don’t think enough people talk about this when it comes to marketing. The complexion of your marketing team relies on the type of marketing that will set your company up for success in the long term.
If you’re a company that can get a bunch of customers that churn out really quickly but you can stay afloat (there are actually companies like that), your marketing will differ from a company that has a really high ACV and is more interested in high-quality customers with lower churn.
All of these marketing motions mean that companies have fundamentally different approaches to marketing.
For us, we’re focused on SMB so our ACV is pretty low., Not only do we need to acquire a lot of customers, we have to retain them. That means we have to have an outsized emphasis on brand in terms of differentiating ourselves and a healthy obsession with delivering a great experience to our customers.
That means we disproportionately focuson things like messaging, content, understanding product value, and being very product-led in the way that we market.
This is similar to how our Sales team works. It’s very much a consultative process in making sure people understand the value of the product.
We care about being the first support tool people use and about keeping customers around for 4+ years. One of our cool success stories is that Slack was an early Help Scout customer. They’re not anymore, but they had a great time while they were here and that’s what’s most important to us.
Stewart, if you’re reading this, you should come back. I think we’re still a great fit for Slack.
3. What were the best performing channels for you? Did that change over time?
Our biggest revenue driver has been and still is content.
It’s not just because of SEO strategy, but because we make sure that we’re putting out content that’s refreshing, relevant, and real,
The audience and organic growth we’ve gotten purely from giving people valuable content has paid dividends.
There’s something to be said about how content differentiation really sets your brand apart. We’re not just creating content for the algorithm.
A lot of people can do that, but will you have better open rates on your newsletters, or the connections with your customers like we have, or bring enough value to their lives that they become brand advocates?
I think as companies, we have to make content compelling enough to choose us.
Consumers only have a certain amount of minutes to consume content in a day.
Are they going to spend it listening to us on a podcast, or would they rather continue the Britney Spears memoir?
We are truly competing with things that are more entertaining, so we have to provide value.
4. For marketing strategy, who comes to these meetings, who runs the meeting, and how often do you meet?
Our core group shaping marketing at Help Scout is our Chief Revenue Officer and our Marketing leads, which includes our Director of Content, Director of Product Marketing, Creative Director, and me. We meet weekly to keep things on track and ensure we’re thinking far enough ahead.
5. Do you use OKRs (e.g. objectives, key results, 70% goals, etc.) in some form?
This is something that is ever-evolving at Help Scout so I always caveat this with we are not OKR experts, but we do have OKRs at a company level. These are goals that we are committed to across the business, and that feel new and exciting and will carry out throughout the year.
Then we have team goals that are tied to those annual company objectives and some that exist outside of what our strategic viewpoint is as an entire company.
Those team goals are really, “what is our target revenue and what are we going to do to get there?”
6. What’s your primary tool for tracking tasks and campaigns? And for production?
At a project level, we use Asana. At a planning level, we use spreadsheets, including an OKR tracker.
Our Revops team also has this really lovely GTM pacing sheet that shows how we’re pacing toward our goals MoM. I have no idea how the thing works, but I like it and it’s accurate.
(The formula =Target x (DAYS(TODAY()-1,”start of the quarter (YYYY-MM-DD”))/ # of days in the quarter ).
As you move up in your career, internal alignment becomes more and more important. Is X aligned with Y? Are we all going together and are we sequenced together in the right way?
Say you want to put out a new ebook. That’s great, but does MarOps have time to set up the list? What about the creative team? Are you up to speed on our CMS so you can put up the landing page on your own? What are all the pieces that have to align to execute?
We have annual goals and themes, but you always have to leave space for new ideas. . I do struggle with SaaS companies that have to stay on trend. I’m not going to have our team come up with a Help Scout Spotify Wrapped, but there are definitely viral moments we can capitalize on that maybe weren’t talked about during annual planning.
7. How do you make time for everything so everyone isn’t always running at full capacity?
Brenden, when you figure that out, let me know. 😂
Our Creative team tends to catch the most because we care so much about design. Design touches everything so they’re usually the team that will come across areas we haven’t had time to improve or fix.
Because of that, I’m working a lot with our Creative Director to only plan things out at 80% to give us that wiggle room for things that come up.
A great example of this is our brand refresh. We initially scoped it to touch our 12 product feature pages. We thought that would give people enough of the new vibe but it quickly became a slippery slope.
The new brand was so good, I didn’t want anyone to remember that we used to look different so we needed a lot of wiggle room from that original plan of just 12 pages.
We actually delivered 42 new pages and I’m glad we did. A lot of them have performed significantly better in terms of conversion since the rebrand.
“Everyone is always asking for more, but it would be great if we could normalize real capacity over hoped-for capacity.”
8. What is the difference between average marketing leaders and those who are able to attract, hire and retain top talent?
Role clarity is the first thing that comes to mind. I want to make sure everyone knows what my expectations are.
Our People team does a very good job making sure we have transparent career levels across the entire business.
Up front in the hiring process we talk about role level and salary and make sure that you have clarity on your potential career growth, and what is expected of you to get there.
People also get frustrated in roles where they feel they’re outperforming but aren’t being recognized, or the role has dramatically shifted and it wasn’t acknowledged.
Thematically, this is all role clarity.
The second piece, which our new CRO Andrea has helped a lot with, is tying expectations and activities for roles back to business results.
It becomes very hard when you’ve done a ton of great work and later find out it didn’t have impact or drive business results. And I’m not just talking about revenue.
For example, we have less brand awareness than Zendesk for obvious reasons. So we have a lot of work to do on brand that just won’t show in revenue, but it definitely still contributes to driving the business forward.
If you’re proud of the work and it’s not recognized because it’s a fuzzy marketing metric, that’s demotivating.
So I think those two things – role clarity and that recognition or attributing work to business results – make the difference.
9. How do you avoid altitude sickness?
First, I don’t micromanage things. If I’m in there with you, I’m not gonna be there long.
At 22, I knew I wasn’t supposed to be in the weeds on things. I just wasn’t the best at it. I knew then my skillset was coordinating people that are much better at their jobs than I am.
Talent matters a ton. I want the people on my team to always do better at their jobs than I can, and I always want them to understand that.
“I can’t do much with my hands.”
So ultimately, the answer to avoiding altitude sickness is to make sure that your people are accountable not only in terms of what is happening, but also reporting out to you.
10. Is there something unique or philosophically core to how the marketing team and leaders think about acquiring customers?
The core of our marketing is 100% around mutually growing with the customer.
For us right now, one of our huge themes in content is navigating this cultural shift that’s happening with customer support and AI.
From what I’ve seen, no other role gets targeted more for using AI than customer support. With writing or other tools, there’s still this inherently human aspect about what’s being written, but customer support often gets framed as a call center so it’s targeted.
We have developed such a strong rapport with the customer support audience that they come to us to learn about advancing their careers, company goals, etc.
What helped a lot in that regard is that we drink our own champagne. We do everything in house first.
We actually had a webinar recently where our CS content lead moderated the conversation with our internal support team to just give them a space to talk about what it was like to adopt our own AI tools for CS.
And we want to do more of that and just LET. THEM. TALK. We’re over the company position or holding the company line.
We’re asking them to make these changes, so we want to know what it’s like for them. Our CS team essentially is the bar for our product development process. It’s incredibly important for us to be honest about what it is that customer support people are going through, especially when you’re waking up to click-baity headlines about companies eradicating their entire support teams with AI.
People appreciate you being real and open about what your own shortcomings are and having an objective view of things.
We all do the ‘best of’ lists, and of course we’re going to put ourselves first for customer support tools, but what other tools are out there that could objectively benefit the customer more?
“There are reasons, albeit few, that you might choose Zendesk over Help Scout, and we’re ok with saying that.”
The other thing is never forgetting that revenue doesn’t just show up the same day. We’ve had moments on our team where we’ve allocated a lot of funds and people to middle and bottom of funnel things because they can be tracked easily without also recognizing that we need to continue to widen the funnel.
Without that, we run out of juice to squeeze from the lemon.
With our CRO, she’s comfortable with efficiency slipping if growth is happening. We’re not going to compromise growth to be as efficient as possible with a certain channel.
Ultimately, if you do brand marketing and messaging correctly, you should get lift all over. You inevitably become more efficient because by the time they get to your site, they already knew about you.
Everything is warmer and therefore more efficient, but that can’t happen if you track brand with the same metrics as direct response.
11. What other questions do executives ask each other that often aren’t shared publicly?
The first thing that comes to mind is a meme I saw the other day of the shock of joining your first senior leadership team, like “This is what they talk about?!”
So much of it is things nobody else thinks about. When I think about why hierarchy exists, it’s really about timelines. Who else is thinking about where the business will be in 5+ years if not the CEO?
These meetings are very future oriented. How we’re thinking about the product roadmap, different operating systems across the business, and so on. Ultimately, if we’re not thinking and talking about the future, then who is?
Our CRO Andrea is the dean of CMO school and she learned late in her career that so often people are focused on being a functional leader – the M in CMO- but what is required to be the M is different than you being the C, when you’re discussing the overall strategy of the business.
Final notes from Kristen
Customer Support is a layer of your brand experience. Often times, there’s a large gap between the two, but CS and marketing are the two homes for the tone of your company.
Our CS team is the voice of Help Scout, so how far removed can the brand be from how people actually experience the product in the CS queue?
There’s a real tie between brand being the overarching connector between GTM and customer-facing teams.
The more marketing leaders understand the experiences people are having with your CS team the more equipped you are to be successful, especially in a product-led company. The product features is one part of it, but our CS team are essentially our account managers.
If all of your customer-facing teams aren’t in sync with support, it can all fall apart.
How to use this info:
1. Send a DM to your teammate: “Lindsay — I read about how Help Scout gets customers from their VP of Marketing, Kristen Bryant Smith, and I think their philosophies would work really well for our team! Mind if I send them over?” Then send her this link.
2. Meeting with your boss: “I just got a behind-the-scenes look at Help Scout’s approach to marketing a product-led company like ours and I think we can learn a few things. This might be worth bookmarking.
3. Linkedin Post: Why product-led orgs should heavily focus on content differentiators and the overall customer experience (yes, marketing should partner closely with customer support!)
Make sure you connect with & tag Kristen!
Thanks for reading!
This is the 13th CMO playbook and part of a long series.
If you have a tip or feedback, I’d love to hear it.
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