Typeform exploded into popularity with their unique conversational form builder in 2012. Their product disrupted a market that was used to filling out static forms files by field. Typeform was able to boast form completions of 60%+ whereas a standard form completion rate is typically 15%. This helped Typeform grow phenomenally, they have 200 employees, have received $50 million in funding and are growing well. In this episode I speak with Sancar Sahin who is VP Marketing at Typeform about the marketing tactics and strategies they have used to grow.
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Last 5 questions:
What’s your best piece of marketing advice?
Pretty cliché, but I think it’s a good cliché, and it’s always ask a customer. So have a customer at the table as much as possible. So every time you plan, every time you build, every time you launch, bring a customer into that conversation. And I think if you do that, you’ll see that you get to success much quicker.
Can you recommend a book to our listeners?
The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni, I think you pronounce it. And it’s all about organizational health. So it’s about using organizational health as a competitive advantage, and it’s a very interesting read.
What software tool couldn’t you live without?
It’s got to be Slack really. I mean, I just use Slack so much to communicate, and it stores everything, you can search back through it. Slack really is a critical tool.
What’s your favourite example of a marketing campaign?
Outside of the SaaS world, it’s What Cards Against Humanity have done. I won’t go into a lot of detail, but anyone who knows about Cards Against Humanity will know that it’s a pretty random, and horrific game in the first place, but their marketing is spot on, so they … For example, they once just dug a hole in the middle of nowhere, and everyone wrote about it saying, “Why are you digging a hole?” And they kind of said, “Well, why not?” And I just love that kind of random marketing, it just really works, and it cost them next to nothing to do it.
And, within the SaaS world, I’m a big fan of what Zendesk did with their Zendesk alternative campaign. So they saw that as their brand grew, more and more people were searching for Zendesk alternative online, and to … Instead of doing the usual, “Let’s put a comparison landing page up, and talk more about our product offerings”, they created a fake band called Zendesk Alternative, and they created a whole campaign around it. They did a video series, a bit like being spinal tapped, very, very interesting.
Which other podcasts do you listen to?
So unfortunately I actually don’t get that much time to listen to podcasts anymore. I live very close to where I work, so I used to listen to podcasts on the way to work. I listen to Instead quite a lot, so kind of book summaries, which helps me kind of filter out all of the potential books I could be reading in more detail. And a show I do listen to, aside from yours, is the SaaS revolution show, created by the folks who do SaaS in Dublin.
Transcription:
Matt Byrom:
Hello, and welcome to this episode of the Marketing Strategies Podcast. Today I’m joined by Sancar Sahin, who is VP of marketing at Typeform. Sancar has been with Typeform for over three years, and has moved from the head of growth to the VP of marketing, so it’s fair to say he knows what makes Typeform tick. As a hight growth SAS business with over $50 million in funding, 200 employees, and customers such as Forbes, HubSpot, and Slack, I’m excited to understand more about the strategies Sancar and his team have used to acquire new users and grow their business. So let’s dive right in.
Matt Byrom:
How are you doing today Sancar?
Sancar Sahin:
Very well thanks Matt, thanks for having me.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah, you’re very welcome. I love Typeform, I use it, and I imagine many of our listeners do as well, so I’m very excited to have you on the podcast episode today. And for anybody whose listening and hasn’t heard of Typeform, please just tell us little more about what you do, who your customers are, and why people use you.
Sancar Sahin:
Sure. So Typeform is a next generation form builder. So anybody whose running a business online, will know that they exchange information online all of the time, and that’s usually done through an online form or a survey. If you think about getting the opinion of your customers feedback from your employees, or taking registrations online, or whatever it might be, all of this exchange of information is done through online forms. So it’s an extremely important interaction on the web, but the online form space hasn’t been disrupted for a long time. It hasn’t really evolved over time, it hasn’t become more user friendly let’s say.
Sancar Sahin:
So what Typeform does, is it allows you to collect that information online, through online forms, but through next generation online forms. So actually, Typeform was the first form tool to offer a one question at a time experience to its users to really make the exchange of information feel more conversational, and more user friendly. So, essentially, it’s next generation online forms.
Matt Byrom:
And what difference do you see with the one question at a time answer scenario, rather than having a normal form? Do you see increased conversion rates? What are the differences you see that make Typeform stand out from that point of view?
Sancar Sahin:
Yeah. So it’s very intuitive really. So if you think about how you like to be talked to in your daily life, it’s very unlikely that you want someone to come up to you and just shout a series of questions at you. It’s the same online, and when you improve that experience, and you talk to people like people, we do see that has a very big impact on the bottom line metrics, let’s say. So, the average completion rate for a form is around 15% throughout the industry, but for a Typeform it can go … Well, it can go very high indeed, but as an average it’s around the 60% mark, and that’s across many different user cases. So you really do see more people getting to the end of your form, and we believe that the data that you do get is going to be of better quality, because you’ve given people a better experience throughout.
Matt Byrom:
I mean, that’s an incredible different, 15% to 60% of people reaching the end of the form. 15% with normal forms, 60% with Typeform. I mean, that’s a no-brainer. I first sort of learned about Typeform, and I saw your forms out on the web, I think, before I even knew about your company, and I just wondered what the … It was so different, I really just wondered what the software was behind the one question at a time. And then I’ve looked into a bit further, found out it was Typeform, did a bit more research, and I really do believe that you’ve got a fantastic product there.
Sancar Sahin:
Thank you. Yeah, appreciate that. Our two founders, they come from a design background, which I think is what’s really create something that really had the customer and the user … the end user in mind. So they’re actually only solving a problem that they had for themselves, and then realized that there was a big need for this, and we’ve seen great traction ever since the launch a few years ago.
Matt Byrom:
Back in 2012?
Sancar Sahin:
Yeah, that’s right.
Matt Byrom:
So tell me about the marketing strategy at Typeform, what areas do you and your team focus on, on a daily, weekly, monthly basis.
Sancar Sahin:
Yeah. So I think, with any B2B SAS company, we’re very multi-touch. So there’s no one thing that you can point your finger at and say that’s the one thing that’s working for us now, and that will always work for us. We can never really look at just one channel as your saving grace for marketing. So there are many, many things we’re constantly trying on a daily basis, but really, there are probably three main areas that really work for us at the moment.
Sancar Sahin:
So one is our … from a marketing perspective I’m talking. So, one is, our thought leadership content. So, I actually come from a content background, and we put a lot of time and effort into some big thought leadership content pieces. We’ve done a conversational article where, as you read the article, it has a kind of chat bot experience throughout, and it’s as if the author of the article is looking over your shoulder and kind of commenting on certain bits as you read them.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah, I saw that. It’s really, really cool actually. It’s kind of … It’s a totally different experience from a normal article.
Sancar Sahin:
Yeah. And for some people it works, for some people it doesn’t. But actually, we weren’t trying to put a solution out there into the market, we were just experimenting. So we’re constantly thinking, “What could the future of the exchange of information online look like?” So it’s not about kind of delivering a conclusion on that, it’s more to get feedback. And actually, that particular article got a huge amount of reach, and we had hundreds of people asking us, “When can we build this within Typeform’s platform?” And we actually saw that people saw a real practical use for that technology. And, that actually led to an MVP product called, conversations, which is now available to sign up to as a BETA, and it allows you to create that same experience. To create a kind of embedded chat experience within your content. So your articles, your help center content, your job descriptions, whatever it might be.
Matt Byrom:
That’s fantastic.
Sancar Sahin:
Yeah, that was an interesting piece. And then, we did a few other pieces. We interviewed the original voice of Apple’s Siri, did an audio interview.
Matt Byrom:
Okay.
Sancar Sahin:
Yeah, it was great, and we did an interactive timeline article with it, and that got a huge amount of reach for us. It generated nearly 2000 high quality back links back to our site without us having to ask for anything, and just kind of really got us out there into the world, into the media. And people who had never heard of us, heard of us through this piece of content.
Sancar Sahin:
And very recently we launched an interactive video experiment, which is using Typeform’s technology on top of videos. So you can actually choose your path, depending on the answers you give to certain questions that are delivered to you through the Typeform UI. So this kind of thought leadership, high impact content, has managed to give us a large amount of reach, helps us position ourselves in the market as the company thinking about the future of this space, and also does have an impact on the harder metrics, let’s say. The number of back links we get, the traffic back to the site, and other things as well. So that thought leadership content has been a hero of our marketing strategy since we began a few years ago.
Matt Byrom:
I guess you’re not … it’s not necessarily just what people would usually associate thought leadership with really, is it where you’re actually just giving your knowledge and experience, you’re actually pushing the boundaries and creating something new, something different, something that people haven’t seen before. Something technologically advanced that people haven’t really experienced before. So it’s actually something that’s highly shareable from point of view as well.
Sancar Sahin:
Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, I see thought leadership in a couple of different ways. And I think one way is maybe the more traditional sense where, you’re positioning yourself as an expert in a particular subject matter for example. The way I like to think about this kind of thought leadership is, positioning ourselves as the thinkers of tomorrow in this space, if that makes sense?
Sancar Sahin:
We were very lucky, we were there at the right time and the right place, and we disrupted the market with one question at a time. No-one had done that before, now it’s becoming more and more common practice actually. So the product itself kind of disrupted the space, and what we want to do is make sure our content actually enhances that feeling of Typeform being the ones thinking about the future of this space. And that’s how I look at this type of thought leadership.
Matt Byrom:
Is content and SEO, back link generation, and increasing your search metrics, is that a big area of focus for Typeform as a whole?
Sancar Sahin:
Yeah, it is. And that’s actually … That’s kind of what I would say is our kind of second pillar within marketing. So we create these big interactive thought leadership style pieces really for positioning in the market. They’re not designed to bring people directly into the product necessarily, but what we see from getting that amount of reach, and that kind of shareability, we see things like back links come in without us having to pay or beg for them essentially, which is an SEO’s dream, right, not having to sit there all day and beg for back links. And what that does is, that has a very real effect on our lower down the funnel strategies.
Sancar Sahin:
So we’ve actually managed to build up a domain authority, which is, I think, now exactly the same as HubSpots for example, and obviously HubSpot is very famous for leveraging inbound as a key part of their strategies.
Matt Byrom:
Absolutely, yeah.
Sancar Sahin:
So we’ve got to this point where we’ve managed to get ourselves to this really strong defensible stage. Obviously, other people can come in and get to that point eventually, but it takes a lot of time, and it takes a lot of resource. And now we’ve got to this point where we have a nice strong domain authority, and that means we can leverage that a bit lower down the funnel. So for example, when we create new landing pages for high intent keywords, we see that we rank very, very quickly for those keywords on Google. We know pretty quickly if it’s working or not, and when we make optimizations it has a very quick effect, because of that strong domain authority.
Sancar Sahin:
So there’s never really kind of separate strategies in marketing, everything’s interlinked, and should be. So something like really top of the funnel, or even above the funnel content, can have a really real, and tangible impact lower down the funnel as well.
Matt Byrom:
So what you’re saying there is, just to summarize I guess, is that you’re creating high value thought leadership different pieces that are really pushing the boundaries to generate traffic and back links to build your profile, and then when you’re creating other pages that ultimately helps those pages rank much quicker?
Sancar Sahin:
Exactly.
Matt Byrom:
And it’s actually a strategy that I’ve seen work extremely well for other companies, is that creating pages based around the user needs, and ranking those pages so that when people search for solutions around those needs, they actually find Typeform, is that something that’s a part of your strategy as well?
Sancar Sahin:
Yeah, absolutely. So searchers really are a two-headed beast. You have the branded side of search, so people searching for your brand name, and they have a different intent to people searching for a subject matter that you can provide a solution to. So for example, for us there are lots of people on a daily basis searching for things like formed order, survey maker, quiz maker, online registration form builder, things like that. From the short tail to the long tail, and these are people who, they’re basically telling us, “We know we have a problem, and we know we’re looking for a solution, but we don’t know that you are the solution”, because they’re not using our brand name. And that’s an opportunity for us, that’s an opportunity to put our brand front and center. So as long as we’re at the top of the page for those searches, then we’re constantly showing ourselves to new potential customers.
Matt Byrom:
Do you see a lot of your new lead generation, new customer acquisition comes through search?
Sancar Sahin:
Yeah, search is quite big for us. We do a bit of paid search as well. I’m sure you know paid is becoming more and more … it’s taking up more and more real estate on Google, and especially in mobile. So the two things, I actually don’t see them as completely separate either, so they enhance each other. But, yes, our organic search is a relatively big part of our acquisition mix.
Matt Byrom:
And how are you finding paid these days … paid search, are you finding its getting more competitive, more expensive? Is it still a strong performer for you?
Sancar Sahin:
Yeah. I mean, its definitely becoming all of those things, more competitive, more expensive, the two kind of go hand in hand unfortunately. So, what we’re seeing is, there’s this huge trend of SAS products building out their core product experiences so that they’re more of a 360 product for their audience. So, if you think of somebody like Melgen for example, started off as an E-mail provider. I mean, their core product offering was about sending E-mail campaigns. And now, what they’re doing is, they’re positioning themselves more as an all-in-one marketing solution. So they plugin Facebook ads, and retargeting, and all of that are really internet products.
Sancar Sahin:
What that allows them to do is, really increase their LTV, and when they increase their LTV, they can become much more competitive on their paid channels. So as a SAS product, if you’re not really keeping up with that, if you only offer one part of the wider solution that a customer is looking for, then you really kind of reduce your … you limit your opportunities to increase your LTV, and then therefore become more competitive on paid.
Sancar Sahin:
So yeah, paid is constantly a game of … it’s not just a marketing problem, let’s say. The core product experience has to really kind of match the channels that you’re using so that you can remain competitive.
Matt Byrom:
Absolutely, it all has to work together to build the whole. And do you find that actually, that might be a future strategy for Typeform is actually build out and expand your product to serve different customer needs as well as their form fill needs?
Sancar Sahin:
What we know is there’s one thing we do really well, which is forms. So we do forms well, and we’re not trying to necessarily do everything really well. But what we have realized is that, there are plenty of other companies and brands out there who do other parts of the … If you think of why a customer comes to Typeform, they don’t come to us for a form necessarily, they come because they have a job to be done. They have a whole job that they want to get completed, and Typeform happens to provide one part of that job solution.
Sancar Sahin:
So what we’re starting to do, is really look at, “Well, what are those other parts of the job, and how can we enable our customers to get that done really, really well without adding lots of friction to that process?” And the way that we think we can do that, is through partner enabled solutions. So really, this is about us connecting with as many partners as possible through integrations, and just removing that friction from the set-up process. Really helping our customers complete the whole job, without having to jump over 50 hurdles to get there.
Sancar Sahin:
So, yeah, it’s definitely a big focus of ours, but really through working with partners and expanding our integrations offerings, rather than trying to do everything really, really well. Which is, if you think of the HubSpot model, it’s kind of think about everything that can be done, and build that product experience in house, whereas, we’re a little bit different from that where we’re taking the integrations route and working with partners.
Matt Byrom:
And that makes total sense as well, because then you’ve got nice integrations that work really well, and you’ve got best in class software that does each aspect of what you actually need to do. I mean, we use Autopilot as our marketing automation platform, and that has a great integration with Typeform, so they work really nicely together from that point of view. We’ve got a great marketing automation platform in Autopilot, and then a great form provider in Typeform as well.
Sancar Sahin:
Yeah, exactly. People like Autopilot, Intercom, we’ve recently launched an integration with them, and now Typeform can seamlessly be added into the Intercom chat experience. Things like this, it’s really about understanding what the customer is trying to get done, and then working with the right people to help them do that, rather than try and take over the world with our own core product experience.
Matt Byrom:
Fantastic. You were saying you had three main areas that you were core focused, or worked really well for you. We said thought leadership, we touched on SEO and everything associated with that, paid search as well. Was there a third, did we cover that, or?
Sancar Sahin:
Yeah, so the third is a bit of a cop out really, cop out answer, but it’s really the product as marketing, right? So actually there’s only so much that you can do in a company like Typeform in terms of marketing channels. Really, it’s the product that drives the awareness of the offering, and the more we improve the core product experience, the better our word of mouth marketing is. So Typeform is highly, highly driven by virality and word of mouth. So we see a huge kind of, almost, disproportionate number of people come through channels like direct, and branded search. Somewhere there’s some awareness being created, and that’s created through a mix of strategies, but really it’s about the product, and people talking about the product, and spreading the word.
Sancar Sahin:
And we’ve seen this reflected in real numbers, when we launch particular, what we think are sometimes small improvements within the product, we see a direct impact on conversion rates, and we see things moving within the funnel. Just as an example, we recently launched a … So we have a feature called, Logic Jumps, which is basically question branching, so you can say, “If somebody answers A, then send them to X. If they answer B, then send them to Y, et cetera, so you can make your Typeform’s smarter.” We added a visualization tool to allow you to actually kind of map that out and visualize it, and that had a 10% increase in the conversion from sign up to pay, even though it wasn’t a paid feature. So that was just core product experience that kind of generates additional value.
Sancar Sahin:
And that, for a marketing team is really gold, where the product itself generates huge word of mouth effects. And that’s really what gets people coming back to the product.
Matt Byrom:
That’s the ideal position to be in, where you’ve got virality, word of mouth, and that’s a big driver of your traffic and user sign ups really. I did a search on similar web, which shows that, and I know it’s not entirely accurate all the time, but it shows that a high percentage of your traffic is direct. And obviously that would indicate that there’s a lot of word of mouth and virality in your product as well, which is the ideal position to be in, I guess.
Sancar Sahin:
Yeah, exactly. Word of mouth and virality have really kind of been the foundation of our acquisition mix in Typeform. It comes with its challenges, because when most of your traffic comes from direct or branded search, it tells you very little about how they actually first found out about Typeform. So there are other things you need to kind of layer on top to try and break that down. But it’s a very luxurious position to be in, let’s say, because actually, if you just keep making your product better, then you see those numbers increase.
Sancar Sahin:
And then, that means that the role of marketing is really two things, its to support that effect, you surround a product with other great interactions, really nice branded interactions, and you also make sure that you have this sense of control. So things like paid marketing, it’s more like a tap, right? You can turn it on, you can turn it off, and by having that ready and being prepared for when you need it, puts you in a stronger position.
Matt Byrom:
I was going to say actually, it’d be nice to maybe dig into that a little bit more. You’re in a luxury position here, where you’ve got a lot of word of mouth, people talking about your product, mentioning it to their friends, their colleagues, and saying, “Check out Typeform, it’s amazing.” How do you actually measure that, and how are you actually tracking that back from … or, like you say, adding layers onto that, how are you getting more information to sort of really dig into where people are finding out about you in a deeper sense?
Sancar Sahin:
To be completely honest, the whole attribution topic is not something we have nailed down by a long stretch. We still have that challenge of attribution. We still very much have that challenge of, most of our customers come from just a couple of channels, and these channels are very last click. These aren’t the channels where people discover us. With something like, non-branded organic search, you can be pretty certain that, that person has actually discovered your brand for the first time through that search, because they weren’t searching for your brand, they searched for another keyword. So you can be pretty certain. We introduced that person to our brand through that means.
Sancar Sahin:
When they come through direct, you have this other list of questions, which is basically, “When did you first hear about Typeform, and how did you first hear about Typeform? Was it at an event that you went to, was it listening to this podcast, was it a friend of yours told you about the product?” And that’s really a big challenge for us.
Sancar Sahin:
So how do we solve that? Well, we haven’t solved it yet, but we’re looking into using our own tool, right? So we just ask people. We ask people through a Typeform exactly, and we just say, “Hey, when did you first hear about Typeform, and how did you first hear about Typeform?” And that doesn’t give us a really scientific data set, but it does give us some really useful information. So if we see that 80% of those people say they heard about us through a podcast, then we need to be investing more in podcasts. So it’s really about just having that little bit of extra information.
Matt Byrom:
And you’re putting people into general buckets in that sense to say, it might be a podcast, it might be that they actually got a referral from a person that’s actually using Typeform, or it might have been search, but that was further down the funnel for example. Are you then putting people into those buckets?
Sancar Sahin:
Exactly. So we have some kind of high level buckets, or categories that we would put people in, and it’s generally where we invest the most, and that’s what we ask about. And of course, we give people the option to tell us something that isn’t on the list. But things like search, you can’t really ask somebody if they found you through a paid search ad, or through an organic ad. It’s not really worth going to that level of detail, because one, they probably don’t remember, two, they don’t really care. So that way you get an answer about how many people find you through a search, but you don’t really have an answer about if it’s paid search or organic search. Which again, is why you need to be careful looking at those as two completely separate channels.
Sancar Sahin:
But yeah, we have those high level buckets, let’s say.
Matt Byrom:
Okay. So, if we were to look at … We talked a lot about the user acquisition side of things there, how do you market to people once they’re in the consideration phase, or once they’ve actually started a trial of Typeform?
Sancar Sahin:
Yeah, good question. So the first thing is, we consider somebody whose signed up to Typeform. They’re still very much in the consideration stage, so it’s not as if as soon as someone signs up and gives us their E-mail address, that we’ve won that person’s loyalty. That’s not how we look at it. So, we actually imagine that when somebody signs up to Typeform, they’ve probably signed up to a competitor at the same time, and they’re just trying it out. So that means a couple of things needs to happen. One, the product itself, the product experience, needs to give you good onboarding, and we haven’t got that right at the moment. We actually recently revamped our whole build experience within Typeform, and while it helps people get to value a lot quicker, it does also isolate a few people, because it’s not the traditional way to build an online form. It’s not the drag and drop anymore, it’s just type.
Sancar Sahin:
It’s very intuitive and very easy, but actually, for a lot of people who are used to other build experiences, it’s not immediately intuitive. So we need to improve that onboarding experience quite a lot, and that will be something we’ll be doing. So on one hand you have the product onboarding experience, and then we have our kind of life cycle channels. So, we use E-mail and retargeting, in app notifications for example, to really help people along that part of the journey.
Sancar Sahin:
And you mentioned the consideration stage, and that’s really important, because, it’s a point in the customer journey where we need to not oversell our product, and not try and get people to pay unnecessarily. What we’re trying to do is, tell them that they’re in the right place. So we make sure that they have access to reviews, we send them customer stories about real people solving real problems with Typeform. So it’s about really kind of choosing your message, and delivering that at the right time.
Matt Byrom:
That’s interesting. So, again to sort of summarize, that what you’re saying is that, people sign up and they might sign up for a number of different form providers at the same time. It’s typical, I guess, in the SAS industry, where people will try, try, try until they feel like they’ve hit the right one. And what you’re saying here is actually, that what you’re trying to do with your marketing at this stage, is really build trust, help people understand that they’re, as you say, in the right place, and that they’re in good company really?
Sancar Sahin:
Yeah, that’s definitely correct. I mean, a good analogy for this, I think, is the American dating scene. It’s not so common in the UK, where we’re from, but it’s quite common in America to date multiple people at the beginning, right? So, you could be dating three different people and you’re in consideration stage, right? You’re asking, “Are you a cat person, are a dog person?” You’re trying to understand if you have shared values, all of that kind of stuff. And then, when you’re ready to commit to that one person, you tell that person, you tell the other two people that it’s time to part ways. So it’s the same thing for products like this I think, you start off by just testing the waters, but you haven’t fully committed, and that means we still have a job to do. We still have to convince you that we’re the right solution for your problem.
Matt Byrom:
And then how are you measuring the success of each part of your marketing funnel? You mentioned the onboarding is an area where you might feel that there is an area for improvement at the moment, and what are you doing in terms of measuring that success each stage? Are you doing regular experiments to see how things change the percentage sign up at each stage, or how does that work for Typeform?
Sancar Sahin:
Yeah, so we track multiple metrics, and what that allows us to do is, have a very … We can have a simplified look at our funnel, or we can have a complex, more segmented, in depth look at our funnel.
Sancar Sahin:
Either way when you look at those … when you zoom out and look at the funnel, you can see where the gaps are, you can see where people are dropping off. So what we do is kind of hone down on an area that we want to improve. So for example, if we see that acquisition is very strong, but we’re losing people when we get them into the product, then it’s telling us that we’re not onboarding people correctly. And actually, this is something that we have seen.
Sancar Sahin:
So what we’ll do is, then we’ll run a series of experiments within that stage of the funnel to help us have a very kind of tangible impact on those metrics. And it’s all about really talking to the customers and finding out what is going wrong for them, why are they dropping off. And usually, the answer is right there under your nose when you talk to some customers, and yes, some things are simple to change, and some things not so much. But, yeah, we really kind of look for those opportunities and try and focus our experimentation around that particular area.
Matt Byrom:
That’s interesting that you say you speak to customers, I know it’s something that every business does in some way, but how are you actually opening those conversations with customers, and at what stage, and how do you go about that in a sort of methodical way?
Sancar Sahin:
Yeah. So we’re really lucky, because we have a great tool for asking questions. So we often just send out a Typeform to customers via E-mail, and just ask them questions and get feedback in that way, but we also have a great customer success team who is a lot closer to our customers, let’s say. These are a group of people who talk to real customers every single day, and that’s actually a wealth of knowledge for us, because they have so much information about … straight from the customer’s mouth about what they like, or what they don’t like, the reason they came to us in the first place, the reason they left. And that information constantly fuels what we’re building and what we’re producing for our customers.
Sancar Sahin:
So, it’s really, you have the kind of quantitative side, which we can use our tool for and get lots of information from a lot of people at once, and then we have the qualitative side, which is our customer success team just talking to customers on a daily basis.
Matt Byrom:
Fantastic, and I guess those teams will feedback to your team, and help you … and the product team, and help you actually improve and test things and push things forward.
Sancar Sahin:
Yeah, exactly. So we work with the customer success team on … When we redesign our landing page, we don’t just do the kind of on page experiments and look at what number increases and what number decreases when we add this bit of copy, when we add a video, or whatever, we actually start with a conversation with customer success and say, “Look, how can we make this as useful as possible for customers?” And that really comes down to what people have said they are missing when they land on our product. What information are they looking for. So really that dialogue is really important.
Matt Byrom:
And it’s common in marketing that people say, the closer you can be to the customer, the better your product will be and your marketing will be really. And that just totally shouts exactly what you’re saying here really is that, we speak to customers and we ask them questions, we send them type forms, and we like to understand where their pain points are, what they like, what they don’t like, and then you can improve from there.
Matt Byrom:
On the other hand, how do you keep people as customers and reduce churn? What do you do as a marketing team at the other end of the process where people might have left, or they might be thinking of leaving, or might be going to a competitor for example, what do you do in those areas?
Sancar Sahin:
Yeah. So from a marketing perspective, we see our job as ensuring that every stage of the customer journey we deliver the right messages. And that means that when we’ve convinced somebody that Typeform is the right solution for them, our job doesn’t end. We need to keep reminding our customers that they’ve made the right decision, and we do that through different content strategies. So for example, we create lots of customer stories, and we take a very editorial approach to our customer stories so they’re not your kind of traditional testimonials. And we tell peoples real stories, and by doing that and using the storytelling approach, we remind people of the different ways that Typeform can help solve your problems, and that helps reduce churn and increases loyalty both in the product and the brand as a whole.
Sancar Sahin:
And of course, there are certain channels that can really help with that. So retargeting is a great way to deliver that message at the right time. So you can even feed product metrics into that, so if somebody is becoming less active, then maybe you step up a little bit your inspirational content to help people reengage with the product.
Matt Byrom:
That’s particularly interesting. So you’re from that sense, tracking the user’s engagement with your product, adapting your marketing to those people based on how they interact. So I guess from that point of view, are you putting people into certain journeys, or funnels, or workflows based on how they’re using Typeform product?
Sancar Sahin:
Yeah, exactly. And I can’t pretend we have the most sophisticated set up, we have our limitations as well, but yeah, we … the more segmentation you can do the better, I think, and the more personalized you can make the experience. If somebody is using the product, if they’re getting loads, and loads of value out of it, and they’re using all the features to the fullest, and all of that kind of stuff, then it doesn’t make sense to bombard them with content that basically convinces them to use all the features, because they’re doing it. So maybe it’s better to kind of put them into a more inspirational flow, where they just … they learn more and more about how other people are using Typeform.
Sancar Sahin:
Whereas, if people are struggling to get their value, then it does make sense to put them into a flow that kind of shows them how to get to that value quicker, with more pragmatic content that says … So, yeah, we try and segment people as much as possible.
Matt Byrom:
Absolutely. And like you said earlier, it’s all about sending the right messages at the right time to support the people with what they need.
Sancar Sahin:
Exactly.
Matt Byrom:
And I guess we talked a lot about acquisition, and marketing channels, and metrics, what does the Typeform tool kit look like? What software do you guys use on a regular basis?
Sancar Sahin:
I mean, it depends in what kind of area we’re talking about really in marketing, we’re actually pretty simple with our tech stack. So, we don’t use anything like HubSpot for example, for our website. So we don’t actually do deep personalization on our website at the moment, we keep our messaging relatively horizontal until you get into the product experience itself, and then we’ll use E-mail, retargeting, in app, et cetera, to give you a more personalized experience. So, actually, our website is built on WordPress at the moment. It doesn’t mean that’s always going to be the way.
Sancar Sahin:
We use Typeform an awful lot. We genuinely do, we use Typeform a lot to kind of talk to our customers and our employees alike. We use Slack internally for messaging, I couldn’t live without Slack. At the same time if Slack didn’t exist my life would probably actually be a lot simpler, because I wouldn’t have so many messages to think about. It’s kind of a catch-22 situation.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah.
Sancar Sahin:
But, yeah. We use hundreds of SAS products every day really, and our analytics is on Google 360, so we use the pro-version of Google analytics for example.
Matt Byrom:
So stepping back a little bit. So if we were to say, 2019, what’s important for your team, what marketing strategies are you going to be focusing on, what are the big initiatives for you guys, and what areas are you going to be doubling down on? Where have you seen success over this last year that you want to double down and, just really put some extra focus into any particular area?
Sancar Sahin:
So for next year, it’s really about making sure that we don’t have a marketing strategy, and a product strategy, and a customer success strategy, it’s really making sure that actually the company has a … is pulling in the same direction.
Sancar Sahin:
What that really means for us, is making sure we’re building our core product experience to solve people’s problems in a much deeper way. So there’s a few things that is packaged into that. We need to really react to the customer voice, and make sure we’re building things that people are asking for, but we can’t only do that, we want to innovate on top. So we originally disrupted the space, and we want to keep making sure that we do that again. So you’ll see a lot of innovation coming from the product next year. And then from a marketing side, we’re going to support that and make sure as many people know about it as possible, and more specifically we’re going to be leveraging our strong SEO profile, and making sure that we really step up our content. And we’re not talking about quantity of content, we’re talking about quality of content.
Sancar Sahin:
So the product needs to solve people’s problems, and our content needs to solve people’s problems. So with that kind of two=pronged approach, I think next year could be really, really interesting.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah, it sounds like a much more integrated approach where you feel like you’re solid in the market, and it’s a case of really focusing on product and getting the message out with some innovative new product features, and also marketing things as well. You guys are obviously, as I said earlier, pushing the boundaries in terms of things that people have seen before, and it’s a particularly exciting time to be following you guys. So I’m going to actually wrap this up. I’m going to take this to the last five questions, which is five questions I ask every guest on this podcast. So if we can start with number one is, what’s your best piece of marketing advice?
Sancar Sahin:
Pretty cliché, but I think it’s a good cliché, and it’s always ask a customer. So have a customer at the table as much as possible. So every time you plan, every time you build, every time you launch, bring a customer into that conversation. And I think if you do that, you’ll see that you get to success much quicker.
Matt Byrom:
That’s fantastic actually, I love that. I think it’s a great, great recommendation that some people … that people often overlook really, is to just speak with customers and just find out what they think, you often get to the answer much quicker.
Matt Byrom:
So can you recommend a book to our listeners?
Sancar Sahin:
Yeah. So you send me these questions in advance, and I was thinking about this, and the one I chose was, The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni, I think you pronounce it. And it’s all about organizational health. So it’s about using organizational health as a competitive advantage, and it’s a very interesting read.
Matt Byrom:
I think actually that has been recommended in another episode of the podcast as well. Reid Hastings actually, not on the podcast, but recommended it to all his executives to read at Netflix I believe. So I bought that book, and I’m still yet to read it, so maybe you’ve prompted me there as well.
Matt Byrom:
And number three, what software tool could you not live without?
Sancar Sahin:
So I’m assuming that I can’t say Typeform? It’s got to be Slack really. I mean, I just use Slack so much to communicate, and it stores everything, you can search back through it. Slack really is a critical tool.
Matt Byrom:
Obviously it sounds you use Typeform an awful lot as well, so–
Sancar Sahin:
We do.
Matt Byrom:
— that’s definitely one that you couldn’t live without.
Matt Byrom:
And number four, what’s your favorite example of a marketing campaign?
Sancar Sahin:
Outside of the SAS world, it’s What Cards Against Humanity have done. I won’t go into a lot of detail, but anyone who knows about Cards Against Humanity will know that it’s a pretty random, and horrific game in the first place, but their marketing is spot on, so they … For example, they once just dug a hole in the middle of nowhere, and everyone wrote about it saying, “Why are you digging a hole?” And they kind of said, “Well, why not?” And I just love that kind of random marketing, it just really works, and it cost them next to nothing to do it.
Sancar Sahin:
And, within the SAS world, I’m a big fan of what Zendesk did with their Zendesk alternative campaign. So they saw that as their brand grew, more and more people were searching for Zendesk alternative online, and to … Instead of doing the usual, “Let’s put a comparison landing page up, and talk more about our product offerings”, they created a fake band called Zendesk Alternative, and they created a whole campaign around it. They did a video series, a bit like being spinal tapped, very, very interesting.
Matt Byrom:
I actually haven’t seen that, but I’ll dig that up, and I’ll–
Sancar Sahin:
Yeah, check it out.
Matt Byrom:
— put it on the show notes page, so anybody who want to check that out then there will be some content on there around that, it sounds interesting.
Matt Byrom:
And finally, what other podcasts do you listen to?
Sancar Sahin:
Yeah. So unfortunately I actually don’t get that much time to listen to podcasts anymore. I live very close to where I work, so I used to listen to podcasts on the way to work. I listen to Instead quite a lot, so kind of book summaries, which helps me kind of filter out all of the potential books I could be reading in more detail. And a show I do listen to, aside from yours, is the SAS revolution show, created by the folks who do SAS Doc in Dublin.
Matt Byrom:
Excellent. Well, I’ll link all those in there as well. And I have to say, Sancar it’s been an absolute pleasure talking to you today. I implore anybody who has not been to Typeform before to go and check it out. Cool product, and as Sancar mentioned earlier, if you’ve got a normal form, 15% is your normal completion, while if you’ve got a Typeform it’s around 60%, so why would you not use it. Check out this show on iTunes, and the show notes pages at mattbyrom.com, and Sancar, once again, it’s been a pleasure talking to you today.
Sancar Sahin:
Thank you Matt, thanks for having me.
