From personal relationships, to B2B SaaS products—first impressions truly are quite the make/break of how things would go, going forward. 

In all seriousness though, a great deal of importance does need to be placed on planning for the trial experience, and this is a topic that our very own CTO and CoFOunder, Eran Friendinger, delved into in a webinar with Gainsight’s Founder and CTO, Mickey Alon. 

About Eran Friendinger

Eran has more than 20 years of experience with data, AI, deep learning, and managing large teams. He also has distinction in military intelligence, and is passionate about sharing his deep insights on marketing tech, predictive modeling, user-level data, and the role of AI. Before Voyantis, Eran co-founded Adience, a company whose core product allows deep insights into publishers’ mobile audiences, enabling short-loop improvement of the user workflow experience, generating a dramatic increase in ROI. Adience was acquired by MarketTech in 2014.

About Mickey Alon

Mickey Alon is a serial entrepreneur, passionate about designing, building, and launching innovative products that drive business outcomes. He’s the co-author of "Mastering Product Experience in Saas". He was previously the CEO and Founder of Aptrinsic and GVP of Engineering at Marketo, leading the product and engineering of Marketo real-time personalization product (former Insightera) and its content recommendation engine powered by predictive analytics. Additionally, he was CEO and Co-founder of Insightera, which was later acquired by Marketo.

Here’s the link to the playback of the webinar, in case you or your team might want to have a look. 

And feel free to check out the recap below, highlighting the main points that were discussed!

Recap of the webinar

Three obstacles to growth for PLGs

The webinar starts off with Mickey talking about the importance of driving predictable growth in today's market, as inefficient growth is becoming the number one priority for growth teams to think about. He stresses that companies need to think about how to effectively get customers of value, while also thinking about how well they will be retained. 

Most every data-driven company is beginning to look at these metrics, to gain a better understanding of how to activate and optimize on that data. Mickey then transitions to talking about three of the main obstacles to growth for PLG companies:

• The SaaS landscape is ultra competitive: This is why team members’ product experience needs to constantly improve and stand out
  
• Customer Acquisition Costs are too high: Two out of ever three companies are now competing primarily on customer experience
  
• PLG’s need to retain customers to thrive: Recurring revenue models rely on string retention and engagement to succeed

How PLG’s can create predictive, value-based acquisition

The mic then gets handed over to Eran, who jumped right into talking about the following points:

• The current state of B2B campaign optimization, with focus on common practices and methods
  
• A basic, yet effective way to predict CAC and LTV. You can read more about that in one of our previous blog posts!
  
• Why most businesses still struggle to adopt value bidding
  
• How advanced technology can help companies realize the promise the value maximization

Eran transition to talking about when it comes to the current state of B2B campaign optimization, most B2B’s aim to optimize for either Target Observable CAC, or Target Observable ROAS. You can read more about that (in great detail) by reading our two-part series on smart bidding strategies: here’s the link to part 1, about how to choose when constrained by budget. And here’s the link to part 2, about how to choose when constrained by business metrics.

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Eran went on to discuss where common practices fall short. In a nutshell, there are actually a few reasons. For starters, common solutions are only one-size-fits-most, and are too general. Maintenance is also an issue, as the value multipliers are rarely recalculated or adjusted. Additionally, there aren’t any mechanisms in place to test the sensitivity and impact of value adjustments. When it comes to scale, the multiplier approach will break at 3+ dimensions, since the segments become small. 

Predictive bidding at the user level is the holy grail for growth teams

Now here’s the part we all geek over—machine learning! This is the tech that plays a major role in predictive bidding at the user level. Machine learning empowers marketers to further break their audiences down to the minimal size, enabling the generation of viable predictions in a team/account level.

In turn, Eran talks about how granular, value-based segmentation unlocks growth. This is because of the ability to make better, more informed business decisions, as well as the ability to scale user acquisition efforts, while maintaining healthy unit economics with predictive tROAS smart bidding.

‍Check out the full webinar, to hear all the meaty details about predictive value optimization from Eran, followed by additional insights from Mickey on providing omni-channel experiences for UA.