Throughout the world of business, dialogue involving Q+A has replaced speeches and presentations as the format of choice for sharing ideas. Executives are frequently interviewed on stage, job candidates confront a battery of <a href="https://www.fastcompany.com/90415895/how-to-answer-5-common-trick-questions-designed-to-trip-you-up-in-an-interview">questions designed to trip them up</a>, and most formal meetings involve back and forth discussion involving questions and answers.

The Q And A Model

This evaluation of the question asked is often a stalling tactic—an effort to buy time while thinking. Occasionally, it might be a sincere response to an especially thoughtful question. The problem is that if you say, “That’s a good question,” you’re elevating yourself above the questioner. If you’re an executive in a meeting, you’ll sound condescending toward the employee who’s asked the question. If you’re a job seeker, you’ll sound arrogant (or, equally bad, fawning) in praising the hiring manager interviewing you.

Saying 'That's A Good Question!'

Your job is to answer the question, not evaluate it. Instead of commenting on the quality of the question, pause. Don’t be afraid to take a moment to think in silence, and, when you’re ready, make sure you respond confidently.

Don't Evaluate, Just Take Your Time And Answer

It’s a ubiquitous phrase. But here’s why you should eliminate it from your vocabulary before your next big interview.

career

Career

Why you should never say ‘That’s a good question’ in an interview

Rapid delivery is a relatively new phenomenon. It started when Amazon introduced Prime in 2005 and promised two-day shipping. When Amazon entered the grocery business in 2017, it made same-day delivery possible. Instead of price wars, it was time wars. “Amazon effect” is associated with increased expectations for quick delivery. These desires have pressured, if not irritated, retailers. Wanting something right now is a desire associated with instant gratification, a behavior linked to impulse control and addiction.

The Amazon Effect

Psychologist Walter Mischel, head of the famous Stanford Marshmallow Study, offered preschool-aged children their choice of marshmallows or pretzel sticks. He then told them they could have the treat now, or if they could wait 15 minutes to snack they would be rewarded with more. Those who waited for a bigger reward were later reported by their parents to have better academic performance. Since the landmark study, social scientists have experimented to learn how a person delays gratification. One study from Florida State University found that willpower was a limited resource.

Alexa, Test My Willpower

When a person perceives pleasure say, a glimpse of a chocolate cake on a restaurant’s dessert menu, the ventral striatum experiences increased activity. The prefrontal cortex, which handles reasoning and rational thought, must override the drive and tell the server ‘just the check’ will be fine.Researchers have used fMRI machines to present a participant with a potential reward, and then observe the prefrontal cortex activity as the person either opts to pursue pleasure or holds off. These scans have found distinct neural activity between control groups and people with obesity, alcoholism.

Siri, Scan My Brain

Unless a person has a disordered problem with online shopping, wanting quick delivery is not a problematic example of instant gratification. And because of free return policies, consumers often buy an item with the understanding it might be sent back, which means they aren’t even committed yet to the purchase.The same year Amazon Prime started, only 46 percent of Americans had ever bought a product online. Thus, prompt delivery didn’t stem from consumers’ demand for instant gratification. It came from a retailer’s demand for consumers.

OK Google, is This a Problem?

The rise of 'Amazon effect' feeds our need for quick delivery. But that doesn’t mean we’ve lost all impulse control. 

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

Have We Come to Rely on Instant Gratification?

Numerous research projects have found that having friends at work is a good thing. <a href="https://hbr.org/2017/08/having-work-friends-can-be-tricky-but-its-worth-it">Science</a> has found that meaningful friendships in the workplace have benefits like increased emotional well-being, trust, and loyalty. It’s also good for you physically. Making and keeping workplace friends will reduce stress and anxiety and increase your productivity. Your career friendships lead to more candid feedback, a greater sense of belonging, and <a href="https://www.calendar.com/blog/6-ways-to-foster-better-collaboration-in-the-workplace/">improved teamwork and collaboration</a>.

Colleagues With Benefits

You can be friends with your employees. That’s because it comes with advantages like having a fun and relaxed atmosphere. The connection can also help you get to know each other better. As a result, you’ll have more respect and appreciation for one another. And, you’ll be more committed to helping each other out when needed.On the flip side, there are disadvantages. For example, if the friendship goes south, it could lead to conflicts that have nothing to do with work. When the connection has negative consequences, performance decreases, and a toxic work environment has been created.

The Pros And Cons Of Having Friendships At Work

Sometimes it isn’t easy to treat all people the same, but keep this in mind at all times. The balancing act is somewhat like being a parent who has more than one child. You can’t pick favourites, and you need to be consistent.  <ul><li>Resist hiring anyone merely because of their sunny disposition. You want upbeat, yes, but you need to insist on qualifications.</li><li>Be respectful to all of your employees and treat them how you would want to be treated. You wouldn't want to work at a company where your voice is never heard; your colleagues always rely on the opportunity to speak up.</li></ul>

Treat Everyone The Same

Avoid disastrous leadership mistakes like:<ul><li>Publicly creating and bullying others.</li><li>Failing to share and receive feedback.</li><li>Discouraging creativity and innovation.</li><li>Solving problems with a quick fix.</li><li>Not properly delegating work to the right people.</li><li>Resisting change.</li><li>Micromanaging and assigning too much work to others.</li><li>Failing to set goals for your organization.</li></ul>

Don’t Be a Toxic Leader

There needs to be some distance between you and your employees. After all, you still need to have some sort of perception of hierarchy. Some understanding of authority ensures that everyone can get along just well without crossing the line.The best way to stay within guidelines is by establishing ground rules. For example, you can spend time outside of work during happy hour, volunteering, or when attending industry events. But, you may have a policy that you do not attend the birthday party of your employee's children or that you never drink alcohol with them.

Establish Ground Rules

Don’t hide out in your office all day. Get out there and mingle with everyone. Have them lunch with them -- schedule one-on-ones with each team member. And, occasionally get your hands dirty and work in the trenches with them.When you take the time to get to know your employees, you get to find out what their interests are and what makes them tick. You get to learn what hidden talents they possess. And, you may discover that you have more in interest then you previously thought.

Take The Time to Nurture The Relationship

Honesty is one of the best principles you can use to establish a healthy balance between caring for your employees and leading them professionally.The closer you get to someone on a personal level, the harder it becomes to give them honest feedback as employees.Build trust with each of your employees. For example, grant them autonomy and flexible schedules. Trust in your employee builds resilience -- shows you rely on them enough to work where, when, and however they prefer. As a result, this will create a more positive and productive culture.

Be Honest, Trusting, Understanding

If you don’t feel confident enough to strike a balance between being a boss and friend, seek assistance from someone else. For instance, you may want to have an unbiased party make important decisions, such as promoting or <a href="https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/79928">firing employees.</a> Don't mention anything about your personal feeling and relationship to the third party -- and give them complete autonomy to determine the decision.

Enlist the Help of a Third Party

As the boss, you'll want to take care of your own well being as far as workplace connections. Do what's best for your emotional well being and your emotional intelligence so that you can stay at the top of your team productivity.

The Bottom Line

How to make sure your personal connections at work are healthy and productive.

corporateculture

Corporate Culture

communication

Communication

teamwork

Teamwork

Team Productivity: Striking a Balance Between Being a Boss and Friend

At its core, a growth model boils down to a way to conceptualize and summarize your business in a simple equation, which allows you to think about growth in a holistic and structured way. “A growth model is an equation that tells you what are the different variables in your business and how they work together and translate into growth.”

What is A Growth Model?

When you build a mathematical model, you need the following components:<ul><li>Inputs</li><li>Function</li><li>Output</li></ul>The same applies to a growth model.

What Does A Growth Model Look Like?

In Andy Johns’ interview, he shared a basic growth equation which he learned from his his former boss, Chamath Palihapitiya, who then ran growth at Facebook.Growth = A (top of funnel) * B (magic moment) * C (core product value)

A Basic Growth Equation

Leave the numbers and equations aside and start with a high level conceptual model that captures the core levers of growth. This alone will provide a valuable framework to help you make good decisions. Bottom line is this model should explain how your business will grow, in a way that is different from that of other companies.

Start Constructing Your Business Growth Model

The answer is no. Why? Simple: your time is limited, it probably makes more sense for you to spend time on improving your product and growing your initial user base, rather than on building a growth model.Still, there are unique benefits of going over the exercise of creating a growth model and making it part of your day-to-day decision making.

Do You Have To Create A Growth Model?

<ul><li>The process of uncovering all variables and then synthesizing them into one single equation will deepen your understanding of the business</li><li>Growth model also helps you assemble individual metrics into a big picture, and force you to think about their relationships and the relative importance</li><li>When entire team look at a single equation with a couple key variables, it helps prioritize and focus</li><li>Once you have growth model version 1.0, you will naturally begin to find questions to ask. As you ask more questions, you change how you do business, or adjust your model, or do both, and so on and so forth</li></ul>

Benefits of a Business Growth Model

When I was hired as PM Growth at GrowthHackers.com, one of my first few tasks was to create a growth model for the business. With my past experience and training, I was familiar with concepts such as…

startup

Startups

How To Build A Growth Model (Part 1)

Your success as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company is totally dependent on getting and keeping users in your product. Traditional tactics will likely not help to scale your business quickly because they focus on engaging prospects and users outside of the product.&nbsp; Your success depends on: <ul><li>Delivering personalised in-product customer experience which requires you to understand and have the ability to influence user behaviours inside your product.</li><li>A new product-led go-to-market (GTM) strategy that guides marketing, sales, customer success, and product teams.</li></ul>

Personalised product experiences

Delivering a personalized, in-product customer experience will be crucial for every Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company. It enables companies to build a competitive advantage and optimize how they drive revenue, customer acquisition cost (CAC) efficiency, renewals, and intelligent product development decisions. Meaningful, memorable customer experiences can rapidly lead to growth and even market domination.

The Importance of Customer Experience

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies must understand the full customer lifecycle, unify customer data, and track their customers' personal journey through their products. This is only possible with a Product-Led Go-To-Market strategy.

A Customer-Experience-Focused Organization

<ul><li>Show, Don’t Tell: Allow prospects to try a product that will improve the buying experience and give important behavioural data that can help to further personalise the experience.</li><li>Use a customer lifecycle framework rather than a product lifecycle or marketing/sales funnel.</li><li>Understand the whole customer journey, instead of just part of a transaction or experience.</li><li>Align goals around the customer experience and prioritise the Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) metric across departments.</li></ul>

How to Become a Customer-Experience-Focused Organization

To succeed with a product-led go-to-market (GTM) strategy, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies must adapt their processes, tactics, and metrics to support a customer focus. The following can help to establish a solid foundation for a new approach. &nbsp;<ul><li>Define a new customer acquisition process.</li><li>Drive customer acquisition and adoption with a product-led strategy.</li><li>Product-led customer retention and expansion. Embrace organisation-wide accountability for customer success.</li><li>Lay the groundwork for scalable, repeatable customer acquisition.</li></ul>

Implementing a Product-led Go-to-Market Strategy

Your success as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company is completely dependent on acquiring and keeping users in your product. But if you’re using traditional marketing tactics, you’re likely…

Mastering Product Experience (in SaaS) With Product-led Strategy

In the traditional sense, a customer acquisition strategy is a list of channels and techniques of where and how customers will be acquired.&nbsp; Saas companies have to design an initial interaction between the prospect and their product.&nbsp; A customer acquisition strategy is an essential part of your Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy. It covers four elements:<ol><li>Customer (WHO)</li><li>Market (WHERE)</li><li>Product Offering and Pricing (WHAT)</li><li>Channels (HOW)</li></ol>

The customer acquisition strategy

An essential part of designing a customer acquisition strategy is looking at how prospects buy instead of how your company sells its product. It requires you to understand your customer's lifecycle:<ul><li>Acquisition stage</li><li>Adoption stage</li><li>Retention stage</li><li>Expansion stage</li></ul> The four steps of a customer acquisition strategy:&nbsp;<ul><li>Drive awareness and demand&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>Design initial prospect-product interaction so the prospect can try your product&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>Design a journey to deliver value to prospects&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>Convert prospects to paid customers&nbsp;&nbsp;</li></ul>

Designing A Customer Acquisition Strategy

An effective customer acquisition strategy will:&nbsp;<ul><li>Boost product growth</li><li>Reduce Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC). CAC can be a silent killer of SaaS companies.</li><li>Shorten the sales cycle</li><li>Force a focus on the initial interaction</li></ul>

Customer Acquisition Strategy Is Important

Incorporating freemium or free trials in your customer acquisition strategy can help your company sell more effectively. Psychological reasons are:<ul><li>The Endowment Effect. People attribute more value to things merely because they own them.</li><li>Behaviours Drive Attitudes. Studies suggest that prior knowledge of the brand makes a person slightly more favourable towards it.</li><li>Loss Aversion. We fear loss more than we value gain. That is why we favour a free trial.</li><li>Effort vs Impact. How much effort will your prospects spend to try your product vs the kind of impact (benefit) they will get.</li></ul>

Four Psychological Aspects of a Customer Acquisition Strategy

Freemium is a customer acquisition model that gives free access to part of a software product without a time limit. Free trial is a customer acquisition model that gives a partial or complete product to prospects free of charge for a limited time. Companies often structure freemiums using a few parameters to limit the usage, for example:<ul><li>Feature-limited&nbsp;</li><li>Capacity-limited&nbsp;</li><li>Seat-limited&nbsp;</li><li>Customer class limited&nbsp;</li><li>Effort limited&nbsp;</li><li>Support limited&nbsp;</li><li>Time or bandwidth limited&nbsp;</li><li>Storage and space limited&nbsp;</li></ul>

Freemiums and Free Trials

Freemium considerations:Freemium is suitable when your organization has:&nbsp;<ul><li>A large addressable market&nbsp;</li><li>Low costs to serve free users&nbsp;</li><li>Low barriers/commitment for users to start with your product&nbsp;</li></ul>Free trial considerations:<ul><li>How long does it take for prospects to recognise initial value on average? How long should the trial last?</li><li>What features can our team limit or remove from the free trial process?</li><li>How do we nurture a free-trial user? </li></ul>

Considerations for Designing an Effective CAS

<ul><li>Giving away too much of the product. The goal of the freemium is to get customers to increase product usage and finally convert to a paid subscription.</li><li>Don’t deliver enough value.&nbsp;</li><li>Don’t create a sense of urgency.&nbsp;</li><li>Don’t nurture and engage continuously with prospects, resulting in a lower free-to-paid conversion rate.</li><li>Don’t track and analyze insights on how and why customers convert</li><li>Don’t provide appropriate onboarding experience</li><li>Don’t evaluate the cost of supporting free customers.</li></ul>

Why Companies Fail With Freemiums

Offering a full-featured free trial to select users can be an effective way to get the best of both options. Freemium can drive higher signups associated with the freemium model and create a sense of urgency due to a precise expiration date.&nbsp; Drive higher signups: Offer a fully working free trial of your product for a specific duration. At the end of the trial, part of the product is gated, and the prospect can use a freemium version as long as they desire.

The Hybrid Approach

This article covers the key aspects of designing and implementing an effective customer acquisition strategy. It zeros in on a few important decisions when it comes to the customer acquisition…

Freemium vs Free Trial vs Hybrid Customer Acquisition Model in SaaS:

People use Facebook not because they have a particular desired outcome to achieve — it’s purely low energy entertainment. Nobody wakes up and think “I wish I could watch more funny videos of cats, but it is so damn hard to use Facebook.” Unfortunately, that also applies to B2B software.

Customer Journey: Turning it into a Methodology

A methodology presents a form of levelling the customer, so not everyone has to start from the beginning. A success milestone is something meaningful for a customer to achieve; when a real value is perceived. To benefit from a defined customer journey we needed a strict way to assess if the customer had achieved it or not.&nbsp;We set a group of actions the customer had to carry out inside the software, and minimum values for certain KPIs the customer should achieve.&nbsp;

Designing the Customer Journey to be a Methodology

Rd ran a project to understand what success really meant to their customers. A Focus-Group ran 100 hours of customer One-On-One interviews. The same Focus-Group worked together to define the path to reach it. Rd had walked through a path of hyper growth, going from zero to thousands of customers solely using Inbound and our own software as customer acquisition strategies. If you’re looking for a better way to solve a customer’s problem,

How we run the project

The least mature company is the one who doesn't use Inbound marketing strategies yet. In such stage, all that matters is to prove the Channel: that's why this is the first phase. Phases define requirements to start, and usual time frame to complete each one of them. The objective is to set the right expectations.

Phases

4 success milestones were designed to be perceived by the customer as a moment where they get real value out of the software. The goal is to show the customer that they achieved something to be proud of, that they are getting closer to their objective. By Aligning the first milestone with the Onboarding project we simplified things. If customers get stuck at some point, or if it takes too much time to see any real value, they are very likely to churn before they complete it.&nbsp;

Success Milestones

We broke milestones down into tasks with small objectives. A task list is a step by step to do list to complete a particular milestone. Tasks don’t add value per se but they are necessary to hit the milestone. The Task List for each Milestone gives the customer a plan. A plan minimizes decisions they need to make, making them focused on a straightforward path.&nbsp;

Task Lists

If you could design a lot of customized journeys, would it work better for your customers? certainly, but that’s not what a Saas is. A Saas is not a consultancy company or a product with a customized roadmap. Every customer thinks they are special and need something unique, but at the end of the day if they have discipline and stick to a standard methodology they will achieve the results they expect.

Does one size fit all?

Actions inside the software:&nbsp;<ul><li>Install the RD Station tracking code&nbsp;</li><li>Create and Publish one Landing Page&nbsp;</li></ul>

Mapping customers along the Journey

If you automatically assess where the customer is on the journey, you can automate every message you send to him, or even Customize the software interface, based on the success milestone he is at. A success milestone is often an abstraction and not a crystal clear definition. Every morning Gainsight runs a rule (script) that assesses which customers have completed the ‘checklist' then it tags those customers with the correspondent milestone tag.

We used the success funnel to find bottlenecks in our customer journey. We compared the milestones with Churn rate and the result blew our minds. Our obsession became making the customer hit milestones faster. The result couldn’t be different: more of our customers will achieve success faster than we did before.

The Success Funnel

<ul><li>Before: QBRs for every customer that hasn’t had one in three months&nbsp;</li><li>Now: EBRs for customers that are stuck in Success Milestone 2&nbsp;</li><li>Next: EBRs for customers that are at the same milestone for more than 3 months&nbsp;</li></ul>

The Rule that generates daily CTAs (tasks) to the CSMs

Every good business review should end with a plan for the customer to follow. A good CRM can help by summarizing the customer Profile and history. An Ebr is an executive business review, similar to the QBR but not tied to a quarter. We now tie EBRs to milestones so customers can count on a standardized quality of service.

Aligning the Journey with the CSM work

A good customer success methodology always counts on excellent educational resources. If a company tries to do a bit of everything it achieves a bit of nothing. We created a methodology portal with all success milestones organized as a chain of projects. That way, customers get focused on overcoming that milestone. The portal also works as collateral material for the CSM job.

Education

The Product team must also be accountable for making customers hit the Customer Success Milestones. Today at RD, every time they modify the product, an increase in the Success Funnel conversion rate is expected. That’s one of the ways we’ve been measuring the effectiveness of software improvements.&nbsp;

Product Team Objectives

The best benefits of designing a customer journey comes when you start using it as a success funnel. Knowing the conversion rate of a funnel makes you able to predict its throughput. You will turn your cs organization into a “machine” that delivers success in a predictable and measurable way.

Start Creating Your Own Journey Now

I describe how we ran a project to design our Customer Journey and turn it into a Methodology. Now customer can count on a path with clear steps towards the success.

marketingandsales

Marketing & Sales

Here’s a quick briefing of <a href="https://feedier.com/?utm_medium=article&amp;utm_source=medium&amp;utm_campaign=medium-wordpress-awareness-2018-05-21&amp;utm_content=how-to-create-a-wordpress-plugin-for-your-web-app">Feedier </a>if you’ve never heard of it: <ul><li>It’s a feedback collector tool, using surveys to understand your users </li><li>It’s very flexible </li><li>It’s free! </li><li>Has a good API (very important here) </li><li>Has an in-site widget (very important here) </li><li>Lets you reward your customers </li><li>Lets you create conditional questions </li><li>Has a complete analytic report dashboard </li><li>Lets you manage feedback individually </li></ul>

Step 1: Find your web app

WordPress plugin are by design very simple. Our plugin will only need two files. <ul><li>feedier.php : main plugin’s PHP file. </li><li>assets/js/admin.js : JavaScript script to save the options using Ajax. </li></ul>

Step 2: Setup our plugin and its architecture

In our class’ constructor, let’s register three new actions which are required to add an admin page on WordPress: <ul><li>addAdminMenu will add a new page in the WordPress left menu. There will be also a callback to another method containing the page’s content. </li><li>storeAdminData will be called whenever the user clicks the “Save settings” button. </li><li>Addadminscripts will register a new Javascript file to our Wordpress Admin in order to save the form’s data.</li></ul>

Step 3: Create our admin page

Now that we have our options saved, we can create a dynamic widget that will depend on the options set by the user through our admin page. We need to create a new method to our Plugin that will print this code depending on the variables set by the user. To do this, we’ll hook our method to the Wp_Footer action.&nbsp;

Step 4: Insert the dynamic code automatically into our pages

Today, we are going to see how to create a very simple WordPress plugin for any web app that needs to insert a piece of code to your site. These web apps could be anything, like CrazyEgg, Freshbook…

How to create a WordPress plugin for your web app

With the rising popularity of Webpack more and more people start comparing it with Gulp. &nbsp;Fierce discussions that can be observed among developers, swarmed comment sections of <a href="https://hackernoon.com/tagged/web-development" target="_self">web development</a> websites about which one is better. This guide will explain what <a href="https://hackernoon.com/tagged/webpack" target="_self">Webpack </a>is, how it differs from Gulp, and what’s most important — which one you should use.

Webpack vs Gulp

A lot has changed in the web development industry in the past couple of years. It appears that new tools keep displacing old resolutions. Take CodeKIT for example: a GUI-based tool for compiling and minifying tools and assets, which was replaced by Grunt. When Gulp appeared, it immediately won the hearts of web developers with its intuitiveness and power.&nbsp;

Introduction

Fierce discussions that can be observed among developers, swarmed comment sections of web development websites about which one is better. This guide will explain what Webpack is, how it differs from…

Why you should never say ‘That’s a good question’ in an interview

Have We Come to Rely on Instant Gratification?

Team Productivity: Striking a Balance Between Being a Boss and Friend

How To Build A Growth Model (Part 1)

Mastering Product Experience (in SaaS) With Product-led Strategy

Stephen Strickland