Adding virality to Enterprise products
In Product Led Growth companies, virality is a key strategy.
“How do we encourage our happy users to bring more users?”
“If each customer brings >1 additional user we can grow with near zero cost of acquisition.”
Companies like Facebook, Google, Uber, Airbnb have all experienced periods of hypergrowth because their new customers brought even more customers with them.
We often think of virality as a consumer product strategy - not suitable for Enterprise.
We can however use similar techniques to accelerate growth.
Virality in the Enterprise
There are a two types of virality in the Enterprise:
In-company virality - more users in the same company
Intra-company virality - more users from other companies
Both are important, but I’m going to focus on Intra-company virality - “How do we get more new customers?”
Build a product so good your users talk about it to their friends and colleagues
Sounds obvious - but a lot of enterprise software is designed to solve a problem for managers and senior execs - not the end users. The end users are just that - users.
Consider how many users see CRM or the HR platform as something that helps them personally. Near zero.
But there are companies that design an experience that taps into the individual user’s experience and get talked about.
Gong in the call recording space
Zoom in the video meeting space
Apollo in the contact data space
These are products that are designed to delight the individual user and solve their personal goals - so they talk to their friends about them.
The first time I started using Uber I was showing my friends constantly. “No don’t hail a cab - watch this”
I’d tap the button, show the car driving towards us, and as it pulled up everyone went “ooooooh!” and started downloading the Uber app.
Consider how that type of conversation would go in your product.
If I loved your product and was telling a friend what would I show, how would I describe it?
Make it easy for your users to sell for you.
Build in exposure to non-customers
Think through how the usage of your product can expose your brand to non-users and give them value.
A good example of this would be DocuSign - the esignature platform provides a beautifully designed signing experience for the recipient (a non-customer) and having completed signing, offers them a free account to store their signed agreement.
I worked for a cloud email security company and we placed a footer at the bottom of every email our customers sent:
Every day millions of people saw the banner on the bottom of their inbound emails.
As sellers we often heard “Oh yes, I’ve seen your company on emails we receive”. It turned cold calls into warm calls.
Think through your customer’s workflow and consider where there are opportunities to gain exposure - portals, emails, social updates, transactional updates, push notifications.
Introduce third parties into your product use case
Thinking through your common usecases, consider where introducing partners, suppliers, consultants into the workflow could give an opportunity for driving exposure into other companies.
Imagine you provide a customer success platform, but you also work with system integrators that support that customer.
Could you (with the customer’s agreement) give them a partner view into your customer’s data, that inspires them to imagine if they had this data for all of their customers?
Could you include lawyers, marketing agencies, sales training firms or data analysts into the flow?
Connect with users personally
Most enterprise users are registered on your platform with their work email address.
But people change jobs.
A lot.
In tech sales the average tenure is just over 2 years.
Someone that loved your product at Company A is probably an ideal evangelist for your product at Company B.
Imagine providing an incentive for users to provide their personal email address through the platform.
You could provide them value and support through their personal account, and when their corporate email gets de-provisioned offer to provide free access while they ramp up in their new role.
At least encourage connection on social so that the personal relationship continues after the professional one ends (at Company A).
Create new shareable products out of customer data
Most companies are generating large amounts of customer data and this gives you opportunities to present this back to customers for them to share.
Consider Spotify’s annual list of your top artists and songs, or your bank telling you where you’ve been spending your money.
You can provide your end users with this kind of information - opportunities opened, cases closed, calls held, revenue won.
Get this content out to users in a shareable format and watch them go!
Virality is an enterprise strategy
Your happy users are one of your best sales channels - and you don’t even need to pay them.
Take some time to bring your wider team together and consider how the way your users use your platform could provide exposure and bring in new customers for near zero incremental cost of acquisition.
Get started
Whenever you are ready, there are two ways that I can help you accelerate your revenue.
Buyer Experience Audit - I’ll impersonate a buyer researching your segment and company and let you know what I find. Ideal for planning your Revenue Operations strategy.
RevOps Impact Playbooks - I’ll help you implement one or more tactical processes across your revenue teams - content, referrals, testimonials, adoption and more.