I joined Bond shortly after its acquisition by Newell Brands. Bond produced robotic handwritten notes at scale for B2B and B2C use cases.

Problem:

As a member of the cross-functional leadership team at Bond, I realized that the sales team was spending a disproportionate amount of time and cost onboarding SMB customers. These SMB customers had strong lifetime value (LTV) and represented one of our highest average revenue per user (ARPU) segments, considering they often made repeat purchases.

The SMB customers shared their frustrated feedback with the slow and manual existing process and would often drop off before completing their order through an account executive.

I hypothesized we could better serve these customers by redesigning our web and mobile applications to include self-service features for this valuable and underserved audience. I imagined that something similar to “Mailchimp for handwritten notes” would allow marketers to compose and send 1:many handwritten note campaigns without the intervention of an account executive.

We could then analyze usage and identify which users might be potential product-qualified leads (PQLs) for more profitable sales outreach.

Approach:

I had to win over hearts and minds to get the buy-in for this foray into product-led growth.

I prepared multiple presentations (example), leveraging current data and customer feedback to persuade marketing, sales, and the parent company to embrace and trust this shift to self-service for this persona.

I led the product team in conducting user interviews, during which we quickly confirmed the hypothesis and demand for this redesign. We used this knowledge to build clickable prototypes with InVision, which we then tested with potential first customers to understand and inform what features were necessary at launch.

Armed with a substantiated hypothesis and the learnings from multiple customer interviews and user tests, I was able to get stakeholder buy-in to move forward with the push into self-service.

I created the product requirements documentation (example) and go-to-market plan. These assets were our guiding light and were shared broadly across the company to make sure all teams moved in the same direction.

Outcome

We shipped the MVP versions of the new self-service functionality for the web and iOS mobile applications in >3 months. The new feature set added $1+ million in top-line revenue, a 433 percent jump YoY.

Additionally, the sales team was also able to shift upmarket to Enterprise deals, increasing their average deal size from $4,000 to $10,000+ over the same period.