David Henry
In this Customer Spotlight, we hear from Connor Fee, CRO at Shortcut, to learn how their sales team uses Endgame to maximize the yield from their active free base.
Shortcut is a project management tool in a crowded space with giants to contend with. They need people to love their product to win, so they started by building their active free user base. For Shortcut, it became clear that as they converted free users to paid, they also needed to replenish their active free base in order to hit long term growth targets.
In the same way you need to grow website traffic to drive organic leads, PLG companies have to grow their active free base to drive sustained revenue growth.
To enable both user and revenue growth, Connor split the sales org into two teams: activation and revenue. Each team supports a different personas: Self-serve Steve and White-glove Wendy. Unsurprisingly, Self-serve Steve doesn’t want to talk to sales. White-glove Wendy probably won’t admit it, but she prefers some help evaluating the product.
Shortcut’s strategy is to replenish the active free base with the Activation Team, while the Revenue Team runs higher-touch sales plays to convert sales-ready free users and grow their existing accounts.
Shortcut’s revenue team uses Endgame to help identify accounts with high Signals that are likely to convert from free to paid. This helps fuel prospecting into accounts where reps use Details View to look at product adoption across users, identify power users and champions, and engage them in Outreach with personalized email sequences.
Reps look at two primary views within Endgame to support the free to paid sales motion:
Shortcut takes advantage of Endgame’s flexibility to calculate VCS by adding up the total number of pull requests, branches, and commits for an account. Each of these are specific product usage events that indicate readiness to buy.
The view with accounts that have 2 or more Epics created is another angle for sales readiness that surfaces accounts that have gone full speed ahead with Epics but haven’t yet surfaced on the VCS view. Having both prevents accounts from falling through the cracks and feeds a constant stream of sales ready accounts to the revenue team.
Endgame gives me a holistic view into my accounts with realtime usage data, so I can easily create personalized messages to prospects without having multiple tabs open, drastically reducing how many clicks it takes to pioneer into my book of business. It's hard to imagine prospecting without Endgame.
Most importantly, the sales reps have confidence they are focusing on the right accounts because those with excellent Signal Strength convert at a rate of 7x higher than poor accounts. This means reps can log into Endgame, fitler their territory for the best accounts, and get the product context to personalize outreach all in one place.
Shortcut is laser focused on increasing the rate of activations in 2022. To make this happen, Connor and his team are aggressively hiring for product specialists. The intention is that humans can help improve the conversion of paid users and boost activation – a pattern that has already shown itself at Shortcut. They are looking for folks with 0-3 years of experience that typically fall into two buckets:
Check out Shortcut’s career page to learn more.
