Matthew Stein

Starter launch. First task I had when I started was to prep the marketing team for the launch of our free tier product. I defined the onboarding behaviors we wanted to track and worked with product to get the data pushed into HubSpot and Salesforce. Using those fields, we defined what a Product-Qualified Lead looked like, and the PQL handoff process to the sales team.

Our lightning strike, pairing a funding announcement with the starter launch, resulted in a 4x increase in our normal monthly organic traffic.

While untangling the marketing-ops pile of spaghetti, I uncovered 26,000 leads which were never uploaded properly into our Martech stack. After uploading, segmenting and prioritizing then, we ran a campaign to nurture them resulting in a 320% increase in Monthly MQLs.

Speaking Links:

• How to Develop your PQL Strategy
• A Masterclass in Product-Led Marketing
• How to launch a sales team within a PLG-first company
• #TheRealPLG – EP 03 | How Marketing Operations will Adapt for PLG
• #TheRealPLG – EP 05 | PQL & Automation Sync with Marketing Leadership

Started as the solo person for Support and Success activities. Hired and trained Northeastern Co-ops to handle support responsibilities. Re-focused on the customer onboarding experience. I hired a Director of Support to implement our support strategy and expand round the world coverage.

Case Studies - Created successful and enthusiastic customers and to help our marketing team produce 5 written and 2 video case studies

Hand in glove with customers - Worked deeply with customer's QA teams, security teams, devops teams and engineering leadership to improve their testing coverage and quality. Testing environments and pipelines are critical and highly sensitive infrastructure. Ensuring mabl's automated testing worked seemlessly with their deployment pipeline was the first major technical challenge for each new customer. With that achieved, I created a scalable and systematic approach to training, adoption, expansion and creating delight for customers.

Solving for the customer - What does that mean? When making decisions, customer needs take primacy. This principle guides me while considering the myriad choices required in a growth-mode startup. Choosing between a better customer experience or a more efficient workflow for my employees, I choose the better customer experience and solve for efficiency later.

Other Highlights:
• Hired Support lead to scale team and take us international
• Performed experiments for Onboarding training
• Embedded product usage metrics on SFDC account pages
• Developed QBR process for Key Accounts
• Brought CS team into weekly Sales pipeline meetings for better alignment
• Defined customer developmental milestones for upsell and expansion
• Defined incident severity levels and created response plans

Responsible for Midaxo Customer Success, building and managing a distributed team handling customer onboarding and reducing churn.

Building for Scale - I streamlined our hiring process, cutting the cycle down to 9 days from over 3 weeks. Experimenting with two target personas, I defined hiring criteria and created scorecards. Teams need direction, motivation, and on-going skills development. During weekly 1:1's, each of my team members received that support.

Measuring What Matters - When I started, the CS team had fractured communications and no measurement of where they spent their time. I implemented a ticketing system that met our security requirements. That enabled reporting data about issues to our Product team. Our Customer Onboarding process was ad hoc, and led by the customer. The senior members of the CS team created a playbook and we rolled out a 90-day, 8 hour onboarding process. At 90 days, I called each customer to survey them about their onboarding experience.

Solving for the customer - What does that mean? When making decisions, customer needs take primacy. This principle guides me while considering the myriad choices required in a growth-mode startup. Choosing between a better customer experience or a more efficient workflow for my employees, I choose the better customer experience and solve for efficiency later.

Other Highlights:
• B-round funding
• Customer onboarding process standardized
• Increased revenue by charging for services
• Unified customer communication
• Defined incident severity levels and created response plan
• Negotiation training for CS team
• Redefined customer lifecycle stages
• Tracked product usage
• Prepared for GDPR
• New hire training and developmental milestones
• Monthly team metrics posted on internal wiki

Built user on-boarding automation framework and content. Experimented to find out which messages worked from Sales team, then automated them. Check-ins and follow-ups measurably moved potential customers through the sales funnel. Worked with internal security team and Ops to ensure all user data was protected when integrating 3rd party marketing software.

Project Managed the new sign-up flow post-launch, improving conversion rates from 42% to 66% while also collecting more data. Worked with multiple internal teams to roll this out smoothly and successfully. Iterated bi-weekly to experiment and improve based on data collected. Only member of the marketing team with GIT access to push code to production.

Made HubSpot do things it normally can't. Examples include: Multi-part form conversions on single page; posting form data to multiple end-points; Aligning email workflows to days of the week; A/B and multi-variate testing in email workflows.

I was brought in to SonicBids to overhaul and re-build their marketing team and infrastructure. When I started, SonicBids' blog was plagued by technical issues, broken image links, and non-existant content strategy. Daily Gig Guide emails, a huge driver for the business, had zero tracking data, and took 4-5 person-hours each day to send.

Through some creative automation and new software, I freed up enough people-hours to assign new tasks. The daily emails that kept the business running now only took 15 minutes to send, down from 4-5 hours per day. We also started collecting open and click rates to improve our designs.

I began blogging with relevant content for our users. I taught lunch-and-learn sessions on blogging to get posts from our Sales team. For more content, I recruited subject matter experts as guest bloggers from the music industry. This also gave us co-marketing opportunities. In the first 4 months we tripled organic traffic.

Our members used Sonicbids to host music, photos, videos, performance schedules and other promotional materials. I worked with Engineering to improve page structures to maximize visibility by search engines.