Hookdeck enables developers to instantly and reliably manage webhooks. The company has gained immense early traction, and co-founder Eric Bang Tri Tran needed a way to identify the sales-ready users among their free signups.

The Hookdeck team utilizes a modern startup stack of Segment, HubSpot, Mixpanel, Stripe, and Customer.io. Eric got interested in Calixa after realizing that despite having all of these tools, there was still a visibility gap in his funnel. People would read helpful web content and sign up, which is tracked as contacts in HubSpot. Once in the product, their usage was tracked in Mixpanel, but there was no sales-centric view of the entire journey.

There's a real gap between product analytics and the action needed to move people along the sales funnel. We're interested in having visibility of product qualified leads, so we can nudge them the right way at the right time. We were constantly thinking, how can we better understand the user journey and capture users' high value activities?

After linking Segment, HubSpot and Stripe with Calixa, Eric was able to get insight into which users were worth reaching out to and confidence that he was leading with the right message. He found Calixa's platform so helpful that he starts each day with it.

A Co-founder's Morning Routine

As Hookdeck's co-founder, Eric constantly balances countless conflicting priorities. Speaking to active users is one thing that he always makes time for. His warm outreach allows him to capitalize on his top of funnel efforts and scale revenue efficiently.

As a one person team, I have like 75 things to do. But talking to the right users is top of my list. I already put so much effort into getting these people on the platform and using it. It's important that I get them across the last mile.

Like most startups, Hookdeck regularly iterates on their ideal customer profile. While they have a general idea of who they want to target, Calixa surfaces insights about people Eric may have overlooked.

The insight that Calixa brings helps me be more focused on what brings value. Who are we helping? Who are we really solving a problem for?

After finding a sales-ready user, Eric decides the best course of action. He can go from lead qualification to opportunity creation to sales engagement in a single workflow. Whenever he has questions, he's been able to quickly gain context with the data that exists in Calixa.

Starting the day off entirely focused on customers ensures that the decisions I make throughout the day are always in our customers' best interests. My ideal morning looks like:

1) monitoring qualified signups from the day before
2) creating opportunities from that list
3) taking the next best action

Who did XYZ? Should I contact them? Is that somebody to upsell? Is there somebody I can nurture?

All these questions that are fundamental for product-led growth are answered in Calixa. I spend every morning making sure that I don't let opportunities fall into the cracks.

Value Before Revenue

For Eric, every sales conversation is a chance to show value to customers. He understands the power of a consultative sale.

Unless you're solving their problem, they're not going to buy it. Why talk about revenue before you showed them how to get the first win? Once you prove that you can deliver value, then they will be happy to buy.

Incorporating product insights into the conversation reinforces the value customers are getting from the product. Rather than providing hypothetical examples, Eric suggests best practices that other companies have used to achieve success and highlights the results they saw.

Another big component to Eric's value selling is his speed to lead. Before using Calixa, Eric manually coded automations for key product metrics. However, his DIY approach lacked the context of each alert. He realized that effective alerts must promptly reveal all the information at a glance, so he can trust the data he was seeing and be more opinionated. Calixa's real-time notifications–with full context views–enabled him to do timely outreach for the product triggers he cares most about.

As soon as somebody logs in five times within a week, send me an alert. I'll look at what they did. Then I'll go talk to them. ‘Hey you've been using Hookdeck. I saw you clicked XYZ. Do you need help to get to your next step?'

That has been really well received by users, because I catch them at exactly the perfect time. It's not three days later. I saw that the moment they're trying to get something done. And they're coming back a lot to get something done. I'm there to help them. That's my goal.'

At the end of the day, Eric cares most about user happiness. That's a big part of what drew him to product-led sales. That's why he co-founded a startup.

If you want to make sure that your users stay happy and you're helping them as much as you can, Calixa is critical in your stack. Without it, how can you trust that you are actually helping your customers?