Beacons identifies top 15% of user base & facilitates just-in-time upsell outreach

Goal

While Beacons has always had a product-led growth motion as a core tenet to their go-to-market, as their user growth started to skyrocket and their product portfolio 6X, it became harder and harder to provide a quality, personalized customer experience. 

Challenge

Beacons mission is to be the all in one platform for digital creators but as their product portfolio diversified to meet this objective, the data and insights on how users were leveraging Beacons (or where they were falling short) was very limited. 

Jessica Li, Chief of Staff, found herself filtering users by one of the only data points she had - follower count. “I found that follower count really wasn’t a leading indicator that they’d be a solid customer for us or that they’d benefit from multiple products of ours because of their reach. We were trying to send personalized follow up to users but really have nothing to personalize off of.” 

Each time Jessica made a product data request to engineering it took up a couple days of each 2-week sprint. “When you're a startup, taking away from product sprints is a big expense to pay – we knew we needed to focus engineering on building products and therefore, we needed a non-technical, self-sufficient way to access product data.” 

“We had to find a way to identify high intent and high value users in a non-technical way. We had to eliminate our engineering bottleneck and become self-sufficient with product data. ”

Solution

The turning point of Beacons looking for a tool like Calixa was when they started selling Media Kits (a creators online resume) used to book brand deals. Beacons saw a big opportunity to tie the users that used this product to their invoicing product to close the brand deal.  

“Instantly we knew we’d be leaving money on the table if we didn’t act on those timely opportunities to upsell a product.” They needed to know who to reach out to and when, as to not miss out on these timely upsells. 

Jessica started first by rolling out Calixa to a small group providing example use cases, custom Slack alerts, and how-to guides so internally each unique role understood the value Calixa could bring to them. “Calixa has improved the customer experience and our bottom line, no question. But one thing that’s been invaluable is our product team having better context and understanding of our product’s value.” 

When looking for Calixa, Jessica knew she needed better access to data and the ability to filter and score users but what she wasn’t expecting was how helpful proactive Slack alerts would be. “With filtered views and Slack alerts, we’re now completely confident we’ll catch any need of a user and it allows us to prioritize focus on those we deem as most valuable. We now have great product insights to take action on without any technical barriers!” 

Impact

With Calixa, Beacons was able to better identify and tier their customers focusing just on that top 15%. With real-time Slack alerts of product usage upticks and adoption, its allowed for that ‘just-in-time’ email outreach and ability to templatize email cadences by product line or adoption curve. 

“With the ability to score and filter our users on a multitude of factors including adoption, drop off or multi-product use, we’re able to provide so much more real value to our customers.” The ability to define different levels of product success or activation across product lines and then couple that with overlapping product value has allowed Beacons to really harness that top 15% of their users base.  

“Calixa has improved the customer experience and our bottom line, no question. Having scaled with Calixa from 2 to 13 products, I can’t imagine doing that blindly and trying to upsell or improve WAU across each product line.”

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