Getting people to talk to you

Product engineers, our ICP, are very self-serve and happy to implement PostHog themselves and read the docs without ever interacting with someone unless they have support queries.

Why is it helpful for someone to talk to you?

The reasons have to be genuinely helpful ones - just 'having a point of contact' is not enough. Reasons include:

• You can save them money:
  • They've implemented PostHog in a silly way and are consuming stuff they don't need
  • They can pre-commit and get a discount on credit
• You can help them get more out of PostHog for the same amount of money, e.g. if they're ingesting loads of events but not using features to their fullest
• You can train their team on how to use PostHog, so they don't have to
• You can make them aware of upcoming or new products that are specifically useful for their use case
• You can be a shortcut to premium support, if they are in your book of business

How to get people to talk to you

This is usually the most difficult bit! Sometimes customers will proactively reach out to us because they see their bill rocketing, but we have many customers who have happily self-served to a very high level of spend without feeling any need to talk to us. In particular, engineers have no interest in jumping on a call with you 99% of the time.

• Offer to optimize their usage/reduce their billing - if they are pointlessly tracking a bunch of junk, tell them! Otherwise they'll just find out themselves and churn anyway.
• Tell them about new or upcoming features or products that they may not be aware of which you know could be a great fit for them (and let them try them out for free).
• Use multiple channels - email is usually the worst way to reach our ICP. Slack, in-app Surveys or even Telegram are all usually better. But try email first anyway.
• Ping everyone in the account individually (don't do group, no one will reply) - start with the most active users first. New users are also good.
• Loom videos sharing your observations about their usage/account provide a personalized and human touch which can go a long way to building lasting relationships. Ask Simon for an invitation to our company account if you don't have access.
• Adding the contact on LinkedIn and sending a very human video or audio message can work really well - even for technical people (use the LinkedIn mobile app).
• Figure out what the non-technical people in their team need and then go out and talk to them - get someone who isn’t an engineer to talk to us given engineers don’t want to.
• If they submit a support request, jump in and respond yourself to try and build a relationship.
• Ask the wider team for help - we have to get creative here! You'd be surprised how often somebody knows someone...

Before you do any of this stuff, get to know your customer as well as you possibly can. Don't do clickbaity things or trick people into talking to you - it'll just annoy them. And definitely don't just offer a generic checkin 'to see how things are going'!

Ideally you want to get multiple people into a shared Slack channel, as we've found this enables the best communication and allows us to provide them with great support. Just adding a bunch people to the Slack channel is also a legit tactic - forgiveness, not permission.

Just been handed an account?

Sometimes you'll get a customer in your book who was previously working with someone else on the PostHog team. A pre-existing relationship can help, but it's not guaranteed they'll want to talk to you.

We've found a message like this in Slack/email works well after the intro:

Thanks [PostHog team mate] Hey [customer] :blob-wave: Excited to be working with you! As I take over, it would be a big help if we could schedule a quick 15–20 minutes intro call [link to your Calendly]. Just a chance for me to learn more and figure out how I can best support you going forward. Let me know if you'd be open to that.

We've found most people will respond to this.

Have you been ghosted?

If you've had a conversation with someone, there was interest on their side and then they suddenly go dark, using the John Barrows Ghosting Sequence can revivify them.

1. After 2 weeks of valuable follow-up and you've not heard back, reply-all to the latest email thread. Change the subject to: "Still interested?"

And put in the body:

[Name]

Still looking at options like PostHog to solve [business problem they previously acknowledged]?

Let me know either way.

That last line is very important because it gives them a safe option to say "no". About half will respond. 2. If there's no response again after another week, change the subject again to "Did I lose you?"

Leave the body empty. This will pick up about 80% of people who go dark. If not, close out the opportunity 3 days after this final message.