There’s an excellent interview with Bill Macaitis, CMO of Slack, over on SaaScribe. We’d recommend heading over there to read it, but thought we’d pull out the 5 quotes we found most interesting.
Take a look:
Quote 1: On the 2 big KPIs – “Daily Active Users” & “NPS”
One of the top-level metrics we look at here in Slack is we look at Daily Active Users. That’s a real big one for us from a standpoint of if you’re not using Slack or using it every day, you’re really not using it. And it’s a high bar and high threshold to get to. We recently announced we hit the 1.7 million Daily Active User count and that was a really cool milestone for us to think that we have that many people using us every single day.
Another big one we look at from a company-wide perspective is, as you mentioned, Net Promoter Score. Yes, I’m pretty passionate about that one because I think that that’s a very good proxy of word-of-mouth growth. It’s also I think a very long-term indicator of the health of the company. We can certainly help accelerate the company in marketing and we can have that fuel to the fire but you really want to have a really healthy NPS score which is indicative of just how much people love you and are they recommending you.
We track that specifically in marketing because I think marketing just has the toolset to track that and to break it down by vertical, by segment, by user type. But we view that as an overall company metric.
Quote 2: On Revenue vs Customer Success
I would say holistically, Slack has always put more weight on customer success-type metrics. Essentially, our bar has never been simply did they buy from us and we’re happy. It’s not if they bought. It’s not even if they renewed. It’s would they recommend us. And if they recommend us they’re going to have a better experience, they’re going to talk to our peers, and we’re always going to have a very strong, healthy, organic order-based growth curve.
Quote 3: On asking the “Why”
Is NPS something that all SaaS startups should be implementing and using?
Yeah, I think it’s a really good metric for any company to have because, one, it’s so easy to get. I mean, it’s a one-question. How likely are you to recommend Slack to your friends and colleagues on a scale of 1 to 10? You can make in an optional second question which I recommend as you put the “why” on there. And it just gives you so much good data. You can benchmark it against your competitors, against the SaaS industry. You can understand ‘are you starting to get product/market fit?’. You can understand ‘what are the Top 3 reasons I am getting recommended?’, or conversely ‘what are the Top 3 reasons I’m not getting recommended?’.
Quote 4: On Feedback & Understanding Your Unique Selling Points:
One of the things I eventually ended up doing was I really looked at the NPS data and I was like, why are people recommending us? That’s when we started to get around this theme of all your communications in one place. That was like we consistently saw that’s why people were recommending us. Then we consistently saw that people were saying big reductions in email and improvements in productivity so we worked that into it. And we consistently saw it was a really simple and easy tool to use.
Now when people when ask us, I say, hey, it’s a messaging app for teams. It brings together all your team’s communications in one place and eliminates or reduces email, and it’s just a simple and fun tool to use. A lot of that just came off of the NPS survey and us understanding why people like Slack and conversely what were the areas we can improve and routing that to the product team in making sure it’s a good holistic feedback loop.
I definitely recommend it. I think is such a simple thing to do and the data is so powerful.
Quote 5: On Word of Mouth
Word-of-mouth is definitely our biggest acquisition channel. As we pushed into a number of parallel marketing efforts, everything from around content marketing to nurturing to advertising and all the different channels we do there that has helped accelerate that core word-of-mouth. But I’ve always believed you have to have word-of-mouth.
It kind of gets back to what I talked about what a brand is, the sum of every single experience. I think what we do there is we don’t just track word-of-mouth. And NPS, as we had talked about, that is the proxy, at least for me, of what your word-of-mouth growth is. We really do a lot of initiatives to try to harness and make sure that there’s a healthy, ongoing word-of-mouth growth.
