Infusionsoft Payments

Product Launch

This launch was my most memorable product marketing endeavor while I was at Infusionsoft. Read on to hear how we built a product that solved pervasive customer needs and achieved record adoption through kick-ass product marketing.

Company

Infusionsoft is an all-in-one sales and marketing software that helps small businesses get organized, grow sales and save time. The company serves more than 33,000 businesses, and is an 8-time Inc. 500|5000 honoree.

I was a Product Marketing Manager at Infusionsoft during their Series C & D investments and throughout their growth from $60-100MM in revenues. During my tenure, I led product marketing for their flagship software and add-on products while growing the product marketing function and team.

The goal

• Customer: Build a credit card processing solution that 1) integrated with Infusionsoft’s platform to lessen multisystem chaos, and 2) made it painless for small businesses to get setup and begin processing credit card payments
• Business: Create and grow a new revenue line from credit card processing fees (dependent on # of adopters and dollar volume processed) and successfully launch Infusionsoft’s first new product in 3 years

The challenge

This launch was particularly interesting for me because I was involved before we green-lighted the product. As a result, my product marketing responsibilities spanned the entire product lifecycle.

• Quantifying the customer need – We knew our current credit card processing solutions weren’t great but we didn’t know how pervasive of a problem they were for our customers. To assess this and the need for an alternative solution, I conducted a preliminary survey and followed up with customer interviews. Our product teams used the market feedback I captured to develop product requirements.
• Sizing market and revenue opportunity – Not all Infusionsoft packages offer e-commerce capability, which meant not all of our customers could use this new product. In order to build the business case and green-light the project, I sized our total addressable (customer) market and modeled our potential revenues based on adoption/switching assumptions, historical processing volumes and revenue sharing agreements with our technology vendor.
• Technology vendor selection – After we green-lighted the project and authored product requirements, I participated in the vendor selection process to ensure our vendor fully understood our customers’ needs, could power the solution & experience we ideated and shared our mission to help small businesses succeed (and wasn’t in it just for the money).
• Authoring core messaging – Credit card processing isn’t something people naturally get excited about. In fact, it’s something small businesses hate. Banks and processors deem they high risk, which means they’re saddled with complicated processing applications, delayed approval decisions, hidden fees and software integration problems. All this pain I discovered during interviews was music to my ears when it came time to author messaging. Fast and easy setup, transparent pricing and integrated, painless processing, anyone?
• Architecting go-to-market strategy and launch plan – This product was a big deal for Infusionsoft because it was our first launch in 3 years and the more customers we had adopting it and processing payments, the more money we’d make. I authored an extensive GTM plan to achieve growth while minimizing our business risk. For maximum exposure, we decided to launch at our annual user conference in front of 4,500 entrepreneurs. My plans extended beyond the main event and included strategies for non-attendees.
• Creative direction – In addition to authoring the core messaging for the product, I worked with our Creative department on the design of all customer-facing assets. This included the event product keynote, sales collateral, marketing website and launch/nurture emails.
• Post-launch optimization and driving growth & consumption – I like to joke that product launches or events are the glamorous moments for product marketers, but not what ultimately drives success and revenue. Being a new product, we had a lot to learn about customer behavior in regards to the product and our marketing. By trusting validated learning over opinions, we were able to tweak the product experience and marketing efforts to optimize adoption, usage and retention.

Results

Infusionsoft Payments quickly became the #1 payment processor choice for new users — more new users sign up for Infusionsoft payments than the other 12 payment processing options combined.

The majority of existing customers using other options actually switched over to Infusionsoft Payments, which is testament to the ROI in developing market-driven products.

In addition to the numbers below, other notable results were:

• Launch event success – Out of the eligible attendees at our annual user conference, 64% of them signed up to be amongst the first to receive our product
• Email performance – The launch email to all customers received a 44% OR, 14% CTR and 14.7% CTOR (the industry average is 10% CTOR)
• Low impact on Support – We designed a “stupid simple” and easy onboarding process that netted us a sustained 1% support call volume post-launch. I talked with another enterprise company pre-launch and support calls regarding their similar solution swelled to 30%, necessitating them to devote 25% of their Support team solely to this product