Playbook Template Library

Background

Problem Statement

Saleswhale(YC16) took up a rather niche space in the RevOps market. Our AI-powered email assistants are primarily targeted at helping marketing and sales teams identify qualified leads so they can spend their time on deals that have a higher chance of closing.

Then, we were reliant on a POC-led sales process where a prospect would sign up for a demo session and the sales team would kick off from there. The AI chatbot essentially runs in the background and it can be hard for new users to visualize how our software can work for their unique use case.

As we were shifting into a freemium business model, we had to design a way for any new user to be able try out our AI assistants without any user guidance.

The Goal: How might we help prospects visualize how AI email assistants work and encourage them to sign up for an account with minimal human guidance?

Design Process

Key Takeaways from Research

• Customer Gong Calls — Takes a while for prospects to comprehend how the AI works. “This looks quite complex”; “How does the AI know which lead is qualified?” Customers also struggle to connect their pain points to our solution at times, which also means they struggle to come up with use cases after onboarding.

• Market Research — A quick look at how some of the high-adoption self-serve products such as Typeform, Miro, and Canva revealed a similar strategy - They all have a robust repository of ready-for-use, tried, and tested templates. The hypothesis is that templates can empower the user to jumpstart the use of our product with minimal guidance.

  
  

Internal Concept Testing

I sent out a Notion doc with a prototype link to test with some internal stakeholders from the commercial and dev team. The web team was interested in 2 main questions:

• For marketing: Do the flow and content design make good landing pages for future ads we could be pushing out on Linkedin?

• For customer success: Are the templates sufficient in answering some of the common use cases for customers?

The team also pondered the following considerations:

• Was a search function necessary if we only had 7 templates/playbooks to start with?

• What is the unified term we should use for templates — playbooks or use cases?

• How can we make the templates more robust and surface more educational material for new users?

• How can we come up with a proper filtering system for the library? How should we categorize the playbooks?

Outcome

Seamless Integration from Marketing Site to App

After the launch of the Playbooks page on the marketing website, it quickly became the top 3 most-visited pages based on our Hubspot analytics. In the final flow, when the prospect explores the ready-made templates on the web, he will be directed to the same template within the app itself.

Building the Foundations of a PLG Approach

To drive exponential growth, the product had to sell itself. The Playbooks template library is one of the building blocks for a self-serve product strategy.

• Increased user activation: The template flow directly addresses the needs of organic user search and directs users to the app

• Reusable education material: These ready-made templates could double as material for the customer success and sales team when they reach out to new or existing customers

• Scalable infrastructure: Now that the infrastructure is set, product managers can easily request for new templates to be added to the marketing website as our repository grows