Emilia Korczynska’s Post

A few reflections from scaling a marketing team from 1 to 19: 1. “Just one quick question”- some days when I feel this could be my real job title. Every time I complete a task - there are 10 more popping up. Every time I figure something out - it takes a while 10 minutes for me to ruin the satisfaction by realising there’s still more I haven’t solved than that I have solved. 2. “What’s my role, today?” Joining marketing a fast-growing company at an early stage means you’ll never be bored, and your job changes every few months…even if you haven’t ever applied for a new one. Heck - the larger your team, the more often your job changes - averaging a few very different roles per day. 3. The imposter syndrome is real. And hits hard. Accepting you can’t be great, or even good, at 10 completely different things is hard when you want to be helpful - but there aren’t enough hours in the day to keep up with the changes in ads, content, demand gen, ABM, mOPs, events… you need to sacrifice depth for breath, and “keeping your hand in” for “staying on top of”. 4. You don’t know what you don’t know, and no one will tell you. Because no one is talking about the budgets or what it really took to achieve a certain outcome. You’re working out of a black box and it can be incredibly stressful to make these bets with your budget. 5. Connecting the dots between channels is harder than you think. Inbound vs. outbound. Organic vs. Paid. Paid AND outbound. Paid AND organic inbound. Making sure all the dots are connected, the overall strategy is consistent and we’re not bleeding leads at any stage, as well as attributing leads correctly - is one hell of a challenge. 6. You need motivated TALENT. On the previous point - of course you can’t execute multichannel without a team of A players owning one channel each, ready to go the extra mile in this hectic environment. But how do you keep so many people motivated for long enough to see the results? 7. Has anyone figured out how to get rid of Digital Clutter?! I thought we were the Marie Kondos of Notion and gonna win an Oscar for best-organised marketing team one day, but hey - 5th year in, I’m sometimes surprised how long it takes me to find “that spreadsheet, but not *that* version of *that* one”. In-app search tools typically *suck*. We’ve created a massive resource database and other intertwined databases in Notion, and I must say now things are significantly better - but the extent and complexity of our processes by now make it virtually impossible to keep up with the necessary documentation. 8. BONUS POINT: Having a life. With a large team 19 scattered across the globe (from Vancouver, Canada, to Hanoi, Vietnam - I kid you not.) and working Sunday to Saturday (because Middle East) it’s always a working day for someone, somewhere. It never stops. The issues keep coming, and you need a hard boundary not to spend your entire life on Slack. How do you deal with the “messy middle”? 

Actual footage of a product designer user-testing their new UI in production...if you find this funny & have some rants about SaaS products you want to share - 30,000 people are keen to hear from you! I'm announcing our first Product Rantz takeover - in May, I will host guest appearances on our weekly Product Rantz newsletter. Anything related to product/user experience, analytics, metrics, user feedback, product discovery and delivery goes! Just hit me up in the comments/DMs with your ideas & let's talk. In other news: HIRING 👉 we're still looking for a full-time Content Editor for our content team - application form in the comments 👉 also looking for a sharp, all-rounded marketing generalist for another friend-of-the-family startup

Scaled Content: Should you use Programmatic SEO of AI content? Despite common confusion - Programmatic SEO content =/= AI content! They are both scaled content types and methods for scaling content faster - but they lend themselves best for producing different types of content. E.g. if you're writing content targeting niche, "zero-search volume" KWs that follows a repetitive pattern - use programmatic SEO, not AI content. But if you're creating top-of-the-funnel content with a high search volume and tons of content already in serps, that doesn't follow any pattern - use AI content. Similarly - if your content is very volatile and requires frequent updates - use programmatic SEO (so you can manage it from a centralized database - and update all pieces at once) - e.g. train schedules, tool reviews etc. But if your content is 'evergreen' (e.g. definitions, glossaries) - you can use AI as well as programmatic. If you aim to include a lot original quotes and reuse them between different posts - programmatic will be better than AI content. BUT - if you're creating content in synthetic languages (with a lot of inflections - e.g. Polish, Russian, Portugese, Hungarian) - stay away from programmatic SEO as you just won't get the grammar right. AI content tools like SurferSEO can help you with this. I've summarized it briefly in the table below - for more on that point, check out the post in the comments. At Userpilot - we use both. We produce content completely from scratch (50%), using programmatic SEO (35%) and using AI (~15%). P.S. In a desperate effort to procrastinate practising my Brighton SEO talk for Thursday, I moved a bunch of templates with linked databases from my Patreon to a dedicated online store - making things a bit more organized for those of you that just want the templates check out 👉 programmaticseocontent [.] io

As I wrote in my recent post on LinkedIn - the most frustrating aspect of any buyer’s journey is the uncertainty - what the tool can do to help you achieve what you need to achieve, how are you supposed to find that out, and how long it will take. Most sales processes, as well as the free trial processes - fail to deliver on those answers. It doesn't matter whether they are PLG or SLG! They don’t actually provide the answers people need to be able to make their buying decision - “Will this tool solve my problem? Is it worth investing in?”. Most of my sales experience has been a) some discovery + demo. b) that’s it! Get into the free trial and have fun! c) me not having the time and/or urgency to figure it out, and the in-app experience not being helpful enough for me to figure it out quickly. I drop off the wagon without actually achieving my goals, having wasted some of mine and the sales people’s time… But to be fair - let me state the obvious - it's not the buyer's responsibility to sell the product to themselves. If they are getting ghosted by the sales team and nobody's helping them achieve their goals in the sales process - because the customer success teams are only involved post-sale and sales engineers are rare, expensive, and available only to the largest companies - and there's no "PLG version of the sales engineer" - them dropping out of the buyer's journey is a fair game. Here's how to change the status quo - and close more deals from self-serve and sales-led motions 👇

[💡 Growth in 2024 comes from proving you can solve your prospects’ problem faster & cheaper than your competitors - regardless whether you do it self-serve or through a sales process] I’ve got a new brain crush - Deepina (Dee) Kapila from Miro has recently articulated her thoughts (and exactly my thoughts, btw.) on this artificial PLG vs SLG divide in Kyle Poyar’s Growth Unhinged so well, I just want to print it out and send it to whoever still uses this short-sighted “PLG vs SLG” beef & further alienates sales from product and CS teams…while we should be doing the exact opposite. Just STOP, you PLG folks, you. Recognise that your customers don’t care how you label yourself - and that you need to rally your product, product marketing, sales, CS/CX teams together around this one goal - getting *ALL* users on the happy path & and providing a seamless buying experience - regardless if it’s self-serve or sales-assisted. Providing it at sales, in an economically-feasible way regardless of the prospects ACV - and making the free + self-serve motions co-exist peacefully, leading to more deals, without “cannibalizing” sales. (Wow, I’ve used so many acronyms in one paragraph, how smart, I know.) If Amplitude has made it work - so can you. But here’s what we need to acknowledge, and then - address: 🔴 Your prospects don’t care (nor understand) whether you’re “sales led” or “product led”. They all want a seamless experience with buying and implementing your product though - they want to understand exactly how your product will solve their problem/meet their needs - and have some proof of concept to show their managers before committing their $$$$ (especially in this climate). 🔴 You can’t provide 1:1 sales experience to deals < $3k ACV. The math doesn’t work out. If you don’t want to loose out on all these companies though - that may also grow over time and become your premium/enterprise plan customers later on through your expansion efforts - you need to plan for a “scaled” buying and customer experience. This includes freemium/free trial with self serve checkout for the lower plans (or even higher plans, for those folks that are allergic to talking to sales) But to have a good trial-to-paid self-serve conversion rates - you need to translate the white-glove sales, sales engineering and CS experience into digital experience - with trial onboarding mimicking your POC process to create a “a self-serve POC” - through automated onboarding, mutual action plans, in-app help resources, and one-to-many troubleshooting sessions with the CS/SEs. 🔴 The most frustrating aspect of any buyer’s journey is the uncertainty - what the tool can do to help you achieve what you need to achieve, how are you suppose to find that out, and how long it will take. Most sales processes, as well as the self-serve free trial processes - fail to deliver on that promise. How to disrupt this status quo? More tomorrow 😎

I wonder how many deals SaaS companies are losing to unnecessary complexity. Website, pricing, offering, sales process (eeerm what process? I can’t even recall a company that would guide me through the steps of their sales process and offer a structured timeline and POC.) Nobody needs a reminder of how *complex* life is. If you’re making things unnecessarily complex for your buyers - there’s a big chance that they will just give up & default to status quo (unless you’re lucky enough to be the ultimate painkiller / mandated by legal requirements) because making the decisions is harder and more risky (and the more zeros involved, the riskier it is $$$) than not making one. Here are a few indicators that you maybe losing deals to unnecessary complexity - give yourself one point for every time you nodded your head when reading: 👉 Your website doesn’t say what your product does in the hero header - instead, have this vague benefit talk that makes you sound like chatGPT after two pints. 👉 Your pricing doesn’t allow your prospects to figure out how much they would actually need to pay for your product plan that meets their needs without talking to sales, and even the sales often won’t tell them - and they have to wait for a complex proposal with multiple variables and add ons. 👉 Your product pages do not provide a list of features your product actually has. Your solution pages don’t explain what problems these features solve. 👉 Your sales people don’t have straightforward answers to your prospects’ questions. 👉 There are no clear timeframe, agenda or next steps for the sales process. There’s no proof of concept offered (if no free trial) or no self-serve proof of concept process in the free trial. There’s no shared space for you and the prospect with the timelines and clear to-dos. 👉 Your demo booking/ signup form asks for questions that are not used to personalise the sales/ trial onboarding process. Conversely - you don’t ask any questions about the prospects’ goals and use case that would allow you to personalise it. How many points did you score? ;) 

[🔔 NEW Programmatic SEO template 🔔] Following up on the post from last week - here's the first post template using the NEW Persona database: "[Persona1] vs [Persona2] - what's the difference?" This template allows you to create a lot of these Top-of-the-Funnel, high-traffic blog posts very easily and in a very scalable way - from 20 personas, you're gonna get 190 unique blog posts! 🤔 Why create the "[Persona1] vs [Persona2]" blog posts? 🟢 While these blogs are not going to be the highest-converting ones, they are going to drive tons of traffic and indicate your "topical authority" to Google. 🟢 Most of these KW combinations are high volume, low difficulty. 🟢 These high traffic, glossary-type posts - if done well - can become go-to resources for many and attract good quality links. Also - you can plug your tool as one of the "must have tools" for this persona, and link high-intent sales pages/ comparison blogs there - thus passing the link juice from this high traffic page to your sales pages, and helping them rank better. 🟢 What's more - filling in this "persona database" will allow you to create dozens of more "higher intent" templates - e.g. "Best tools for {persona}", "{tool1} vs {tool2} - which is better for {persona}?", "Best resources for {persona}", How to hire a good {persona}?, "{persona} salary, job description, career path" etc. coming soon! 🟢 So you'll have 1000s of blogs for the price of e.g. 20 (if you fill in the database with 20 personas). 🤔 How to use this template? Dig into the post (in the comments) to learn more & get the plug-and-play template.

I'm going on a conference bender again - would love to catch up with any folks that will be around 👀 - give me a 🙋♀️ in the comments if you're going to be around/ would like to join any of the events we're organizing (🔥)! 1) 25 & 26 April 2024 - brightonSEO (UK) - Once again, I will be speaking about our experience with scaling content - this time about Programmatic SEO without programming - how to produce 100s of BOFU & TOFU blog posts ("Tool1 vs Tool2 - which one is better for {use case}, competitors comparison pages, "Best tools for...{use case}" listicles, persona related pages etc.) using *JUST GOOGLE SHEETS*. With the price per blog as low as $4 👀 Join me & our amazing Content Project Manager Sophie Grigoryan to learn our secrets 🤫 in Brighton! 2) Next up - Team Userpilot is heading to Austin 🤠! Join us 13-15 May 2024  for SaaStock USA - and grab a pint with Yazan Sehwail, Tiana He & Kevin O'Sullivan. 🔥 🌮 🌯 We're also hosting a private VIP dinner for Product Leaders on the 16th May in downtown Austin - let me know if you'd like to join for some insightful conversations over good food & wine with fellow VPs of Product! 3) May 31, 2024 - I'll be a +1* at Digital Olympus event in Eidhoven - can't wait to hear amazing speakers like Aleyda Solis, Kevin Indig or Bibi Raven! *Shameless plug - my partner's startup BacklinkManager.io is one of the media partners for the event, go check out Michal Jackowski's FREE link quality evaluation tool & backlink tracker. I'll be in Amsterdam the weekend that follows - any friends there? 👀 4) June 4th-5th - SaaStr Europa - London - while I'm not attending the conference this time, I'm based in London - so if you're there for SaaStr, give me shout! 🔥 5) June 6th - Dublin - we're hosting an exclusive networking event together with Product People - in our new Dublin office! Join 100+ product thought leaders for a panel discussion on SaaS Product Metrics Benchmarks (do they even exist? 👀) - based on our NEW industry report - with pizza and beer on da house! 🍕 🍻 6) June 12th -13th - Talinn, Estonia - I'll be at SEO Estonia - can't wait to hear Koray Tuğberk Gübür (hopefully I can understand ~20% of his talk this time 🙈), Kyle Roof and Karl Kangur live! Links to the events in the comments 👇

Do you sometimes feel like...your job is pretty much impossible? Like: everyone urges you to be more data-driven and create a data-driven product roadmap...but how do you do that when you're launching a new product and you still don't have any data? How do you know what will really create value for your users? I've written a post about my frustrations with uncertainty in marketing recently - how can I ever make a "data-driven" decision about a new channel - how much budget & resources to allocate to it - if all the "benchmarks" and "best practices" do not really translate to our company? Then Dr Else van den Berg reminded me in the comments you folks in product have it so much worse... Benchmarks in SaaS product management are a joke. Change my mind. Comparing one tool's conversion/ activation etc. rates to another ones is like comparing apples to oranges. You need your own benchmarks to draw any conclusions. And then you need to run true A/B tests (on the same audience segments, at the same time) to see if your interventions / product improvements are moving the needle when it comes to these key metrics. So you see my point: you need data to create a data-driven product roadmap...but you need a product with data tracking implementation first to collect the data. Derek Skaletsky wrote a great post for Ben Williams' PLG Geek about this recently - and called out the "statistical significance cult" for waiting to implement product data tracking untill...well until it's way too late: The solution? Just do it. ✅ But how? Check out the post below to find out 👇

The thing that I find most frustrating about marketing - to the point of sometimes wanting to quit & run for the hills - is how much we’re working in a black box. I’m not a person that deals well with uncertainty. I would put my whole life in a spreadsheet if I could. Ironically - I’m trying to control my control freak instincts rather than trying to control the ever-more complex reality - which makes me just a little less annoying to co-exist with. This is perhaps why I’m still surviving in this profession. But back to the point: Imagine you’re starting up a new marketing channel in your company. How do you plan the budget? How do you allocate resources? How do you decide on the strategy? How do you project the CAC and ROI? 👉 You probably search for some “best practices” and ask people you know (who succeeded with this channel) what they did. But hey - they worked at a completely different company, with a different buyer’s persona, different pain points, budgets and sales cycles. 👉 You’re looking for some conversion “benchmarks”. But there are no benchmarks. See above. We’re comparing apples to oranges to avocados to Philly steak sandwiches. Most benchmarks be like: “email open rates in B2B SaaS”. This is a joke. What’s your regular “B2B SaaS”?! Using these averages to base your OKRs and budget is like using the “average calories in food, overall” to create your diet plan. 👉 You read books and articles about the best strategies and hottest tactics, and hire a certain coach or guru who has a “proven system” (but will never take responsibility for the results or work on commission basis). My experience: doing the exact same thing at two different companies gives very different results. Heck, even doing the exact same thing at the very same company gives very different results…over time, depending on, I don’t know, the weather. 👉Estimating budget - you don’t even try to look for any info about that! Nobody’s talking about money. Yes, people are posting their success stories left and right - but nobody’s ever mentioning *how much* it cost them. Was this huge success story even...breaking even? 👉 Choosing “the right tools” - oh “the ever changing digital landscape”. One day something is working like a dream, next day it’s getting you in Google jail / spam folder. Things are constantly breaking. 👉 And do we even ever have decent data? Let’s not even open this can of worms… How are you dealing with this, fellow kids? Anyway, your advice will probably not work for me...