Product-led growth

00

Overview

I was the lead content designer on this project for ShareFile from 2023 - 2024. I worked with a brand designer, a customer marketing manager, a product manager, and a product marketing director.

We enabled sustainable growth by introducing a no-touch sales model, increased trial conversion by 300%, and contributed more than $10 million in incremental ARR.

01

Context

ShareFile is a B2B SaaS company with over 3 million monthly active users that serves both enterprise and SMB customers. It has historically used a very high-touch sales model.

Our product-led growth initiative included a family of projects: creating a try now flow, creating a buy now flow, improving our onboarding experience, and finding opportunities to upsell.

02

Try now

The customer journey doesn’t start with a trial. It starts with the process of signing up for that trial.

So we made it easier. We simplified the instructions, cleaned up the interface, and made it faster for people to get up and going. ShareFile had just gone through a rebrand, so I also made sure that the new experience reflected our refreshed voice and tone.

In addition to streamlining the process, we also looked at the data we were collecting from users. Historically, ShareFile hadn’t asked customers to specify their industry. This was limiting our ability to provide personalized experiences and target specific markets, so we used this as an opportunity to start collecting that data.

03

Buy now

ShareFile had historically used a high-touch sales model, but we didn’t want a phone call to stand in the way between us and potential customers. Providing a self-service option let smaller businesses with standard needs get started faster, and it freed up our sales team to dedicate more time to the enterprise clients that really needed their personalized attention.

To make sure we didn't lose any customers along the way, we tested the try and buy flows extensively. I documented every error message that could be thrown and provided updated language to engineering that provided the user with a clear path to recovery, so that no error would dissuade someone from pursuing a trial or purchasing a plan.

We had also noticed that a surprising percentage of customers would purchase a plan but then never follow through on creating their account. If someone isn’t using a product they pay for, they’re more likely to churn. To mitigate this, I created a reminder email that we started sending to customers who hadn’t created an account within one week of purchase.

04

Onboarding

After we made it easy for people to try the product, we had to make sure they liked it enough to convert. We knew the value of ShareFile, but we needed to make it crystal clear to someone trying the product for the first time.

Our onboarding experience at the time ended in a prompt for the user to add another person to their trial. We knew that accounts that add another user and share a file have a 25% higher retention rate, so we launched an A/B test to see if we could encourage trial users to engage with more than 1 core event using a jobs to be done (JTBD) onboarding framework.

We outlined our core events
We started by breaking down our core events:

• Share a file

• Create a client

• Create a folder

• Create a project

• Request a signature

We let the user choose their own adventure
I drafted an onboarding experience that would let the user choose which core event they wanted to engage with as part of their onboarding tour, and then wrote step-by-step tutorial guides for each option. When I was done, I worked with the team to build them out in Pendo.

We launched our A/B test
We set it up so that 50% of horizontal trials without e-signature would see the new JTBD onboarding experience, while the remaining half would see our current one as a control. We let the experiment run for 3 months.

We looked at the results
Compared to the control, our test group had a 130% increase in adoption, a 60% increase in activation, and an increase in feature adoption across the board, no matter which core event they chose to engage with (or even if they chose to engage at all).

We also learned that the vast majority of people chose to share a file as their first action.

05

Upselling

Once someone became a customer, we wanted to make sure they knew everything ShareFile was capable of… even if they had only signed up for the basic plan.

To accomplish this, we gave users on our basic plan limited access to certain features of our premium plans. Our thought was that if they could see firsthand the value that these features bring, they’d be more likely to upgrade to the premium plan.

I let our users know about the opportunity
I created two modals: one that went to administrators to remind them about what we were doing (we had also notified them via email weeks before), and another that went to end users directing them towards the new features they could test out.

I provided a path to upgrade
For admins, this was easy: whenever they encountered a paywall, we could show them a big shiny button with an UPGRADE label.

But no one wants to upgrade only to get features that go unused. As I created modals for end users to let them know when they’d run out of free projects or electronic signatures, I suggested that we add a way for them to send a request to their admin to upgrade and bring those features back. I also wrote the email that this triggered for the admin.

Because they knew their users were actively seeking out these premium features, admins could upgrade with confidence. This also had the added benefit of helping our end users feel less frustrated by the paywalls, because they felt like they could do something about them.)

06

Outcomes

We introduced a low-touch sales model
Introducing a self-service option enabled more sustainable growth, opened our doors to new business by allowing us to reach a broader audience, and freed up our sales team to focus on higher-value deals.

We increased trial conversion by 300%
Between our try now flow and our JTBD onboarding experiment, we tripled our conversion rate.

We contributed over $10 million in incremental ARR
Between our buy now flow, our increase in trial conversion, feature-led upselling, and storage enforcement, we contributed over $10M in incremental ARR.