贿赂客户来聊：PostHog 客户成功经理的破冰话术

Customer success managers at PostHog spend a lot of time getting customers to talk to them.

This is weird because in my past post-sales roles, I sat in back-to-back-to-back meetings that contributed to my growing existential dread and backlog of Jira support tickets that I had to beg people to look at. Even when I started playing defense on my calendar, it didn't feel like I was going to win a championship (little sports talk for my ball-knowers).

At PostHog, by the time a customer makes it to my book, the expectation is that they are in a steady state. When the product is set up and working, a direct ping from some employee of a software vendor might as well have the urgency of a glacier. Why should they talk to me at all? Why is this guy who only types Slack messages in lowercase letters accosting me in a very kind manner?

Weapons grade prose

A note for the reader: I am handsome and charming. While that gets me nine-tenths of the way there, it falls short in traditional communication channels. If I was going to be competing for attention, the outreach needed to be short, attention grabbing, and valuable. If somebody laughs, 2x strength multiplier.

I was already armed with a powerful weapon - the written word crafted via the neurotic casino that is my mind. If punching keys with my fingers to create words that people would read had been a viable and lucrative career, I would have pursued it. Instead, I opted to learn how to program and honed my penchant for writing on social media sites (mainly Twitter). I somehow amassed 30,000 followers for no reason before retiring my sword.

In the past few months, I have dusted off the sword. Here's the actual messages I've sent that have worked. Not every one includes giving away free merch, I promise.

The messages that worked

These drove meaningful quick calls, or interactions that led to continued engagement:

hi there [customer employee name]. trade proposal - 30 minutes of your time for some posthog merch. hit me with a 🟩 or ⛔

Direct play to a customer living in Florida who went to college in the Southeast. Made a guess that he was into fantasy football, and I was correct.

hi [customer employee name] remember me? i have returned with a dashboard for you. re: mobile app, sorry i am late. take it for a spin and let me know what you think. also i impersonated you to create this dashboard, if you hate it it looks like you created it and if you love it then it was me.

Seven emoji reactions. Banger.

completely (well semi-related) unrelated ping here but wanted to let you know [customer employee name] that you are in the top 10 of literally all posthog users when it comes to using the posthog mcp. i'd love to get a little time with you to ask about how you're using the mcp. in exchange for your time, i'd love to give you a code for some merch.

Finding out that you, a regular person, are in the top percentile of activity on a major website is a massive serotonin hit. I have to think streaming 83 hours of shows last month is puts me well above average, but that is a leaderboard I would not be proud to be on.

hey folks happy friday! I know it's been quiet but wanted to check in and see if there was anything that you were working on that you needed help with or any feedback you might have for the platform. One of the things that I've been enjoying is seeing how many users are using the platform and what their number of sessions looks like. handing out a gold medal 🥇 to [customer employee name] as top user. i sent you a code for a t-shirt via posthog.com/merch

This actually generated a DM from an engineering manager who was confused about what I was talking about, but after some clarification it allowed me to press for valuable feedback on the product ("while we're here...") and get more users into our Slack channel.

Corporate speak bores customers

While a lot of these conversations were driven by the promise of a merch code, I don't think the merch code is the primary driving factor behind responses. Yes, I am not above bribery. I say this all the time.

My belief is that these types of messages elicit responses because they are a refreshing deviation from the constant barrage of process, procedure, and corporate speak that bore us to death. I'm a millennial that grew up in the age of the Internet and that sort of exposure (good, bad, and ugly) fuels the breadth of my creativity that has found a home at PostHog. I am on calls wearing a TUMMY ACHE SURVIVOR graphic tee with raccoons on it, you are sending twice-polished emails proposing our execs talk to each other. We are not the same.

If you're still skeptical, I don't give up on the lack of Slack response. This week, I sent a care package to the main office of a company that has ghosted every email, LinkedIn message, carrier pigeon, and cry for help I've ever sent. It's not just any care package - in the box is a potato with my face on it, asking them to check their email.