How Freshworks leveraged messaging strategy to drive superior acquisition

A story about reconnecting with customers, finding messaging opportunities, and overhauling acquisition strategies for growth.
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“We needed to empower our teams with actionable insights, and that’s exactly what we were able accomplish. For me, that was a huge win.”

GP Abhishek

Prev. Head of Inbound Growth, Freshworks

Highlights

  • Conducted 70 customer interviews
  • Thematic analysis of all interviews across 3 products
  • Clustering of top JTBD themes
  • Identified messaging & acquisition opportunities per product

Services Provided

  • Customer research & interviews
  • Thematic analysis and coding of interviews
  • Jobs-To-Be-Done mapping based on outcomes of customers
  • Messaging & positioning guides
  • Customer journey mapping

The Company

Freshworks is a publicly traded enterprise (NASDAQ: FRSH) with 15 years under its belt and thousands of employees spread around the globe. Serving over 67,000 customers – including American Express, Bridgestone, Databricks, Fila, Nucor, and Sony – Freshworks is widely considered an industry leader in software solutions for customer and IT service teams. And the company has done it all thanks to a diverse suite of products and early strategic bets, backed by a team that is passionate about making work faster, easier, and more human for every client they serve.

So when Freshwork’s Head of Inbound Growth, GP Abhishek, and Growth Lead, Shrivarshini Somasekhar, from the Inbound Growth team contacted DemandMaven, it was with the intent of turning “good” into “excellent.” Thanks in part to their own pivotal experiences with market research, GP and Varshini knew that the best and only way to get a deep understanding of their customers – especially across multiple products and services – was to talk directly to them. But actually conducting a large-scale research study that could provide them with the insights they needed would require seamless logistical coordination, expert guidance, and a method for turning valuable nuggets into actionable jumping-off-points.

DemandMaven delivered all of that, and more.

Over the course of three months, Asia and her team conducted 70 Jobs to Be Done-style interviews with Freshworks customers across three different Freshworks products, in a process to uncover the real “jobs” they are trying to accomplish by purchasing the products. The artifacts and data analysis that came out of the project are now in frequent use by members of the Freshworks growth and marketing teams, who are excited to have additional customer context to guide their decision-making – whether they’re crafting a webinar or refining ad messaging or producing a product tour for the website.

“The [customer’s] ‘aha’ moments are interesting, but if the ‘aha’ moments are not applied, they’re not useful. They’re just interesting. So, in this case, I found that the research got used by my own team in a significant way, and by other teams as a source of input among other inputs to make larger decisions. That, to me, was sort of validation [that our teams have] understood the research, they accept most of the findings, and they also plan to use some of it to make those big decisions. That, to me, was the win,” said GP.

The Challenge

Feeling disconnected from a huge customer base

To maintain its position as an industry leader, Freshworks is in a state of constant evolution, adapting to better serve the needs of its customers. In 2023, the company had a robust set of product offerings that needed updated messaging and go-to-market strategies to ensure they were reaching the right audiences at the right time.

“Freshworks had gone through a little bit of change in terms of how we were going to market with our products. Different products were starting to become our priorities and we were launching the Customer Service Suite. We were at a point where we needed to do [some] things differently and we needed to do things that we weren’t doing before,” Varshini explained.

At the time, GP and Varshini, like every other member of the marketing team, were making decisions based on a combination of finely tuned instincts developed from years in the field and product analytics. Although scraping information from various existing sources – Gong calls, case studies, dashboard data – could tell them a lot, there was no substitute for hearing directly from the customers themselves.

“Everyone generally, needed to make buyer-informed decisions as against those based on experience or intuition,” Varshini went on.

 

GP added, “[I felt] there was an opportunity to be a lot more narrow and specific in terms of talking to our ICP, [understanding] their pain points, and getting them to a promised land. I think the premise was if we know these three things really well, there is a significant lift that we could get from improving our overall journey conversion rate.”

Ultimately a better source of customer data would help them implement changes in their growth operations, across every stage of the customer journey.

“Tactically speaking it would impact what we communicate via our ads, what we communicate on our landing pages, so ad engagement, improving landing page conversion, this was the initial goal that we had in mind. We also then extended that concept to improving how we message to existing clients. Eventually it also over time became an input to drive better decision-making around packaging.”

GP, Varshini, and team wanted to gain a better understanding of how their customer support products were helping their customers accomplish their goals and find success in their day-to-day businesses.

“So, a large part of our decisions [up until now] were based on what we knew, and we felt that there was a need to explore more and really understand what our customers care about. What does their journey look like? What is it that they want to accomplish with us?

 

The initial idea was to leverage these for inputs into messaging, primarily to drive better acquisition, to drive leads that are closer to our ICP. And then, eventually once we get those leads, to drive product engagement to convert them into paying customers,” GP explained.

The Solution

Live interviews and deep thematic analysis from an experienced insights team

When it came to narrowing down their approach for hitting their growth goals and KPIs, research was the obvious place to start. GP, in particular, was an experienced market researcher himself and personally understood the value of having that kind of outside-in perspective.

“Thankfully, at that time, while we had a lot of quantitative data we saw in our dashboards, there was also internal support in terms of understanding more about the users, especially [in particular segments]. So, the first option was research, and to be honest, there was no other option that we had in mind,” GP explained.

 

“As a company, we always want to learn more about the user and the customer to see what we can do better,” he went on.

Rather than choose a large market research firm like Nielsen, GP wanted to work with somebody who had a unique understanding of the SaaS business.

“Also, because this was important research, we wanted someone who’s really focused and who is an expert in this field. And that’s where I asked around, and one of the referrals that I got from another colleague was DemandMaven. And of course then the rest is history.”

DemandMaven is a woman-owned growth consultancy founded by Asia Orangio in 2018. Deeply experienced with proven SaaS frameworks that generate results, DemandMaven was the perfect match to help GP and Varshini execute an intensive multi-step interview plan to achieve three central objectives:

  • Support go-to-market acquisition programs by defining buyer segments and archetypes
  • Gain insights of the drivers behind why people decide, choose, and churn from Freshworks
  • Understanding the customer experience journey and identifying gaps to close

In order to achieve these objectives, the Freshworks and DemandMaven worked together to conduct interviews in the style of JTBD for the products Freshdesk, Freshchat, and the Customer Service Suite, interviewing 70 paying customers, churned customers, and active trialists for each product across various regions such as India, North America, United Kingdom, and parts of Europe.

To round out the insights gathered from the interviews, DemandMaven also conducted a series of surveys on trialists and customers for each product. After getting hundreds of responses, an analysis was conducted of both data sets: survey respondents and interviewees.

They delivered their research findings in a series of presentations and tables, broken down by product category and including opportunities for content and sales enablement.

The Result

Aligned messaging, improved CRO, and confidence

Before working with DemandMaven, there was no doubt about whether the Freshworks marketing team had a good understanding of their customers. But now, according to Varshini, the research has created a surety for people to depend on, confirming hunches they had while also opening new doors of opportunity.

When questions do arise, they always have the artifacts created by DemandMaven – including the JTBD briefs, which provide a detailed summary of each customer profile, quotes, and other highlights from the interviews and corresponding analysis.

“I see people going in those docs and scrolling through to see something that they can use in their copy or [in] webinars. When the solution engineering team comes and says, ‘Can you give us more context on how Freshdesk users think and how they want to see the product in action?’ I send them the Jobs to Be Done brief and they [can] look at it and say, ‘Okay, this is really helpful because now we know how to think about how to run the webinar, how to target the webinar, structure the webinar.’ All of that becomes more clear with the briefs,” Varshini explained.

Both GP and Varshini have a strong conviction that research is only valuable when it is able to be understood and used. They’ve brought not only their own team but other teams from within Freshworks into the fold so they can absorb and apply the work too.

“The messaging has been streamlined. In the sense that, now we can go into a meeting and [refer to a customer profile] and people immediately get what needs to be done. Even this morning we were talking about the difference between [two of our product offerings] and immediately everyone turned and looked at me and they said, ‘What did the DemandMaven research tell us?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, I have answers over here,” Varshini said.

Although it has only been a few months since Freshworks completed their initial consultation with DemandMaven, GP and Varshini are seeing the impact of the research in almost every facet of their growth operations.

“We built a product tour specifically for [one of the audience personas that came out of the DemandMaven research] and specifically with the pain points that those users would have. And we see a higher engagement with those product tours. We see more people spending time on it and the click-through rates are better. It’s still early stages and we haven’t distributed them to scale but we do see early trends there.”

Knowing that Freshworks is a large organization, DemandMaven coded and presented the data in a way that made it easy for every contributor to engage with.

Varshini said, “I did geek out heavily and I think I got a lot of others to geek out too on the [presentation of the data]. That’s going to be giving us answers for many, many more quarters to come. There’s going to be new things we’re going to find as we dig into it. We were able to sift through different answers and then see what the voice of the customer is for a group within a certain topic. Especially for our organization, the size of Freshworks, I think it helps us pinpoint to what we are looking for and see bigger, dig deeper and reflect that against the voice of the customer.”

Getting deep is an important part of the Jobs To Be Done methodology and it’s something Asia has instilled in every member of her own team. Clients like Freshworks appreciate the skill it takes to so deftly maneuver through customer conversations to find the “crux of the matter,” as Varshini put it.

“I think I would take that as a lesson for myself to ask the right questions to keep asking questions until we get to the soul of what they’re trying to say. I think that’s just a general life skill that I’ve picked up – [don’t] just go with the high level answer, dig deeper to get to what they’re really trying to say,” she explained.

GP agreed, “The whole team does a really, really good job. The interviewers did the best job asking questions, and it was just so interesting to listen to the questions that were asked. So I enjoyed the structure of the interviews as well.”

“We built a product tour specifically for [one of the audience personas that came out of the DemandMaven research] and specifically with the pain points that those users would have. And we see a higher engagement with those product tours. We see more people spending time on it and the click-through rates are better. It’s still early stages and we haven’t distributed them to scale but we do see early trends there.”

Shrivarshini Somasekhar

Growth Lead, Freshworks

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