Unlocking the Power of Champion Tracking for an Early-Stage PLG Startup, with Storylane founder Nalin Senthamil

Problem

Storylane is an early-stage company in the demo automation market. Their product enjoys a very high degree of user love. This was organically resulting in word-of-mouth sales and G2 Referrals.
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As part of his strategy to leverage multiple channels to grow, Nalin wanted to implement a Champion Tracking solution that can help them systematically understand when their happy users and buyers were moving jobs so that they can continue the relationship and re-engage them at the right time.

“We have around 2,000 customers. A lot of them are product led, which means we don't even talk to them. They try the product. They subscribe to us. And then they upsell and upgrade to higher plans. And of course, some of them talk to us to buy our enterprise plan.”
- Nalin Senthamil, CEO, Storylane

Solution

Role of Champion Tracking in Storylane’s PLG framework:

Storylane has around 2000 customers, most of whom are acquired through product-led efforts, meaning they try the product and subscribe to it without any human intervention. There are a few who talk to them and directly sign up for a bigger contract (sales-led). Because of the PLG motion, they have a sizable number of people who have paid (not free users) and used the product before. Many of them probably could not convert that into a company-wide sales contract due to limitations that might not apply in their new jobs.
This, combined with the fact that their product is loved by its users and they can simply get to the Storylane's website and start using the product again makes Champion Tracking a key connector in their PLG framework.

Champion Tracking:

Boomerang integrates with their systems to surface job changers from their user base every month. This is an important ‘signal’ but according to Nalin, people might not be waiting to buy a new product right away. In fact, in his experience, they’ve seen the re-engagement to happen as early as 2 weeks, and as late as 3 months.

Engagement Strategy for Boomerang Leads:

Nalin believes that there are two ways of engaging with Boomerang leads:

1. Soft-touch Engagement: Most of these users and buyers have used Storylane and probably have a good opinion of it. The idea behind the soft-touch engagement strategy is to make sure they continue to be in the circle of Storylane well-wishers, and more importantly, don’t go from happy patrons to annoy prospects because of heavy prospecting! To that extent, Nalin recommends a couple of emails driving towards connecting on LinkedIn and staying in touch, etc. This part is owned by Nalin at Storylane. (see below for a section about the importance of founder involvement with Boomerang leads)
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2. Regular Sales Engagement: After a couple of months, the team tries to correlate multiple signals from that organization and enroll them into a regular sales engagement sequence which factors in all the signals captured around this Boomerang lead. In Storylane’s case, this is also where they disqualify any lead who belongs to an account that’s too small or not a good ICP-fit.

Team and resources for Boomerang Engagement:

One of the biggest challenges in an early-stage company is the lack of capacity to take on all the projects that they want to. Nalin believes in a hybrid model that is heavily automated at the top (when the leads come in) using automation tools like PhantomBuster, followed by a highly white-glove approach to Boomerang engagement with a dedicated BDR allocated to this.

Importance of Founder engagement with Boomerang leads:

Nalin personally connects with all Boomerang leads on LinkedIn. He believes that past users and buyers are extremely useful sources of feedback for the product and as an early-stage founder, it’s absolutely essential that you personally reach out to them intending to get their feedback. He clarifies that while his sales team would pursue these leads after some time in a ‘salesy’ way, his objectives are clearly and distinctly to collect their feedback. This distinction in messaging and asking, as opposed to a transactional ask, also makes them open to the conversation.

The goal is Champion Enablement:

‍Because Storylane’s champions are mostly past users, a big part of the objective of their engagement is to enable these past users to be champions in the new company much before there’s any buying intent. In simple terms, it’s just about getting them to start using the PLG version of Storylane again in their new job.

This is interesting and different from most sales-led companies because this drives higher positive responses than when you’re reaching out purely with the intention of launching a new buying cycle through them. When the intent is in place (typically after 2-3 months), these champions would have enough

Business Impact

Attribution for Champion Tracking/ Boomerang:

Nalin believes that many companies incorrectly obsess over Direct Attribution (first or last touch) and that in a multi-signal, dynamic buying environment like today's, that's not the right approach. He believes in equal or more importance to Indirect Attribution, i.e. how each signal like champion job change plays with the rest of the signals to drive desired business outcomes. These signals could be website engagement, intent signals, social engagement, etc.

For job change signals specifically, I don't expect past users to talk to my SDRs first, because they've been users of Storylane. They know the ins and outs of the product. They know how to get in touch. They’d not necessarily come through the SDR. They might go talk to the AE that they have worked with before. Or they will click on a marketing email or social post, or respond to me directly on LinkedIn and get connected there, or go to the website and sign up directly. There's a lot of indirect attribution that happens here.
- Nalin Senthamil

In the case of Storylane, it has also happened a few times that past users or buyers have organically made it back into their sales pipeline even before they reached out, which further emphasizes the potential of Champion Tracking for a company like Storylane.

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Storylane business impact:

Through the direct attribution model for Boomerang, Storylane has secured 20+ new opportunities/customers through their BDR team. These are organization-wide engagements and also do not include indirect attributions like referred pipeline, and user-led acquisitions of Boomerang leads who directly visit their product, which are all in addition to these.

From a business impact standpoint, this has been a significant component of the growth model for Storylane and they’ve doubled down on the investment to include additional well-wishers like past evaluators who ended up not purchasing, etc. into the Boomerang engine.  

They are also exploring additional use cases around using Boomerang signals for i) churn risk mitigation and ii) account-level expansion (once there’s a small user-level land).

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The B2B landscape is changing very fast. Buyers no longer come in with a single point of view around tools. When there is a signal like this, why wouldn’t you use it?! Your strategies might change a bit depending on PLG or not, but these are very valuable signals irrespective of that. If you have a product that users love and you’ve customers who have seen value from it, you’re just leaving money on the table by not doing Champion Tracking!
- Nalin Senthamil

In this conversation, Nalin, the CEO of Storylane, discusses the importance of champion tracking in the context of product-led growth (PLG) and how it can significantly impact customer retention and acquisition. He shares insights on the tech stack used at Storylane, the integration with Boomerang for tracking job changes, and the indirect attribution that plays a crucial role in B2B buying. Nalin emphasizes the need for nurturing relationships with champions who change jobs and how this can lead to higher-value deals. The discussion also covers the challenges faced in implementing champion tracking and the strategies to overcome them.