​Core Value Proposition

The core value that the Sekel platform provides is an increased number of leads organically which are call leads, form leads, drive directions ( footfalls ) and WhatsApp leads to the store. It does this by

1. Listing management of the store on GBP, Bing, and Apple Maps ( Search ).
2. It generates a dynamic microsite and updates IVR numbers for a uniform brand presence.
3. It automatically lists all the products on the GBP and the website along with automated local SEO of the store's microsite.
4. This helps the store rank organically on search and Google Maps for near me searches and also product + locality searches.
5. Automated review management, where any reviews across their stores are automatically replied increases engagement with end customers and also improves its ranking.

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As mentioned earlier in the acquisition submission for the store owners the core value prop is to boost foot traffic and generate more leads.

And for the Brand to stay competitive and achieve high-performance growth.

The top features of Sekel are below and the frequency of the usage.

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1. The store owners receive calls from IVR day in and day out on their primary and secondary numbers
2. They also experience the core value when they receive notification of the calls on SMS, WhatsApp, and emails, or when they download data on their emails.
3. The ICPs also experience the core value prop via the SellrApp ( Mobile application ) and Dashboard (Web Application)

ICP Deep Dive

Within these industries, there are emerging types of users,

• 1 the store owners,
• 2 the leads who have to keep up the monitoring,
• And 3 the heads who are the decision makers and
• 4 the invisible blockers and leadership members who are not directly involved.
  Below are the key ICPs,

Below are all the Key ICPs with their natural frequency of the product and key features used

Defining now the natural frequency of the subproducts as per the ICP.

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Engagement Framework

The engagement framework for the ICPs would be different as their use cases are usually different. Below is the is the engagement framework

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An active user is one who has logged in to the application whether web or mobile and performed an action on Lead management in the specified time of the ICP.

1. So for the Retail Marketing head ICP, they are active if they have viewed Leads ( Call or Form ) at least once in 1 month.
2. Similarly the Senior Marketing Executive ICP, they are active if they have viewed Leads ( Call or Form ) at least once in 1 week.
3. And for the Store Owner ICP, they are active if they have viewed Leads ( Call or Form ) at least 2-3 times in 1 week.

Segmenting the users and the company based on usage of the application, stores, and frequency, based on the Power / Core / Casual framework.

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The key observation is that the Power accounts have stayed the longest ( > 2 years ) indicating the reasoning for having complete integration plus usage of the platform. Another key insight also from the user was "to not touch the system as it is generating more leads". The retailers are satisfied and there is a higher lock-in period and associated cost of the switch. Also, there have been cases when the accounts have moved from lesser locations to higher locations. Thereby having more satisfaction and higher lead numbers. Experiencing JTBD more, and increasing retention.

It also has the opposite effect that lesser locations do not experience complete JTBD as the time to JTBD is also higher, which is at least 6 months. Therefore retention for Casual accounts is lower versus Power and Core.

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Segmenting the ICPs based on the above framework only on the active users and not the dormant users.

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1. Casual Users - Retail Marketing Heads - Due to their time and adoption of the tech stack, they prefer to download the data, and view it in Excel, and create their dashboards even though the tool provides this ability. Their core job to be done is to ensure the project is on track and there are no outliers. They would engage and escalate to the CS team if there are any issues and also share any new features that are directed toward increasing the revenue generated.
2. Core Users - Senior Executives - Often the operators who are overseeing the entire operations on behalf of the ICP -1. Ensuring the day-to-day issues are resolved, all coordination are complete, reports are generated, and making sure there are no outliers and if there are then raising concern. They monitor the progress of the leads, dealers, website, and other features and report to ICP1
3. Power Users - Store Owners - These are the actual people who get notifications, call leads and form leads from the buyers. They engage with the leads, call, message, and WhatsApp them to convert them and increase revenue by selling the brand's products. They are measured on the targets to be achieved and conversion percentages.

Apart from these, there are both Lapsed Accounts and Lapsed users who are not active yet are paying customers and have access to the platform. For engagement campaigns would also consider some of the lapsed users as well to create a comprehensive engagement strategy.

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We know that the casual user which is the ICP 1, the Marketing Head. Is someone who logs in only once a month to view leads or downloads them. They also use at the max only two features. Since they also have multiple other tasks throughout the day. Their time is the most expensive real estate to capture.

Here are the hypotheses that could be relevant and will pick one and run a campaign. Also, we can pick one hypothesis to do a product hook.

1. Hypothesis 1: The ICP is not aware of all of the features, analytics, and insights the platform can generate.
2. Hypothesis 2: The ICP finds it difficult to use the platform and the user experience is difficult to navigate and use other features.
3. Hypothesis 3: The ICP would log in more if there were more notifications sent by the system about leads or updates.
4. Hypothesis 4: The ICP would log in more if the dashboard could be customizable for their reporting which could be an IKEA effect.

Campaign: For Hypothesis 1 we can run email campaigns introducing all the varied features and how it will benefit them.

Revamp: For Hypothesis 2 a complete revamp of the dashboard user experience and teardown can be done, which was done in the onboarding project. This along with onboarding tutorials, videos, and walkthroughs could be new features and product hooks as well.

Notification System: For Hypothesis 3, there could be a notification system created to send key data points weekly to the ICP to summarize the weekly leads, engagement, and traffic.

Product hook: For Hypothesis 4, this could be a product hook that can create higher stickiness as the core reason why these ICPs download the sheets and use Excel is the ease of use data analysis on Excel or another BI tool, rather than integrating a BI tool within the dashboard making it much easier to create dashboards and monitor the data periodically.

Now for Hypothesis 1, here are the campaign Details.

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We know that the core user is a senior executive in the marketing department of the brand and reports to the ICP -1 who is the marketing head. They use the application somewhere between 3-10 times a week and use at least 3 features of the platform. Since they are the operators of the company to ensure that all organic, paid, and other BTL activities are functioning and fight fire where needed. Also, generate reports of the campaigns, and report conversions as well.

Here is the hypothesis,

1. ICP doesn't know all the features and actions possible to be done in each single module which they use heavily
2. ICP doesn't know all the other features that are possible to generate more demand
3. ICP wants to know what their competitors are doing.
4. ICP also wants to know how the brand perception is across all platforms, keep a tab, and address it ASAP
5. ICP also wants to assign missed leads and get a status from the retailers and wants to see the action done collaboratively.

For the above hypothesis, some can be campaigns, and workflows and others are product hooks.

Campaigns: Hypothesis 1 and 2 can be email and webinars to create awareness of the depth and breadth of the application.

Product hooks: Hypothesis 3, 4, and 5 can be new product hooks.

Notifcations: Hypothesis 5 can also be a hypothesis and workflow, to get notified T+1 days of leads not actioned and get status updates from the dealer or sales teams.

Building for Hypothesis 1, where each feature is deep-dived, here are the details of the campaign

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This campaign is to introduce an increased mobile application to manage leads and manage the store on mobile instead of on the web. This can be used by the store owner, sales team, and the brand admins to keep a tab on the business on the go.

The Hypothesis is that Store owners require an app to track their leads, and make calls and therefore increase stickiness to Sekel, build loyalty, and great WoM which would be in itself an acquisition for Direct to retailer model or new brands altogether.

For this, there would be different messaging for all the ICPs, and this would require a top-down approach, therefore targeting would be ICP-1, and ICP-2 and later once the approval comes, the messaging would change for ICP-3 with local language-catered messaging.

Here are the campaign details.

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CREATIVE

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Product Hook 1 - Customizable Dashboard.

The ability to fetch the required feed, and create own graphs and metrics would create the best stickiness to the application. Integrations with existing tools, allowing the brand to be able to drag and drop metrics would be key. This along with defined templates like Mixpanel or Amplitude can help users visualize the customer journeys and actions on journeys that are broken.

As soon as the brand person logs in to the system they are asked if they can customize their dashboard.

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Once they click yes, this allows them to view a drag-and-drop functionality of creating a custom dashboard tailor-made for them, this will allow them to add other sources of data enticing the platform and its usage.

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Product Hook 2 - Competitor Research

As an ICP-1 or ICP-2 logs in to the dashboard, they are directed to a pop that says competitor research. This allows them to notice, click on it, and then search for their competitors. They get information regarding their competition in the dashboard itself, this allows more stickiness and builds trust within users that this tool has most features which other tools lack all in one single pricing.

When they open the dashboard, they see this pop-up to know your competitor.

When they click on it, they are taken to a screen where they enter their competitor's name, and search. Which shows them the results.

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Birds Eye View

Sekel Tech's retention rate is quite low, alarmingly low. I have segmented the retention rate by the Account types which are Casual, Core, and Power, below are the findings,

1. The retention percentage for Casual Accounts which are Stores less than 100 is 20.00%
2. The retention, percentage for Core Accounts which are Stores between 100-500 is 40.00%
3. The retention percentage for Power Accounts which are Store > 500 is 55.56%

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Anything lesser than 90% is a concerning percentage of the retention, and then also the company is profitable. It's the price point of the application. For comparison, the retention rate of Hubspot is 110%. Meaning it is not only retained but has upselled its users.

This retention rate is of more than 2 years. There have been only 24 brands that have activated, and out of The averagewhich now there are only 10 that are currently active.

The average retention rate is 42%

Since the platform allows multiple industries to set up stores and increase their discovery, below is the retention rate across industries,

1. Retention percentage for Dairy Store: 0.00%
2. Retention percentage for lifestyle: 9.09%
3. Retention percentage for automotive-automobile: 37.50%
4. Retention percentage for home-services: 62.50%
5. Retention percentage for personal service: 100.00%
6. Retention percentage for retail: 0.00%
7. Retention percentage for electrical-electronics: 100.00%
8. Retention percentage for restaurants: 0.00%

Here is the visualization of the retention curve. The data is available since 2022 therefore I have ploted it since then. If I were to slice it since 2023 at which point the entire product got stable as the product was in the stages of moving from an older codebase to a newer one, the retention curve flattens after 6 months

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Microscopic View

Channels Driving the Best Retention

Sekel traditionally has always relied on organic, WOM, and email marketing, as the key channels of distribution and has not invested anything in paid marketing. Understanding these channels across our Accounts and ICPs, these are best estimates for the channels as there is little evidence as most of the users who are currently retained have either left the organization or someone new has come in their place. Most of the clients are people who have had high word of mouth from previous versions of Sekel Tech.

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Products / Sub Products Driving the Best Retention

Looking at the retained accounts, we can trace back what are the products that are used and identify which ones generate the best retention. From the retention curve, we can see that the more locations the higher the number of retained accounts. From the segmentation section, we identified that Power accounts use all the features + API integrations and have 500+ locations.

1. Location management is important for all accounts therefore it is the core function of the application, which includes setting up locations on the dashboard and also taking GMB manage access.
2. Lead management is what enables all the ICPs to experience the core value prop.
3. Content Management is highly required to create the website and integrate it with the brand's store locator, create dealer and product pages under the brand subdomain to increase visibility.
4. Analytics are crucial, specifically, search and location analytics to increase retention
5. Integrations with their inventory and sales data to fetch the product per store data and showcase revenue contribution and return on investment spending. This builds stickiness and commitment.

Here we will define churn, which is once an active user but has discontinued the service and is not in contract anymore in the past 2 years. After speaking to most of the ex-customers, ex-sales, and customer success teams.

Below are all the reasons categorized in whether Voluntary or Involuntary.

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Picking up the frequency of these issues,

• Delayed Payments: 4 mentions
• The support team was unavailable on weekends: 2 mentions
• Pricing was too high: 2 mentions
• Other concerns: Each mentioned 1 time

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Negative Actions to Look out for

Below is the list of negative actions that need to be looked at high priority.

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The retention campaign starts with the lapsed accounts that are not active, none of the ICPs are active, this campaign will be sent to both the ICP-1 and ICP-2 at a monthly rate.

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CREATIVE

A churned user has left for the reasons defined earlier. For each of these reasons, we can create specific campaigns and also create product hooks that can get the churned users back.

Tackling the pricing too high, we can create campaigns introducing a new pricing which can target the churned users and give them the perceived value of the pricing, and how much ROI can be generated based on the industry. This campaign can be emailed to the Marketing heads ( ICP -1 ) and ( ICP - 2 ). We can also communicate for a pilot with a few locations so that they can replace their current vendor with A/B testing.

There could be LinkedIn campaigns also created for this. But for the scope here, will create another email campaign for the churned users specifically those who mentioned high prices and delayed payments.

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Targeting the churned accounts that operate on weekends and have higher footfalls and call leads. These could be Personal Services, Retail, Luxury and also Automobiles. Below are the campaign details. This would also require a feature hook on developing a great customer support platform, either automated or manual, but a manual one would have higher satisfaction.

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Linkedin Sponsored post

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In this campaign, we will target all the churned user accounts for ICP-1 and ICP-2 with all the new and advanced features getting them to be aware of the new developments and how it will help them.

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Adding the LinkedIn creative here,

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This is going to be a webinar for hyperlocal discovery, where the invites will go to all the churned, new, and existing accounts along with their ICPs. This will help them establish Sekel as a leader in terms of hyperlocal demand generation and take the next step to understand and implement it with Sekel. This will re-engage them with Sekel.

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