How Typeform focuses on annual subscriptions I Interview with Kevin Raheja from Typeform

See an abstract of the interview below on how to increase annual subscriptions…

Pathmonk: Kevin is heading up business development and sales and he was just hailing over from HubSpot a couple of months ago. So Kevin, it’s great to have you on the show. (…) Can you tell me a little bit about Typeform in your own words? What is it all about? 

Kevin Raheja: Sure, yeah. Typeform as you said, is an interactive, data collection tool and we do it, in kind of a different way. Then you see most static forms on your website. We do it with an element of design and we do it conversationally. So it gently leads the respondent down a path, in a conversational way. Typeform was built by designers. So that is a strong value proposition for tens of thousands of companies. (…) There’s no dominant vertical. We have seen customers all across the board using Typeform. 

Pathmonk: Since you are working in the business development and sales organization, what types of companies would you be working with – at which size are you stepping in? 

Kevin Raheja: Yeah I think certainly we want to have a focus on annualized contracts, on the sales side, especially because we’re working with SMBs (…). So you know from a sales approach, I’m looking to be focused on annualized, contracts or even multi-year contracts. We have so many users at you know, hundreds of thousands of companies that are on our freemium plan where there’s just an opportunity. And by the way, we don’t have an outbound sales team yet (…). So the strategy there is to first look at accounts that have users that are using Typeform and then try to expand those accounts..So that’s the first approach is to, identify users that are not only familiar with Typeform, but also using it and then expand those contracts into larger accounts

Pathmonk: Could you tell me a little bit about a typical day? I mean there’s obviously there’s tons of different journeys for the business accounts that you would be focusing on, what would be a typical user journey from them to start start using the product Typeform, find it and then maybe getting in contact with you guys? 

Kevin Raheja: Okay. Yeah I think, again, we want to focus, because we have something that we also did really well at HubSpot,  didn’t necessarily have to go out cold call new because we had such a wide reach with our freemium offering. So the idea was really to let marketing drive the expansion of the freemium accounts, get people to sign up, try Typeform or HubSpot before they buy it and then that’s when the sales team goes in and identifies, ICP ideal customer profiles, amongst the free users and that they think that they can nurture up into a paid customer.

Pathmonk: Very interesting.You mentioned you came over from HubSpot. I’m curious what type of processes you brought over to Typeform? Maybe you could tell us a little bit about the sales process.

Kevin Raheja: You know, once an inbound lead arrives, or is qualified as to be relevant for the sales team? Sure. I think the, so what I was managing at, um, HubSpot was mainly the strategic partnerships team. So the integrations, the platform side of HubSpot’s business and,  that’s a big focus for us at Typeform as well as expanding partnerships through integrations. And so  I think, you know, just coming in and really taking  the partnership model that I built at HubSpot and applying it to Typeform, that, that’s probably the processes that I’m looking to bring over here (…)

Pathmonk: And when you reflect on this time and HubSpot is there a couple of things that you want to bring in for sure now in your new role? Like a few sort of key learnings that you just know work for partnerships, programs on that scale? 

Kevin Raheja:  I think, well we do a lot of analysis at HubSpot as  the more tools that you, a customer was able to connect to HubSpot. You know, retention would go from 80% two over a 100% percent just from going one to four tools installed into HubSpot. So if you could get a customer to install the software that they’re already using for their business into your product, the chances of retaining that customer and the chances of increasing the account size was much greater.

Pathmonk: One cheeky question.What type of inbound tech stack to increase leads would you be using now in Typeform since you moved over t? 

Kevin Raheja: Yeah, it’s a great, it’s a great question. So uh, we’re actually using, um, Iterable at, um, at Typeform we use, uh, HubSpot, uh, for a CRM, um, in a few of our departments. And on the sales side we use, uh, we’re, we’re using Salesforce currently. We just signed up for Iterable and our marketing team seems pleased with it.

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