Kristin Florin

Buying a new pair of Birkenstocks the other day, just landed and....BAM. Pop up. 🤯 Is there a retailer out there that doesn't greet "new users" with such an intrusive popup as soon as they land? It's proliferated throughout eCommerce, I think for 3 reasons: 1. The need for first-party data 2. The assumption that the user will buy (or won't buy, and need to somehow capture them) 3. Everyone does it. So should we. (oh, and people are used to it). The status quo What does this do to margins? How do you not know whether this user (like me) would have bought anyway regardless of discount intervention? Increase subscriptions by 5%, conversion by 1% and acting desperate by 100%. The solution is to recognise user intent to accurately serve newsletter subscriptions, especially those with discount % off. Serving a popup, not on an arbitrary attribute like "new user" but on genuine behaviour that indicates the users mindset. 🧘🏻‍♂️ (his isn't to hate on Birkenstock, I'm a fan, just everyone does it and I genuinely wanted some new Birkers) 🩴

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You don’t have to scale the wall alone. Some days are rough. String a few together with work stress, family stress, little to no sleep, and a feeling that things just aren’t moving forward might be too common in business today. More grinding isn’t the answer. Be strong enough to ask for help. We all hit the wall. Some of us gently bump into it and others hit at full speed, back up, and ram it again - hard. Most of us do both. Be smarter, stronger, and better for yourself, your family, and your team be extending a hand on good days and reaching for a hand on the bad days.

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What's wrong here? John Cutler's chart beautifully illustrates the lag time between what management is thinking and how this propagates to the teams. Some lag time is inevitable due to the different levels of perspective (macro vs. micro), but we can actively minimise that. What are your best practices to minimise lag time and create a strong alignment between teams and management?

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Bonus content just released in my "Many Hats of a TPM" series. This one isn't really a hat but it's just as important as one. It's about being a good human. I'm curious what you think of the topics. Can you be a good #TPM without ~empathy ~collaboration ~leadership ~growth mindset ~coaching ~mentoring ~partnership The link is in the comments below. #productdevelopment #programmanagement #technicalprogrammanagement

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In Q1, Bravado closed more customers than in all of 2023. 📈📈📈 How? Turns out there are 3 things you have to get nail to grow exponentially: == 1. Predict The Future Accurately - In November '23, when layoffs were swirling and the economy looked dead to right still, we started seeing the first signs of recovery. Quota attainment started barely creeping up. Stock market started rebounding faster. First rumors of competitive VC rounds resuming. We dug in and, by Dec '23 formed the opinion that 2024 was going to be a shocking return to the heyday of ZIRP 2021. Crazy growth, hiring, valuations skyrocketing, huge pressure on companies to scale or die. The AI Revolution was coming faster than anyone understood then. == 2. Scared Money Don't Make No Money So we made the incredibly risky decision to burn all the boats and go All In on Full Time Sales Hiring. This was an unpopular opinion even within Bravado, let alone outside. Lots of "Are you crazy? Google just laid off 10K more and you think there's gonna be a massive hiring spree??" 🤡 But I've been through a lot of these cycles now. Sales hiring is always the first thing to get cut... and the first to come back. So we made the bet and were the first to be aggressive here. Invested deeply in the product experience and GTM to match. Started prepping content and data to share with the sales community. Monitored closely and saw quota attainment skyrocketing. By March, we were miles ahead of competitors / LinkedIn in terms of our capacity to build a world class sales team with Bravado's AI Sales Recruiter in a box. === 3. Hire A World Class Sales Team Look, there's no easy way to say this. The vast vast majority of sales leaders and reps are just not that good. They can sell when everything is scripted and perfect. They can sell to the perfect ICP with a lot of budget and existing pain / need. They are effectively very good order takers. But the ones who can manufacture pain? Create demand? Change a customer POV or biz strategy by reframing a problem? Win an intellectual debate? Advocate for an opinionated POV? One in a 100, at best. I had spent years trying to convince Kara Kayrouz to build with me. It's no coincidence that our best quarter in company history coincided with her first ramped quarter leading our revenue operation. She brought on a world class executive Sarah Dunn who, together, have formed a GTM org that advises and changes how our customers hire for the better. We don't close deals: we shift business strategy. We show clients a whole new way to think about sales talent. That's what you gotta get right to scale like this. 1. Market 2. Product 3. Sales Talent If you need help with #3, DM, tag a friend, or comment and let Kara / Sarah show you why every white hot startup is switching to Bravado RecruiterAI to supercharge their sales hiring.

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Hot take: not all friction is bad friction. The CRO gurus tell you you need to make everything as smooth as possible. You streamline, and streamline, and streamline until your store follows all the best practices—and, in doing so, is the same as all the others out there. But sometimes, putting an obstacle on your customer’s path can make an otherwise mundane transaction much more memorable. This haggling chatbot, powered by Nibble and spotted in the wild in Wype’s checkout flow, is a good example. Wype could have gone with a regular promo—instead, they chose to make the customer work for their discount by convincing an AI. For the brand, the benefits are obvious: a higher AOV and a better contribution margin in a category where shipping individual products is prohibitively expensive. For the consumer, it’s an experience that feels novel and slightly mysterious, as if you’ve uncovered a cheat code you were not supposed to know about. (For as long as these chatbots are an exception and not the norm, at least—but that’s why you keep innovating.) So here’s a wild idea: the next time you’re optimizing your purchase experience, is there a way you can reach your goals by making things harder, not easier? #ecommerce #dtc #cx #ai #cro

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We get spooked 🕷️ when we see brands stocked out of best sellers because we know the implications are brutal: ☠️ Marketing dollars wasted, driving customers toward a poor experience. 😱 Customer complaints – they hate being ghosted by their favorite products. 📦 Inventory piling up in the wrong places (sizes, colors), leading to markdowns and costly warehouse bills. Flagship was built to keep stock-outs at bay. Ready to solve your inventory nightmares? Get in touch 🎃 #Retail #Inventory #MachineLearning #Forecasting

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Two facts: 1) BigCommerce appointed Travis Hess, who joined the company as President this past May, as its new CEO. 2) Businesses that Travis Hess lead get acquired. From BigCommerce's announcement: Hess previously held senior leadership roles at Accenture, where he led the firm's D2C commerce offering and go-to-market strategy. He has also served on partner advisory boards for Shopify, Klaviyo, SAP/Hybris, and Rackspace Technology. Prior to his time at Accenture, Hess was VP of The Stable, an omnichannel commerce agency that was acquired by Accenture, and before that, CEO of BVA, a Shopify agency, which was acquired by The Stable in 2021. 👀 See the pattern here? Everywhere Travis Hess works gets acquired! Earlier this year in May, I reported that BigCommerce was exploring a sale after attracting takeover interest, according to Reuters sources. The sources said that BigCommerce asked investment bank Qatalyst Partners to solicit interest from potential buyers that include private equity firms, but that the discussions were at an early stage and no deal was certain. Industry folks have been speculating for years that BigCommerce should / would get acquired. The company has lost more than 90% of its market value in the four years since its IPO in Aug 2020 and currently holds a market cap of $447M, down from its brief ~$12B valuation in Aug 2020. Rick Watson reported in August that BigCommerce told Wall Street it is no longer for sale, per a research note from Ken Wong, CFA at Oppenheimer. However who's to say that that the For Sale sign isn't switched back on as quickly as it was switched off? Perhaps the leadership shakeup at BigCommerce is in preparation for the company's sale, as Hess comes with tremendous experience leading companies through an acquisition. But that's purely speculation... Either way, I wish BigCommerce the best of luck with the transition, and if not sold, I hope to see great things from the company next year. I'll be keep you posted via my Shopifreaks E-Commerce Newsletter. Next edition drops this afternoon.

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⚡️ I often hear this from execs: “This business is inefficient and my team is buried. it’s costing us a lot - in many ways.” I listen, lean in, and then casually say, “You know, I could develop a custom app to fix that.” Their eyes light up with equal parts shock and excitement. And just like that, we dive into the exploration phase of the project. It’s often that simple. The best solutions come from real conversations and being ready to jump in with a practical fix. 🙌 #operations #leadership

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Help! Do you work in retail? Would love your genuine insight here. Curious why shopping has turned into the stock market with all of the price adjustments. From a CX perspective it creates a really terrible experience. I'm seeing it at Wayfair, at World Market, and other outlets. Assuming outlets can track if items carts don't go to purchase, but are they measuring the effect and seeing no bottom line impact or do they assume there's no impact? #retail #customerexperience

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Homer's "everything is okay alarm" is your spreadsheet. However, an information management system alerts you to what needs attention. Find your DataTruth™ and cut out the noise. https://lnkd.in/ega4P3YA #DataTruth #signalovernoise #digitaltransformation #digitaldashboards #dashboard #informationmanagement #simpsons

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Grocery retailers, and really any brick-and-mortar retailer, are typically skeptical about claims of a 3% year-over-year sales lift. I've found this is either due to: 1. They've been burned by past vendors 2. Poor prior investment returns. 3. Poor measurement efficacy and they can't be confident in the outcomes. As part of their investment review process, Schnucks independently verified Upside's reported results. Check out their findings here: https://lnkd.in/ePUE3S8A

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Another masterclass podcast from Christian Idiodi. This time he's covering coaching impostor syndrome with Chris Jones. Two quotes in particular that resonated with me: (1) "Coaching impostor syndrome starts with having a culture of coaching” - Christian. My take: Imposter syndrome is a sensitive topic. If you don’t have trust (which comes with genuine coaching), you likely won’t even be aware that someone on your team is going through impostor syndrome. Yet, someone’s direct manager is often one of the people best positioned to boost confidence and help a person through impostor syndrome. (2) “It’s always hardest to see your own problem. It’s really a lot easier to see clearly a structure around somebody else’s problem.” - Chris. My take: I love how Chris talks about getting help on impostor syndrome from various different people beyond just your boss (especially as you move up in leadership). This quote reminds me very much of the peer-to-peer relationships we have among the directors in Intermountain’s Digital Services team. We cover a wide variety of different product areas (e.g. patient portal, contact center, IT service management, intranet, marketing site, etc.). Despite these differences, we often collaborate and coach each other through tough problems. This creates a magnifying effect on our ability to learn that helps us solve difficult problems and stretch ourselves in ways that overcomes impostor syndrome.

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If you don't ask for what you need how can you ever get it, right? Here's me trying, and hoping for good karma: Are you a CRO manager or digital marketer in an e-commerce business? Please have a coffee chat with me (virtual, or physical in Copenhagen), and share your goals, needs and pains.* Happy to reciprocate if you ever need a product person's input 🙏 *Yes, I know GenAI can easily craft persona descriptions, but I still think real people are the best. https://lnkd.in/dcqFjZ-w #productmanagement #persona #ICP #research

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I can picture the number of conversations happening next week after this outage. Conversations about whether we should test, review, and manually apply patches instead of allowing software to auto-update to patch security threats immediately. Round and round we go.

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Growth-ready financial close Learn from our customers how you can accelerate the close, unleash productivity, and boost your competitive advantage 🚀

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Tell that your products are premium without really saying it! Am I the only one who gets excited by cookware? Yes? ok.. The first thing that I bought for my new house was a set of shelf knives. 🙈 My recent one-night-scroll in this category was Misen. I love how their website screams premium with their creatives and copy. To sell premium, keeping the price high isn't enough. You need to command that price. You need to show that you're the best in the industry. You are what the professionals would choose. And you're a status symbol. Misen's images and website design embodies all of this. Now I can't wait to try out your products, Michael Mahoney! Also, is this a good ASMR or what? 😵 Shopify

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The best thing you can do for yourself. Full stop. Even though the freaking bull threw me off after 31 miserable seconds 🤠 - what stuck is the unbeaten feeling of community and belonging at Pavilion's GTM Nashville last year. It's the only professional event locked in my calendar for any given year. And it's the only Go-to-Market event for Executives. GTM2024 is coming up Oct 14th-16th in Austin, Texas. Koen Stam, Jeroen Hendriks and I will make the trip from Amsterdam, completely unplug from ordinary life for a couple of days and plug into what's the incarnation of community. I speak so highly of it as it treats me to three unique experiences at once. 1️⃣ Connect across the pond: Switching from European to American perspective gives me a 180 degree in GTM approach. It's difficult to gain the same insights over LinkedIn posts or community 1:1s. 2️⃣ Spending time with the most wonderful people: Meeting Fred Mather, Laura “LG" Guerra, Tracy Linne, Sari Green, John Williams, Jeff Ignacio, Aaron Leeder 🏒, Carly Pallis, Erich Starrett and so many others IRL for the first time felt beyond special. 3️⃣ The most outstanding content: This is the opportunity for true GTM alignment. Budget season is creeping up and not too long before Sales, Marketing, RevOps, and Success are smashing their heads over target setting, cost allocation and revenue ownership. Take this opportunity to grab all of those three, join the best speakers in our field (looking forward to Kyle Coleman & Adam Robinson), dive into interactive workshops and beat the freaking bull! 📌 Shoot “Align my GTM team” into the comments and I'll send you a special discount for one of the last tickets. #GTM2024

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