CallRail leverages its product—and Pendo—to drive predictable expansion revenue
For software companies of all sizes, being able to predictably and consistently drive revenue is critical to business success. CallRail, the AI-powered lead intelligence platform, is no exception. Trusted by more than 200,000 businesses across the US, Canada, UK, and Australia, CallRail’s solutions help businesses track and attribute each lead to their marketing journey; capture and manage every call, text, chat, and form; and use insights surfaced by AI to optimize their marketing.
Prior to 2020, cross-sell and upsell revenue was not a predictable source of revenue for the business. In an effort to change this, CallRail’s product, customer marketing, and sales teams came together under a single goal: Driving trials and upgrades for their suite of additional products.
In order to do this efficiently with a product-led motion, CallRail sought out Pendo to power their back-to-base expansion strategy.
“I know that each of our additional products will help our customers improve their marketing,” said Sarah Parham, product manager at CallRail. “So when we use Pendo to present the value of the product to users in the right place at the right time and then let them start a free trial with just one click, we’re helping CallRail deliver on our mission to enable more businesses to market with confidence.”
Building a robust product-led growth motion
Parham partners closely with Carly Cornforth, CallRail’s senior manager of customer marketing, on the company’s product-led growth strategy. The two used Pendo to implement a three-pronged approach.
The first component is in-app contextual guides. “In-app contextuals make it easy for users to add a product to their subscription right when they’re trying to do a specific task that the product could help with or solve.,” explained Cornforth.
They also leverage customer lifecycle-based prompts that target users with in-app expansion messages based on current product usage and where they are in their journey with CallRail. And finally, Cornforth and Parham launch one-off in-app campaigns focused on any pricing promotions or seasonal campaigns.
CallRail utilizes several parts of the Pendo One platform to bring their product-led growth strategy to life, but there are a few key elements to highlight:
- They combine user metadata with Pendo data, allowing the team to target specific users based on product usage and where they are in their customer journey. This makes it possible to surface cross-sell and upsell guides to the right users at the right time.
- They use permalinks to directly link to Pendo Guides from out-of-app marketing channels, giving users a one-click activation experience to add products or upgrade plans. Using cookies, they can identify if a website visitor is a customer—and if so, which products they already use—to further customize CTAs.
- They leverage guide throttling, which limits the number of in-app guides a user can see in a set timeframe, in order to avoid serving users too many expansion-focused messages.
Using the product to increase revenue
This multi-faceted product-led growth strategy has proven highly successful. With Pendo as the primary channel for cross-selling and upselling, CallRail’s back-to-base expansion revenue accounts for about 20% of the business’ new monthly recurring revenue.
“We know that we can measure, analyze, understand, and optimize everything we do with Pendo—which is really critical to our product-led growth principles at CallRail.”
Carly Cornforth, Senior Manager of Customer Marketing
“This is huge because prior to launching Pendo and really putting a strategy around cross-selling and upselling, we didn’t have a predictable source of income for back-to-base revenue,” Cornforth noted. “It’s become a really important part of the business.”
In 2023, CallRail applied their three-pronged approach to successfully launch a new product. In just one year, they exceeded 1,000 units—resulting in about $1,000,000 of expansion annual recurring revenue for the business.
Infusing delight into the product experience
Another focus area for Cornforth and Parham has been getting more data into Pendo to make Guides more personalized for end users. Earlier this year, they worked to get industry data from Salesforce into Pendo to enable the ability to target high-value industries more seamlessly with their in-app campaigns.
Most recently, they’re working to infuse areas of customer delight into the CallRail application by using Pendo to celebrate customer milestones like completing their in-app onboarding checklist or their first anniversary of logging into the product.
“Since we’ve solidified our overall Guides strategy, we can shift our attention more into customer delight areas,” noted Parham. “When we want to try something that’s a little more experimental, Pendo makes it really easy to test things without having to ask developers for their time, which is a big benefit.”
Cornforth added that “over time we’ve been able to test the fact that our users actually enjoy having that [delightful] experience in the app.” Not to mention these campaigns continue to drive business impact, for example a Valentine’s Day-themed in-app guide drove significant trials as part of a larger multi-channel strategy.
Powering more efficient marketing
Since introducing it into their marketing mix, Pendo has become a key channel in CallRail’s overall strategy. “When we’re running anything from a pricing promotion to a voice of customer campaign and anything in between, we always consider whether Pendo would be the right channel to leverage,” explained Cornforth.
One of the biggest benefits of Pendo is it allows Parham and Cornforth to easily A/B test different elements of their in-app guide strategy, including guide content, static images vs. GIFs, and CTAs. “We’ve built a lot of these in-app contextuals over time, and we’ve used Pendo along the way to A/B test different pieces of them so we can figure out what’s working and what’s not,” explained Parham. “We’re getting better and better at doing it right the first time because of all the data that we have in Pendo.”
“Instead of having to rely on development teams, we can use Pendo to quickly A/B test different in-app messaging and know what is resonating the most with our users.”
Sarah Parham, Product Manager
Pendo also makes it easy for the CallRail team to ensure all of their in-app campaigns accurately represent the brand, which is essential for any marketing team. They’ve tailored their Pendo Guide themes to reflect brand colors, and each campaign follows internal Pendo Guide guidelines in order to maintain consistency in appearance and style.
Thinking ahead to the future, CallRail plans to continue expanding their Pendo-powered product-led growth strategy and apply their three-pronged approach to additional launches. Cornforth and Parham’s work has also spurred company-wide interest in leveraging Pendo.
“For everyone else at CallRail, Pendo has become the go-to method for getting any important message into our app, especially when the ask is time-sensitive or the segment is really specific,” said Parham. “We know that Pendo has the tools we need to target the right user at the right time in a way that makes sense for their unique customer journey, which is so powerful.”