Account Metadata to the Max

A somewhat underappreciated feature of Pendo that ends up being incredibly powerful for a PM is the ability to associate metadata to both visitors and accounts. We utilize this feature quite heavily with our own instance of Pendo (aka: Pendo @ Pendo). Let’s take a peek at some of the items we push into our own instance:

CSM assigned:

This is the Customer Success Manager assigned to an account, pulled from Salesforce. This makes it super quick for us to figure out who to reach out to when we have questions about an account. For example, when we see that an account is using a feature in an interesting way, we look up the CSM and then reach out, asking “Do you know how this customer is using Pendo? Mind if I reach out to them”?

Subscription Flags:

This is my favorite field, and what inspired me to write this short blog post. This field comes from the agent (ie, pushed in directly via JS from browser), and contains a list of subscription-level flags for a given account. So for example, when an account has paid for access to integrations, there will be a flag in our system called “Integrations”. Similarly, there are flags for some advanced features like “parent accounts”, “require HTTPS”, and more. I’m then able to create segments in Pendo for things like “subscriptionFlag contains ‘requireHTTPS’” to get a feel for how many and which accounts are using that feature, and then target guides on those accounts. It brings me joy every time I realize the wealth of data that is in that simple little field.

Published guide count (and draft guide count, staged guide count, disabled guide count):

It’s admittedly hard to know current states using Pendo. You can easily see how many people or how many times people clicked a button to, for example, publish a guide. But it’s hard to understand how many guides are now in the state of “published”. To solve this for our own instance, we push a metadata field for the current count of guides published for each account. This gives us a really good feel for how our accounts are using guides, and lets us build out nice segments of accounts based on this data.

And more:

We also have account metadata on things like the number of events, users and visitors for an account, as well as the number of features and pages that are tagged. In addition, we have a ton more Salesforce data coming in, such as ARR, renewal date, and more.

In conclusion…

Adding a bit more metadata adds so much value for Product Managers. You’ll find yourself using Pendo for tasks that never occured to you before, and you’ll be surprised how quickly you can get answers to questions. And, as a bonus, you won’t need to bother your engineering team.