Product-Led Sales (PLS) Vendor Spotlight: Navattic

As the Pocus team has worked to build the first-ever Product-Led Sales (PLS) platform — and the playbooks and communities that bring it to life — over the past few years, we’ve had the pleasure of crossing paths with plenty of vendors who are pivotal in this new category. 

In this series, we want to shine a light on those vendors by featuring a breakdown of what they do, how they got started, which problems they’re on a mission to solve, and more. 

Looking for a way to connect with these vendors and other top thinkers in the PLS and product-led growth (PLG) space? Join the lively conversation in Pocus’ Slack-based community. 

Now, on to our spotlight. 

Watch it here or read on below ⬇️

Who is Natalie and What is Navattic?

In this first-ever installment of Pocus’ vendor spotlight series, we connected with Natalie Marcotullio, head of growth and operations at Navattic. 

Navattic is a modern, no-code-knowledge-required platform that empowers go-to-market (GTM) teams to quickly build and distribute interactive product demos. With Navattic, any company can go PLG by quickly creating demos that drive conversions and get prospects to value more quickly. 

In Natalie’s words: “Navattic is custom-designed for marketers and go-to-market teams, and that shows in our ease of use. From a marketer perspective, every single tool that saves you time and is efficient empowers you to get back to campaigns and the rest of your to-do list. Navattic is one of those key tools.” 

As for Natalie, she’s what she calls a “holistic marketer,” which makes perfect sense considering her background in entrepreneurship, B2B SaaS, and SEO/SEM. And she first connected with some of her future Navattic colleagues in college, which brings us to another topic: Navattic’s roots. 

An Origin Story As Old as Time: Building for An Overlooked Segment

Natalie and two of Navattic’s three founders — Chris Hoyle, CTO and Neil McLean, CEO — were all part of an entrepreneurship program in college. After connecting with the third founder, Randy Frank, at Oracle, the wheels really started turning. It was here the trio recognized a gap in the market. 

Natalie: They saw there wasn't a lot of tooling for pre-sales teams. Specifically, a lot of pre-sales teams were building demos, spending all day building the same demos over and over again. And they wanted to help solve that problem. Since then, we've pivoted to a different use case that focuses more on go-to-market teams, as we’ve found that they get a lot of value from adopting these product tours. But that’s how it all originated. 

What Key Problem Does Navattic Solve for Its Customers?

After the pivot, Navattic’s focus became giving companies a better tool for delivering on what’s become a common consumer demand. 

Natalie: We’re solving for the fact that prospects are just demanding a better buying experience. 

Everyone in this day and age has been a buyer at some point. I know I was a heavy buyer at my old company, and I get so frustrated by the two options given. You can either do a free trial, which takes a lot of work for you to set it up, get your data in there, and finally see value. Or, you have to talk to sales, wait three days to connect to a real salesperson, get qualified by a BDR, and then when you finally see the product maybe realize it does nothing you want. Companies are finally recognizing “Hey, prospects want to see the product earlier. How can I do that?” That’s a question we help them answer. 

Who is the Ideal Navattic User? 

Natalie: Navattic can really work in any SaaS product setting.  But to be more specific, I'd say we're best for any company that has a more complex or technical product and is mostly web-based.

As far as who’s actually using Navattic to build demos, it tends to be product marketers or demand gen or growth marketers. It’s usually a role that governs product assets, is in charge of the website, and/or is responsible for driving conversions, leads, or lead improvement.

Where Does Navattic Fall in the Modern PLS Tech Stack? 

Natalie: We’re really focused on what we call “product-led marketing” or “product-led content.” But the general space is interactive product tours, or demos — the two are mostly interchangeable. And we’re building this space with a few other competitors. We're working together to build awareness of this new approach to product led.

What sets Navattic apart from competitors like Amplitude and Pendo in the product tour space is the specific type of viewer for whom they’ve built their platform. 

Natalie: Product tours are really for customers and in-app experiences. They’re for users who are doing a free trial, or are already full customers. That's not who we're for. Navattic is for top-of-funnel prospects who are interested in your product and just want to see it high-level without having to create or set up an account. We’re pre-onboarding. We’re a tool for showing high-level value of a product in an aha moment. The goal is to lead prospects to want to sign up for that free trial, demo, etc.

In addition to existing in a unique space in the tech stack, Navattic is also easy to implement no matter when a company decides they want to add top-of-funnel product demos to their flow.  

Natalie: Navattic is not a tool like Salesforce that's going to require you to overhaul your entire company. I'd say if you're doing a website redesign and already thinking about it, then that is a good time to layer us in. Typical onboarding time is about two weeks to a month, and once you've mapped out your tour, it takes 30 minutes to build.

Fave Navattic Success Story 

Natalie: Ramp has a great success story with Navattic. Ramp offers 5-in-1 software that consolidates corporate cards, expense management, bill payments, accounting, and reporting into one simple, free solution.

I think FinTech tools are a great fit for Navattic because they often require handing over personal finance information to do a free trial (like connecting your bank account). Users may not feel comfortable connecting their financial information until they have seen the product.

When Ramp came to us, they were looking for a way to demonstrate value to potential new customers without putting them through the full onboarding process. They wanted to build a self-service product demo with as much ease and as little risk as possible.

After launching their product tour on our website, Navattic has contributed to 15% of leads collected on their site. They’ve also noticed that there is a much higher propensity to convert to being a Ramp customer if a prospect has completed the self-service product tour.

It just goes to show that prospects want to see the product. If they can see the product and they resonate with it, they are much more likely to book a demo or do a free trial than if they only experience it through an ebook or similar.

Tell Us More About the GTM Strategy at Navattic

Navattic is an exciting example of how businesses don’t have to be 100% product-led to apply  a PLS motion and reap the benefits of a PLS GMT strategy. 

Natalie: Since we’re a younger company, we’re in our product-led sales stage. Obviously, at Navattic, we believe that product-led content and marketing is really effective in educating the prospect before they enter the sales motion — but we’re not fully PLG yet. It's something we're going to look towards in the future.

However, we’re gathering a lot of customer insights and data that tell us our sales motion is really helpful right now. The  idea is that, in all of our marketing and in all of our content, we want to show off product tours and Navattic as much as possible. So once users do enter that sales cycle, they're educated almost as much as if they had completed a free trial.

What Do You Like Most About Navattic? 

Natalie: I think one of the main reasons I love Navattic is that I hate making product demo videos — because I have had to make them so many times. They take months, and by the time you get one done, your UI is updated and your demo is irrelevant. So Navattic really fits into my personal mission against the old way of doing product demo videos. 

What’s Navatic’s Biggest Goal Over the Next Year?

Natalie: We want to help every company that wants to go product led, go product led. As much as possible. Like I talked about earlier with the buying experience, buying is changing. Our vision is to help other companies realize that, and create better buy experiences.

What Do You Think the Future Holds for the PLS Category?

🔮 As far as PLS developments five years or more in the future, Natalie sees the same thing emerging that many other PLS leaders we’ve talked to have foretold: a hybrid approach. 

Natalie: I think we’re going to see almost everyone have a hybrid model. My first indication of this is how many CTAs are on websites now.

In the past, the marketing practice was to use one CTA to direct everyone to one thing — don’t let them do anything else, this is your sales process. Well, now, we’ve realized people learn and want to buy differently. So rather than forcing buyers through one path, whether it be sales-led or product-led, we’ll see multiple options.

I think we're going to talk less and less in the future about product-led versus not product-led companies. Instead, we’ll look at companies on an individual basis to determine what is their sales motion, what is their marketing motion, and what is their product-led motion. 

🎱 When it comes to the shorter term, Natalie predicts 2022 will be all about something every marketer reading this can get excited about: product-led content. 

Natalie: One thing we're getting really excited about, and I'm incorporating into a lot of our marketing at Navattic, is what we're calling “product-led content.”

Rather than the typical ebooks or white papers, we’re thinking about how we can educate on a topic while also educating about our product. One really good example is the Ahrefs blog. Rather than just giving you generic tips that you have to figure out how to execute on, it adds, "If you use our product, this is exactly how you execute on our product." It’s a lot more valuable in my opinion than a blog that gives you five tips, but then you have to figure out what to do next, what tool to use, to actually execute on those tips.

And it's not just blogs where we can do this. It's also webinars, and ads even. Rather than featuring a random graphic, why not have a GIF of your product or something like that? Yes, some prospects will need more education and will still need to be nurtured a little bit. But many modern buyers — especially ones who have shown some sort of intent or interest before — don't necessarily want all the fluffy talk. They just want to see your product to know if it works for them or not.

Join the Pocus Community to Connect with PLS Vendors and Leaders

Looking forward to more insights like the above from PLS vendors — as well as leading thinkers in the space?

There’s always an enlightening discussion happening in Pocus' Product-Led Sales Slack community. Request an invite to join the fam. Want to nominate a vendor for our new spotlight series? Hit up Sandy on Slack.