PostHog Handbook Library / Growth

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# Getting people to talk to you

Auto TL;DR

## At a Glance

This long page covers these main areas. The list is generated from the article headings, so it updates with every handbook rebuild.

1. Why is it helpful for someone to talk to you?
2. How to get people to talk to you
3. Your first message where we've never had contact
4. Asking for introductions
5. Just been handed an account?
6. Have you been ghosted?
7. LinkedIn Sales Nav

Product engineers, our ICP, are very self-serve and happy to implement PostHog themselves and read the docs without ever interacting with someone unless they have support queries.

### Why is it helpful for someone to talk to you?

The reasons have to be _genuinely helpful_ ones - just 'having a point of contact' is not enough. Reasons include:

- You can save them money:
- They've implemented PostHog in a silly way and are consuming stuff they don't need
- They can pre-commit and get a discount on credit
- You can help them get more out of PostHog for the same amount of money, e.g. if they're ingesting loads of events but not using features to their fullest
- You can train their team on how to use PostHog, so they don't have to
- You can make them aware of upcoming or new products that are specifically useful for their use case
- You can be a shortcut to premium support, if they are in your book of business

If you go down the 'saving money' route, bear in mind two things:

- Prepaid credit never works as an opener - 'save money by fixing implementation' >>> 'save money by committing to credit at a discount'
- Buying a bunch of credits at a nice discount is much nicer to hear than 'please commit to a scary annual plan' - they can commit for a year, 6 months, whatever so long as they buy >$20k up front

### How to get people to talk to you

This is usually the most difficult bit! Sometimes customers will proactively reach out to us because they see their bill rocketing, but we have many customers who have happily self-served to a very high level of spend without feeling any need to talk to us. In particular, engineers have no interest in jumping on a call with you 99% of the time.

- Offer to optimize their usage/reduce their billing - if they are pointlessly tracking a bunch of junk, tell them! Otherwise they'll just find out themselves and churn anyway.
- Tell them about new or upcoming features or products that they may not be aware of which you know could be a great fit for them (and let them try them out for free).
- Use multiple channels - email is usually the worst way to reach our ICP. Slack, in-app Surveys or even Telegram are all usually better. But try email first anyway.
- Ping everyone in the account individually (don't do group, no one will reply) - start with the most active users first. New users are also good.
- Loom videos sharing your observations about their usage/account provide a personalized and human touch which can go a long way to building lasting relationships. Ask Simon for an invitation to our company account if you don't have access.
- Adding the contact on LinkedIn and sending a very human video or audio message can work really well - even for technical people (use the LinkedIn mobile app).
- Figure out what the non-technical people in their team need and then go out and talk to them - get someone who isn’t an engineer to talk to us given engineers don’t want to.
- If they submit a support request, jump in and respond yourself to try and build a relationship.
- Subscribe to your customers' newsletters, set up Google Alerts, use their products and follow their X or Reddit communities. This lets you time your outreach for when they've just shipped something - making it about them, not you. For example, if they just launched an AI feature, you can reach out the next day to the PM or engineer and congratulate them whilst they are energized and then connect it to a PostHog product they might not be using yet that helps them make their new product better.
- Ask the wider team for help - we have to get creative here! You'd be surprised how often somebody knows someone...
- If you're not succeeding getting through with your champions, engage with "new users" instead – colleagues recently invited into PostHog. Monitor for them via the "new user" segment in Vitally and reach out immediately with an email and Slack invite. New users often accept because they assume the Slack channel is part of their company's PostHog setup. Be helpful, send merch, and when it lands at their office, the rest of the team is much more likely to join the Slack channel (especially when the new user refers them to how helpful you've been).
- Find your customer's GitHub – company open source repos or individual engineers' personal projects. Review any open bugs, issues, etc. and submit a real pull request. Extra points if you fix an open bug on their company repo. The customer will see your name somewhere other than their inbox and engage. For important customers, ask our engineering team for help with more complex fixes.
- If you're reaching out to a non-English speaking team and getting no response, try writing your message in their language. Use Claude to draft it, or ideally – get a native speaker on your team to help you craft it.
- Guest-list your customer to a cool event – a PostHog event, industry meetup, hackathon, etc. – where they can meet potential customers, partners, or peers in their space. You're putting them in front of people who can help their business – and that's a reason to talk to you.

> Before you do any of this stuff, get to know your customer as well as you possibly can. Don't do clickbaity things or trick people into talking to you - it'll just annoy them. And definitely don't just offer a generic checkin 'to see how things are going'!

Ideally you want to get multiple people into a shared Slack channel, as we've found this enables the best communication and allows us to provide them with great support. Just adding a bunch people to the Slack channel is also a legit tactic - forgiveness, not permission.

#### Your first message where we've never had contact

Despite the organization using PostHog, they may not recognize you/PostHog, or may not even be the correct person to talk to about PostHog, which means your message needs to be well crafted.

When crafting a message, consider the following:

1. Your initial outreach isn't about you, it is about them. Lead with customer-centered comms. Avoid leading with being attached to their account or telling them how you are there to help them. Tim has some great thoughts on this subject.
2. Avoid fluff. "I'm just reaching out to", "I just wanted to" etc. are empty phrases that take longer to get to the point. Before you hit send, reread and see if there is anything you can cut out.
3. Lead with value within the first sentence. If it takes a paragraph to get there, you won't get responses.
4. Ask yourself, if I got this email to the sales@ email box, would I engage it? Would I even give it a second look?

Some examples of good emails that have worked:

> Hello [name],

> It looks like your Product Analytics usage has increased over the past month and I wanted to ensure that the increase was expected.

> Here are some tools you can use to ensure you are collecting the correct events and getting valuable insights from them. We have a whole host of tutorials and guides to help you get the most out of PostHog.

> If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask.

> [First],

> Wanted to reach out direct since I noticed the [Company] team ramp up usage in PostHog recently.

> We'll typically reach out to help with optimizing event capture and make recommendations with regards to instrumentation + querying in PostHog.

> Up for a chat? Here's my calendar, feel free to grab a time that works best for you.

> Cheers,

#### Asking for introductions

If you feel like you have done a good job with a customer, and have genuinely been helpful, it's ok to ask for a favor back. You can be specific and ask for a direct introduction to a person you want to talk to, or try go a bit more broad and ask the person if they know anyone who would benefit from some help with PostHog. Either way, a warm introduction from a colleague is always going to be better than reaching out on your own. Something like "Hey Leon, our session last week seemed to have landed well. I'm glad you found it useful. I was wondering if you could help me out. Your team is growing really quickly, and there's a bunch of new folks starting to use PostHog. I imagine not all of them are super comfortable with the platform yet and could use a helping hand. Could you introduce me to Simon, Charles and Scott?"

#### Just been handed an account?

Sometimes you'll get a customer in your book who was previously working with someone else on the PostHog team. A pre-existing relationship can help, but it's not guaranteed they'll want to talk to you.

We've found a message like this in Slack/email works well after the intro:

> Thanks [PostHog team mate]

> Hey [customer] :blob-wave: Excited to be working with you! As I take over, it would be a big help if we could schedule a quick 15–20 minutes intro call [link to your Calendly]. Just a chance for me to learn more and figure out how I can best support you going forward. Let me know if you'd be open to that.

We've found most people will respond to this.

### Have you been ghosted?

If you've had a conversation with someone, there was interest on their side and then they suddenly go dark, using the John Barrows Ghosting Sequence can revivify them.

1. After 2 weeks of valuable follow-up and you've not heard back, reply-all to the latest email thread.

Change the subject to: "Still interested?"

And put in the body:

> `[Name]`

> Still looking at options like PostHog to solve `[business problem they previously acknowledged]?`

> Let me know either way.

That last line is very important because it gives them a safe option to say "no". About half will respond.

1. If there's no response again after another week, change the subject again to "Did I lose you?"

Leave the body empty. This will pick up about 80% of people who go dark. If not, close out the opportunity 3 days after this final message.

### LinkedIn Sales Nav

To get notified about new hires and other changes to the accounts you manage, you can set up lists of accounts to track in LinkedIn Sales Nav.

1. Search for an account you want and click on their profile.
2. Click the star icon on the left, and then choose a list to add them to.
3. Optional, tailor the notifications you get in LinkedIn

You will now be notified any time a senior hire joins your account, which will be helpful for tracking folks to reach out to and give advanced signals around potential data science hires.

Canonical URL: https://posthog.com/handbook/growth/sales/getting-people-to-talk-to-you

GitHub source: contents/handbook/growth/sales/getting-people-to-talk-to-you.md

Content hash: `00a279d08bf92ac0`