Building Stuff To Help You Sell The Stuff You Build
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Transcript of Building Stuff To Help You Sell The Stuff You Build
BUILDING THINGS TO HELP SELL THE THINGS YOU BUILD
Patrick McKenzie
Want To Follow?
Hashtag #MicroConf or tweet at @patio11
Slides are available at http://bitly.com/microconfRocks
Bingo Cards… Who Knew, Right?
We Were All Newbies Once
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See My First Microconf Talk
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Once More, With(out) Feeling
Products With A Side Of Consulting
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2012 Was A Very Good Year
Not Important Relative To Last Slide
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Quick Wins To Pay For Microconf 2014
Look for the star! $X,000 in return for under 2 hours of work.
The Fundamental SaaS Equation
Traffic is hardest to optimize for – see Rob Walling’s presentation or mine from 2011.
Conversion rate throughout funnel is easier to optimize (A/B testing, funnel analytics, etc), but takes weeks/months to see results.
ARPU you can manipulate with a few minutes of work
Churn: run your own Operation Retention
Charge. More.
• Killed the $9 plan
• Added in $199 plan due to apparent demand
In Which I Take My Own Darn Advice
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Scaled Revenue for Appointment Reminder
Lifecycle Emails For SaaS
How Is This Different Than Last Year?
Drip email marketing is often/typically pre-signup, lifecycle emails are post-signup.
Lifecycle emails require more app-specific logic.
Very helpful: good understanding of funnel.
Not required: Lots of volume Great copywriting
Get People To Upgrade To Annual Billing
Offer discount (“1 month free”) if they switch to annual billing.
Offer it to “loyal customers” over email
One click + confirmation to switch.
Conversion rate from 10% to 25%+
Immediate revenue of $200 per email sent
Raising Your ARPU, Trivially
Consider Bob, who has 280 appointments a month and is on Small Business ($79).
Is Bob happy? How can we make him happier?
We should do Bob a solid and convince him to upgrade to Office ($199), perhaps at a discount.
Did This At A Consulting Client
“Run my a SQL query of everyone who is within 20% of quota on FEATURE_1, FEATURE_2, or FEATURE_3” (~3 minutes)
Add in 3 extra special-offer plans, which were equivalent to existing tiers but at a slight (~20%) discount (2 minutes)
Write a two paragraph email and interpolate their account data (25 minutes)
Made +N% of yearly recurring revenue
Investigating Low Conversion Rate
Takes ~20 minutes to do in Rails or whatever Put it on a dashboard which you use for
Customer Support tasks, review daily-ish Get qualitative feedback no matter how
poor/small data is
What’s The Difference?
Walking People Through The Trial
They start
They succeed
They get confused
My Trial Email Sequence
Day Zero: Auto-generated welcome Day Three: Personal welcome from me Day Twenty:
If trial is successful: sell them hard If trial is unsuccessful: rescue the trial
Day Twenty Seven: “incoming charge”
Welcome Mail
Establish expectations for trial
Getting started guide
Introduce yourself and ask for them to email you
Personalized Welcome
Styled to look like sent one-on-one Announce your availability Ask for email “Sent from my iPhone” – maybe not Lots of folks send this automatically within an hour,
almost certainly a good idea but I don’t do it personally
Free Trial Going Well
Simple heuristic Do ROI
calculation Close sale (or
mention it is automatic) Immediate
incentive
Free Trial Not Going Well
Simple heuristic Figure out why they
aren’t doing well Offer a trial
extension if they talk to you
Great opportunity for customer development
Weekly Checkup (“Get Them Promoted”)
High perceived value
Great engagement Creates “ongoing
earned media” via the option to embed announcements/links/etc
Makes ROI discussions academic
Digging Into Individual Accounts
If he cancels or has a CC billing failurehe gets a phone call.
Everybody gets a dunning email, sent three times.
[Action Required] Appointment Reminder Could Not Renew Your Subscription
Get to the point ASAP Prominent link to
capture updated CC data
Extend a 3 day grace period, try daily within grace
Don’t forget a “You didn’t update so we took the liberty of pausing your account” email
How To Quit Consulting
But Patrick, Why Would I Quit Consulting?
People say consulting doesn’t scale. Horsepuckey.
Ways to scale consulting: Move your rate up, dramatically Hire people Improve your utilization at the margin
So Why Really?
Constant rat race to get new clients Lots of unpaid time doing prospecting /
proposal / administrative work You have a boss and you have to go
to work every day
Why Not Replace With Software?
Why Not Replace With A SaaS?
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Scaled Revenue for Appointment Reminder
So What Do We Do Then?
Productized consulting Your most common / most valuable consulting
engagement, delivered without the full dance An e-book / video course / etc A training event / seminar / etc
Sell it through email Offer it at a variety of price points Make several gigs worth of money in a
repeatable, scalable, tweakable fashion… with lead-in time of 2 weeks to 3 months, not 6 months to 5 years
My Non-software Product
Most common consulting engagement (2010): “We send no email. Can you, like, fix that?”
I would implement: Drip marketing (see Microconf 2012
presentation) Lifecycle emails (like two minutes ago)
It generally required: Lots of sales / convincing A bit of coding Copywriting delivered by me, the non-
expert
Goals For Productized Consulting Convince people who already find me credible
that they should be doing email, too Teach them how to implement:
Drip marketing (see Microconf 2012 presentation) Lifecycle emails (like two minutes ago)
This generally requires: Lots of sales / convincing delivered at scale SaaS products I could recommend and glue code I
could describe in high-level detail rather than write Copywriting that I could teach them to do
themselves
Why Would You Buy That Over Consulting?
Because it’s $500 versus $20,000 Because you couldn’t find somebody to
do this for you Because you’re not sure you can get to it
right now Because it’s a cheap, easy way “to test
the waters”
Why Not Get It Free On the Internet?
Because real businesses spend money on problems
“Free if you have two week to research it” is not free to someone who cuts paychecks bi-weekly
Because paid initiatives signal quality and help to reduce roadblocks to adoption within an organization
The Key To Marketing It
Started building an email list a few months in advance
Focused 75% on teaching people stuff (pricing, selling to enterprises, A/B testing, etc) and 25% on telling them about upcoming product
Sent two, count ‘em, two sales emails Sent folks to a long copy page
My “Squeeze Page” For Emails
http://training.kalzumeus.com
Promotion:• Put a HelloBar
lookalike on blog, mentioned occasionally in blog posts
• Tweeted once or twice• Ended up on HN once
because the community knows me
Not just for the “Internet famous”: I got 5,000 signups but total “unknowns” routinely hit X00 in a day
LifecycleEmails.com Long Copy #1
Establish value proposition very early
Main heading and subhead only there to convince you “In or out, do you want to read more?
Note “intriguing” copywriting like “unreasonable amounts of money”
LifecycleEmails.com Long Copy #2
Use a case study from your consulting career
Copywriting wise, just because it’s long copy doesn’t mean it has to be a Giant Wall of Text
LifecycleEmails.com Long Copy #3
Personal testimonial from a consulting client with graphical call-out
Customer is more like Jason than like you or me
LifecycleEmails.com Long Copy #4
Acknowledge prospects’ objections and answer them
(Amy Hoy: “Can you smell the guilt here?”)
LifecycleEmails.com Long Copy #5
BENEFITS OF TAKING THIS are more important to the customer than what it contains
But be explicit on that, too.
LifecycleEmails.com Packaging
Pricing: Again, charge more, charge more, charge more.
Multiple ways to buy means multiple ways for best customers to discover ways to pay you more money.
Nathan Barry Is An Effing Genius
“Designing Web Applications”
Three packages: $249 / $99 / $39
Sales focuses on what customer gets not on what the price is
So how did that work out for Nathan?
Packaging Is A Huge Win
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Nathan's Sales By Package
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Mo' Packages = Mo' MoneyComplete Package $249
Book & Videos $99
Book Alone $49
What About The Actual Product? Me speaking into my webcam and a $60
microphone Loosely scripted. If I do it again, will add slides. Took ~2 weeks to record plus a video editor (ARGH)
that cost about $3,000, but added fairly little value over $300 on oDesk.
Hosted the videos on Wistia and rolled my own delivery platform (you should probably use Gumroad or similar)
Partnered with folks with related interests: additional value to customers at vanishingly little work to me
Funny Story About The Revenue Launch day (sent an email, it got on HN):
$12,862 Next week or two: $16,576 “Reminder: the sale ends today” :
$15,579 Total to date: $64,608
Keys To Product Success
Email, email, email. Get people on it, delight them with the things you can teach them, sell only very occasionally.
Target a pain point which you know there is a demand for. Consulting = validated market, right?
Work on your copy. You don’t have to be a genius. I certainly am not. (Joanna has a book, buy it: copyhackers.com 100X ROI for me)
Deliver quality products, because you only have one reputation.
For more details
Get on my email list @ training.kalzumeus.com
Special bonus for Microconf folks: You can have the lifecycle emails product for free if you didn’t already buy it, or the next one (probably on A/B testing) if you did. Send me an email. I trust you.
Thanks for Listening
Blog at http://www.kalzumeus.com Slides will be posted. See @patio11 Send me email. I love chatting about
this. [email protected]