# How to Stop Giving Demos & Build a Sales Factory Instead – James Kennedy – MicroConf Growth 2017

Channel: Rob Walling
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20hN2YGRfJo
Duration: 40 min
Language: English
Words: 8209
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/20hN2YGRfJo

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[0:00] [Music] [Music]

[0:15] okay cool so what I was saying that was genius you missed it sorry about that and so what I was saying was that I actually I do live in South Africa but I'm actually Irish so it's gonna be very confusing if you're trying to figure out my accent and one of the nice things about being Irish when you go abroad is that actually you know they have a fairly convivial reputation and when people meet me they expect me to be kind of a nice guy by default which is nice you know it's only afterwards that I get a chance to mock that up you know um so if I was

[0:49] German for example you might expect me to be smart if I was English you might expect me to be well-spoken but for the most part because I'm Irish you just expect me to have a beer and maybe tell the joke which is which is useful most of the time but there's a couple of instances when actually being German or English to be kind of useful for example when you're stood in front on a stage in front of a crowd of 200 of yours that appears in hero's so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna try and emulate you know the German English factor and all the

[1:25] other smart countries and I'm gonna try and give you the presentation that I wish I I could have when I come to micro comm but if I fail you meet beer afterwards you can have the authentic hangout with an Irish guy experience I got yes right so and let's get going with with product demos show of hands who poop demos their product at the moment like WebEx style join me I'm blinded here but I'm gonna say about 30% of people keep your hand up if you want to still be doing that in five years time yeah hardly anyone right okay there's one guy good man yourself right

[2:03] so it's great product demos are fantastic especially at the early stage because it's it's a two-way thing right you get to explain what your product does but possibly more importantly you get to understand what the customers are looking for and what I'm going to show you in the course of this presentation is basically we managed to double the effectiveness of how we kind of demo our product but we don't demo our product anymore we demo the value and that's part of it and I'm gonna tell you how we we did this but actually only doing half the number of demos so the further let's work much

[2:39] better results and and and that's we're gonna do before I get into that much to my own share and I'm going to just explain where we're coming from I am 40 can't believe I'm saying that what that means is I get to explain my career now in terms of decades instead of years that's kind of frustrating for me but it's useful for you because it'll speed things up first decade of my life nothing really relevant happened second decade also nothing relevant I didn't get a computer it wasn't really until the third decade that you know I had a job for 18 months two years and in that

[3:17] job they gave me this like Siemens m20 which is like a phone without a screen on it and you could plug it into the back of a computer and you can send 80 commands to it and then it would send and receive SMS I thought it's genius I love this tech so I immediately quit my job because that was jobs for losers obviously and I decided okay I'm gonna sell a product gonna create a product using this tech so I built an SMS app that would allow people to take you know type into computer and send out physical text messages which is cool but of course there was no micro comp

[3:51] there was no Robin Mike so I didn't know how to sell that so I ran out of money and I went contracting but that didn't put me off a year later then I decided well I'm gonna build another estimate SMS based product so I bailed like a bulk SMS tool for sending out hundreds of SMS is at a time of course that idea was what Jason Cohen might describe is you know picking your pennies on the dollar so you know I was selling an SMS for $0.10 making one cent on it impossible to make that business work so I ran out of money and I went back

[4:21] contracting of course I didn't learn my lesson from there I went on to you know building another SMS product which was like premium rate SMS so this is where send an SMS it charges you five books and people who are making money in return for that five bucks with like Sanji back a picture of Visconti cloud girl or boy which worked quite well but I was sending pack by was selling services that were like you know build your vocabulary or learn a French word of the day again terrible idea I didn't go anywhere so when contracting and then finally you know you'd like to think that I learned by less but I didn't I

[4:57] went on to do bulk SMS picture messaging so basically us my 20s I learned only one thing I am i suck at coming up with business ideas so what I did was I hooked up with my my beautiful girlfriend and their wife Priscilla she was much better at coming up with business ideas and I've since bat myself from coming up any ideas at all and instead what I do is I look for people who have real problems and I try and build tech for them so percenter had a real problem and a real problem was she worked in an ad agency she wrote radio and TV ads she was a

[5:29] copywriter for two radio and TV ads and when she wants to actually make her TV ad she would have to hire a voiceover and at the time you say guide like these silver disk things and you put them in the coffee cup holder in their computer and you would listen to voices until you find someone you liked so what we did was built a straightforward marketplace and for the bulk of my thirties that's what we did we ran that marketplace it was kind of a 4-hour work week style business we lived in Argentina we had lots of money for steak and wine and not much else but it was was fine you know

[6:03] and but after a while something serious happened and that's that these guys started appearing on the scene and and you know no one's done this yet Michael Kampf I don't know we do that in the goof-proof the gross edition we put our kids up here but this isn't I'm not putting this picture up here just to prove that I've had sex voice I'm pretty I'm putting it up here to realize what deep I was in because I had this kind of marginal business web business I was living in that America I couldn't actually really afford to move back to Dublin and yet you know it wasn't just me and Priscilla anymore who

[6:39] were had skin in the game suddenly these little dudes and at the time you know Priscilla was obviously doing she was going on to do wonderful other things now so I was left by myself so I did what every responsible new father would do is and I went straight to Vegas in fact I went to Micro Kampf the legendary Michael Karpf 2013 where this gentleman gave the epic you know how to build your bootstraps cash machine talk which is I'm not going to give it approx a poor proximally of what this talk was but I'm sure you've all seen it my big takeaway from this was really he gave me all of

[7:15] the financial sort of framework for building a sow's business that I had missed in my previous businesses you know so he tells you what your price point should be what you should pay per click how you compare how much you can pay to get to acquire a customer how you handle pricing all this sort of stuff so it was it was just what I was missing because you know initially I had no problem business problems to work on then I had a business problems to work on it just turns out my customers were dirt poor they're all starving artists and then finally I knew using Jason's

[7:45] advice I could build a business so I went back to Dublin I met my partner rich who's he ran an IT support business at the time and he came across lots of people who had you know business problems and I said watch this video if you come across something like this a problem that sounds like this I'll help you build it and we're off so a couple weeks later he got two emails in the same week from two of his customers and what they both needed was they were both using something old a purchase order system so let's figure paper based if you live in it work in a sort of medium

[8:17] large size company you want to buy something you get a bit of paper which is called a purchase order you say dear boss I need to buy a new MacBook Air nine hundred dollars and you will bring it to him he would sign it then you bring it to the finance department they would give you a number you give that number to the supplier and what this allows you to do is have sort of purchasing controls within a medium sized organize a so it's a good practice very good thing to do the only thing is it buries you in admin so what we did was we built an app

[8:43] for that you know so mobile and web app allows you to easily raise requisitions for expenses within your company and we pre-sold it to those two first first two companies unicef and clarence cosmetics and then i went about trying to see if i could find anyone else to buy it so about you know two months later i find our first two cold customer and another two costumers and another two customers no three customers and very very slowly we started to build up you know once we got to our first 10 customers we knew okay cool there's enough people out there that are using this to have this

[9:18] problem we've acquired cold customers so we knew it could work so we're off at the races now what I did was I designed like because we were so early on what I did was I wanted to talk to absolutely everyone that came in we had so few leads they were so precious to us but I wanted to give each lead the best service I possibly could so what that meant was as soon it's actually was a trust complaining about Marketo hopping on the phone with someone as soon as someone registers for a lead magnet I was that guy anyone saw any sort of intent or interest in our

[9:52] product I would get on the phone straightaway with them and I would try and understand what they were looking for most the time that was super embarrassing because our product was brand new it hardly did anything they would ask for very basic features that we did not have but we just had to kind of muscle through that and I do believe it was a great way to you know rather than staring at the analytics tea leaves or surveying people just talking to potential customers it's a really good idea of what the product should be so about 18 months of sort of excruciating sort of sales process like this talking

[10:26] to people were basically we did we couldn't help we slowly developed the product in a right way and by the end of that we had sort of had a repeatable sale that basically didn't need us to write code every time we had it a customer so that was fine and until you kind of cut tool sort of august last year and and you know we were starting to build up our traffic sources and these are the negraph the demo that we're doing by summer last year we're doing kind of 40 demos a week a month rather and that's doesn't sound a lot but it's actually when you consider

[10:58] all the follow-up and all the work that goes into it and everything it was grinding and the worst thing is I couldn't really see who else on our small team would be able to do this other than me and my partner you know because we were weird a kind of engine behind the whole thing we had the best understanding of it and it really looked like that we kind of built a set of shackles for ourselves and we were going to be shackled to basically doing demos to people for the rest of our career so what I did was I went to micron Finn Barcelona and when I was there steli

[11:32] efti got up on stage and he said something pretty interesting and he said that for using a sales process that see he sort of outlined there you should be able to convert 7% of your trials now this is a free trial now free - free trial - custom you should be able to convert 7% those into customer at the time we were only at 3% we were only half that and that was including doing these phone calls trying to get on the phone front of you know wrangle people into doing a demo I couldn't and once I saw that number I realized huh this is a

[12:07] big opportunity for us because like all you guys I'm sure I see my business is a big funnel and I look at the different parts of the funnel and I think well where's the biggest opportunity for us to dramatically improve what we're doing and this is a 2x improvement so if what he's saying was correct of course and so I said okay this is the one number number that matters for us now and we're going to see if we can apply steadies formula to achieve that 7% instead of the 3% so you notice under there and the great thing about this is what he did was he kind of exploded I was that part

[12:44] of the funnel and he said James you're dead right you should be ringing everyone that comes into your app within five minutes of them signing up you should only expect to actually you know contact one and three of them 30% and then he said you should only actually bother to demo half of those 50% of those and this is qualification step is something I never considered before I was running around like a madman trying to talk to anyone who was half interested in buying our product and and then finally he said if you do this properly fifty percent of those people actually end up buying which sounded

[13:19] pretty good to me obviously double the performance we had the only trick is we didn't know if we could implement it would it really work for us so what we did was I combined this with a you know a mixer gtalk that I had seen years ago this straining guy called Walt Maher and he has this idea of a sales Factory and the basic idea of a sales Factory is that you split all your sales work into two separate parts there's sales administration so that's anything like reaching out to customers qualifying them taking their credit card details following up with them all the kind of sort of time-consuming stuff and then

[13:58] there's the actual value demonstration so that's at the tip of the needle if you like the point where you need someone to sit down and actually demo you know the value that your product can deliver for them and the it sounds very attractive because as me is me and my pritch we're doing all the demos it meant that all I would have to do is just sit down put on my headset and talk to someone and they would buy or not I wouldn't even really have to worry about the follow-up and so on so we combined Stella's advice and this strategy and we split our sales process out into into

[14:31] three distinct roles than by different people so we had what we call our first responders or people who qualify leads as they come in so there's the guys who were watching the stock Channel waiting for a sign up to come in they're the guys who were calling them and then crucially they're qualifying them and what they do is they hand over to someone who's going to demonstrate the value of the product and at the early stage that was me and and then finally after that you hand over to someone who's going to do the sales administration of getting the billing sorted out and you know figuring it all

[15:01] all the onboarding and so on so using this technique in the first month we immediately started doing half the demos we were before which was good but there were a couple of gotchas so what I'm gonna try and do is I'm going to talk about each of these roles and I'm going to talk about some of the specific wording that we used that we found to be successful for us and so hopefully you get an idea of how you may able to be able to use it for you know for yourselves so the first role is that the first responders now being getting on the phone with someone

[15:35] who signs into your products giving them a call it's it's a lie it's like a little bit tough to do if you're not used to it and and the big fear will be that you will pick up the phone you will talk to someone they will be super disgruntled they will you know swear at you and they'll slam down the phone and then they'll go online and they'll give you a bad review and that does happen it happens about 1 in 30 times so maybe let even less than 5% like 1 in 30 times you get someone where you've called them it is an intrusion that you've called them

[16:09] and and they are not happy about that but at least 5 out of 30 times so 5 times more you will get someone who is super happy that you have given them a call because according to Jason Lemkin anyway only about 15% of people like to buy software like you and I like to buy software in that they don't want to talk to anyone they just want to sign up themselves figure it out themselves do whatever that leaves 85% of the market who actually value having someone to consult with them on how to implement our product and that is especially true for products like ours which are a b2b

[16:48] product and you know when you roll out our system you don't just use it by yourself as your own tool you roll it out to your entire company so often times it's very valuable to have someone to talk to to make sure that you don't make a fool of yourself in front of your work colleagues so that's so that's what we do so the process is is quite straightforward and you know there's two things that will then when you when you call someone first either you get a gatekeeper or you get straight through to the person themselves and or more likely actually two out of three times

[17:20] they won't give you a valid phone number or the phone don't be wrong or you won't be able to get through or whatever and and when you do get through to if you get through to a gatekeeper the best sort of way through without we have families is to keep it super casual so hey it's James here calling for Paul is he available don't say hey it's James here from rubber-stamp thought I oh I wonder if Paul Magee is available to talk to me so keep it super casual and super relaxed I noticed the moat you know our experience the most likely way you're gonna get someone actually puts

[17:51] you true to the tier actual prospect oftentimes though there aren't gatekeepers it's actually in the minority most times you get directly through to someone who who is actually looking for a product now the great thing about phoning them when they sign up is that you know in that moment that's when they have dedicated time to solving this problem so if you wait 30 minutes an hour a day you could be catching them when they're doing something else totally irrelevant and they're not in a good place to to consider your offer right now so that's why we do it straight away because we know they're most likely to be actually

[18:27] considering this problem right now at the moment that would sign up so we do that we talked to them and then if we get through to the actual prospect the wording we find to work best is we'll say hi it's James here from rubber-stamp I know you've just signed up for a trial and I wanted to save you a bunch of time by just asking a few questions to make sure that you're not considering our product when we're not able to help for you and the important thing we do there is we sell them on the idea of taking your call so I'm giving them a reason

[18:56] why it's better to talk to me for five minutes then try and figure it out yourself maybe we get it wrong maybe trial the product for two weeks and then realize at the end of that no this was never going to do what I needed to in the first place and then without a brass we'll go straight into what are you using right now for to manage your purchasing purchasing so are using spreadsheets and I'll ask them something specific like that and the idea is here by the time we get to this stage you know I've sold them on the idea of why it's a good it talked to me I've done it

[19:26] so they're gonna save time by doing that and I'm getting straight into the first bit of information that I'm interested in understanding which is what are they using right now and then what is the problem with that and the key thing what I'm trying to do on this call is just find out exactly what problem ere's trying to solve or at that moment so like Nate my best sales guy says you know people don't buy drills what they're doing is they're buying the ability to put a hole in a wall so we're not interested that they want to purchase control system what I'm interested in is why what problem are

[19:59] they trying to solve at a particular moment and for different personas or different types of customers that will be dramatically different finding this out is very very important when it comes to demonstrating value otherwise if you don't know exactly what their problem is it's going to take you forever to try and demonstrate the you know demonstrate how the product can address that because you'd be like scatter gunning with all sorts of you know problems that you can solve and for most of us you know our product solves multiple problems there might be so for example someone signing up for our app in the construction industry probably

[20:33] has a problem with people not filling out their paperwork at the construction site so the paperwork never gets back to the office if they're a school it's probably the pewte the teachers aren't getting reimbursed fast enough for their expenses and that's causing trouble with the within the organization but even within that we want to get a lot more tighter into exactly what their problem is in their words and their exact words that they use is very very important to hear and to write down so well a few extra once we got that woman's who got exactly what the problem is in this instance well write that down we're

[21:07] putting this all in a sort of Google form and then we'll ask them some other questions like you know when do you need to have this problem solved by when what's your budget for this problem you know who is the decision-makers that's not so many questions like a couple of key ones that are really going to tee up the person is going to demonstrate value if the next person who's going to show the product rent it's going to tee them up in a winning situation the key on this call is not to give out too much information so we give out pricing information but really with most

[21:40] questions that they are going to have for us we're going to say listen I live in listened to your requirements a we're not a fit so if for example in our case they are looking for inventory management say listen we're not the right person for you I'm glad we had this conversation you could just save you some time but if if they are a good fit then what we will do is say listen it's a great question what I want to do is I want to get a product specialist to show you how that works and they're going to show you how similar customers to you are solving the exact same

[22:07] problem I guarantee you this is the best way to do it it's going to save you a lot of time I was going to make sure you have a better outcome so we'll aim then to get these these people on to the next stage the funnel so by the time the qualification is done they've agreed to a follow up demo we set that demo not right now not today we do it like a day two or three days in advance and the reason for that is that we want to have is not a good chunk of time to properly prepare so if we are going to show someone this is product by

[22:37] the time they get down to this stage in the funnel they're worse we have spent at least a couple of hundred bucks on them in terms of marketing spanned so we don't want to waste our opportunity by giving them like a demonstrate a random demonstration of the product we want to exactly laser focus in on the problem that they have told us they're having using their language so this word is scheduled to demo and you know and using a sort of a scheduling software is very useful here to do this and then what we'll do is we'll hand over to the demo so the demo or in advance will prepare

[23:08] and the idea is to make him the Oracle of all him or her the Oracle of all knowledge and to set him up for success or her settlement for success and and the key to doing that is to make sure that he has a checklist of stuff he's going to prepare for properly so we use process Street and we have like a better twenty point checklist for each demo goes through and there's you know kind of stuff that are basic but they can really catch you out if you're going to show your product round so it can be you know things like the day before I'm

[23:40] confirming the time you're going to call them the phone where you're going to call them on the link they need to click on to see the screen sharing software and closer into the time we want or about an hour or two before the demo we want to check them out at LinkedIn we're gonna have a look at their website we want to figure out who their CEO is or who's ever going to be signing off on products we're going to put all those names into our software so by the time they see our software they're going to actually recognize names that are in their organization already and they am

[24:09] an addition to that what we'll do is we'll take similar stammers and we'll sort of apply some of the same typical purchases that they they use and you know in that in the with this for the similar customer into their account as well so it's for construction you know they're probably buying bags of cement and pipes and nails and stuff like that and and if it's like four schools it might be school trips or could be science equipment and so on the whole point here is that we're trying to narrow the gap between what our software does and the problem they need to fix I'm gonna

[24:39] explain how that works so I'm gonna do this now I'm going to show you the slide deck that we use when we if we are going to show someone our product how we're going to the actual slide that this is a debt that I actually use a couple of weeks ago for an Australian company they were in construction as it happens and straightaway when they come onto the call I will just fill things to catch you out but the first thing is to say do you see in our own screen which are name written on it because often I can tell you it's fairly annoying to be ten

[25:08] minutes into a demo and someone who suddenly realize on am I supposed to be seeing something here right now and they haven't been able to see the screen properly so little steps like that will put into our into our process tree and when they see this iron screen I will ask them okay so just confirm for me what is the problem you're trying to to fix and then they will tell you and then what we do is our next group next screen is going to look like this it says okay well our software fixes and then whatever the hell they told you in the other qualification phase now the reason

[25:40] we're doing this is that our product v fixes many problems but the problem is that when you're looking at software and you have a business problem you have to do the work of closing the gap between those two things so if you see an empty product you have to say well hold on what's an approver who's an approver and there they have to translate between what what the terminology the software is using and what their actual business problem is so bye-bye am stating that we that what our product does insert whatever the problem they're looking to fix is what we're doing is we're using their language to explain exactly what

[26:18] we do now you have to remember we wouldn't have got this far if we didn't actually do this so it'll be pointless to just say well our product fixes your ability to go to Disneyland for every year it when it obviously doesn't do that and the whole key to success is here because we split out the qualification process we know exactly what they're looking for in their own words and the key phrase that they would say maybe even at that stage or maybe even straight a straight after demo is they should say this is exactly what I'm looking for and remember they may well have done two or three demos

[26:52] with our competitors or your competitors I can guarantee you those competitors are not explaining the benefits of their software in terms of the customers own problems the way yeah we're doing here then what we do is we say ok to fix it show you how if we fix this problem I'm going to download a product in eight minutes I can't tell you how relieved they are when they hear eight minutes because no one likes sitting true at plot as a product demo for 40 or 50 minutes especially when it's not relevant for the problem you're trying to fix and by laser targeting in exactly on what they're looking for it enables

[27:28] you to actually do that so I don't have to show them about the reporting and I don't have to show them about the you know the email transaction we have confirmation or the file upload if they're not interested in that I just have to show them exactly how our product fix their problem now what I will say is that I'll say okay I'm good the reason I can do I can show you this in eight minutes is that we have a bunch of other features I'm not going to show you those because that's just wasting your time but if you're curious afterwards just to ask me and I can go

[27:58] in and I can show you any of the other features that we have so at this point then we'll go in I'll give them an 8 minute demo basically addressing the problem that they specifically had told me that they had so let's say for example and you know if they can't get their reimbursements done on time and then and will come out of that demo and add a stage they should say this is exactly what I'm looking for you asked them is anything missing they'll say probably saying no and which case I prefer to just shut the up and say nothing

[28:35] I love awkward silences and especially love them in a sales situation because the obvious next step is that you know we both agreed our product is going to solve their problem I've shown them how it's going to do that and then the obvious next step for them and say okay well what do we do next if they say that then okay well the next step is we're going to we're going to get you set up I can take a credit card detail and so wine often times they won't set out of course because they're savvy buyers they often have some objections so what I like to do to handle objections is I'll

[29:09] have like cost testimonials brought up from customers in their segment would address is exactly their segment so you can see I have a couple of them here you know they might say the objection might be well it's going to take me too much time to implement I'll have for quotes saying here no actually this is going to save you a bunny time a bunch of time they might be saying well does this really work is it going to save us money here's some pose for not now I won't go through each of the quotes but I will do is I have a slide for each common

[29:34] objection and I'll bring that up and I'll use that as a way of handling giving them confidence that whatever they're worried about is not going to happen and then what I used like to do is I like to put in like an industry-specific slide with people who from their industry who have addressed the same problem so and then we go on to the next steps and then you know oftentimes it's the best opportunity you have to close them on that call but oftentimes they won't go for that they'll say you know large organization I need to speak to my boss I need to go to committee I need to talk to my

[30:05] girlfriend whatever and in which case we we switch over into to follow up those so so so so the follow up is key you know you may have seen this floating around your Facebook at some stage which is like you know 80% of sales happen between the 6th and 12th the contact will long after all your competitors have given up and sadly its total it's not if someone told you made all these stats off but our good friend steli he does he's tell us that yeah sales are really made on the follow up not to show up so and the key thing that study so brilliant C key thing says

[30:48] is that your competitors have given up you're still there because they they wouldn't no one searches for purchase order system for fun let me tell you that so they wouldn't have done it unless they had a problem to be solved and because we've agreed now that you know it's a good fit here then we just need to follow up until it's the right time and the great thing about handing over to someone else for that is that's the only thing that I have to worry about okay and now to support people who are doing the follow-up what I'll do is I will give them some assets so they're just

[31:18] not annoying people so for example we'll use some bid sketch to create a quote for those people we'll give it that to the person who's doing the follow-up so we can say listen I have a quote for you here and so when they get in touch it's not it's adding value I'll give them a recording of the web session that we did or to join me session we did we can send that later on we're trying to give them a few assets to make the follow-up less annoying but also let them know that yeah we're here and ready to held it handle yourself when you're want to give it to us now

[31:46] that's the basic technique but there is a couple of things we got wrong when we implemented this first thing is very important is the disadvantage for your strategy is that you build up rapport with the first person then you lose all that rapport when you go on to the second person you build up rapport there and so on so you have three opportunities for losing rapport with the prospect you've been talking about the best way to avoid this or the best way to ameliorate this is to foreshadowing so at each step of the process the person who's doing the qualification is going to tell them exactly what's gonna happen in an

[32:22] accident so when they're scheduling their call they're gonna say listen James is gonna be the guy he's calling you he's gonna call you he's gonna confirm by email 15 minutes in advance he's going to prepare them with just for you and when I show up and do that it builds a lot of confidence in the prospect that hey they said they were gonna call on time they said they're gonna prepare a demo for me they did all out ergo if they tell me our software can help it out with our problem maybe it can also and so before shadowing at every step is very important so you the

[32:50] customers are aware that they are and what the next step in the process is going to be and what they're expected to do when you get to the end of that process so and one of my favorite quotes I googled it so it must be true it's Mark Twain says that you know come comparison is the death of joy or comparison is the death of happiness and except if you're building a sales Factory for SAS business in which case comparison is awesome because what you can do is how do you break apart the sales process into three different steps you can then have two or three people at each in each role and

[33:31] they can coach one another on how best to achieve their objective before they hand on so for example the qualification people can try different ways of introducing themselves you can clearly see who's better at getting who's better at setting appointments and who's not and can because it's a very tightly defined tight job specification you can improve that role a lot more especially so when it comes to demonstrating the product itself we had one guy who's literally three times better at demoing the product than someone else so it was an immediate reacts on our sales process just by swapping them out moving the other guy somewhere else you can't do that if you

[34:06] just have one super sales guy if you have one super man who can you know be responsible follow-up get in touch demo the value you know build rapport with the customer first of all those guys are freaking expensive and second of all you have no real control out of help you know it's much harder to coach them to success so is this for you well I think you know it's worked well for b2b especially where you roll out a product within a company and there is going to be a slightly longer sales cycle our sales like is about six weeks and I think if you have a conversion rate that

[34:40] you think can be higher ours was three percent you know steli said we get to seven and we manage that after three months I think it's a good candidate for you for you then and another reason is if you're if you're experiencing let's say you know if you know your organic sales turn faster than your you know sales who actually talk to people to actually talk to you which is similar for her in some circumstance and make sense to try and get in touch with people and give them a higher touch sale especially considering that for us certainly people who do a demo tend to be higher value customers and they said

[35:11] tend to you know they sent worth more to us long run if you're going to do this with a traditional sales commission model it's actually quite hard at my type of business you know or our average customers were like $109 month and and to you know to think this would have done here is done the chart on the right hand side this mo where along the top is a number of qualified leads you can generate and in order to be able to hire a traditional salesperson to do this for you you're gonna need to be getting at least 40 leads a month and about an average mor of $1,000 a month so it can

[35:46] be done and last you guys will fit into that category we don't and that's why we split out the sales process because the people who do individual steps are you know great guys but they were looking at a lower price point than a super sales guy and it means that we can afford to offer the same sort of high touch sales experience at a much lower cost so for example the people who are doing the sales administration you know it depends it varies like we we work in South Africa so we have a 24-hour sales operation there and losses less than two thousand dollars a month to man so it's

[36:16] something you can maybe outsource maybe you do in your local market point is if two thousand dollars a month is more than is what you add each one if you might add at least that every month in mo or each month it might be worth doing this so that my friends is how you can stop giving product I'm out and and start solving solving problems in your own customer boards instead thanks James

[36:47] hi great presentation by the way excellent so you just talked about kind of stratifying the different roles in that that sales process yeah one of the things that I know we've kind of struggled with it we're right where I'm the guy demoing almost every demo so it's it's it's I get it and we're up at that 30 to 40 a malice so we're there I it's a red lining but being able to find talent that is again as you said it was you know cost-effective in your model but you know customer-facing I mean what is your qualifying procedure for that talent and where are you finding them

[37:25] are you is it in in country is it in some so for first responders yeah so you know we're offices in South Africa so we do there but I find it very easy to find people who can pick up a phone dial it and fill out a Google Form you know and in fact I have awesome people who are doing this I'm probably way better than I would be and so that's the first responder side I'm the sort of sales administration you can do that relatively inexpensively you could outsource it if you wanted or you could do in your local market depending on your price point there where it comes to

[37:56] actually demonstrating the value you know so that where what you're doing right now the fact that we've you systemize a lot more and there's a lot less to do it's much easier to fill that role so if you are expecting someone to have like we can take people who are actually very little sales experience we can give them the checklist as long as they're you know they're they're reasonably smart they can learn that a lot easier so whatever you're doing implicitly right now you know which given your experience start putting that in plus the street is fantastic for this sort of stuff and then you I'm not

[38:29] totally sure what your product is but you know we found it by narrowing the role is much easier to fill you know it's hard to get someone who can do all of this stuff but it's quite easy to get someone who can do a specific thing well are you paying an hourly buy project for one sales person now I was doing this demos were paying her like fixed fee per demo you know for about $30 a demo we think and then she gets the Commission on that if she makes a sale so we don't do it full-time but you know you don't need to go to

[38:59] Commission rules because that really eats into your margin so it might make sense depending on the volume of demos just to hire someone full-time to do it you know no committee the Commission's are really a double-edged sword eats into your margin so there's no reason to do it if you follow this model because it's really table a and so sloppy it's much more straightforward then you know the mythical awesome salesperson all right we have time for one more before a break I noticed on your website you don't have the pricing available what's the strategy behind them so it's Navy test we put up the pricing fewer people

[39:38] signed up and and that's why we don't do it I can't remember the exact test but a one convincingly it's one of these things like it's a it's always a little bit what we think about it is you need to have the you have the ball you need to have something that the customers want in order to progress the sale further pricing is an obvious one and if they don't find a pricing on the pricing site they're you know obviously more likely it's trying to dig into the product or product this pricing is actually on the inside but to answer your question it's a straight up baby

[40:10] test because more trials so we we don't do the pricing publicly anymore thank you very much James all right thanks [Applause] you

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