# Question + Answer: Hiten Shah and Steli Efti of The Startup Chat

Channel: Rob Walling
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-CALnzguN4
Duration: 53 min
Language: English
Words: 10494
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/M-CALnzguN4

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[0:00] [Music] [Music] so to start off with as I said we've got a bunch of questions to go through the first one comes from Ryan Bennett and he says after a customer has started a trial it's our job to help them become successful with our product this effort will lead to long term customer with big lifetime value what suggestions you have for engaging and nurturing the onboarding process given that we know what milestones the customer will need to reach in order to become successful

[0:38] so I mean it depends heavily on who your customer is what kind of company you run what kind of culture you have what you're good about it but in very generic terms if you're early in the process I would do anything and everything possible and I wouldn't worry if it's profitable or scalable so you might want to drive to their office you know and spend an afternoon with them get to know them set them up if you can't do that you want to definitely call them you know talk them figure out why did they sign up how did they find out about you what are their needs what

[1:11] are other things they've looked into build a relationship and help them succeed with whatever it takes and then you know you can just go up the the the different steps of things that scale more but aren't less personal so they elect some context and they will lack some crucial insights because the the crucial thing here is whatever it is that you think you know that your new trial users need to do to be successful you're probably wrong about a bunch of stuff and the only way to get real insights into what they truly need to be successful you want to spend as much time as possible trying to get to these

[1:48] insights and spending time with them in person on the phone is gonna be a lot more insightful than just sending them a survey or just automating drip emails but there's thousands of tactics webinars rip emails you know tons of something you can do to help people on board but I would say spend more time trying to understand truly what it takes for somebody to be successful and don't be that fast in thinking you know what it is because you have a bunch of assumptions that are probably wrong so it's more about making sure that you go through that learning process just because you think something like say for

[2:17] example they need to sign up and set up their account and they need to do X in order to make that make product work for example don't just assume that Oh throwing a video out there is going to do it like you actually have to call them talk to them walk them through that and see what it is that kind of motivates them to actually do that that's one thing but you might even be wrong about you think well everybody that sets up the email account on our system will be you know more active and more successful and that might be true but it might not you you

[2:44] really need to make sure that you're not jumping to conclusions too quickly and also even once you've figured out what makes somebody really successful in the onboarding process your job is not done forever because people change businesses change your product changes the market changes so you want to make sure that with some level of frequencies you go and revisit and test your your assumptions again and go we always knew that this is making people successful is this still true today right and that goes kind of back to what I think does said this morning about having people go through your your signup process for example that's that's

[3:14] kind what you get in I do want to mention one thing before the next question about this that some of it is the person that did the concierge onboarding course here somewhere because there was a concierge onboarding course I think it was a micro Kauffman attendee but basically the tactic is called concierge onboarding and there's a bunch of ebooks and stuff like that out there about it I think what people jump to is the product sort of marketing and the drip emails and instead doing something where you're hand-holding a lot more so you can learn as much smarter and there's a name for it concierge onboarding so look that up and

[3:50] I think that'll give you an idea of how that sort of process would work very cool so the next question comes to us from Peter Shanley and he says have you seen patterns around third party service integrations that are an important part of product strategy and when it would be most useful for example when are they the most strategic and helpful for acquisition churn revenue expansion etc yeah I like I like the the last part of it better than the other parts of it because it starts with like what you're trying to improve so any of those integrations like usually you're trying to improve a metric just as a quick tip

[4:22] unless it's like a Shopify app store type thing a lot of the integrations won't help you with acquisition so you might want to think about these integrations for retention or engagement for example if you integrate with slack with your product cuz I know that's becoming a really popular thing you want to look at you want to look at doing that if you think that getting that information data engagement and slack would increase your retention or increase your engagement so I would just say that like it really depends on what the problems are in your business and whether integrations gonna help solve them and also whether you're trying to

[4:56] attract new customers from it that might not already might if your existing customers didn't need that integration so again just back to what's your business problem and how our integrations gonna help solve it as the approach I would take others are there situations where you can see that those integrations are generally I guess predictable as being an ultra good thing for your business like are there certain market verticals that those types of integrations work better for or is it very very largely dependent on like the audience that your product serves every single thing I've seen is dependent on audience and also dependent on what's popular right now so you're seeing so

[5:31] many slack integrations if you see other companies be successful with it or something and really try to figure out why they're being successful because I actually think the opposite I think it's risky to integrate without understanding how it's going to impact your user base and your own metrics and why is that you can waste it's just yeah I think it's one of the themes of the conference so far that I've seen which is like it's like you'll you could waste a lot of effort on it and it might not be the one most important thing or the thing you should focus on so you could spend all

[6:01] this time doing a slack integration for your finance app when they don't use slack or they don't want the finance numbers push to slack and stuff like that so our next question comes from lester buck and he says we can always practice selling by selling our own products and services but that doubles the tension because it's our products and we can't be sure whether it's the product or us having no sales skills when we're having troubles where are some strategies for introverts techies and geeks to learn by selling to learn to sell by selling other people's products one guru everyone suggested telemarketing for a weekend but from

[6:34] craigslist ads they asked for a years experience in during that week Sandler is something like Sandler sales training worth trying not for me this is literally not directed to me so there's so much in that question so let's say you don't have a lot of sales experience you would classify yourself as a more technical person and and you're like you know when we fail selling our product we don't know is it the product is it me or is it the product right and should we go and try doing you know telemarketing or taking courses all that can be great but but the question is just what is the optimal

[7:15] use of your time if you had all the time in the world that would tell you to take all classes read all the books do do everything right but if you're a of a product might as well invest the effort in trying to sell that if you're uncomfortable about it what I would tell you to do is like sales is something that happens every day you just have to think about it that way so instead of selling the product to a customer maybe what you need to do first is selling people on giving you feedback about that problem right how about you're setting the goal every day I'm gonna have 10

[7:47] conversations with people and if you don't know where to find people just go into you know a Starbucks or something and buy people coffee and then say I have three questions and learn to to ask questions and dig really deep and try to understand their issues of their challenges around the problem that you're trying to solve with your product right you can you can sell so many things it's yourself asking people for time of feedback and and improve and iterate on that without being a lot of people think to be good at sales you have to be incredibly charismatic and you don't at all like you just need to

[8:21] understand how to ask some really good questions to understand what the promise from the other side and then indicate it or or come to a conclusion if your product solves that and then tell me that in a succinct way with the next action item hey now that I heard these 10 things about you I really think the product that I've built can solve your issues here's how it's going to do it and why it's good and here's what I want you to do you know put your hand in your pocket bring out the one with a credit card and let's get started with a trial or something you have to face the moment

[8:51] of truth of asking for something and then having the rejection as a response where people go well I don't want to do that and that's the Matt that's where most people go oh I failed and if you just stop doing that and you go oh now we can learn something hey do you want to sign up for my new free product or do you want to sign up for my for my product no cool why what is missing was it me like did I do a bad job am I talking too much too little did I ask the wrong questions can I buy you coffee and asked you for feedback I'm

[9:23] trying to improve I'm trying to do better what is it is the product really not doing what you wanted to do why if you think about it more as a learning experience versus a failure or success I'm good or bad at sales you're gonna improve and get better and better at it and there's talks out there and if anybody in the audience of this is a specific person want to know a lot more you can just shoot me an email at stellar closer I'll send you some resources and talks on like how to systematically get better at sales if you're not a sales dude okay but it's

[9:53] just the way of the the attitude that approach is much more important than learning how to do sales I was selling for somebody else it seems to me like there's an underlying theme with this question about being comfortable doing sales and being comfortable facing that rejection time and time again and I've heard different strategies to essentially overcome those fears one of which is you're not trying to make 3 sales for example per day you're trying to just make 10 calls or 15 or 20 or something like that can you talk a little bit more about that because I mean it seems to me like it's more of a psychological fear than it is

[10:25] about you know actually meeting sales numbers or you know getting a certain number of meatiness specific metric that is actually outside of your control like you can control whether you make 10 calls or not but you can't control whether or not you know three people actually purchase or anything yeah I would even take that idea further and go instead of focusing on you don't want to focus on success in sales which is like let's get three close deals today you can focus on activity which is I'm gonna make ten calls but even a level higher than that is to focus on failure so to say you know what if I make ten calls on

[10:55] average three are gonna be good which is not gonna be the case but just for easy math so I'm gonna have to be rejected seven times to get to success so my goal every day is to get rejected seven times so if you get lucky or unlucky and you made ten calls and you didn't reach anybody your job is not done right and also if somebody rejects that is now something you can check off a list that is actually a little bit of something that brings you closer to your ultimate goal this is a little bit of playing mind games with your own head but at the end of the day sales just

[11:23] like entrepreneurship is not about being comfortable that is not the name of the game asking somebody nobody likes rejection neither do i so asking somebody for like hey do you want to do this do you want to sign up do you want to give me money is an uncomfortable moment all you have to do is train that muscle train to be more comfortable with doing uncomfortable things because there's no way around it I have no better way of doing it so when people I think that this is a good add-on question because all of times people because they feel so uncomfortable they try to avoid that and then they go can I

[11:52] read a book that's gonna make this easier or like can I watch a talk or can I do something else and you can do all these things but it's not gonna make it more comfortable you have to get comfortable with the idea that you're gonna have to feel a certain level of discomfort consistently if you want to accomplish the dreams and goals you have for your business so the sooner you get you know the sooner you accept that reality the easier your life is gonna be great our next question comes from Jack Jones and he says what are some strategies you've seen work for repairing burnout

[12:23] yeah I'm assuming this is more like I started the business and I'm burnt out or you've just oh like overworked you put in you know 50 80 hours above and beyond maybe when you're full-time is there this ends up going into like lots of sort of contextual like why are you burned-out did you are you not making enough progress and a whole bunch of areas like that that end up being very personal is is kind of what I've noticed so overall if you if you feel burnt out and you've been trying to start your business it's probably because you haven't been making progress fast enough and the first thing to do when you feel

[13:07] that burn out is like step back and think to yourself like why am I actually burnt out and is it something that I continuously do that I should stop doing is it something that I'm not doing that I need to start doing so it's just an evaluation of the things you're doing and are they helping you make progress or not and oftentimes you know especially if you're an engineer or even a marketer you're gonna default to doing the things again even related to the last question things that are very comfortable for you which you can keep doing maybe you feel like you can keep doing them like you can keep writing

[13:41] code but if nobody's coming and using your product at some point you realize that if I keep writing code I'm I'm gonna run out of money or I'm gonna run out of time right and so is it burnout because you've been writing all that code or is it burnout because you haven't been making the progress so I try to quantify it not necessarily as I'm burnt out because I'm working too hard or I'm burnt out because I've worked 100 hours a week because I've seen people working 100 hours a week that would never say they're burnt out and I've seen people working 100 hours a week that say they're burnt out and the

[14:11] difference between those two groups is deceptively simple which is the folks that are working 100 hours a week and are motivated to keep doing that are making progress and they know that the things are working on are really important to get what they want you know their hopes and dreams Esteli put it and if you're sort of working 100 hours a week and you feel burnt out there's probably an underlying root cause that's less to do with the hundred hours a week and more to do with progress more to do with growth and a lot of other things like that so are there specific questions you can ask yourself or like a

[14:45] framework that somebody could use to try and help pinpoint the specifics of what the underlying cause is yeah I mean if you're it's usually because you are your framework is you might not have one right and it's a framework for making sort of progress which again deceptively simple am i working on the most important thing right now so if you don't have a product then you probably need to work on getting a product getting a product means finding a problem people have and it's likely you know if you're burnt out and your engineer you've been working too much in the land of making the product instead

[15:23] of figuring out what's important in the product so you know I'll give you the ultimate framework for me on a business which is there's two things that matter product and distribution everything else is sort of related to one of those two so anytime I hear someone say I'm they're burnt out I try to just give him the framework oh well is it that you have a product and you can't market it or is it that you've got all this marketing or all these users or something and for some reason that products not working right which might almost sound like the same problem but if you're burnt out

[15:51] it's one of those two things it's just not working and you might be doing the wrong thing you might be trying to get all these customers and your product sucks or you might have you know very few customers and you don't know if your product sucks because you don't have enough customers so the framework I would just give you a step back and think about where is my problem in my business that's preventing me from making progress and causing me to feel burnt out you're probably just working on the wrong things excellent and our next question comes from Kurt Elster and this is I believe specifically aimed at heaton so he

[16:21] you're gonna have to answer this one cell he's gonna answer it no I'm gonna add he's gonna answer I to stop me what are you gonna do and squat down here we'll make all right how is Stella's hair so perfect you sure you want to answer this telly answer I don't look at his hair that's good to the next question are so I guess at this point we'll take questions from the audience we'll be wandering around here where's the first question right here okay so this is a sales question is there a particular time of day that's best to do cold outreach I ask that because I've

[17:06] got like an outbound you know drip campaign but I've also done you know just pick up the phone and call I have noticed that like on Tuesday afternoon probably like a little bit after lunch I get a pretty good response rate when I'm following up with people well that's one follow-up so as far as like outbound is there a particular good time of day does it depend on the industry etc it totally depends on who you're trying to reach who's that person what is their life look like how do they organize their day so in some cases it might be very early even earlier than you think it might be

[17:37] very late it might be on the weekend it might be at odd hours or at times where you would not expect that it's a good time to try to to get in touch with somebody so the only the only answer there's to experiment but there's there's the typical things there's typical truths like Mondays and Fridays very broadly speaking are busier days in a corporate setting so people tend to be potentially less responsive but breaking that rule can be very profitable if you have the type of customer that doesn't have stressful Monday's or Friday's I'm gonna be a customer that gets a lot of important calls on Monday so they are in

[18:13] the habit of picking up the phone when they get a call on Monday so no there's no universal truth you should experiment a lot and then see what what gives you an outsized return and maybe there isn't but a lot of times there is it a day at a time that works better than others and it's not the same for everybody I'm gonna give you a quick hack which is you can if you have any kind of like analytics on some website where you know it's that audience because you probably have a website just go look at the hours time of day day of week and things like

[18:44] that that people are visiting your website at least you'll know they're online now that doesn't mean you want to send it when they're doing that that's more of a judgment call but it can inform you on what time of day and day of week to test at least and adding one little thing to that if you have a website that people can sign up on our landing page something people do that you then try to reach out to them and communicate with them afterwards trying to call people within five minutes of them taking that action online is going to have significant returns on your reach rate because people are still at

[19:15] their computer they just looked at your stuff they're probably not in a meeting or somewhere else in the gym or something so there's even studies about that the area is huge so if you ever try to call people after they took an inbound action like sign up for something test out what the results are if you call them really quickly after they took the action versus calling them an hour or a day later next question thank you so I have a question about identifying my market and I'll give you the context I'm building a database application builder and it's been built for over a decade I have seen competitors companies

[19:56] judging from the number of employees they have I know they are making revenue but where I'm getting stuck as who are they're selling it to how are they approaching them I'm kind of stuck I don't know where to you know can you identify some strategies I could use to identify they're my competitors you know and customers and try to do something similar to reach and you talk to people in their space yeah oftentimes just looking at competitors businesses or websites it's very hard to determine how they're getting customers I think you're hitting this problem and I've seen it quite a bit so the approach that you you should

[20:44] take is go go talk to people that could either use your product or go talk to people that are using those competitive products people meeting customers and actually go figure out how they've discovered the product and I'm going and what they think about it he's just saying that to me cuz I get distracted anyways so everything starts with the customer so do whatever you can and go have enough conversations with potential customers and a lot of these questions will start getting sort of you'll have a lot more clarity you might not get the definitive answer but you'll know things like oh in this market people are doing

[21:22] are it looks like most of these customers found out about these companies from a conference or they found out online through some ads right but they'll tell you the customer will actually tell you so one of the what if you're already competitor focused one of the best things to do is get customer focused by talking to their customers and figuring out who they are where they are etc and just trying to get a hold of them another option would be fine you know there's one thing that kind of was mentioned earlier in the day about sell what was it sell sell the situation so there's probably a situation people are

[21:54] in when they should be using your product and if you think about it that way and hypothesize that you can go reach them or try to think up how can I reach them when they're in this situation but the biggest piece of advice I can give you is go go find customers or potential customers and just go talk to them and you're go to market and all those kind of things become a lot more clear totally agree with him heating you have to like you're totally in the dark which I appreciate and I'm like getting all the light but some people want that better yes much better

[22:23] and just one add on I'm typically I have we'd have a longer conversation with you and like why you've built something and you're so focused on the competitors but just to throw out this hack because I know salespeople and most people here don't as well you can always sign up for your competitors side to get a demo or trial of something some sales person typically a more junior one is gonna get in touch with you and that person is gonna be more than willing to give you all information you want if you just ask the question so you go oh how many people are you guys huh you know I found

[22:53] you this way how most people finding you um I wondered what is your ideal customer so just I know that I'm the ideal customer and you just get all the at you you will get if you ask three questions they'll keep talking for another hour and telling you things you haven't thought about asking so just as a little hack on top of that so you guys are passed like 22 minutes at this point you're good you're alright that's not the we're not gonna tell you okay we see it but you're not gonna know we're good on time way again so I have another cold-calling question it turns out in

[23:25] Canada we can't send cold emails anymore so I'm turning to cold calling and I'm just wondering if it makes sense to hire a VA to set up my demos for VPS and IT leadership from my b2b product so my concern is that the resources might not have the subject matter expertise to be able to you know engage the technical leadership in order to set up these demos or scope up some of these appointments yeah I would agree I mean I don't know the answers I don't know you could just try it for a week and then you'd know but if I had to guess I would

[24:02] guess that it you don't wanna you don't want to outsource something you haven't done and you don't understand yourself well right and with sales it's the same thing as with product development right so a lot of times people ask me hey steli we were ready to start selling so we're gonna can you recommend us and outsource sales firm because I was running one and my answer is no I can't recommend anyone but the answer is like how can we outsource this sales thing and I always tell them do yet have you done sales at all yourselves it any kind of capacity and the answer is no it's kind of like me saying you know

[24:33] what Heaton I want to build a social app that's gonna be his biggest snapchat and I need a web development forum and then he didn't ask me well what's the app what's the idea about it I'm like oh I don't have an idea I just want to entire firm yeah I just want here's gonna be my my ask for that web development from it needs to be social and mobile and we want to reach a million people well if they knew that they'd build it themselves right I'd say it's not that how great how good of an idea does that sound to you guys it's the exact same to my ears when

[25:05] somebody's like I've never done sales we know nothing about sales but we're gonna outsource at the sales problem it's yeah hire a PA but is the question like somebody without domain expertise can they set up calls they need to have a cold calling expertise right they need to be able to talk in a way on a cold call to capture somebody's attention get their trust and then get them to buy into the minimal amount of value prop to jump on another call if they're really well trained on that they're gonna be able to do without understanding the industry at all but if they have not done cold calling they're not really

[25:40] like ninjas on that then no it's not as easy as just getting them on the phone or I at least you can always try and see if this is a different case but the chance of success although I'll throw one in which is why cold calling but don't answer that like you might want to try alternatives to email and phone so I have a question about controlling the success of your of your marketing so say you have a product you want to grow it very slowly you want to make sure you can provide support you want to make sure your infrastructure handles it but you also want to experiment with some

[26:14] some wider reach marketing like email campaigns or Google AdWords how do you how do you kind of compromise controlled growth with starting to look at larger scale marketing yeah you have you have you're basically talking about marketing channels right and you have ones that are working I mean this is everybody like if you have some scale it sounds like you do so you have ones that are working you have ones you might have tried before that are not gonna work for you or at least you believe that and then you have this third bucket which you might not have yet which is always have some percentage

[26:50] of your resources on marketing dedicated to channel discovery so it's just experimenting with new channels so for example spend 500 bucks on reddit the numbers actually 5,000 now you know on a very high scale on most experiments when you're really trying to find new channels but you can spend 500 and get a good idea if you want to spend more money on most channels although they're all channels are generally getting expensive when it's paid marketing but if you're trying to find like organic channels that are not paid it's the same process how do I figure out how to spend the least amount of effort to see if

[27:23] this thing's gonna work for me right and most marketing balls down to basically get traffic convert the traffic so that's a framework there that I would use against all the different channels you have and figure out if you can get traffic from the channel and then figure out not necessarily in this order and then figure out if you can convert now there's a lot of ways to figure that out like you go do some analysis if it's if it's Google Adwords you do bunch a bunch on who's advertising and whether they're whether you think they're getting traffic based on the keywords they're advertising for and when you look at their site are they

[27:54] converting it and if that looks good then it's something you might want to try yourself so there's a lot of different tactics to do the experimentation but most most folks tend to not do that third bucket which is experimentation because otherwise you're never really going to discover kind of what's next and whatever you're already doing is foundational probably and it's already getting you some base level of growth but to get more growth you probably are going to need more channels one thing to add to this don't worry about future success so much right because that's a worry that a lot of times it's wasted oh we would like to do

[28:27] this but then how are we handling the millions of customers that are come to us you know you can always tell people know you can always stop things stopped running a marketing channel you can always create like limitation you know we're running this marketing thing that's gonna drive millions of people but we say we only have 10 spots open like you could always do things to limit it but worrying too much about what to do because if it's too successful it's gonna be a lot of work usually is not the best way to spend worry steli I've heard you speak at another conference about the card with someone

[29:03] at close i/o to help you with the content marketing although the videos the blog posts the ebooks everything that you've created I'm really curious about that person that you work with if that's still the case like is it a marketing person is that a writer I'm in a similar situation I'd like to find someone to help take what I say to customers and create you know some long-lasting you know sort of materials like that I'm curious about that relationship so this is somebody that I've been friends with for 15 years he lived in my apartment for two years when I was back in Europe so you know if you

[29:39] know somebody for that amount of time and you've lived with them maybe you should think about them in a marketing role so this friend of mine was doing he I mean this is the exact okay mine neither so that's why I looked at friends as an option so he was doing a lot of marketing but he had very little experience about SAS stuff and we just started working together it was a long and slow process and he took a long time until we found our groove and found like a really good machinery we have an episode on like how to do scalable content marketing and I actually like

[30:12] break down the formula and how we do it but but yeah the the basic thing is that the fastest way for me to generate content is to create video and then we take that video today it's like our raw material and the content fabrication and we push it through a process now where multiple people work on this they'll take the video and they're turning it into a blog post we take the blog posts and we turn them into books we take the books and we turn them into and which is repurpose and remix a lot but the raw material at the beginning of it is just

[30:42] video because that's a medium I can create somewhat of a good quality but very high quantity content let me give a quick tip because that's what we do right if you have the budget you can just hire people a lot like not a lot of them but like four or five of them to actually do the thing you want them to do so it could be that you record a call and you say I want to turn this into marketing material take my call turn it into marketing material give that to four or five people spend 50 to 250 bucks each and just keep doing that until you find the

[31:16] people maybe one maybe more that can actually work with you on that so when you have a task like you came at it with a deliberate task I have calls and I want to turn that into something else so just hire people and it's really inexpensive and we've gotten lucky when we take processes like that where you just take a process and hire multiple people to do it and see who you like what time do we have to tell you something a lot of time we're good so as an engineer I kind of have an implicit bias against interruption marketing but I find myself in a situation where I

[31:52] really want to start using cold calling as a as a technique and so I've been trying that but my bad implicit bias is coming across over the phone in terms of like lack of confidence or lack of confidence in the product how do you kind of get over that I guess I'm gonna start and then tell you we'll take over the sales part I want to point out one thing though and this could be just semantics but I wouldn't consider outbound marketing I'd consider it purely sales and the reason is the tactics you use aren't marketing tactics they're sales tactics because you're you're trying to get a conversation so

[32:27] just just want to clarify it in my mind as a marketer I wouldn't want outbound to be thought of as a marketing thing although I get why because it's meant to acquire customers but it acquires customers straight into the sales process so you generally need more sales tactics and less marketing tactics so yeah so first I think you identifying a really important point which is if you're not sold you can't sell and this is I think an overlooked truth because it's so obvious and so simple but if you're not really sold on what you do you're gonna struggle selling me on it but this translates to many parts of the sales

[33:04] cycle if you are incredibly cheap in the way you make buying decisions you're probably gonna struggle selling a high premium product right if you like whatever you trying to get other people's to do ask yourself when was the last time I did this right when was the last time I signed up for a trial with my credit card before even looking at the product when was the last time I did what if I'm asking other people to do if you're like indeed this is the way the world works and this is the way I act you're gonna be authentic and that's gonna translate into you assuming that

[33:36] the other person is gonna agree with you versus what you're doing which is you're assuming I'm gonna annoy this person I'm gonna interrupt their day I'm gonna destroy their productivity potentially their life this call is gonna make the world a worse place all right there you go let me make the next call right if that's the foundationally the way you think about this this is gonna be really hard right this is gonna be harder than it needs to be so I mean this specific case I'd have to ask you a million questions do you really need to do cold calls before coaching about to do it well I'd be like do we really need

[34:12] to do this is this really the only thing that's left as an option for you but assuming that that was the case there's some truth that forces you to it you have to ask yourself you have to make a hard choice if you're gonna find a way to love it and to make your cold calls the best interruption of somebody's day make that call packed with value stand you know above anything that anybody could expect and make this really special and make that your benchmark that you're trying to live up to or find a new business on your way to of doing things but currently you're kind of

[34:47] stuck in this hell of struggling and you're right you're never gonna get anything done or anything accomplished that way and we can chat about this more later on if you want questions questions for heating up next anyways oh good we're alternating if you've noticed cool or we'll talk over each other yeah so I actually lean more towards like a background in direct sales but I'm now doing more in the marketing and measuring analytics and doing all that stuff but I find that I have a I struggle with going up the tree making changes coming down and leaving it alone so do you have a strategy around how you

[35:29] stay productive when you're measuring a lot of things and you know what's your kind of like your calendar or plan for for making changes and then coming back to them and being productive in that way use your calendar like just literally like this is like the ultimate marketers hack right you you're in this really messed up sort of process where you have to go make a bunch of bets and then you have to wait some amount of time to see if they work that's essentially the problem I think you're describing well if you're an engineer or designer you write code or you design something and literally in minutes you

[36:06] know whether at work if you're an engineer you deploy it you see it if you're a designer you can literally see it in front of you this is what I drew this is what I coded it worked as a marketer I would say that your your your addiction is traffic you can ask the ball guy in front right here he's addicted to traffic that's my co-founder he does all the marketing uh-huh and and so my advice is calendar it right like in its calendar to the point where it's like create new campaigns on Monday look at the campaigns on Wednesday right and then go figure out what to do for next

[36:40] week on Friday cuz then you're gonna you know you're gonna have to create new campaigns on Monday so whatever your schedule is just put a regimen in a schedule that way you know when to look at it one of the worst things for me even still to this day is setting up and starting an a/b test and then just biting my nails as I watch it happen so this hack of like getting distracted in the middle of those check-ins has been really useful to me so maybe you could write code in the middle right and then so like it's like Monday is marketing day we I create campaigns Tuesdays

[37:13] engineering day I'm gonna go write some code Wednesdays marketing day again I'm gonna check how things worked and tweak them turn them off whatever so just said of cadence set a schedule and honestly stick to it because marketing is pretty trial and error compared a lot of other things so this is question for steli and heat in the same time so no stick to steli this question I did so just this question is more specific how do you grow from you know when you are operating in us you know in the vertical so I'm selling I mean the financial services industry and we are sending it

[37:53] to financial advisors we have product that works people are getting value from it and you know how do you grow it it's from the team of three people to you know and two of you know hundred customers two thousand customers in a specific vertical so if you can give some tips or advice on that I'll be awesome you should answer that aisle we have rules steli again i like to break them just to see that face like the rule now alright so it is my my two cents on this so to summarize the question you have a bunch of customers and a very specific vertical and you're like how do

[38:28] i get more of them alright well how did you get the first ones that's why you wanted me answer it yeah it's my question so we started with called email reaching out you know associations we recently started with facebook advertising which scale still be better than just reaching or one-to-one to people but I want to basically attract and generate more leads at scale right so I don't want to generate you know one or two leads a day but maybe like twenty I'd week for example right things like that yeah well I don't know so there's no Universal like this is the thing you do once you have this and then that will

[39:17] be the result otherwise why would there be a need for conference like this right if we just all follow that one formula but the typically what you do is it's not so much so you acquired some customers and you've done it in a very like labor intense high-touch way and you're like this is not what I want to do for the rest of my life and this is not gonna allow us to grow as much as our ambition wants us to so what are the things we haven't done yet that will allow us to get faster better more results and the best way to get there

[39:46] that I know is to spend more time with the customers you've required to really get to know them a lot better beyond just getting their money and getting them to buy you want to figure out where do they spend most of their time how what was the last thing they bought and are they always buying the way that you sold to them or other ways they are buying you really want to get to customer insights because these insights again will point you in to channels and approaches and ways to grow your company if you don't spend any of your time once you've acquired a customer to get to know them a lot

[40:16] better then the problem is you're as smart as you were you know one customer ago once you're at ten customers or 40 customers so it's a you're like we now we have 50 customers we used to have one customer and we still don't know how to get to 10,000 customers so my my advice to you would be spend a lot more time with those customers to learn ask them that question hey I'm so glad that you bought this is amazing one question from a founder to the VP of blah blah blah forum basically we just have one important person to another important person I need advice from you if you

[40:49] were running my business and if you were running this company and you had the ambition to go from X to Y how would you do it as an expert in the industry just ask them that question more so than any kind of other sales or marketing experts that are more generic because these people are going to give you the right answers and I've got a tip so steli has a blog post and probably videos on getting referrals from your customers especially if you have if you're like high-touch which i think you are I don't know if I'll get you 20 customers a week but it's probably a channel that you

[41:22] should use if you're not using it because apparently his his tips work google it what do you vice do you guys have on doing enterprise deals and avoiding getting crushed on price what do you mean by crushed on price just just that just caving to excessive discounts and demands oh oh well still he's gonna tell you not to do that so don't cave and he's actually gonna tell you the opposite but there's a sticker running around that's got me that says charge more perceived value and enterprise as the price goes up the perceived value goes up and enterprise more than other markets I'm gonna defer to steli in a second but like in these

[42:07] kind of things that I've seen them they're not looking for a discount they might not find your product valuable at all if they're the ones pushing you to it and on urine the mistake you might make is I just want to close the deal so I'll do discounts or all I'll I'll lower the price for some reason and make up a reason why but like it's a hack like it's more of a value misalignment that I found like when you're trying to discount so hard yeah so when dealing with the enterprise there's two scenarios one is they are pushing you on price because they think they can and

[42:39] then you allow them to for that in that scenario just don't you know nobody's putting a gun at your hand you don't have to sell to them and it's surprising how many times customers have told me if you don't do X we will not be able to buy and I said okay I'm not gonna do X and then they just went and bought anyways all right some people some sales people would say bias are liars but I think that they well first of all a lot of times they don't really know what they will or will not do in the future they're just humans right they're just

[43:15] emotional and or they're just bad negotiators and they think the best way to negotiate is to tell you some consequence they think you're afraid of so you don't have to say yes just because somebody tells you they're not gonna buy if you don't do that the other scenario is in some cases depending on route buys your products sometimes you have to go through procurement at some point or something along those lines you the discount is part of the sales process because somebody in the end in that buying process their whole reason they exist is to get a discount so in those cases you just price your product in a way that

[43:47] takes that into account and you just realize I can't say it there's not gonna be a discount because there's somebody that's not gonna approve this because this person's job and livelihood depends on saying I brought us this amount of savings they'll just apply this to every situation if you are that type of enterprise sale you just increase your product by 40 percent in price give yourself a little race for the hard work that you have to sell one more person or one more stage and you give them a 30% discount at that stage but just because they ask you just because they're big and you're small doesn't mean you have

[44:19] to do what they tell you to do there's a reason there is here's my number one advice when you deal with really large customers there's a reason why they're at the table with you and it's not that you're so worthless it's not worth their time there's a reason that talking to you right so act like it hey Mike this thing says eight so I'm developing a app ERP app for coffee roasters this is a very small small vertical and I'm just trying to figure out if the value metric hasn't been defined it's something that they haven't they don't have a solution right now how do we how do we basically figure out how

[44:56] to price when they are using you know Excel and everything all this are you doing sales like inside sales to them like talking to them and stuff yeah I mean I'm from the industry and when I sell I can sell but it's yeah right now I'm saying hey I'll give you a deep discount because I just want to get you on board and I get a couple customers but then what's next after that when I don't have enough history to define it right well what was the original question again I'm trying to get the nuance so so if you create a solution that there's not a comparable value

[45:33] metric for how do you define the price so at the end of the day they're they're still there I can't imagine you you're in a scenario where they're not doing the thing that you're gonna make easier for them to do so they might not have a solution for it I mean this is classic b2b SAS in my mind which is equivalent of oh they're using Excel today right this is like people were using Excel and stuff like that to do project management and then things like Basecamp came along and all that so the way you would the way you would the way you could have this conversation is if you understand

[46:11] what they're doing what the late I mean I'm getting very detailed but like this is really useful even internally even if you don't speak to them like this but understand what they're doing today what the costs are hourly cost by team members the cost of a certain tool cost time even wasted is a cost waiting time is a cost and quantify all the cost and then you can have some reasonable justification to say something like and this is the ultimate in a in a model like this but it's like you would say like you know from all the customers we've talked to that are just like you

[46:43] this is how much time effort money whatever the metric is it takes for them to do things currently before they use our tool then once they start using our tool this is the savings we provide this is how much more money we can make you blah blah blah so you're almost presenting a scenario of here's where you are with our solution here's where you're gonna get to make it up because like it's software software automates right or speeds things up make it up time for one more question wants to be last make it a good one no pressure like really good fantastic there might be room for two the the

[47:32] thing says five Oh so I've heard a lot of questions from other attendees at the conference so far about how do you come up with kind of like a comprehensive marketing strategy it's not like specifics but you know knowing what you know of kind of you got to fifteen or twenty customers how do you kind of think about scaling a marketing strategy get to it like a hundred or two hundred customers I know you guys are kind of talked around it a little bit but how do you think about like coming up with a plan not really the specifics but its first le goddamn you I faked a malray this is it by the way

[48:15] this gentleman makes a podcast go from my Dropbox folder to the magical place of iTunes and then to the people that are listening here so if you want to do a podcast this is the man to talk to podcast motor big shout out so how do you so is the question how do you go from like 10 to 100 100 mm or how do you put together some strategy in your marketing be the early days you might not have any yeah do more free work that's what got him here I guess I don't know right for us that's that's how the the marketing plan was to give these to

[48:52] people to help them with their podcast so one day they go to a conference in the first row and then you ask them the question and one of those guys gives you a big shout out that repeat that keep doing that just with everyone so the answer is I don't know like I I don't know I think that just like with everything else as you move forward and you progress you'll learn things you gain insights about what works and what doesn't you learn more about yourself and your team where are we really good at what can we do exceptionally well versus things that might be great things to do

[49:25] but we're just not as good at and based on these learnings you ask yourself all right what is kind of the next step with that we can take and my experience is that in the early days you wouldn't be hyper focused on the day like you want to be hyper focus on super short-term you want to violently execute a mediocre plan today too many people fail in the earliest because they think too far ahead but then once you get to a significant scale once you you know got from like one customer to ten to a hundred to a thousand once you get to a point where your business makes

[49:57] significant revenue then you start shifting from something that's like 100 percent of your effort and energy is just spent on like short term short term short term just starting to spread out more and spending 70% of your time on short term things and spending 30% of your time a little bit a mid term and long term and eventually that ratio changes and hopefully at some point your business is so successful so big that you spend almost all your time are really long-term things and and I think that's where that that's where like strategic strategy plays a bigger part because then you start thinking really about the next five years and the big

[50:29] trends and the big initiatives but I think that people start to worry about that stuff they tend to worry about this stuff way too early oh we got three customers how can we now put a strategy plan together hire VP of Marketing hi it's like just chill out right I and we all want to get there really fast but usually people get there too early you know we've made the opposite mistake in our business we went there we were so good at the executing and the here now we're crushing it until the business got so big there that wasn't working anymore but it was very habitual so we're now in the process of

[51:01] kind of starting to implement more longer-term thinking more longer-term strategy because this is just way too big for the way we were operating it in the early days we made the opposite mistake but yeah don't worry about it so much so if we have time for one more question we do have a little time we need you to between I'm curious what strategies you recommend for identifying pricing tiers for a software-as-a-service app if you already have a collection of features and you understand the benefit they're providing to a customer how do you break down what you should be charging does it come down to customer interviews

[51:34] something else we're gonna walk off stage and the next person that walks on is gonna answer that question and if he does not then ask him the question yes and usually any pricing related question we get Heaton is just referring to that person anyways he's like I don't have to add you can reach the person right now there you go thank you very much for selling Hayden thank you so after the conference this evening both steli and Heaton will be in the next room over right after we're it's probably round five somewhere between 5:45 and six is when they'll get started but they're basically gonna be doing

[52:10] office hours so if anyone has any specific direct questions you want to ask of them if you didn't want to ask them now you can do that then yeah and also if you even if you ask a question and you're like I'd love to ask ten follow-up questions and really get super specific and concrete and off record meter said that the room where lunch was right after this event is over and we're going to spend you know an hour there Joe thanks [Applause] you

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