How to Win Customers From Bigger Competitors: 5 SaaS Playbooks

0:00So what I want to talk to you guys about is an opportunity that is right now and right here in time that every one of you can grasp and you have an edge right now. That edge is clock speed. So um I don't know if you've looked at your stock portfolio recently like maybe since November of 2021. I invest pretty heavily into cloud technology companies

0:23and it's not looking so good right now. There's a lot of red in there. But for this particular group over here, this is my second time back at Microconf and I spoke last year as well. I learned a lot about how you have clock speed as a huge advantage. And so I don't know if you look at your own sort of sales cycles, what trials, demos look like in Q1, but what we saw with our work with over 100 plus B2B SAS companies was specifically that well sales cycles really slowed down and customers were cancelling, renewals were at risk, and they wanted alternatives because the contract sizes

1:00started to become just a little maybe a lot smaller, which creates a unique opportunity for you. that opportunity is those customers need to go somewhere, right? They need to find an alternative. It's not like they're going to go back to the way they used to do things with pen, paper, Excel, email. Once you've tasted what software can do for you, you never go back. And so they're looking for great alternatives. And so I want to show you how you might be able to take your SAS platform today and actually go and get these customers that your largest competitor has. So just

1:34visualize that competitor for a second. somebody who's in your space where you're maybe fremies. You kind of like admire them, but at the same time, you want would love to eat their lunch as well. I'm going to show you how you can actually nibble at their ARR. Okay, that's what we're going to focus on. And this particular point in time, I reckon you probably have somewhere between 3 to 6 months to be able to make the biggest opportunity because later this year when interest rates start to back down, well, a lot of those customers are going to come back to big tech and that just going to is going to make it a little

2:05bit more competitive for everybody in this room. So, you have this window of time of opportunity to kind of go in and do what you need to do. And so if you really think about sort of these large companies and all the logos that they have on there, what I'm going to really challenge you guys to do over here is think about how can you go in and start nibbling some of those amazing customers that they basically have. You can acquire them for cheaper. You can have them stick around longer and pay you more and actually succeed with the solutions you have. One of the things I

2:33love about everybody that I've met through micro comp and as a tiny seed mentor basically as well is that every one of you are creating useful solutions. They're not nice to haves. They're must haves. They solve a real problem. And people will pay good money to solve real problems. So, think about what that might look like. And when you can just come in and go zink and you get

2:51their customers, basically. All right. So, there you go, Lanna. Um, you know, it's not it's not easy to beat the 800 lb gorilla in the room. If you think about everything that they've got going for them, their sites are larger, their marketing teams are bigger, they've been around perhaps for longer, and so it can feel a little bit intimidating, frankly, to go after, you know, whoever that 800lb gorilla is in this room. And so, think about if you're in a space where you might compete with HubSpot or with Active Campaign or with Salesforce, whoever that basically might be in your space. Maybe it's just even a bootstrap

3:28company that started so long ago that now they're becoming effectively the dominant player in your space. Just kind of think about who that is in your mind's eye right now. We're going to figure out how to take them down and exactly how you might be able to get in front of their customers when there's the right moment in time. What this is not going to be about is building some broad halo of brand awareness. That's not what we're talking about. It's about being in front of the right person at the right time and then making that change basically happen. Now, the three things that hold back a lot of bootstrap

3:59SAS companies, including the many that I've spoken to over the last year as a tiny seed mentor, is number one is just not enough customers. You have an amazing product, it's sticky, low churn, good lifetime value. It's simply not large enough. Now, large enough is a question really of like how big do you want it to be because if you're building it as a business that supports your dreams, your passion, your lifestyle, it doesn't need to be that large. But what I often hear and what our our agency at Powered by Search often hears is, "Yeah, you know what? If we only had more demos, if we only had more trials,

4:33things would just go swimmingly." And so there's a volume issue over here where if you're hearing kind of crickets through the entire pipeline or the pipelines remained effectively the same at the steady state for the last 6 months, year, two years, whatever that looks like basically for you, that's a key problem to solve and marketing can actually help you solve that particular

4:50problem. The second of course is you know you get stuck starting but not finishing. And so what ends up happening over there is if you are building your platform taking care of your customers then going to the market you know writing content doing your own SEO for example you can get into this really kind of inspirationdriven space of going today I feel like writing some content you know the other day I feel like repurposing it but today I'm going to jump in and focus on some customer support tickets and that type of thing. What ends up happening is you have a lot of things that you know start from zero. They get

5:25to like 3.5 but they never quite get to one. Has anybody ever felt that way where you are you you are you constantly like ping ponging between the process of attracting engaging converting serving retaining and so that ends up happening and I think that's an endemic problem for anyone trying to grow a small business into a slightly larger business. Now, one thing that we have going for us as Bootstrap founders, of course, is that our code actually keeps our companies buoyant in many ways. And what I mean by that is you can go to bed at night and not have to restart from zero every single day in that code that

6:01you wrote. It keeps working for you and it builds leverage essentially. If your marketing isn't building leverage in that same way, that's where the opportunity is. We're going to talk about that. And then you get into this random act of marketing. Man, the number of times I I have a founder come to me and say, "You know what would be really cool? I'm going to teach chat GPT to churn out 50 to 100 articles is going to be amazing. The SEO value is going to go

6:25through the roof." Or, "You know what? I'm going to start doing some Google paid ads or some Facebook ads." And I talk to that same person three or six months down the line. And they say, "Hey, how'd that go?" And they often come back and go, "Yeah, nothing to write home about related to that." And so if you have a lot of random acts of marketing where it's not by design, it's very much by def default. This is where you want to really pause and go how much of the work that I'm doing, my teams are doing for example, my agencies, my consultants, freelancers are doing is just because

6:58I'm trying to tick a box essentially on what I think marketing should basically work like. If these are problems you're facing right now then you know there is a better way because if you actually start making some changes in the terms of the opportunities that you need over here some big things can actually end up happen one of the first things of course is that you you know think about the pole position you end up having the situation where you have so many customers that your servers basically melt and if you're on something like AWS John can help you with that can help you figure out some solutions and you get to

7:30this position where you know your bank manager is kind of like where's all this money coming from? Is this legal? Right? And you can think about that and go, hm, that may not be the solution that or the situation that I could ever dream of my own company in, but it's entirely possible. And the beauty of software companies is that you have 80 to 90% gross margins and then, you know, it just flows straight down to the profit line. If only you can solve for the marketing equation, right? Because product actually does its job and it's helping real people, they'll continue paying you. And uh as um a friend a

8:02friend of mine Yako says you know recurring revenue is a function of recurring impact at the end of the day. So if you keep having recurring impact there's no reason why you can't see the future of your business. That's why you can actually look at a spreadsheet look at your your current customers work out your net retention and churn and go next year I know exactly what I'm going to make even if growth stayed exactly steady. That's the beauty of it in terms of the opportunity. Um, the second thing is really starting small but finishing big. So rather than starting lots of things and then never finishing. Just

8:34remember that great works of art don't always start out complex. So if you think about an audio engineer suite and you look at those big mixer boards for example, the ones that have like I don't know 30 knobs basically on them, we often over complicate what it is that needs to be done when it comes to something like marketing. And I don't think you need to do that because, you know, Paul McCartney actually recorded Hey Jude on an eight track and there's only so many buttons that you can actually press on an eight track when

9:02you're recording something like that. Simplicity really wins over here. Uh, one of the things I often share with teams is that, you know, the way you make a Formula 1 car faster is not by putting in a bigger engine. You actually make it lighter and that's what makes it go faster. That's effectively what you can do with your marketing as well. So often when we start work with clients

9:20like Rally or Charles, where are you? You Charles from Spark Shipping. We actually take stuff away. There you are, man. Um, and by taking stuff away, we actually kill the things that aren't working, but take up a lot of mind space. And by doing that, you can actually make some big changes actually happen because now you have more attention for only the things that

9:39really matter. And here's the sort of the thought exercise I'd love to share with you. You're not, you know, you're not designing and developing your software in this haphazard kind of way. You're so intentional about it. In fact, if you saw inefficiency in the way that your platforms were being developed, whether you're doing it yourself or with your teams, it might drive you a little crazy. So why is it that your marketing is acceptable for it to be haphazard and all over the place where you've got like your content over here and your website over here, your CRM over here, your nurture and drip campaigns over here,

10:14and none of it talks to each other. So the challenge really that I'd like to put in front of you is that what if your marketing was as well engineered as your software? You figure that out and you can market, sell, and deliver and the business takes off basically just like a rocket ship at that point in time. But there are mistakes that kind of get in the way. So in the the context of stir like Lyanna was basically talking about part of what I'm going to be sharing with you is what to what to fix between that the ears the headsp space basically of this. And then we're going

10:45to go into some really practical and tactical tips that you can actually deploy. Most of what I'm going to be sharing with you is a day's work at best and everything is not a point in time. It's going to be an evergreen system. So once you basically put it in place it just keeps working for you. So the challenge that in preparing for this was really how can we make it so that your marketing behaves the same way that your software basically does meaning once you set it up it just kind of works for you right and you can depend on it reliably and you're not also using people as

11:16process because who here has hired an independent consultant or an agency spent 3 to six months working with them and being like yeah I just wasted all that money can I just see a show of hands like where you've maybe outsourced that decision Holy crap. Wow. The bar is so low. Jesus. Okay. Um, three big mistakes. The first one is this. The number of times we hear, you know, I've tried whatever the channel is and it just doesn't work for us. Man, I would be if I had a dollar for every every single time I heard one of that. I mean, the uh, you

11:50know, Google ads doesn't work for us. SEO doesn't work for us. Facebook ads don't work for us. Drip emails don't work for us. That's just not how our customers buy. And so whenever we have these biases where we're so, you know, we're so stuck to our outcomes because we tried something and it didn't end up working, uh, that is just holding yourself back. I mean, think about it this way. Um, how many people over here maybe if you're married, you you ended up marrying like your high school sweetheart or middle school date, you

12:19know, your crush. Anybody? Two. Amazing. Well, three. Amazing. uh for most of us, you know, we have to go through this process of dating people and figuring out the right fits, right, until you get to the person that is your person for the rest of your life. The same thing kind of happens with channels. Just because you went on a date with Google Ads once and it didn't work out, doesn't mean it it won't work out at all. And so, keep at it. But not just in terms of perseverance, because everybody here is perseveres at the end of the day. I know you keep running into

12:48brick walls every single day with the way that you're getting revenue, building the product, building your teams, you know, going up market, down market, cross market, whatever you want to do. But if you keep thinking that the channel just doesn't work for you, ultimately that obstacle is actually got nothing to do with your marketing. It's just something that's between your ears basically. It's something we think and if we change that particular thought pattern, it can actually open up uh

13:09quite a bit of of room for growth. Uh I can't go up against them. So if you are like you know what I'm this small little independent bootstrap software company and they are the big funded venturebacked you know teams on teams on teams they hired more people in the last month than I've hired in the last 5 years that's another example of where you're going to be setting yourself back from being able to go in and nibble at their ARR eat their lunch so to speak now the reality about small companies is that because you have clock speed because you can ship fastaster faster

13:45because you are permissionless, right? You just want to make up your mind that you want to do something and you go ahead and do it at the end of the day. That's where the beauty of all of this really is at the end of it. So, all you need to do is just choose, just decide that some of the stuff that you're going to be learning here at Micro Comp, you can go in and apply, right? And even if it just means delegating, you know, the one of the best conference uh secrets or hacks that I learned was after a talk, if you note down a couple of things that

14:13might be useful for you immediately at the stream of consciousness, share that with your teams, whether that's a voice note, a slack note and just be like we got to talk about ABC thing and let's do let's do that Wednesday Thursday basically this week. It keeps that conversation alive because inspiration and motivation ultimately is fleeting. Uh Zig Ziggler basically says that motivation is leading and then so is you know bathing that's why we do it often right same idea basically over here as well. Um one of the things that probably frustrates you guys a lot is how many times as a successful software business owner do you have somebody come to you

14:48and say hey I've got an idea for an app. This is how the app basically works. Hey you know what would be really cool? I was at a, you know, I was at a soccer game or I was at the PTA meeting and I came up with an idea for an app and this is exactly what it would work, how it would work. And then you kind of step into the role of being like, "Oh, you

15:06know, that sounds like half decent. Let's go do some customer development. Let's go write some lines of code. Let's set up an MVP or an alpha." And then the other person just kind of goes like it glosses over them, you know, just you they realize sort of what you're saying to them that it's going to be work. They don't do anything. So you can if if you can identify with how frustrating that is for you when you lay out a path uh for somebody to be able to make their dream a reality and go from idea to execution. It's the same thing when you hear stuff about marketing and you're

15:36really good at product as well. And so don't let that hold you back where you go, this is just too much stuff and I've got way too much on my plate right now. And what about those commits that I basically need to do? What about that stuff that's in the backlog? What about the this fire that's burning basically over here? And so I'd encourage you to really kind of dig into it and specifically look at how you can actually take some of these strategies and start mapping them. I'm also going to leave leave tons of room for Q&A as well so we can go, you know, deep and

16:04and tactical including if you have tried some of these strategies, if they have not worked for you, we're just going to have a group conversation basically about it and talk about how that might work for you if you tried it just a little bit differently, just a nudge and a twist rather than a complete hard reset. So here's my sort of challenge to you. No small plans. Just because you're having you have a small business at the end of the day doesn't mean you have to have small plans. Your ambition is far better than the infrastructure for the opportunity you have right now. And so how do you make that happen? Because

16:35you're already good at product and you're consistently going to get better at product. The question is how do you start doing that with your marketing? And so I want to talk to you about sort of five hot playbooks that you can use over here. And now we're going to slow it down a little bit because I want to

16:49talk about each playbook intentionally. Uh I'll start with the story actually. So uh you know Jordan Gal is a two-time client of ours. We first started working with him at Cart Hook. And then last year he uh he approached us and said, "Hey, uh would love for you to work with us at Rally." And Rally, for those of you that don't know, is an e-commerce company or it's a headless commerce company that works with e-commerce uh merchants basically. uh he had a a huge situation where he was part of Shopify uh including their sort of their app platform with Cart Hook and then he went uh hard left and said no no let me

17:26actually my next company won't be beholden to platform risk and so we're going to build this this business at Rally which focuses on everybody who wants to build an e-commerce business outside of Shopify's walled garden and so one of the things that we did sort of if I were to cut to what can happen if you actually start taking these

17:45playbooks and started deploying them. Well, uh, I think Rallyy's marketing team was one internal person and the rest of it was was our team at Powered by Search. We ended up getting them HubSpot as a customer. We ended up getting them Porsche as a customer. All from inbound, no outbound, no cold email, no outreach of any kind, purely based off these particular strategies that I'm going to be showing you over here. And so, and who did we get them from? We got them from fast and we got them from Bolt. Two super large well-funded tech companies in the space with sort of magnanimous founders, you know, who were, you know, doing all

18:23sorts of PR stunts so that they could basically create more and more mind share for the market. I mean, they literally had VCs wrapped around their fingers in terms of being able to raise more rounds until it stopped working obviously. Um, and so this is often the the challenge with, you know, funded tech companies. It's a bit of a bubble. It's a roller coaster up, but you know, stairs up and elevator down at the end of the day. So, here's what you can start doing. Um, maybe I'll start out by saying that people will switch for different and better, but we should define what that actually is, especially

18:58in an environment where it's not growth at all costs. So the first thing to kind of talk about over here is better is effectively about cost effective plus flexible but also less risky. And unfortunately, one of the challenges with running a bootstrap company hasn't been around for 10 plus years is that if you're trying to attract higher value, higher annual contract value, higher arpoo type of customers, there's a risk to them because they'll kind of like if if you've ever have had a large customer come to you and be like, are you going to be out of business next year? That's a challenge basically to to go through

19:34and navigate, right? But you can you can overcome that challenge by being mo more cost- effective which is a positioning strategy that I think many of you use. I've heard many micro founders talk about how the competitor is 10x the price and has much more friction. For example, you have to go jump through hoops just to even know their price and go talk to a salesperson or something of that kind. Um and you just make it much more simple. So you know the pricing is right on the site. You can sign up and play with it. You don't need to talk to anybody. So the process of getting

20:04started becomes a lot easier. That's cool. What we also need to be is flexible right now. So what's changing in the the B2B SAS market that we're seeing is what used to be a a gated demo. A lot of these companies that are larger are now focusing on interactive demos where you can actually play with the platform yourself before ever talking to somebody. They're going from, you know, long and convulated sort of process around how you might talk to a salesperson to a video demo. It could be like five minutes. So quite literally what most of this room has already done which is just let me show you on a loom

20:39video for five minutes how my platform basically works. Enterprise companies are very slow to move down that that path. So in other words, you already have speed. I'm not saying anything net new to you over here. You're doing it. And what you need now need to do is take that particular positioning and start hammering it as a way or a unique selling proposition. Basically the last bit of less risky we'll talk about how to get there as well. The other thing that most uh bootstrap companies have as a challenge is you don't have unlimited budget. So uh show hands. Who here spends more than $10,000 a month on

21:15advertising? One person, two four. So I would say what, like maybe 4% 5% of the room, something like that. Maybe even less. I I I shouldn't really do public math on stage. Um, but it's one of those things where most of you are either in one of three states. You don't do any advertising whatsoever. So everything you're doing right now is inbound content SEO focused. You might be doing something very small like maybe spending like $500 a month to call it like $2,500 a month. And then there's the ones who are using an ad stream like u, you know, Google ads, Facebook, LinkedIn, whatever

21:51to be able to actually go to market. Like it's your primary channel. you've turned it into a profitable channel for you. Uh the reality over here is it's hard to build your brand awareness because you're a small company trying to act like a established company. Doesn't have to be a large company to a customer who doesn't know have any idea who you are. So why don't we change the game, right? Let's flip it basically on its head. And what I mean by flipping it on its head is is essentially you can slip into consideration midstream. So what we're not talking about over here is anything that's top off of funnel. If

22:27you've heard that term before like hey we need to fill the top of the funnel. We're not talking about that. What what we are talking about far more is you want to ride on the coattails of brand awareness that already exists in your market. So this means there are searches. Let's start with the most basic one. People are googling your competitor's names, right? are you showing up when they are googling your competitor's names either in organic search in paid search on LinkedIn as a comment and so I'm going to just say like think about it broadly not just as a channel but are you showing up and

23:02being part of the conversation when someone is looking up your competitor's name the answer is no let's start over there because all you need to do is actually just jump on their coattails and ride that wave essentially potentially to be in the space of consideration. So when somebody is looking up I don't know uh active campaign alternatives for example that would be one of the places if you offer an email you know an email solution to basically end up showing up and the opportunity looks a little bit like this. Um have you ever purchased software within like a week or two when you never knew what that company was

23:44before? like you'd haven't ever heard that heard the name. Just quick show of hands if that's ever happened for you. We were like you. Yeah. Okay. So there you go. How about half or more than half of the room? Um that happens when you have a problem. It's a thorny problem that you need to solve right now. You plugged in a couple of keywords into Google. You did a cursory look on someone else's platform's, you know, website and you're like, "This does exactly what I needed to do." And it's usually very utilitarian. It's something like a use case. So, hey, I want to start a podcast. So, you know what? I

24:14need a podcast hosting platform. Okay, Transistor basically pops up. Cool. Pricing looks good. Lots of credibility, good evidence, easy process. It's not that much of a considered purchase. You know, I I really doubt that somebody calls up the founders over there and says, "Can I talk to you for 30 minutes about your podcast platform?" Because there's enough already out there for you to be able to make that decision really quickly. So, how could we do that? But for you essentially that's what I mean by slipping into this idea of consideration basically midstream. Um when this happens you have a customer kind of go hey I didn't know that insert

24:51your company name did that. So this it's the aha moment before they get to use the product. But what we're not doing is you know we're not doing big brand building campaigns for example. We're not running ads on YouTube. We're not running a ton of content that tries to educate a type of audience around the fact that they have a problem and they should solve it. We're only trying to get in front of people who are disgruntled or dissatisfied or frustrated with whatever their existing way of solving the problem really is, right? And that means that there's really two types of audiences that we

25:23think type of think try to think of. There's uh an upgrader audience. So these are people who are effectively using spreadsheets, using email, making progress that way, using the tools that are at their hands, but not really paying for a modern SAS solution. And then there's switchers. Switchers are basically switching away from a legacy platform, a bigger platform, a more premium platform or more pricey platform. Perhaps they are switching away because uh you know that it started becoming a lot more clunky. Uh a good example of that would be in the email marketing space. every couple of years uh the particular providers in there go through a deliverability challenge and

26:00so what ends up happening is people start complaining about how the builders don't work very well or the the emails take forever basically to put together or how they are actually going into the spam inbox and then there's a rotation that ends up happening at that point in time. So each one of those points where someone who's a customer is dissatisfied is an opportunity to enter the conversation that's already happening in the prospect's mind. Um, so with that, you're going to first start by crafting your comparison pages. Just quick show of hands. How many of you actually have

26:28comparison pages? Oh, wow. Huge opportunity over here. So, one of the reasons why most people don't put up comparison pages is because they think they're an underhanded strategy. Uh, you know, I don't want to talk smack about my competition and therefore I won't put up a a comparison page. My customers will, you know, h, you know, they'll just choose me because my product is better. Uh, well, I got bad news for you. If you build it, they won't come, unfortunately. And so, if you don't have a system for selling, you'll be forced into your customers half-hazard process for buying. And at the end of the day, building a business

27:04is a full contact sport. You can't spectate from the sidelines. There are good ways of building a competitor comparison page. We have a playbook on it at Powerbase Search. If you search Google that, you'll be able to find it. But generally speaking, there are a couple of points that you want to nail over here. Um the first one is you have to have a differentiated point of view on what kind of product is right for the right kind of person. So if you have a table focus the folks who put your hands up about comparison pages if you are trying to do a feature forfeature

27:33comparison you will lose. You know that that's the definition of checking a box and saying okay job done. Move on to something that's more fun like building product for example. Um especially if marketing feels like a chore to you. We're all configured differently. If you are asking me to build product, I would be feeling exactly the other way and going wow like building product feels intimidating for me. Um marketing however comes very naturally. And so what we want to do over here is nyx the the feature comparison table and instead what we want to focus on is this. It's different strokes for different folks, right? And

28:08so different kinds of buyers would be attracted to your platform for different reasons. And all they're doing is really making a choice. You're not influencing anybody to use your product in particular. What you ask you are doing is asking them to really choose what kind of person are they who then supports this kind of software platform and perhaps that's yours, right? And so we want a differentiated product view on that. You want to offer a genuine and deep comparison. So on Amazon quick uh you know quick story over here do you think fivestar products sell more than you know one-star products probably yes right anybody bought a

28:48one-star product recently probably steer you know clear from that what the interesting thing about that is products that are rated 4.1 outs sell the fivestar products by a mar like a huge margin the reason for that is because people feel that those types of reviews are far more objective there you you can take the good and the bad together. And unfortunately, most comparison pages, they always I mean, especially if you look at the feature tables, it's like your platform is all green checkboxes and the competitor's platforms all red, you know, crosses basically. And so, you know, we're we tend to think that if you put that in front of a buyer that

29:24they're going to be like, you know what, this is amazing. Of course, I'm going to sign up with your platform. Could be couldn't be further from the truth. So actually giving a nod to what they have done your competitors that is that they've done a better job of that you are now working towards or maybe you don't even compete on that particular axis that's a way of giving a genuine compliment. We don't want to negitor basically at all. So there's no there's no dunking happening of any kind. And then you want to acknowledge that not everybody is your customer. Um, how many of you use some sort of product review

29:56site like Capterra, Get Up, Trust Radius, just a place to be able to collate your customer reviews? Good. Okay. So, if you're not, you should be on these review websites because they're actually a a huge part even if you don't pay them for their PPC product basically on how your customers are making decisions. Um, one of the things that I've seen a lot with Bootstrap founders is they think that it's a, you know, Google a term, land on the site, sign up for a trial, and away you go. or Google a term, sign up on the site, you know, sign up for a demo, and away you go. The

30:26buying process doesn't work that way. If you actually look at your analytics, you're going to see people ping ponging all over the place. And actually, one of the places that people will look for information are these actual, you know, review websites. Now, one of the ways you can actually use a review website to your advantage is simply copy and pasting the things that your uh that people did not like about your your competition. So building a comparison page, all you have to do is go to their better architected, more full review page and going at the things that people did not like and then using their

31:00customer marketing or lack thereof and that's what you're basically putting on your comparison pages along the way. Every time you see something that people don't love something about your your competition, add in how you are solving that in a different way, a better way, making it cheaper or easier basically for your customers. So the copywriting in this case, a lot of people think that copywriting is some sort of voodoo blackbox type of skill. What it really is is listening to customers even if they're not your customers, right? And if you think about everything that a you know a product and feature is, every feature in your product exists to solve

31:35a problem that you should have built only by talking to customers and doing that customer development as to how your alternative way of solving that problem makes more progress than they could make on their own. Just think about that for a second. So all your copy should be assembled like Lego blocks rather than written in a way which is again amazing copywriters can totally change your business. Talk to somebody like Lyanna for that right but if you are trying to do this yourself think about you know building your copy block by block as opposed to just going how do I sound like Clickfunnels for example um or how do do I need to sound

32:08salesy? You do not at all. What you need to be sounding is clear and useful as opposed to clever. Um, the next one is a magic trick, which is drive customers with Google discovery ads. So, I'm going to show you a $10 a day strategy basically with this. And all it is is putting in fishing lines into the water. So, you're on your boat, which is your, you know, your SAS business in this case. And, you know, I was talking to somebody at breakfast today and they said, I don't have the time to go and learn Facebook ads or I don't have the time to go and learn

32:41Google ads. I'd much rather hire somebody to be able to do that. But then I run into this challenge which is they cost money and then I have to actually fund the media spend basically as well. So I just end up doing nothing. The cost of inaction is real. However, these discovery ads are actually pretty darn useful. And so what we're really doing is dropping this fishing net into the water and just expecting fish to come in. Uh this these ads are fundamentally different than Google keyword search ads. So they show up in a couple of different pages. So you can take a screenshot of this if uh if it's

33:11helpful. Basically, discovery ads are a way of being able to get in front of the right person at the right time with a message that funnels them back to the most appropriate page on your website, even if that's not a pay-per-click landing page. Um, I'll give you some examples of of what this looks like. So, there's an an intent high intent category that you can do. So, you can basically target using keywords, you can target using URLs, or you can target using purchase interest. Okay. So, three ways of targeting. Um, so if you are selling construction management software or if you're selling something like healthcare lab management information

33:52management software or something like that, it would be it wouldn't be unreasonable to think that somebody is going into Google and typing in something like, you know, lab management software and looking at a list of companies, right? So, they're going to be looking at Capterra, they're going to be looking at Gap and and whatnot. They'll be looking at five to 10 different websites that are platforms basically for that type of thing. And so, how do you know that they're doing that? The answer to that question is Google discovery ads. Basically, you could say anybody who's in a high intent category over here is somebody that we

34:26want to get our ads in front of. Um, one thing that you I'm sure see in your email is a renewal notice for different SAS apps that you have. So for example, it says something like your contract is up for renewal. You know, if you don't do anything, we'll just renew the agreement for another year or for another month. You can target that

34:47breadcrumb using Google discovery ads. And so if you think about, you know, look at your just done do a simple sort of SQL lookup in your database, find the number of people who have Gmail addresses that are using your product right now. You can serve a Gmail ad inside Gmail to associate with when your competitor's renewal notices are coming up. Similarly, you can target an ad when they have pricing increases. And so this is really ninja stuff at the end of the

35:16day, but it is not difficult to set up. The execution is actually the easy part. Knowing the patterns, the strategy for it is where there's creativity kind of involved. So if you want to jam on some ideas basically for that, that's what you can start doing with this. And by the way, I'm not talking about $500 a day in ad spend. Start with 10 bucks a day. It's what you would spend on coffee and breakfast anyway. And so discovery ads are a great way of doing that. The other way is they're kind of like lazy man's AdWords essentially. So what I mean by that is you can actually be in

35:45Gmail in Google search and on YouTube all using discovery ads. So they're like a an easy button basically for uh for Google. And so not only can you target competitors, you can target purchase interest, you can also target people who haven't done the thing that you, you know, want them to do on your website. So if somebody's come to the site and they haven't, uh, they haven't signed up for the trial or the demo, you can start showing them proofbased ads as to why they should do so. By the way, uh, quick tip on that, do not sell the value that your software actually sells as an end

36:18outcome. So let's say the time value is something like after 30 days people go this is amazing and I wish I had bought this 6 months ago. Many of you are making the mistake of your ads if you're doing ads at all to sell that. I would suggest you sell the immediate next step which is what is the value you can get simply by trying signing up for a trial or for the demo. That's the point of copy. It's trying to get you to do read the first line so you can you know you want to read the second line. The second line leads to wanting to click a button

36:48or fill out a form. And so this is a core reason why ads sometimes fail. It's because, you know, I'm over here and the ad is trying to sell me on what I'll experience 30, 60, 90 days basically down the line when all I need to do is take this immediate next step over here. If this is interesting, if you search up SAS boomerang method on Google, you'll see our playbook basically for that. Um, comment on their coattails. So people are already talking about products like yours. Just add your voice. If you're not part of the conversation, you'll be left out of the conversation. So, here's

37:17an example. So, there's a product called Workflow Max that is owned by Zero that is being retired next year. Um, you know, so June 2024, this very upstart guy, Matthew from Project Works, it's a project management platform, you know, workflow software. He jumps on and he basically says, "Hey, the Matt here, CEO of Project Works platform consultancies use that has a better integration uh with Zero than WorkflowMax, their native platform basically does. We appreciate the news of this sale is frustrating at best for firms who are already under the pump, which is why we've decided to wave our migration fee for customers who make the switch to Project Works. We've been

37:57migrating customers from WorkflowMax for years, and in that time, we've become damn good at it. I don't need to read the rest over here, but this particular comment on LinkedIn got 60 likes and replies. Whenever you see likes and replies, multiply that number by a factor of somewhere between 2 and 10. That's how many clicks that particular person's actually getting. And just think of your own behavior. How many times do you actually look at a social media post and go, "Yeah, I agree with that." But you don't comment or like. So that's happening in mass essentially. So, this is a simple way you can set up listening

38:33tools for this type of stuff. All LinkedIn posts are publicly indexable by Google. You could even set up a LinkedIn alert on Google uh Google alerts, I guess, um for mentions around this and do that entirely for free. And so, what happens, the workflow would be you get an email from Google uh alerts that says, "Hey, so and so, your competitor name is being mentioned and it's on LinkedIn." You're just spending somewhere between 5 to 10 minutes basically per day. or better even delegate that if you have an EA or somebody like that you can teach them to respond to this type of thing which is

39:05effectively you know legacy software shutting down you know competitor increasing pricing and even template it out I know you guys are big fans of productivity focus on that pick on their price increases so what would you do if your biggest competitor you know double their prices and Nathan Barry is you know he came in and he came in hot on Twitter when Active Campaign decided to significantly increase their prices they literally doubled their prices over a weekend and they had deliverability issues, right? So he said, "If Active Campaign significantly increase your price or it's just been unstable, send me a note here to get, you know, get you

39:40to a stable platform." This is the type of thing that big companies cannot do. You know, Nathan's running a 32 million AR company and a proud ConvertKit investor basically here as well. Um, and he's acknowledging that there's not only price issues, but there's stability issues basically as well. Uh Jesse Hanley from Bento does this as well on Twitter quite actively and has been doing so for years. Again, all you need to do, I'm not saying be on Twitter all day, okay? I'm saying set up an alert for this type of thing in anticipation that it will happen and it happens a couple of times a year basically and be

40:15in the moment to respond basically to it. Um flex your flexibility. Big companies are slow to move. They're rigid in the rules and they're too big to care. So you can do the things that they can't to win the competitors that they or the customers that they won't. Um what tools can you flex? Number one, concurge onboarding. Uh larger companies need to to really have customer support teams or success teams and actually financially model what they should charge for onboarding. Uh one of our clients, Charles back over there, you know, we were talking at breakfast about how onboarding is such a huge component of success at the end of the day for

40:50retention and for activation. Basically, he charges for it right now after years of not charging for it. What I would recommend you guys do is offer it up for free and make it a mandatory part of the process. If you aren't doing that today, what you're going to start seeing is your turn rates will really drop. Your LTVs will basically go up and just by opening up a channel, you'll actually see proactive problems from your customers well before they turn into support tickets, right? And this is

41:16something that you can just offer. Remember, just because you offer something doesn't mean you can't change your mind. I've talked to a lot of founders who go, "Wait a minute. So, if I offer concierge onboarding uh on my website, won't everybody ask for that?" No. Put parameters around it. Nathan, for example, started with if you you must have over 500 people on your email list in order to for to qualify for concierge onboarding and you must buy our middle plan and up. So, not the $29 version, but 49 and up or you might have to buy for a year in advance. Um, offer white club service. Just remember one of

41:48the things that uh Patrick Campbell basically talks about is the future of SAS is where it's kind of like active users aren't the the metric that we'll be measuring as much. It's just whether somebody gets the outcome from SAS um that the promise basically that the platform basically provides rather than the people logging in and building workflows and sending emails and things like that. It effectively becomes

42:09middleware or in the back of your mind. It just works. You don't need to think basically about it. One way of hacking that is to get to white glove service and then finally founder visibility and interaction. Um I want to leave two or three minutes basically for questions but if this was interesting we are coming out with a book later this year called predictable growth. It's the nine different MR accelerators we use with every single one of our 100 plus B2B SAS companies. Um I think you can get the first chapter if you go to predictablegrowth.com or scan that QR code. But I'll stop over here and love

42:39to take a question or two and we'll wrap up because I know we've got another great speaker coming up. Thank you, Dev. [applause] We have time for one or two questions. And Alex and Trac are walking around with these boxes. So, if you haven't seen these boxes, they throw Why are you walking? Throw it. No, throw it. Yeah, that's what we do. So, they're super padded Nerf boxes. We started using them

43:05in Europe and they're amazing. So, uh, my question is, oh, it's a mic. Okay. Is this on the box? [laughter] Is a mic. It's a mic. Technology. All right. So, my question is regarding the comparison pages, the comparison page you recommended. And my question is regarding location. You recommend it's a standalone page. Should it be on the pricing page? Should it be on the solution page? Should it be on the home or landing page? What's what's

43:31the best location for that? So, stick your comparison pages in your footer. Okay. So, number one thing is people are going to be talking about you and thinking about your competition regardless of whether you care about it or not. So, put an individual page. So, your brand versus competitor brand in the footer, they should be individual pages. They will rank on Google. If you want to get really fancy with it, if you've got two well-known competitors, you could do a three-way comparison page. So, you know, zero versus QuickBooks versus insert, you know, you just kind of insert yourself into the conversation. If you continually lose deals to a competitor in the process of

44:06trial or with demo, that's when you start putting it on more crucial pages that are part of the customer journey, like pricing pages, signup pages, that type of thing. And what you want to do, by the way, is not big up and beat your chest yourself. Use a customer to talk about how they switched away from the competitor towards you and let that their voice is going to be far more believable than anything you'll

44:25essentially end up saying. We have time for one more if there are any questions for dev way in the back. Alex, do you think you can make that throw? I'm gonna kill someone. This is the best. This is my favorite part of micro comp now. Yes. Is this mic? Oh, cool. Um, so you said to sell the value of the demo, not 30 days after the demo. How

44:50precisely would you go about doing that? Uh, how precisely? Just repeat that question one more time. So, so how do you sell the how do you sell how do you sell the value of the demo as opposed to the 30 days post demo? Yeah, good good question. So, your demo has to make somebody feel like they can make progress regardless of whether they buy your product. Often we think of a stage of a sales process like a demo as the the demo exists to close a customer. And I would I would recommend that you start thinking about it a bit differently which is the demo exists for

45:22the customer to be able to wrap their arms around the problem that they're trying to solve. And regardless of whether they buy your your particular product, they buy your category instead, right? So just they've made the mental shift to go from if they're an upgrader audience to go from, you know, I'm going to use email and spreadsheets to I you know what that doesn't work for us anymore. We need to use a modern SAS solution. Right? That in itself is what you will see. So if you're if you can say that by the end of this demo we will show you how to save x hours, you know,

45:54earn y more dollars or do twice the work with the same staff you have. Those are good value drivers for why somebody might want to go to the demo in the first place, right? Whereas most people think a demo is a thinly veiled way of a sales pitch basically. So you really want to make it more buyer centric. That's what I mean by selling it. Thanks for having me. Thank you. [applause]