Hey everyone, welcome back to Stacking Growth. I'm Sam Peony and today I'm joined by City Waterfall. What's up everybody? Best, best duo in the world.
So, yeah today we're gonna make it a short one quick and sweet but something that I know is top of mind for a lot of people. So, a lot of us are facing pop-ax in in your marketing budget or ad spend or if you're just seeing general demand is a little bit down as people are looking at my economic situation and trying to figure out what to do. So as a marketer, how do you combat this? What should you be taking on if you don't have the levers to really grill that you think in terms of ad spend?
So, one thing that that's sitting and I've been talking recently about is control. You can control in a sense of if you can focus on improving your current conversion rates at various points in the process, you can make what you're currently running more efficient. So then when demand does start to pick back up, budget does start to pick back up, then it's just putting fuel on a hot burning fire already and then you'll be off to the races and seeing results in no time. So, a couple levers.
Let's break it down into let's call it four levers. So, the first one will be like website visitor to that initial hand raiser, right? So, we can click the website. Second one, we can think about, okay, what happens from the point of when you raise your hand to having that first call with sales.
Third one can be post discovery call to qualified opportunity and the last one, qualified opportunity to close one. So, start at the first one, Sydney. What do you think about, when we get into the website, any general best practices that you like to often recommend right off the battery or would say that if you aren't doing these now you should explore adding them? Definitely.
One caveat here is that anybody can do this almost like any company. This is not reflective of your media budget or what programs you're running or anything. So, I think this is super tactical advice like for any marketer or any person in the company as well. So, that's just my little PSA.
Moving on. So, for levers, when you think about the website, you know, everybody lands on your homepage, you know, most of your traffic. So, you should really be thinking about what is the primary CTA on my home page. There should be a very clear path and primary CTA, not three CTAs above the fold.
And if you're really optimizing for what's going to drive revenue and what's going to drive your pipeline, like think about that when someone comes to your site. We definitely recommend only one CTA in the hero, not dual CTAs. And even in the header or in the top nav too, try to focus on one CTA. I know companies that have product-led growth offerings and sales led, they often like to do two.
But a few things there. One, you can, if you have a personalization tool or something like that, they already have, you can personalize the home page. Do you like return visitors or certain segments, things like that. So, that's, you can personalize the CTA that way.
If you don't have that, totally fine, you can still have different calls to actions, but you need to be thoughtful about which pages it makes sense to put which CTA's on and then at what area in the page. So, for example, maybe you lead with your strongest CTA, which maybe let's just say it's a demo request. And yes, you also have a free trial. And just as you scroll down mid page on the home page, then maybe you talk about your free trial offering.
So, that's just like a total off the top of the top example. But being more thoughtful in that or even testing that, you don't even need a testing tool, you can use Google Optimize for free. So, you know, don't use that as an excuse, I would say. That's like the first one that comes to mind, just because that's like the entry point.
What about others you got, Sam? Yeah, I mean, just a hammer that point home. Like we love and train, the top right on the website is where you go and you find that you want to get in touch. Make sure it's something that actually helps them get in touch with sales, not linked to pre-recorded demos or something else.
But when you over complicate it with too many CTA's, I call it the Netflix effect. Like, you're so many options, you don't know what to do and you don't do anything at all. You're just like, well, shit, I'm sorry. Wish that I had a watch something like you don't know about.
We can swear on this podcast, I'm pretty sure I've squared multiple times. Yeah, it takes, yes. So, yeah, to stack on top of that, I'll then say, I know so many people get concerned about the form. So, when you do get to that big primary conversion point, you hit that page, do I have five fields, do I have six fields?
What's the difference? What happens if I do it? Don't over complicate it. Don't ever think that one either.
Usually just, you know, get their name, email, company, how do you hear about us? We always love that one. Keep it short and sweet, but the big thing is really where I think we'll start to get into this next letter, which is the the hand raiser into booking that first meeting. So, we like to recommend, if you all don't use a tool like ChiliPiper, don't have a partnership with them, they're just a great job.
What that does is so many times, I can think back to any form you've ever filled out. Usually, you fill out the form and then you get this lovely little note. We'll be in touch in two to four business days. It's like, okay, well, I'm on your website.
I kind of wanted a demo now. That's why I'm here. The companies are quickly adopted, this tool where if you can't follow up with an ASAP or it's going to be a sales development rep that's going to be calling them out of the blue and then you have troubles with getting in touch with them, you keep missing each other via phone, you're playing email tag. A tool like ChiliPiper makes it really easy to let them schedule the date, the time of that call, because then instead of an SDR calling them out of the blue when they can't talk, they're in another meeting, they're dropping their kids off at school, whatever it may be.
If they know that they signed up for this demo in two days at nine in the morning, I can bet you they're going to show up with a much stronger likelihood than if you're trying to play tag and back and forth. So that's one where I've seen first time with a number of clients we usually would start off with call like a 20% attendance rate from the Hammers or the meeting books and again, these are people who want to talk to your sales team, got that up to 40%, 50% just by the implementation of this tool. It's not complex. It's easy.
Again, it's really, it's just making things more convenient for the prospect to get in touch with your sales team. Yeah, it's a great recommendation. It kind of, you're going to shift your mindset of don't focus necessarily on speed to lead, like speed to like the first email going out or speed to the first phone call, like focus your mindset on like speed to meeting. Like if you can get that meeting scheduled within the first 30 seconds versus it's going to take you two to three days, even get that scheduled on the calendar, that's going to a, help reduce your sales cycle lengths, which is a huge lever in pipeline velocity, but b, it's also just a better experience for your buyer and it's a better experience likely for your sales team too.
And a more efficient experience, you know, your SDRs can, you know, focus on doing other activities that will drive other results rather than trying to schedule a call with someone who already is just kind of admin support at that point. They just like need to get that task done. One thing around like forms and meeting booking tools and all of that is, I think sometimes you have a hard conversation with people internally around forms and, you know, whether it is implementing a meeting booking solution or whether it's reducing it, but if you're seriously, you know, thinking about how do we do more with less, having that tough conversation of like, all right, you guys, here's what we're going to do. We're going to take the country field and the unnecessary fields, you know, some people that's like state and zip code and like all this information and you know what we're going to do, we're going to let, we're going to get the form bill and then if you need that later, or for routing or for whatever, like maybe think about tailoring your internal process a little bit first in order to generate more high intent leads and tailor that like one of the past companies I was at before we actually implemented meeting booking tool, which we did and it was great.
But before that, we changed our process where we would have people post form fill manually like look up the country and make sure it was routed correctly. Like, that's a better use to me of like a head count rather than chasing down, you know, someone to build a meeting and then we would just handle it internally on our backend, not bug the customer about it, not make sure, you know, they were feeling good about it. So, sometimes you have to have those hard conversations about you're asking me to do more, you're not giving me like enough resources or enough x, y, or z. So here's what I recommend and why, and you kind of got to put your foot down and say, we're going to try it and then like, I'll report back out on the results of implementing a booking tool, changing the form, doing a combination of both, and you know, we have pretty high confidence that it's not going to go backwards.
Pretty high confidence is going to go forwards and it's going to net positive results for you. So, for whatever that's where. And I think that I'd like the way that you position it there is. Let's try it out.
Let's test this experiment with all these types of things. You can always revert back if something breaks for whatever reason. So you can always have that in your back pocket. Hey, it doesn't go well.
Cool. Go back to what we're doing before. But otherwise, if you want to make progress, you have to try something different than before. Okay, so it's any meeting book has happened.
They showed up. They spoke with the sales rep. How do you get them more efficiently over to a qualified opportunity from there? Or what are some of the things that you might be looking at?
So obviously, this is going to vary very much by company. But the first thing is look at your internal process. Like look at how many calls you're scheduling. Look at what is necessary, what is not, what can be delivered via async instead of a dedicated next steps meeting or something like that.
Like really like audit your internal process from meeting book to the point where you need to get it qualified, right? And a lot of times you'll in your CRM, you're going to have your opportunity stages or that you can dig into and see at what points things are taking, you know, how many days in between stage. Sometimes this is pre opportunity, which you could still look at depending on how everything is set up, but really audit that. And understand, okay, is there something we could deliver to the customer video format, a content format that's like educational that we can like speed this up?
Or is there any other resources that sales traditionally would give in a presentation that we could kind of automate in some way? And then that's just an idea depending on what you find, but you will likely find that there's going to be one stage that's going to take a majority like much longer average days in that stage versus your other stages. So we definitely recommend that you at every opportunity stage, there's a date field associated with that and you implement that and put that into your workflows every time it moves to stage, it stamps that individual date field. And then you can see what is the time between these these stages, you can run formulas and workflows and your CRM to automate this into a field.
But it's super helpful to see, right, things are getting stuck at proposal and taking way too long from proposal to, I don't know, contract, just making stage names up here. But and so like, what why is that? Let's dig into that. Is it happening across the board?
Is it in certain gios? Is it in certain segments? Is it with certain sales reps? And then fixing that, because again, I'm going to go back to sales cycle length.
Sales cycle length is the biggest lever you have in pipeline velocity. So like mathematically. So yes, obviously, win rates and size of deals are also levers, but sales cycle is going to give you the biggest bang for your buck. And so if you can look at it this way and try to dig into your internal data, I think that's where you're going to see like the fruits of your labor and larger impact for your time.
And again, it's literally just focus and time and analysis that you need to put into this. There's no tool you need to get. There's no money budget you need to spend. It's just blocking time for this.
Yeah, I wish I had that 10 years ago. What about so helpful then? All right, final one. So qualified opportunity to how do you finally win that deal?
So what I think about this is two different ways. Love me a good win loss analysis. You can get so much goodness out of that. So again, something free.
Go and look at the last year's worth of data while you're winning deals, while you're losing deals. One thing you can do that like to take, why are we losing so many deals? First thing you do create content based off of it again. Just go write some blog posts, make some videos about it, have sales reps, record some looms that you can use, but correctly get ahead a lot of the objections that come up in that sales process and use that in your marketing material.
So you can show that to prospects, you can insert that nurture sequences, but a lot of goodness that you can do there. So it doesn't fall on the sales rep's shoulders to be the bigger bad news and find that out when they got stage five one, they could have learned it in stage one or something much earlier on. Aside from the content creation part of that, I would say look at it also from your offer standpoint. So if you run a loss analysis and you find that your biggest buckets are lost due to price or lost due to functionality, you should be thinking about how do we update our roadmap moving forward.
So if you're losing a lot of deals due to pricing, you should probably evaluate if your price point is right for the target market you're going after. If you should evaluate increasing your price, decreasing your price, whatever that may be. Or if you're having no problems with price, but your market just wants more features functionality, that means you're usually under pricing yourself. So you actually need to start thinking about it.
Start building out this feature, that feature, get it built into the product roadmap, and then we can start capturing these people who love what we do, but we're just missing those key one to two items. So again, that's just developer hours internally. It has nothing to do with media spend, anything else but creating those feedback loops, with sales, with your product marketers, with your product developers, those can go a long way. Yeah, definitely.
The insights around pricing and packaging, just in general, when loss analysis something great to run every six months, maybe depending on yourself cycle, maybe even more frequently than that. But you don't have to be a pricing and packaging guru. Okay, like, you know, I'm not like, that's not my niche. That's not like something I'm super skilled in.
But what you can do is run the data, run the analysis and point out the problem. So you can point out the problem and say, Hey, here's this analysis, here's what I think is going on, here's all this data that kind of supports that. Maybe you're not the pricing and packaging guru, maybe you don't have any clue when it comes to pricing and packaging, but then you can go work with the team or the person who does and go to them with the data and say like, Hey, I think this, we need to revisit this and like start, you know, start like a mini, you know, committee of like, Hey, we need to revisit this, get everyone in the room that needs to be in the room that is in charge of pricing and packaging and strategy. And that's a good takeaway.
Like, I think some people back away from like strategy or pricing or even like product because they're like, I'm not the product team. I don't know what's going on there, but you can still point out and share these insights with the rest of the company. And pricing and packaging is key, especially like right now when we're going through kind of a macroeconomic change in the world. And are depending on where you are in the world, it might be different time.
But that's also just like a trigger to go look at things, check on things. You know, we did that here internally, like we completely redid our pricing and packaging based on customer feedback based on the changes happening. So that's just a little psa. Love it.
So super actionable. Those are our four big ones. We'll love to hear if other people have other ones that worked well for them. Definitely reach out to us.
Might have to do a part two where we can add into some posts that we can expand upon this. So this is helpful. Thank you Sydney for the lovely conversation. And before the discussion, I'd like to take a look again.
Awesome. Sounds good.