Optimize Your Funnel By Getting Inside Your Buyer's Head

1. OPTIMIZE YOUR FUNNEL BY GETTING INSIDE YOUR BUYERS HEAD David Skok, Matrix Partners Blog: ForEntrepreneurs.com

2. 3 STAGES OF A STARTUP And how the CEO should manage the company

3. Search for Product/Market Fit Scaling the Business Search for Repeatable & Scalable & Profitable Growth Model

4. WHY DO WE NEED A SALES PROCESS?

5. MyProduct.com HOW IT WORKS DESCRIPTION Our product allows you … BUY NOW! Only $9,999.99 In a perfect world…

6. WHY DOESN’T THIS WORK?

7. BUYER QUESTIONS AND CONCERNS BUYING PROCESS

8. How do we respond?

9. Design a Sales Process Breakdown the process into a series of steps that we want customers to go through Website Free Trial Purchase

10. Results in a Funnel Not all people entering the first step will get to the second, etc.

11. Studying Funnel Blockage Points Suspects Suspects Suspects Suspects Suspects Suspects Suspects Suspects Suspects Suspects Suspects Suspects

12. The Source of most Problems Vendor-centric funnel design Suspects Suspects Suspects Suspects Suspects Suspects Suspects Suspects Suspects Suspects Suspects Suspects

13. NOT MOTIVATED TO DO THAT THEY ARE CUSTOMERS WILL DO SOMETHING YOU ARE HOPING YOUR

14. THERE IS AN OPPORTUNITY TO UNBLOCK BY GETTING INSIDE YOUR BUYER’S HEAD

15. JBOSS EXAMPLE EMAIL ADDRESS BEFORE FREE DOWNLOAD

16. IMPACT CUT THE DOWNLOAD RATE BY MORE THAN 10X

17. FRICTION CONCERNS Get Inside your Customer’s Head

18. MOTIVATIONS FRICTION CONCERNS Re-design, or try to use what motivates them

19. JBOSS EXAMPLE • Making $27,000 a month selling documentation • Solution: • Give away documentation to get their email address

20. BUYER THE BUYER CENTRIC FUNNEL DESIGN

21. THE BUYERS JOURNEY

22. CONSIDERATION AWARENESS PURCHASE THE BUYERS JOURNEY CLOSED DEAL

23. • Moving house • Movers, phones, cable TV, furniture, insurance, etc. • Just lost my data in hard drive crash • Backup software/service • Starting a new software project • Dev Tools, etc. • Performance issues with existing app • APM tools • Difficulties tracking bugs across multi-tier apps • Bug tracking software TRIGGERS

24. Getting to know your Buyer Personae • What are their key business goals? • How does our product help them achieve those? • What does their Boss expect of them? • What pain do they have that we address? • Is it latent pain, or obvious pain? • How do they describe the pain and what they are looking for? • (Helpful for messaging) • Are they out there searching for solutions? • If so, how? • Is solving this pain a high priority for them? • If not, what features would make it a higher priority? • What are the most important features on their checklist? • What are their reactions to our product/company? • What will they like? What will they not like? • What are the main questions and concerns they will have? • What are the steps in their purchasing process? • What are their likely decision making criteria? • Who else has to be involved in the decision (e.g. Business buyer, IT)? • Who influences them? (Sites, organizations, and people) • (Helps us figure out how to market to them) • Other characteristics that are relevant to this purchase • E.g. Developers: • Don't have a budget • Prefer Open Source, and don't like to pay for software

25. MAP BUYERS PROCESS TO YOUR STEPS Research Shortlist Vendors Evaluation ROI & Justification Website Free Trial BUYER VENDOR

26. GET INSIDE YOUR BUYERS HEAD Research Shortlist Vendors Evaluation ROI & Justification Website Free Trial BUYER VENDOR • How are they reacting as they go through our funnel steps? • What are they thinking as they go through their process?

27. OPTIMIZE YOUR STEPS TO FIT Research Shortlist Vendors Evaluation ROI & Justification Website Free Trial ROI Calculator Competitive Features Matrix BUYER VENDOR

28. ADDRESS ALL DECISION CRITERIA Address Security Concerns 3rd Party Security Audit & Whitepaper BUYER

29. Developer Sales Processes are different • Developers are usually not the buyer

30. A few characteristics of developers • They like Free and Open Source • They are cheap, and don’t like paying for things • Talk to other developers to find out about the latest thing • Highly influenced by super-scale companies like FB, Netflix, Google, etc. • Can be very viral if they love your product • Early Adopters • Typically see it as cool to work on the latest thing • They are a great entry point for startup technologies • Have a ton of power over decisions on what goes into the stack

31. DEVELOPERS ARE YOUR CHAMPION (NOTE: NOT TRUE IN ALL CASES. SOMETIMES THE DEVELOPER IS THE BUYER) A GREAT CHANNEL TO YOUR BUYER

32. ADDS FRICTION TO A STEP WHERE YOU SHOULD BE OPTIMIZING FOR MAXIMUM ADOPTION COMMON MISTAKE TRYING TO MONETIZE THE CHANNEL

33. Who is the buyer? • Head of Ops • CTO • VP Tech or Platform • Dev Project or Team Leaders • Etc.

34. JBoss case: Head of Ops • Some characteristics: • Job is focused on: • Uptime (reliability, scalability, security) • Low Latency (great user experience) • Compliance (security) • Data privacy, security, and protection • Secondary focus: • Doing better on faster product cycles: (Continuous Delivery) • They want a throat to choke when something goes wrong • Don’t trust that unless they are paying for it, and have a contract

35. Freemium, Free Trials, Open Source • The Product is your sales person • Great strategy • Free products have a chance of going viral • Greatly lowers CAC, but at the expense of high engineering costs • Other positives • Addresses the Evaluation phase, and answers a ton of questions about the product • The customer does the work

36. The Tricky Thing with Freemium • Usually have to come up with two great products Free Product For-pay Product • Where things go wrong: • The first product is not a great standalone offering • Sometimes because of fear of cannibalizing the for-pay product • The for-pay product is not sufficiently compelling • And the free product remains its greatest competitor

37. MONETIZING OPEN SOURCE • Open Core seems to be the way to go • Two interesting places where there is willingness to pay: • Cloud and SaaS • Even developers see the power of using SaaS applications and the cloud, and expect to pay for these • On Prem Deployments • GitHub Enteprise • Jenkins Enterprise

38. WHAT IS YOUR TIME TO WOW! ? Thanks to Gail Goodman of Constant Contact WOW!

39. DEFINING WOW! Mini Wow! A moment where your buyer sees something cool and exciting • Motivates them to continue exploring Full Wow! The moment when your buyer gets excited enough to want to buy

40. TIME TO WOW! • How many steps? • How much time does it take? • How much FRICTION is involved

41. REMOVE STEPS & REMOVE FRICTION

42. EXAMPLE

43. Defining Wow! • Mini Wow! Moment Sees a React component wired up to data with very little work • Build a GraphQL Server • Connected to their own data • Web, iOS and Android clients connect to that data (React/React Native) • Full Wow! Moment

44. Buyer Journey (partial) Validate how easy it is to build a React app with GraphQLReact Developer Play with it (Trial) Demo/sell to others in company CTO & Backend Developer buy in Play with it (Trial)

45. Trial involves three hard steps Set up a GraphQL Server that fetches our data Deploy so it is accessble by URL Create React & ReactNative component Demo access to data in iOS & Android

46. Tons of Friction in first two steps Build a GraphQL Service • Have Node installed • Download a boilerplate project from GitHub • Npm install some packages • Run the server • Open GraphiQL in your browser • Edit server code • Switch to GraphiQL in your browser • Run the query to see the new result To Deploy to a URL • Hope your server boilerplate has a production deploy setup • Identify a hosting provider • Install the hosting CLI or tools • Sign up for account on hosting service • Run deploy command • Wait for it to deploy • Open GraphiQL in your deployed server to check it's still working • Done

47. Redesign: Wow! in a matter of minutes Launchpad "new" screen: https://launchpad.graphql.com/new Ticketmaster Example Launchpad: https://launchpad.graphql.com/9pw9nnkjr Expo client-side example: https://snack.expo.io/B1Bk_-k7- For more details: Video of Workshop: https://github.com/stubailo/ticketmaster-workshop List of examples: https://github.com/apollographql/launchpad

48. To view the demo, click here: https://www.heavybit.com/library/video/optimize-your-funnel-by-getting-inside- your-buyers-head/?23m25s

49. SUMMARIZING WHATAPOLLO DID: • Clear understanding of Wow! • Analyzed Friction and Concerns for buyer • Redesigned, removing steps and friction

50. IS IT CLEAR HOW TO GET TO WOW?

51. WALKME SCREENSHOT

52. FOR MORE COMPLEX PRODUCTS TEST USING CUSTOMER SUCCESS (OR EVEN PROFESSIONAL SERVICES)

53. ARE THERE DIFFERENT BUYER TYPES WHOSE IDEA OF WOW! ARE NOT THE SAME?

54. Cloud Bees Easy Onboarding & Team Collaboration Access Control & Enterprise Security High Availability + Elastic Pricing CTO Wow! VP PLATFORM Wow! TEAM LEAD Wow!

55. RE-THINK THE PROCESS Source: Josh Porter – Designing for Social Traction CONVENTIONAL APPROACH SIGN UP FOR TRIAL Wow! CONVERT TO CUSTOMER WOW! FIRST, REGISTER LATER Wow! SIGN UP FOR TRIAL CONVERT TO CUSTOMER

56. USING CHROME EXTENSIONS

57. AWS MANAGEMENT TOOL TRIAL Connect to your AWS Account See Management Console I’m not comfortable giving you access to my production App

58. LOOK FOR STEPS THAT HAVE DEPENDENCIES ON OTHER PEOPLE

59. Apollo GraphQL Example Front-End Developer Wants to try GraphQL & Apollo Client Needs a GraphQL Service Asks Backend Developer Back-End Developer

60. Funnel Whack-a-Mole • Solve for blockage points • As you fix one, the problem will move elsewhere

61. SILOED THINKING MARKETING SALES CUSTOMER SUCCESS PRODUCT

62. THE NEW FUNNEL TEAM MARKETING SALES CUSTOMER SUCCESS PRODUCT

63. USE FUNNEL FLOW CHARTS Website Free Trial Handle other questions Proposal High Level Overview xx xx xxx xx xx xxx MicroFunnels where needed

64. Funnel Metrics "IF YOU CAN NOT MEASURE IT, YOU CAN NOT IMPROVE IT." - LORD KELVIN

65. The Beautiful Thing about Funnels…

66. Governed by very simple Math

67. Two Key Levers Top of Funnel Flow (Quantity) Conversion Rate

68. Bookings Top of Funnel Lead Flow Conversion Rate Average Deal Size

69. Secondary Funnel Metrics CAC Time

70. The Key Metrics VISITORS CAMPAIGNS TO DRIVE TRAFFIC TRIALS CLOSED DEALS CONVERSIO N % CONVERSIO N % OVERALL CONVERSION %

71. FINAL THOUGHTS

72. A Common Mistake First Meeting Selling

73. Selling is the Worst Way to Sell First Meeting Build Relationship Build Trust Consultative Selling

74. Build Relationship/Trust: Use something of value to the buyer First Meeting Build Relationship Build Trust Consultative Selling

75. Treat your Buyer like a Bank Account Make a deposit before you try to make a withdrawal

76. For more details on all these topics: visit ForEntrepreneurs.com Presentation Slides: forentrepreneurs.com/heavybit

77. SAAS EXAMPLE For those who don’t relate to developer tools

78. ANALYZE TRIAL STEPS AS THOUGH THEY WERE FUNNEL STEPS Create a full profile Import Contacts Do a search for Prospects See search results Imagine a Sales Rep signing up for the old LinkedIn Wow!

79. Look for blockage Points Imagine a Sales Rep signing up for the old LinkedIn HIGH FALL OFF RATES HERE Create a full profile Import Contacts Do a search for Prospects See search results Wow!

80. For an Outlook/Exchange User Download an App Install the App Run the App Create a full profile Import Contacts Do a search for Prospects See search results Wow!

81. APPLY BLOCKAGE POINT THINKING FRICTION MOTIVATION CONCERNS Replace the downloaded App with request for email credentials and get contacts from Exchange. Create a full profile Import Contacts Do a search for Prospects See search results Wow!

82. • Concern: • I have tons of very private and confidential emails. I don’t want anyone to read those. You want me to give you the password to login to my email?!!!

83. APPLY BLOCKAGE POINT THINKING FRICTION MOTIVATION CONCERNS Replace the downloaded App with by connecting to Contacts on iOS/Android Create a full profile Import Contacts Do a search for Prospects See search results Wow!