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

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

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

WHY DO WE NEED
A SALES PROCESS?

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

WHY DOESN’T
THIS WORK?

BUYER QUESTIONS
AND CONCERNS
BUYING PROCESS

How do we respond?

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

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

Studying Funnel Blockage Points
Suspects Suspects
Suspects
Suspects
Suspects
Suspects
Suspects Suspects
Suspects
Suspects
Suspects
Suspects

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

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

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

JBOSS EXAMPLE
EMAIL ADDRESS BEFORE
FREE DOWNLOAD

IMPACT
CUT THE DOWNLOAD RATE
BY MORE THAN 10X

FRICTION CONCERNS
Get Inside your Customer’s Head

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

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

BUYER
THE
BUYER CENTRIC FUNNEL DESIGN

THE BUYERS JOURNEY

CONSIDERATION
AWARENESS
PURCHASE
THE BUYERS JOURNEY
CLOSED
DEAL

• 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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REMOVE STEPS
& REMOVE FRICTION

EXAMPLE

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

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)

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

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

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

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

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

IS IT CLEAR HOW TO
GET TO WOW?

WALKME SCREENSHOT

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

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

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

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

USING CHROME EXTENSIONS

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

LOOK FOR STEPS
THAT HAVE
DEPENDENCIES ON
OTHER PEOPLE

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

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

SILOED THINKING
MARKETING SALES
CUSTOMER
SUCCESS
PRODUCT

THE NEW FUNNEL TEAM
MARKETING
SALES
CUSTOMER
SUCCESS
PRODUCT

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

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

The Beautiful Thing about Funnels…

Governed by very simple Math

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

Bookings
Top of Funnel Lead Flow
Conversion
Rate
Average
Deal Size

Secondary Funnel Metrics
CAC
Time

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

FINAL THOUGHTS

A Common Mistake
First
Meeting
Selling

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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!

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!

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!

• 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?!!!

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!