Microconf Europe 2013 -- Patrick McKenzie

BUILDING THINGS TO HELP SELL THE THINGS YOU BUILD

Patrick McKenzie

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Hashtag #MicroConf or tweet at @patio11

Slides are available at http://bitly.com/microconfEuropeRocks

Bingo Cards… Who Knew, Right?

We Were All Newbies Once

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BCCDay Job

See My First Microconf Talk

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Once More, With(out) Feeling

Products With A Side Of Consulting

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2012 Was A Very Good Year

Not Important Relative To Last Slide

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And how will I know that people buy it?

What Should I Make?

Quick Wins To Pay For Microconf 2014

Look for the star! $X,000 in return for under 2 hours of work.

The Fundamental SaaS Equation

Traffic is hardest to optimize for – see Rob Walling’s presentation or mine from 2011.

Conversion rate throughout funnel is easier to optimize (A/B testing, funnel analytics, etc), but takes weeks/months to see results.

ARPU you can manipulate with a few minutes of work

Churn: run your own Operation Retention

Charge. More.

• Killed the $9 plan

• Added in $199 plan due to apparent demand

In Which I Take My Own Darn Advice

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Scaled Revenue for Appointment Reminder

Lifecycle Emails For SaaS

How Is This Different Than Last Year?

Drip email marketing is often/typically pre-signup, lifecycle emails are post-signup.

Lifecycle emails require more app-specific logic.

Very helpful: good understanding of funnel Not required:

Lots of volume Great copywriting

Get People To Upgrade To Annual Billing

Offer discount (“1 month free”) if they switch to annual billing.

Offer it to “loyal customers” over email

One click + confirmation to switch.

Conversion rate from 10% to 25%+

Immediate revenue of $200 per email sent

Raising Your ARPU, Trivially

Consider Bob, who has 280 appointments a month and is on Small Business ($79).

Is Bob happy? How can we make him happier?

We should do Bob a solid and convince him to upgrade to Office ($199), perhaps at a discount.

Did This At A Consulting Client

“Run my a SQL query of everyone who is within 20% of quota on FEATURE_1, FEATURE_2, or FEATURE_3” (~3 minutes)

Add in 3 extra special-offer plans, which were equivalent to existing tiers but at a slight (~20%) discount (2 minutes)

Write a two paragraph email and interpolate their account data (25 minutes)

Made +N% of yearly recurring revenue

Investigating Low Conversion Rate

Takes ~20 minutes to do in Rails or whatever Put it on a dashboard which you use for

Customer Support tasks, review daily-ish Get qualitative feedback no matter how

poor/small data is

What’s The Difference?

Walking People Through The Trial

They start

They succeed

They get confused

My Trial Email Sequence

Day Zero: Auto-generated welcome Day Three: Personal welcome from me Day Twenty:

If trial is successful: sell them hard If trial is unsuccessful: rescue the trial

Day Twenty Seven: “incoming charge”

Welcome Mail

Establish expectations for trial

Getting started guide

Introduce yourself and ask for them to email you

Personalized Welcome

Styled to look like sent one-on-one Announce your availability Ask for email “Sent from my iPhone” – maybe not Lots of folks send this automatically within an hour,

almost certainly a good idea but I don’t do it personally

Free Trial Going Well

Simple heuristic Do ROI

calculation Close sale (or

mention it is automatic) Immediate

incentive

Free Trial Not Going Well

Simple heuristic Figure out why they

aren’t doing well Offer a trial

extension if they talk to you

Great opportunity for customer development

Weekly Checkup (“Get Them Promoted”)

High perceived value

Great engagement Creates “ongoing

earned media” via the option to embed announcements/links/etc

Makes ROI discussions academic

Digging Into Individual Accounts

If he cancels or has a CC billing failurehe gets a phone call.

Everybody gets a dunning email, sent three times.

[Action Required] Appointment Reminder Could Not Renew Your Subscription

Get to the point ASAP Prominent link to

capture updated CC data

Extend a 3 day grace period, try daily within grace

Don’t forget a “You didn’t update so we took the liberty of pausing your account” email

How To Quit Consulting

But Patrick, Why Would I Quit Consulting?

People say consulting doesn’t scale. Horsepuckey.

Ways to scale consulting: Move your rate up, dramatically Hire people Improve your utilization at the margin

So Why Really?

Constant rat race to get new clients Lots of unpaid time doing prospecting /

proposal / administrative work You have a boss and you have to go

to work every day

Why Not Replace With Software?

Why Not Replace With A SaaS?

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Scaled Revenue for Appointment Reminder

So What Do We Do Then?

Productized consulting Your most common / most valuable consulting

engagement, delivered without the full dance An e-book / video course / etc A training event / seminar / etc

Sell it through email Offer it at a variety of price points Make several gigs worth of money in a

repeatable, scalable, tweakable fashion… with lead-in time of 2 weeks to 3 months, not 6 months to 5 years

My Non-software Product

Most common consulting engagement (2010): “We send no email. Can you, like, fix that?”

I would implement: Drip marketing (see Microconf 2012

presentation) Lifecycle emails (like two minutes ago)

It generally required: Lots of sales / convincing A bit of coding Copywriting delivered by me, the non-

expert

Goals For Productized Consulting Convince people who already find me credible

that they should be doing email, too Teach them how to implement:

Drip marketing (see Microconf 2012 presentation) Lifecycle emails (like two minutes ago)

This generally requires: Lots of sales / convincing delivered at scale SaaS products I could recommend and glue code I

could describe in high-level detail rather than write Copywriting that I could teach them to do

themselves

Why Would You Buy That Over Consulting?

Because it’s $500 versus $20,000 Because you couldn’t find somebody to

do this for you Because you’re not sure you can get to it

right now Because it’s a cheap, easy way “to test

the waters”

Why Not Get It Free On the Internet?

Because real businesses spend money on problems

“Free if you have two week to research it” is not free to someone who cuts paychecks bi-weekly

Because paid initiatives signal quality and help to reduce roadblocks to adoption within an organization

The Key To Marketing It

Started building an email list a few months in advance

Focused 75% on teaching people stuff (pricing, selling to enterprises, A/B testing, etc) and 25% on telling them about upcoming product

Sent two, count ‘em, two sales emails Sent folks to a long copy page

My “Squeeze Page” For Emails

http://training.kalzumeus.com

Promotion:• Put a HelloBar

lookalike on blog, mentioned occasionally in blog posts

• Tweeted once or twice• Ended up on HN once

because the community knows me

Not just for the “Internet famous”: I got 5,000 signups but total “unknowns” routinely hit X00 in a day

http://training.kalzumeus.com/

http://training.kalzumeus.com/

LifecycleEmails.com Long Copy #1

Establish value proposition very early

Main heading and subhead only there to convince you “In or out, do you want to read more?

Note “intriguing” copywriting like “unreasonable amounts of money”


Use a case study from your consulting career

Copywriting wise, just because it’s long copy doesn’t mean it has to be a Giant Wall of Text


Personal testimonial from a consulting client with graphical call-out

Customer is more like Jason than like you or me


Acknowledge prospects’ objections and answer them

(Amy Hoy: “Can you smell the guilt here?”)


BENEFITS OF TAKING THIS are more important to the customer than what it contains

But be explicit on that, too.

LifecycleEmails.com Packaging

Pricing: Again, charge more, charge more, charge more.

Multiple ways to buy means multiple ways for best customers to discover ways to pay you more money.

Nathan Barry Is An Effing Genius

“Designing Web Applications”

Three packages: $249 / $99 / $39

Sales focuses on what customer gets not on what the price is

So how did that work out for Nathan?

Packaging Is A Huge Win

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Mo' Packages = Mo' MoneyComplete Package $249

Book & Videos $99

Book Alone $49

What About The Actual Product? Me speaking into my webcam and a $60

microphone Loosely scripted. If I do it again, will add slides. Took ~2 weeks to record plus a video editor (ARGH)

that cost about $3,000, but added fairly little value over $300 on oDesk.

Hosted the videos on Wistia and rolled my own delivery platform (you should probably use Gumroad or similar)

Partnered with folks with related interests: additional value to customers at vanishingly little work to me

Funny Story About The Revenue Launch day (sent an email, it got on HN):

$12,862 Next week or two: $16,576 “Reminder: the sale ends today” :

$15,579 Total to date: $64,608

Keys To Product Success

Email, email, email. Get people on it, delight them with the things you can teach them, sell only very occasionally.

Target a pain point which you know there is a demand for. Consulting = validated market, right?

Work on your copy. You don’t have to be a genius. I certainly am not. (Joanna has a book, buy it: copyhackers.com 100X ROI for me)

Deliver quality products, because you only have one reputation.

For more details

Get on my email list @ training.kalzumeus.com

Special bonus for Microconf folks: You can have the lifecycle emails product for free if you didn’t already buy it, or the next one (probably on A/B testing) if you did. Send me an email. I trust you.

Thanks for Listening

Blog at http://www.kalzumeus.com Slides will be posted. See @patio11 Send me email. I love chatting about

this. [email protected]

http://www.kalzumeus.com/