BUILDING THINGS TO HELP SELL THE THINGS YOU BUILD

Patrick McKenzie

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Hashtag #BoS2013 or tweet at @patio11 Slides are available at

http://bitly.com/bos13patio11

Update: She Said Yes

My Wee Little Business

Rather Smaller Than Many Here

2005

2006

2007

2008

2009

2010

2011

2012

0

80000

160000

Profits (Through 2012, Excluding AR)

TrainingConsultingBCCDay Job

Marketeering / MarkDev

SEO AdWords A/B testing conversion optimization funnel analytics Onboarding / first-run experience Lifecycle emails / drip email marketing etc, etc

Most Important Takeaway

You should have: full-time engineers who are only tasked with marketing/sales objectives

Why Don’t We Do This?

We’re too busy with day-to-day to invest. We can’t overcome

organizational/cultural barriers. We assumed integrating a SaaS would

do that. We can’t find the expertise internally.

Progress Is Measured In Working Code?

Organizational/Cultural Issues

I’d Like To Hire A MarkDev Person

Can I Just Buy This Off The Shelf?

How Often Do You Use $TOOL These

Days?

Getting Engineering Onboard

Exploit the hacker ethic: “Beat the system.”

Overcommunicate on experiments and results.

Surface business-level goals more explicitly to the engineering team.

Make this a career track, and award it appropriately, via salary/bonuses/status/etc.

Changing The Culture

Focus on early, obvious wins on low-hanging fruit.

Show engineers fun, challenging problems outside of Product.

Show marketers effective, measurable tools which supplement but do not replace them.

Emphasize mutual respect, empowerment, and opportunities to learn.

Tools Aren’t A Panacea

Just buying it isn’t enough. Make sure to continue exploiting things which you know to work.

Share what you’ve learned (internally and externally).

Remember the tremendous leverage you get from integration with your product/systems. If you’re not using the API, something is probably wrong.

How Do We Get Them On Our Team?

Train them out of your existing engineers. Best option for most of you.

Hire entrepreneurially-minded techies, give them a new brief and room to run. One option: “Failed” startup founders

Hire proven people who have done exactly these things before. Just saying: expect to pay through the nose

for this… … in the unlikely event you find anybody.

Sidenote: Career Advice

Concierge Onboarding

A Bit Of A Mismatch

We sell products but

customers want to buy solutions.

The Traditional SaaS Grid

Less product,Less cost

More product,More cost

Aligning Pricing With Customer Goals

We tell you how to fix the problem

We provide tools so that you can fix the problem

We fix the problem

We fix the problem

What Is Concierge Onboarding?

We proactively engage you at or before signup, to ensure you have a successful experience.

We deal with setup / integration / migration for you, to maximize probability of successful use.

We nag you constantly ^H^H^H assist you in achieving your expressed preference to get started using this software productively, even if you get momentarily distracted by other pressing business matters.

Can You Import From $SYSTEM?

Requirement: A user has a client/patient/etc management system, which we’ve never encountered before. Design a comprehensible onboarding experience which will allow them to export their current client list and import it into Appointment Reminder.

Goals: This takes under 60 seconds, always works, and can successfully be accomplished by Milly the Office Manager.

Minor challenge: We have no a priori knowledge of file format. We cannot influence it. The customer cannot edit it.

Good luck!

Format-Agnostic Import Feature!

Impact On Conversion Rate

4X

Impact On Account LTV (Guess-y)

4X

But Those Multiply, So…

16X

Other Examples Of Concierge

Drip (email marketing): Need an email campaign? We’ll write it for you.

WhooshTraffic (marketing analytics): Not sure what this will do in your business? Our CEO will give you 2 hours of personalized advice.

PlanScope (Project management): Our CEO will walk you through the whole software on Skype.

Campaign Monitor (email marketing): We’ll hold your hand until your first campaign goes out to your real email list.

Improves Innovation Cycle

Concierge

Onboarding

Automated

Onboarding

Product Changes

Getting Started

Offer it in a limited/timeboxed fashion to establish a cost baseline.

Make it a standard component of higher value plans, to drive customers to higher LTV plans.

Scale it up as far as the economics warrant.

Testimony

Thanks for Listening

Blog at http://www.kalzumeus.com https://training.kalzumeus.com Email

list. ~2 emails a month on selling software. You should be on it.

Slides will be posted. See @patio11 Send me email. I love chatting about

this. patrick@kalzumeus.com