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hello and welcome to WP product talk the place where every week we interview an
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experienced WordPress product person about strategies tips experiences failures and successes of running a
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successful and thriving WordPress product business I'm casy Keith co-founder and CEO at BTO plugins and
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I'm Amber Hines CEO at equalized digital and today's topic is growing
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your sales with pre-sales calls and webinars yeah I am really excited about
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this topic especially because we started experimenting with um doing pre-sales webinars a little bit more so I'm
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excited to share what we're talking about and hear what you all have been working on and hopefully get some comments from
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guests yep um we have an excellent guest this week which is Amanda Gorman from
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Stella and welcome to Amanda thanks so much for coming on thank you so much for
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having me so could you introduce yourself a bit and tell us um what you do in
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WordPress absolutely be happy to um so I'm Amanda Gorman I'm with Stellar WP
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director of customer success and Stellar WP is the home of many plugins um some
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of you may be familiar with give WP the events calendar learn Dash um restrict
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content Pro orderable iconic um I feel like I'm missing one in there but a
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whole bunch of family of Brands so we've got a lot a big Suite of uh products that help folks run agencies or help
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folks just raise money online for example um so my role as director of customer success is to listen to the
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customer and to help my team to listen to our customers and to utilize the feedback that that we receive uh to help
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our customers to be successful throughout their journey of you know maybe even trying to understand the
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product from the very pre-sales stage to then actually making a conversion uh of
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using the free product or a paid product and then moving on to possibly renewing
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with us which is ultimately our goal so a lot of my attention is focused on earning that renewal and all of the
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pieces that go into that yeah that's fabulous I I'm really excited we're both really excited to
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have you here and hear some more thoughts about how you'll handle that at selller WP for anyone who is watching
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please do take time to write in the chat on YouTube we will see those comments
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and we are happy to answer any questions or respond back with
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you so um I think it might be helpful for us to talk a little bit more about
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why this why we're talking about pre-sales webinars or calls because I
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think in WordPress a lot of product owners especially smaller products but even a lot of the larger product
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companies don't do any sort of sales efforts they rely on marketing and then
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they maybe have a a demo that is a self-served demo someone can spin up off of their website and then they just
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expect people to purchase and they don't typically engage with people in a live format maybe they a form where you could
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submit a pre-sale question that goes to a support uh help Des software so I
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think it's it's interesting to talk about why this is important and why people might want to think about it um I
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know for us personally we've talked a lot about how can we transition from doing one to one sales to one to many
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sales which is why we've you know experimented with some webinars more recently uh but Amanda why do you think
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it's important for WordPress products to consider doing more of the the the live
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interaction with people absolutely great question you know no matter the size of the business
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I see value in these face-to-face conversations whether it is a one-on-one
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interaction which I believe is the most valuable because you can get into the real nuance and really understanding the
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person that you're communicating with and the person that's interested in you they're investing their time and energy
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looking into your product they're spending time with you that's and that can be a reciprocal engagement you can
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have that relationship and that can really be a lasting relationship um I'll speak more on that in a moment but even
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with a group setting where you're demonstrating to many different people on a webinar or a group demo experience
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you're still having that Personal Touch where you're presenting a member of your team uh showing their face demonstrating
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being the face of that product and that gives an arena for communication to
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happen that might not happen in a demo experience experience where somebody is taking the Reigns and doing something on
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their own of course there's going to be data um you know telary and other kinds of things that you can get from somebody
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navigating a demo experience on their own there's lots of information you can gleam from that but you don't
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necessarily know why like what's the why behind why they're even looking at your
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product and I find that those uh questions if you can get more and more
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curious about that end up fueling everything else that you're doing in
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terms of product development and support and marketing because you get a better understanding of who it is you're
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actually speaking to and have a face to put to that um you know and it can be challenging when you have a big audience
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it feels daunting you don't want to necessarily open yourself up to talking to everybody but even the conversations
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you can have are full of insight that's one person that represents many I assure
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you yeah I think that's a really good point it's all about putting a face to
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the customer from your perspective and the company from their perspective you become real people providing a digital
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product and we all work um from all over the place and we don't tend to meet customers in person of course in this
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industry so I think it's a really important topic because it's a way to bridge that Gap in a more kind of human
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personto person way even we're not going to meet in person and it's also it's a
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sales channel that a lot of us don't think about I know you and I Amanda have emailed recently because I was starting
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to think about it for the first time after seven years of selling plugins Suddenly It's like hang on we maybe we
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could really improve our relationships with customers and increase our sales by doing some sort of pre-sales opportunity
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for them to ask questions and things like that and either whether it's a call we should probably differentiate that
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later in this discussion actually calls versus webinars because they're two different things so I just started
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thinking through the options um so I think that's really important for product companies to think about because
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it may never have occurred to them so on that note
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sorry oh I was I was just gonna say like I think it's interesting because a lot of product companies have come out of
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agencies and we maybe were used to doing sales calls for our agency work and but
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then I don't know why there's this disconnect where we're not like we don't think about doing it maybe because we're just so sick of doing them and so we're
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like that's why we created a product so we don't have to do it right but I think like today maybe we can push back on
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that a little bit and shift people back into that mindset of thinking about the sales of your product sort of similar to
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maybe you thought about the sales of your services back in the day that's a good point yeah absolutely
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because it really like it's all comes down to who are you serving and if you're not really close to that why and
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who you know you might have in your mind of who you think you're serving and what
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their needs are what their problems are but until you actually talk to them you
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might be surprised by what their actual needs are um oftentimes you might just
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find validation of like yeah we're on the right track like the road road map looks like we're going in the right
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direction of what these customers are actually asking for but I often am surprised by what the actual need are of
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our customers yeah well let's move on to the
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story time section um where you go first Amanda can you talk more about your
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experience um in more detail of pre-sales calls and webinars and the on
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the brands that you've worked for absolutely I'd love to uh so I
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started uh with givewp I was a customer success manager for a few years and
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that's where I really got my experience in working with pre-sales and uh just being face Toof face with customers and
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you know this was uh oh five years ago uh four or five years ago um so it was
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pretty like foreign to say that hey we're gonna jump on Zoom with our customers like people were like what
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you're gonna do what um so especially from the pre-sale context you know we weren't sure what that was going to look
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like if we were going to be flooded with inquiries or if it was going to be a slow Trickle and it kind of was somewhere in between where it it really
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started off like we had to present ourselves to our customers to say like Hey we're here like after they purchase
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or even in the pre-sales arena um you know they're reaching out in the contact box and we're not quite understanding
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what it is that they're asking in their in their inquiry you know like they have lots of questions like maybe especially
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those people that write in an essay saying like I want to deal with this this this this this and like having like all these different feature requests but
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like what's the why like what do they actually want to do at the end of the day so we started finding those
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opportunities and opening it up on the website to allow people to book a demo with uh it was with me at first and then
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our team uh eventually grew to have more availability more time slots and um
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those early experiences were so rewarding because it seemed that I was able to find these like pockets of like
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meeting people at the right time uh to be able to not only allow me to
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understand the product more and how we can meet the needs of our customers because I'm having this like real time
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engagement relationship with these folks on the other side of Zoom but also for them they were like wow I'm so glad I
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got your email it was right when I was trying to make a decision on this I only spend 10 minutes a day looking at this
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because I'm a volunteer for my nonprofit and I have to make a decision quickly and I'm so glad that you reached out so
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that we can have this conversation and there were so many like serendipitous moments like that that really like
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fueled the interactions um and I I feel that th that closeness really did help us to
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learn how we can bring a personal touch into these interactions even on a more broad scale to develop that relationship
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so that every time they renew they're like oh I had that conversation with Amanda or with Amy or with Dela and and
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I am so happy to renew this product because I had such a good
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experience amazing yeah so it really you they actually remember even a year later
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at renewal time so that is really great for retention as retention as well as the
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sales so do you want well I was gonna ask a a follow-up
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question could you describe a little bit for people what these what those calls look like how long are they are you have
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you prescripted out a specific we're going to show them this this and this or is it very like hey we get on what are
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your questions and then I might share my screen as I answer them like could yeah how do you handle those at give yeah
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great question so uh with give our audience in particular we are fortunate to be able to spend half an hour with
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these pre-sale conversations that book on our calendar because we are not experiencing um in overflow like where
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our team wouldn't have time for anything else like we're able to kind of reel it in and especially when we first got
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started we were just opening up the floodgates to let it happen and we had quite a few of those 30 minute backtack
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and then you know it's evolved over the years and we've found other ways to make that connection with customers and to
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make improvements throughout this whole experience but uh to answer your question that 30 minutes that we do a
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lot for whoever we're engaging with from a pre-sale context does have a script in
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mind though it does tend to be more organic after the introduction you know the introduction is so important because
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it sets the boundary and it holds the container for the time that you're going to be spending with this person um
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because you want to make sure that your expectations are heard right up front because I've experienced we've all
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experienced where our time can be taken for granted and we don't want to take our customers time for granted either so
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we're reciprocating that that expectation saying I respect your time you respect my time we're we have 30
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minutes to talk today here's what we're going to cover but we're really here to answer your questions so I'm more
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interested in hearing from you and what you need and it kind of just snowballs from there I do have slides that we use
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to kind of show uh the key features of the product especially to somebody that is completely brand new that's just
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trying to learn like what this product is I think that can be helpful but it's
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also something I don't want to eat too much time like two to three minutes on that ideally plus inter uh introductions
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for a total of like five minutes in the beginning is plenty have you experimented with group
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calls or webinars or something where you're talking to customers in on mass or have you always focused on the oneto
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ones we've done both so the Ono ones is how we started and then we started
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introducing a group a group demo um so the group demo would be presented a
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couple times a week uh at different time zones to allow for people to join around the world when they're able to uh and
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the group demos are a smaller group um usually we would see between like to 10
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people joining that and that would be definitely more scripted more intended
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to serve like who's there as a as a whole broad questions usually and then
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if somebody needs more of that handholding like I have a really specific use case we'd encourage them
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for more of a one-on-one so I'm I'm curious and I'll talk a little bit more about what we do
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when we do my story time but one of the things we've debated is right now if someone want wants like an
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individualized call they have to fill out a form there's not like a go book A Time right here like because my partner
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Chris who does all of those he gets nervous and he's like what if my calendar just fills up with these and
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this is all I'm doing so do you have any like almost like metrics on okay if we
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look at our Google analytics we know that we have like 2% of our website traffic actually you know like like how
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would somebody if you were starting to think about this how would you figure out what to expect
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as far as Demand on like how many people actually schedule those versus people
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that see it on your website but never take advantage sure I think it takes a
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lot of experimentation honestly and it depends on the customer base right if you have a lot of questions coming into
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your pre-sale inbox that are a lot of the same questions then there's lots of things that you can do to improve that
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experience to get their answers met um before before they even need to book a call right um and even on the calls that
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you're having you can provide a demo where they can see a live demo a recorded demo um or join a webinar um to
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answer some of those questions before needing to get to a one-on-one um as we've evolved and especially as our team
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has grown and our Audi audience base has grown and as I've been trying to implement this across all of our other
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brands this is a one-on-one opening up to all of the customers is or all of the
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pre-sales is not necessary like the goal what my goal is is to find those
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opportunities that are going to be most fruitful so the pre-sales that are reaching out that are looking at
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competitors that are very clearly uh a common use case and they're having some trouble understanding the value um
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there's lots of cues that can be looked out for in a ticket uh in a an initial ticket that would present like hey I
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think this might be a good opportunity for a call or like you said having somebody submit a form so that they're
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already interested they're demonstrating that they're putting in time and energy investing in researching your product
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before jumping on that one onone um because I I agree I think your calendar can get booked up with the same
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conversation back to back and that's not what you want um I think that was a necessary learning experience that we
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had at give to get to the point where we're at now and it was kind of like learning what the customer is
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interpreting to make improvements along the way yeah I think that's so so the way
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we've been handling it is um the sales calls my partner Christa as I mentioned
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um you submit a form and then he kind of filters right he tries to respond with
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them via email first and the goal really for him to have a sales call with
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someone we're looking at people that want either a 25 Side license or a
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license that is we do Enterprise licensing we don't have unlimited so we'll do like anything that's custom
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more than 25 sites um if they want less than that typically he tries not to have a call with them because he's like I
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just want to answer their questions because I think there's a little bit of a value there where we're trying to figure out what is the the pricing that
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the price point of what we're selling the product for where it makes sense to spend 30 minutes or an hour plus on the
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call um and then and basically for those and I don't know if you can share any of
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these numbers but it's been interesting because I asked him today if he had like a thought from from this year like what
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our conversion rate looked like and he said that when he has calls with people
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who want that level of license which they're usually either agencies for us or like higher ed um sometimes really
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large businesses about 30% of them will purchase right away like after the call
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same day or the next day and then the other ones can take longer so it's not
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that they don't purchase or they say say no but sometimes with the the price point that we start to get at which for
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us it's over 18 it's 1,800 plus and it could be much more since we don't have unlimited sites he said that he was
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seeing like some sometimes it's a couple of months and he has to do multiple sales calls with um multiple demos for
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multiple stakeholders but then but then the turnaround that we've seen on some of those is that there's like a lot of
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lock in at those companies so they're not going to change so it's not just putting that investment in for one year the the assumption is is those people
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will renew but I don't have you seen anything with like what conversion rates
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look like off yours yeah I can speak to give most because uh with the some of
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the other brands we're Mo mostly focusing on one-on-one calls for uh customer interviews um we're kind of
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like positioning those one-onone calls to be more like the value ad of like how is this customer using the product and
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how can we earn their renewal um to make sure that we're listening in all those things uh for for give and the pre-sale
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Arena which we are still doing those one-on-one demos we're typically waiver between like a 30 to 40% conversion rate
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for those folks um and it really does depend on the month and depending the
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the volume that we're seeing um so yeah I I think 30 to 40% is typically where
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we're where we're hovering and feel better about our numbers because I was like man is that too
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low nice to hear from someone else when we had a bigger influx of them every
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week we were seeing more of like that 50 even 60% um but that was like when we
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were seeing more of that volume and right now we're we're really reeling it in and like uh they're they're timec
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consuming these calls oneon-one pre-sales are very timec consuming so we have been more focusing on what the
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webinar experience looks like and the group demo experience um and being able
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to just kind of uh polish our whole pre-sale funnel from a marketing perspective given all the years of
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insights that we've had talking to customers yeah yeah that was the last piece that I had for my story time and I
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could share that and then maybe you could share your experience Katie but um we yeah we we do webinars a lot but
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they're not really sales webinars but we decided the like I just decided the week before or two weeks before Black Friday
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I was like we need to do one the week before Black Friday because I was like let's see what we can do um and so that
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experiment was here's how that turned out for us we got 157 people who
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registered 84 people attended um almost all of them were already on our email
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list when I looked at Zoom to see how they came in they came in for one of the multiple emails that they got um or
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there were a couple we promoted it in um we sponsor a newsletter and so the week
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before we promoted sponsored content in that newsletter so they came out of there but almost everyone was already people on our email list um and then
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of those 157 there were 11 purchases So currently it's about a 7% conversion
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rate I don't know I'm hoping that there's our Black Friday sell inss tomorrow so I'm like hoping there'll be more um one purchased the same day but
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then seven purchased since then so it was kind of interesting like I went and looked and I was like I don't know if this is low it feels like a low
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conversion rate but at the same time if you're talking to like that many people all at once it was an hour to get 11
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purchases verse Maybe you know 30 minutes to get two or something so
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totally totally yeah and uh learn Dash does a meet learn Dash webinar um every
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two weeks and uh we've just been starting to track like conversions there and I'm seeing like around 177%
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conversion right there and that's like a big audience like there could be like 1 150 people um watching that that webinar
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so um I think you know the webinars is a much different experience than that one:
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one that one: one you have a higher usually typical higher experience of conversion because you're making that
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connection and if it's the right fit that right fit is being communicated right away because you're personalizing your approach to that person's needs um
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but the webinar gets a little trickier to do that but I think it's still that personal connection and people can
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present questions that can be answered in real time so it seems like we also just go
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attend a learn Dash webinar and see what their format is K your experience with uh pre
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pre-sales calls and webinars well this is really great timing for me because in
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the last month actually in the last three weeks we've done our first two pre-sales um live streams I've been
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calling them um so we analyzed different ways to do it and I talked to helpful
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people like Amanda about the options and we decided that because of the nature of
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our customers and products we should go for a more group setting that's largely
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because unlike Amber we don't necessarily know we don't know how much
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the customer is likely to spend our products are typically relatively low value um up to about
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$129 but most are cheaper than that and the vast vast majority of our customers
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spend fairly low amounts like single sight licenses that kind of thing and we
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thought well we'd like to do pre-sales for the more valuable customers but we don't have a way to identify what
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license option they're intending to buy when they send a pre-sales inquiry so we went down the group rout instead and we
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watched other people's webinars that they' done like lifter LMS do a lot and we looked at their format and talk to
24:44
them about how they promote them and things so we did our first one on the 17th of November which was the first day
24:50
of our sale and we promoted it in various ways like on the top of our website to the email list that kind of
24:58
thing um there was two of us because we thought the kind of conversational format would work so it was my video my
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YouTuber and myself and it went amazingly I couldn't believe it um I was
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we've done lots of preparation what happens if nobody asks any questions so we thought right we'll demo some
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products and we got a support to tell us what are the most common questions so we could sort of pretend that we'd had
25:24
questions but actually there were loads we had had 50 people register beforehand
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and a lot of them pre-submitted questions so we could prepare answers and demos for them and things like that
25:38
and structure it a bit but there were loads asking live questions which I completely did not expect to happen so
25:45
it was a bit kind of chaotic in a nice way because we were like oh which comment should we do and trying to
25:51
multitask while doing this webinar these new quite complex often queries would
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come in but it was a really interesting experience because I'd had a lot of doubts beforehand mainly because we are
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a multi-product company we have 23 plugins at the moment most of which are
26:09
woocommerce but not exclusively so we don't particularly specialize and so I
26:15
was thinking why would anybody want to watch a live stream about products they're not interested in just to wait
26:22
for the one that they are interested in to come up and we tried to mitigate that by doing an introduction to each product
26:30
so if there was a question about a particular plug-in then we would go on the demo site first and demonstrate the
26:37
plug-in to everybody and explain what it does at a high level so we kind of used
26:42
it as an opportunity to introduce our products to more customers who may not have been considering that one but it
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was interesting what you just said Amber about looking at the sales because I haven't done that yet and it would be a
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bit of a manual task but I'm going to do that look at whoe registered and whether they made a purchase because I haven't
27:00
done that work yet and then yeah I did I did that today it was super it was super manual like I when exported from zoom
27:08
and then I pulled up everyone who had bought an Ed and
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I and I marked I like went through and I just searched on my spreadsheet like for
27:22
their last name I mean what I could be slightly off because that is one thing I've noticed with like uh larger license
27:30
purchases at least for us is I only looked for their name and sometimes the
27:35
person who comes or who gets interested in our plugin is not actually the buyer
27:40
which I bet is the same for give at nonprofits like they might have a developer or someone who's like you
27:45
should buy this but then like it's like the accounting department person who actually goes and purchases it and so I
27:53
yeah yeah yeah so I mean like that's a thing that's a little bit harder to track I think if the person who attended and
27:59
made the buying decision isn't actually the one who create completed the checkout totally we have a thanks to
28:06
Matt Cromwell we have a wonderful spreadsheet that does an automatic lookup um as purchases are coming in to
28:13
see if they've registered for a oneon-one or a demo um group demo um so
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it matches a in a spreadsheet for us already to say like hey this person purchased and they registered like
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that's treated as a conversion so really handy but then I do have my uh my customer success managers looking
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through and saying like Okay is this the same person like uh when we're seeing
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people that registered that we know purchased that we're having a conversation with but we don't see them on the sheet it just takes that
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awareness but um it certainly is that manual effort for sure okay that's really cool I feel like
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we all need to follow up with Matt now yeah tell us how your spreadsheet works
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we'll make you something we need a comment
29:01
yeah so what else were you GNA say Katie I think I might have interrupted you a little bit oh and then we did our second
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live stream on Cyber Monday so that was two days ago and it was good but it
29:14
wasn't as busy as the previous one so I think you might have been right doing one before Black Friday um I thought
29:21
Cyber Monday intuitively would have been busier but actually it was the other way
29:26
around so maybe people were pre- researching or maybe just there was a lot of pent up demand because we'd never
29:33
done one before so people were curious uh so I think now we're going to do one a month um starting in January because
29:40
there's no point in December and and then just keep learning and improving from there so yeah that is a goal we also set
29:49
next year we had had it as a goal for this year and it just didn't happen yeah I sometimes you get hung up on like we
29:56
we said okay okay we wanted to do and we identified four different audiences and we were like let's just come up with uh
30:04
what we were thinking about was like two to four different webinars that we could repeat and we were planning to do two a
30:10
month that are just like sales webinars anyone can register for them and they're the same thing that we just repeat
30:15
throughout the year but targeted to different audiences and then we got really hung up on like okay we have to
30:21
create the slides and we have to like write a script and all this stuff and so it never happened and then right for
30:27
Black Friday I was just like we should just have a webinar and we should demo the plugin I'm like that morning I kind
30:35
of made like two slides but they were screenshots from our website like no one wants a whole presentation do they yeah
30:42
and and then we just got on and we have like a a website that we use internally when we do demos and I just like showed
30:49
how to do some stuff on it um and I mean I I think we got good feedback and I
30:55
mean people did buy afterwards but I I you know I think like I got too much in my head about it has to be perfect and
31:02
probably what matters more is just doing it absolutely absolutely and I wanted to
31:08
speak to the the group demo experience a little bit and like what happens after that because you'll have the transcript
31:15
of all of the comments and all the questions maybe that you didn't get to um live and that happens at learn Dash
31:23
uh quite a bit we get so many questions in the in the chat especially for folks that are brand new coming into the
31:29
product deciding if it's right for them and uh our customer success manager chany she will go through each of those
31:36
questions write up a response to them and then send out an email to all attendees with a list of questions and
31:42
answers um and I think that extra followup is really valuable because not only does it show the attendees that
31:49
you're actively listening to everybody that posed the question uh but you're also giving the um person that's doing
31:56
that on your team an opportunity to really get into the feedback of like what is the general consensus of the
32:02
people that attended this webinar like what are the pain points what's the confusion what what things can we do on
32:08
our sales pages to improve our documentation how can we uh submit some feature requests or anything that might
32:15
might be going on yeah you know actually what's interesting about that when I was looking at my numbers this morning um so
32:24
we did do a follow-up we didn't we were able to get to all of our questions we didn't have as many so we we didn't
32:29
include that but I did send an email out to everyone who had registered with like the webinar on demand link on Zoom so
32:36
they could go watch the recording and actually more of the people who purchased were people who did not attend
32:44
so they had registered Haven done this and then they did not show up and and originally I was like I'll just send it
32:51
I don't want to spam people who didn't come or whatever right but then but then I was like no maybe like they knew they
32:56
could couldn't come but they wanted the recording so I sent it out to all of them and it's interesting because we actually had more purchases from people
33:02
who watched the recording later than attended live um so I think like you're right that followup to people and not
33:09
just people who attended but everyone is really important nice I've written that down I'll do that
33:17
tomorrow yeah so we have a question um so Matt made a comment about his love
33:24
for spreadsheets and um also he's got a question for Amanda I'd
33:30
love to hear about Amanda's 30 minute fundraising audits to postp purchase webinars are so helpful
33:37
too yes yes so this is specific to givewp uh so we offer a 30 minute
33:42
fundraising audit uh for folks that purchase a Pro Plan or agency plan so it is geared towards the higher tier plans
33:49
where they're investing you know $4.99 to 5.99 for their plan for the year uh
33:55
and these customers benefit from this audit to be able to take advantage of this one-on-one call that is after
34:01
they've purchased we typically send out our emails for this audit um three
34:06
months after they've made a purchase is like when we really start to let them know that this would be a good
34:11
opportunity to take advantage of it we let them know in the beginning that it's there because it's a value ad to their
34:17
purchase but the most people um benefit is when they're further into using the
34:23
product and they have some real um actionable insight for us as well as we
34:28
have for them uh because they've already implemented some forums and they might be looking at ways to optimize their
34:33
fundraising experience and we can provide them uh with ways to optimize
34:39
the way that donors flow on their websites um from our experience and
34:44
working with other customers that are doing um similar work in the similar Industries so we provide lots of
34:50
customer examples and um uh some strategies for improving story uh for
34:57
the messaging that they're putting on their donation page even the positioning of Their donation button sometimes
35:03
people hide their donation button and it's really hard to find in their main navigation or somewhere on their website
35:10
um so we help them kind of like sort through all of these like key strategies
35:15
and especially for folks that are managing a a nonprofit um website that
35:21
have very limited time limited resources they really find Value in this because they can get a lot of improve
35:26
improvements in a short period of time and go make those changes and see real real
35:33
changes yeah we we do something similar although it's much closer to the
35:39
purchase Point usually um where at the our top two tiers it includes a 30
35:44
minute accessibility strategy call um so and it's interesting because a lot of
35:51
times it's not really about how to use the plug-in sometimes people ask questions about like things they've seen
35:58
in the Plugin or that but a lot of times they're asking other broader things sort of like yours like it's not like how do
36:04
I connect stripe I can't figure it out it's like how do I get the most out of it and that's what like going back to
36:10
those pre-sales webinars that's one of the things we've been talking about with our goals for next year with these
36:15
webinars is trying to come up with um not necessarily just how to literally
36:21
use the product but talking to people about how they can use the product
36:27
strategically if that makes sense like building service like in the case of agencies like building accessibility
36:33
services around our product um or using it to grow recurring revenue or those
36:38
sorts of things and so I think like that's where having those face-to-face conversations like circling back to
36:45
Wordpress productors don't always frequently do this you start to hear like where are the pain points for
36:50
people or even the few people we've had cancel this year when we follow up with them like sometimes they've said well I
36:57
bought it last year and I was hoping I could figure out how to sell accessibility more and I couldn't and so
37:03
now I'm not right and we're like oh okay so we need to literally teach people how
37:08
to get their clients to pay them to pay us right so so it's it's kind of
37:16
interesting and I don't know if either of you have thought about that along the same way like the the pre-sales webinars
37:22
are not always necessarily a literal demo of the
37:28
totally totally it ends up yeah that's why I like leaving the uh script pretty
37:33
opened like having that initial container but then like really like having the conversation be led by the
37:40
questions that the pre-sale is coming to you with uh because then it kind of changes the tone and like any
37:46
expectations you might have had uh kind of goes out the window as they're presenting their story their use case
37:53
and you can kind of get in touch with all right what is it that they actually are asking what is their actual problem
37:59
that they're trying to solve and how does our product fit into that in a way
38:06
that is honest and transparent and like you don't need all these 50 workarounds
38:11
to make this happen no like it can do this it doesn't do this but that's a great feedback you know what I mean like
38:18
pre-sale calls just present this awesome opportunity for being super transparent about like hey our audience is typically
38:23
like going to do this with our product sounds like you're looking to do that you know and just being really like
38:29
straight up with them up from the from the uh front of it yeah I find that the
38:35
generally the pre-sales need is not that they necessarily want a demo of the product they want to know how it was
38:42
going to meet their very specific requirements and even if your product
38:48
can't do it very often if you're experiened um and this says a lot about the person doing the calls you can
38:55
signpost them to maybe a complimentary product so yes they can use your plugin
39:00
for 80% of the functionality and they can use it with this other plugin for the rest which you've tested with and
39:06
that kind of thing so hopefully you can still meet their needs in a positive way um instead of like just trying to put a
39:14
square peg in a round hole and it's not going to work which is always a problem
39:20
so but I love the way you both have such specific audiences um so with give it's
39:25
the charity people so you know that increasing the um donations and fundraising is a real priority for them
39:33
and with Amber it's the accessibility and that's the priority for them because I don't kind of have that in the same
39:39
way people are much more diverse and um I love what you were saying about the
39:45
audits that you do for people after the sales and in fact Matt also commented and said how they help make the product
39:51
more sticky and they increase renewals and so I've kind of had that challenge for our products how can we show that
39:59
extra value and help them with their websites when we don't necessarily know what their priority is so what we do is
40:07
at about 11 months so a month before the renewal we offer them a kind of what we
40:12
call a plug-in health check where we offer to look at how they're using the plug-in and make recommendations and
40:20
this is by email rather than a call at the moment but it's interesting hearing your stories because that must be much
40:26
more effective when you know so much about them yeah you know I wonder too though
40:33
because I was thinking about this earlier when you were saying you haven't done a lot of the onetoone pre-sales
40:38
because you have a hard time knowing if they're just going to buy the single site or like a a multi-site license or a
40:44
more expensive license and I wonder if there's a way that you can I'm very into
40:50
like data right like if you have someone's domain which you have from their email address um there's some crms
40:58
that could that do this or you could even like cross reference like data from somewhere else to try and see like with
41:05
some businesses you can actually get what it thinks their annual revenue is like what range it's in and and maybe
41:12
from their domain alone you could sort of assess if this is an e-commerce store
41:18
or like maybe the number of products like asking them how many products are in your store and somebody who
41:24
identifies that they have you know 500 or a thousand plus products
41:30
well that right there is somebody who's probably going to invest more in plugins and somebody who has
41:36
five that's really interesting you know what we could do is look at the Domain
41:41
to identify are they a website owner or are they a developer aent agency because
41:48
we've our customers are about 5050 between the two but our high value customers the vast majority of course
41:55
are building multi multiple websites and coming back for multiple projects so we could easily see if they're like um
42:02
something design or something in their domain it's fairly obvious isn't it so yeah that that's an interesting idea
42:09
yeah we have rules in our CRM where um we do ask people in certain instances to
42:16
identify themselves and we'll ask like government Education Agency like those sorts of things um but we also have
42:23
automated rules where if they come in Via a different way if they've got like a dog or doedu right like we can tag
42:29
their industry pretty quickly off that but I feel like if you added a you know
42:35
a question right like are you an agency owner right or do you work at an agency or something like that might even help
42:41
you so you don't have to do all of the manual work if you know um especially if you had it on a
42:47
form like the pre-sales questions form and then you know okay these are the people that we want to get on a call
42:52
with and you could screen them with that one question you know yeah and you could do it under the guise of asking them um
42:59
like what is their level of technical knowledge because that is relevant to pre-sales isn't it if they're a
43:04
developer you're going ideally you would answer in a different way to if there's a hobbyist designing their first web
43:10
press site yeah absolutely I love that and
43:16
being able to track that as you're having conversations too I love my spreadsheets as well as Matt and being
43:23
able to see like who you're talking to and just being able to have that report to say like a number of uh you know the
43:29
actual we we have a good healthy split at give as well like agency folks as well as nonprofits it's kind of a a
43:35
middle split um but that is also a validated assumption um through these
43:40
conversations that we've had with folks that we're actually able to validate yes these are who our customers are that
43:46
we're actually talking to and getting some insights from and it's very different what those insights look
43:52
like so we're about at the end of our our time so I think it'd be good to
43:57
transition into what our best advice is for new product owners people who have
44:03
not done pre-sales calls and webinars um Amanda do you want to start off what's
44:09
your advice for people who are starting to think about doing these sure so given
44:14
everything we've talked about today I think the most important thing to consider or just to hold close is your
44:22
why staying close to your why uh and and the who you're serving um your who
44:30
you're what you're why the reason why you're showing up to work each day you
44:36
know and the best way to stay close to that why in my opinion is to have these
44:42
conversations whatever way that is showing up for you whether it is actively listening even just in emails
44:50
and tickets and taking the extra steps to make sure that you've got a really good feedback loop in process in in
44:55
place uh taking the step towards uh one-on-one calls whether that looks like a pre-sale
45:01
Arena on a very selective basis or uh after purchase and these customer
45:06
interviews um or audits um just opening up opportunities giving your team the uh
45:12
empowerment to say like hey this person would be a really good person to talk to um maybe not even opening up the
45:18
floodgates but just having opportunities like that and opening up your calendar for those opportunities at least a
45:25
couple times a week is really beneficial because then you know that you're staying close and you're staying in the
45:31
active listening mode excellent yeah I think my best
45:37
advice would be to think from your customers perspective your potential customer what would help them to get the
45:44
best possible introduction to your product and maximize the chances of buying it and finding success with it so
45:50
that they remain with you and hopefully something good will come of that which may be individual calls it may be group
45:57
calls of course that does need to be balanced against the needs and capacity of your business as well so think about
46:04
what's realistic what your customer needs and then try and come up with something but overall it's definitely
46:10
something that's worth thinking about there a lots of product owners just don't yeah I think my my best advice is
46:18
kind of going back to what I was saying about how we hadn't done a webinar because I just kept thinking it had to
46:23
be perfect and so I'm I'm a little bit like just try it once don't you don't have to plan a ton assumingly you have a
46:30
website that shows your product right you can just get on and do that and then go from there and see how it goes tweak
46:37
if needed and try it again um so I think my best advice is just go for
46:43
it excellent well before we finish let's give some positive feedback for Amanda
46:49
uh Amanda is such a pro I learned so much from her thanks for sharing with us today Amanda absolutely so that's from
46:57
again and um well that's a wrap and thank you for joining us next week we're
47:02
going to discuss podcasting as a marketing tool for product businesses with special guest Matt mados although
47:09
I'm told we're not allowed to call him Matt because there are too many mats around so we'll see how that
47:16
goes yep and of course special thanks to post status for being our green room if
47:22
you enjoy these shows do us a favor hit like and subscribe on YouTube share it
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47:34
appreciate that uh and most of all we hope to see you here next week bye
47:40
bye