Growing your Sales with Pre-Sales Calls & Webinars

[00:00:14] Katie Keith: Hello and welcome to WP product talk, the place where every week we interview an experienced WordPress product person about strategies, tips, experiences, failures and successes of running a successful and thriving WordPress product business. I'm Katie Keith, co-founder and CEO at Barn2 plugins.

[00:00:34] Amber Hinds: And I'm Amber Hines, CEO at Equalize Digital.

[00:00:38] Katie Keith: And today's topic is growing your sales with pre-sales calls and webinars.

[00:00:44] Amber Hinds: Yeah, I am really excited about this topic, especially because we started experimenting with doing pre-sales webinars a little bit more. So I'm excited to share what we're talking about and hear what you all have been working on and hopefully get some comments from guests.

[00:00:59] Katie Keith: Yep. And we have an excellent guest this week, which is Amanda Gorman from Stella and welcome to Amanda. Thanks so much for coming on.

[00:01:10] Amanda Gorman: Thank you so much for having me.

[00:01:13] Katie Keith: So could you introduce yourself a bit and tell us what you do in WordPress?

[00:01:19] Amanda Gorman: Absolutely, I'd be happy to. So I'm Amanda Gorman. I'm with Stellar WP, Director of Customer Success. And Stellar WP is the home of many plugins. Some of you may be familiar with GiveWP, the Events Calendar, LearnDash, Restrict Content Pro, Orderable, Iconic. I feel like I'm missing one in there, but a whole bunch of family of brands. So we've got a big suite of products that help. folks run agencies or help folks just raise money online, for example. So my role as Director of Customer Success is to listen to the customer and to help my team to listen to our customers and to utilize the feedback that we receive to help our customers to be successful throughout their journey of, you know, maybe even trying to understand the product from the very pre-sales stage to then actually making a conversion of using the free product or a paid product. and then moving on to possibly renewing with us, which is ultimately our goal. So a lot of my attention is focused on earning that renewal and all of the pieces that go into that.

[00:02:28] Amber Hinds: Yeah, that's fabulous. I'm really excited. We're both really excited to have you here and hear some more thoughts about how you all handle that at StellarWP For anyone who is watching, please do take time to write in the chat on YouTube. We will see those comments and we are happy to answer any questions or respond back with you. So I think it might be helpful for us to talk a little bit more about why we're talking about pre-sales webinars or calls. Because I think in WordPress, a lot of product owners, especially smaller products, but even a lot of the larger product companies don't do any sort of sales. They rely on marketing and then they maybe have a demo that is a self-serve demo. Someone can spin up off of their website and then they just expect people to purchase and they don't typically engage with people in a live format. Maybe they have a form where you could submit a pre-sale question that goes to a support help desk software. So I think it's interesting to talk about why this is important and why people might want to think about it. I know for us personally, we've talked a lot about how can we transition from doing one to one sales to one to many sales, which is why we've experimented with some webinars more recently. But Amanda, why do you think it's important for WordPress products to consider doing more of the live interaction with people?

[00:04:04] Amanda Gorman: Absolutely great question. You know, no matter the size of the business, I see value in these face-to-face conversations, whether it is a one-on-one interaction, which I believe is the most valuable because you can get into the real nuance and really understanding the person that you're communicating with and the person that's interested in you. They're investing their time and energy looking into your product. They're spending time with you. That's, and that can be reciprocal engagement. You can have that relationship and that can really be a lasting relationship. I'll speak more on that in a moment, but even with a group setting where you're demonstrating to many different people on a webinar or a group demo experience, you're still having that personal touch where you're presenting a member of your team, showing their face, demonstrating being the face of that product. And that gives an arena for communication to happen that might not happen in a demo experience where somebody is taking the reins and doing something on their own. Of course, there's going to be data, know, telemetry and other kinds of things that you can get from somebody navigating a demo experience on their own. There's lots of information you can glean from that, but you don't necessarily know why. Like, what's the why behind why they're even looking at your product? And I find that those questions, if you can get more and more curious about that, end up fueling everything else that you're doing in terms of product development and support and marketing, because you get a better understanding of who it is you're actually speaking to and have a face to put to that. And it can be challenging when you have a big audience. It feels daunting. You don't want to necessarily open yourself up to talking to everybody. but even the conversations you can have are full of insight. That's one person that represents many, I assure you.

[00:06:02] Katie Keith: Yeah, I think that's a really good point. It's all about putting a face to the customer from your perspective and the company from their perspective. You become real people providing a digital product. And we all work from all over the place and we don't tend to meet customers in person, of course, in this 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 person to person way, even though we're not going to meet in person. And it's also, it's a sales channel that a lot of us don't think about. I know you and I, Amanda, have emailed recently because I was starting to think about it for the first time after seven years of selling plugins. Suddenly it's like, hang on. maybe we could really improve our relationships with customers and increase our sales by doing some sort of pre-sales opportunity for them to ask questions and things like that. either whether it's a call, we should probably differentiate that later in this discussion, actually, calls versus webinars, because they're two different things. So I just started thinking through the options. So I think that's really important for product companies to think about, because it may never have occurred to them. So on that note, sorry.

[00:07:19] Amber Hinds: I was just going to say, I think it's interesting because a lot of product companies have come out of agencies. And we maybe were used to doing sales calls for our agency work. But then I don't know why there's this disconnect where we don't think about doing it, maybe because we're just so sick of doing them. And so we're like, that's why we created a product. So we don't have to do it. But I think today maybe we can. push back on that a little bit and shift people back into that mindset of thinking about the sales of your product sort of similar to maybe you thought about the sales of your services back in the day.

[00:07:54] Katie Keith: That's a good point, yeah.

[00:07:56] Amanda Gorman: Absolutely, 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 who, you you might have in your mind of who you think you're serving and what their needs are, what their problems are. But until you actually talk to them, you might be surprised by what their actual needs are. Oftentimes, you might just find validation of like, yeah, we're on the right track. roadmap looks like we're going in the right direction of what these customers are actually asking for. But I often am surprised by what the actual needs are of our customers.

[00:08:33] Katie Keith: Yeah, well, let's move on to the storytime section where you go first Amanda. Can you talk more about your experience in more detail of pre-sales calls and webinars and the on the brands that you've worked for?

[00:08:50] Amanda Gorman: Absolutely, I'd love to. So I started with GiveWP. I was a customer success manager for a few years and that's where I really got my experience in working with pre-sales and just being face to face with customers. And this was five years ago, four or five years ago. So it was pretty like foreign to say that, hey, we're gonna jump on Zoom with our customers. Like people were like, what? You're gonna do what? So especially from the pre-sale context, we weren't sure what that was going to look like if we 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 really started off like we had to present ourselves to our customers to say like, hey, we're here. Like after they purchase or even in the pre-sales arena, they're reaching out in the contact box and we're not quite understanding what it is that they're asking in their inquiry. You know, like they have lots of questions, like maybe especially those people that write in an essay saying like, I want to deal with this, this, this, this, this, and like having like all of these different feature requests, but like, what's the why? Like, what do they actually want to do at the end of the day? So we started finding those opportunities and opening it up on the website to allow people to book a demo with, it was with me at first. And then our team, eventually grew to have more availability, more time slots and. Those early experiences were so rewarding because it seemed that I was able to find these like pockets of like meeting people at the right time to be able to not only allow me to understand the product more and how we can meet the needs of our customers because I'm having this like real time engagement relationship with these folks on the other side of Zoom. But also for them, they were like, wow, I'm so glad I 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 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 that we can have this conversation. And there were so many like serendipitous moments like that that really like fueled the interactions. And I feel that that closeness really did help us to learn how we can bring a personal touch into these interactions, even on a more broad scale, to develop that relationship so that every time they renew, they're like, oh, I had that conversation with Amanda or with Amy or with Delka. And I am so happy to renew this product because I had such a good experience.

[00:11:27] Katie Keith: Amazing. Yeah, so it really you they actually remember even a year later at renewal time. So that is really great for retention as retention as well as the sales. So Amber, do you want.

[00:11:41] Amber Hinds: I was going to ask a follow up question. Could you describe a little bit for people what those calls look like? How long are they? Have you pre-scripted out a specific, we're going to show them this, this, and this? Or is it very like, hey, we get on, what are your questions? And then I might share my screen as I answer them. How do you handle those, I guess?

[00:12:02] Amanda Gorman: Yeah, great question. with give our audience in particular, we are fortunate to be able to spend half an hour with these pre-sale conversations that book on our calendar because we are not experiencing an overflow like where 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 started, we were just opening up the flood gates to let it happen. And we had quite a few of those 30 minute back to back. And then, you know, it's evolved over the years. And we've found other ways to make that connection with customers and to make improvements throughout this whole experience. But to answer your question, that 30 minutes that we do a lot for whoever we're engaging with from a pre-sale context does have a script in mind, though it does tend to be more organic after the introduction. know, the introduction is so important because it sets the boundary and it holds the container for the time that you're going to be spending with this person. Because you want to make sure that your expectations are heard right up front because I've experienced, we've all experienced where our time can be taken for granted. And we don't want to take our customers time for granted either. So we're reciprocating that expectation saying, I respect your time, you respect my time. We have 30 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 interested in hearing from you and what you need. and it kind of just snowballs from there. I do have slides that we use to kind of show the key features of the product, especially to somebody that is completely brand new, that's just trying to learn like what this product is. I think that can be helpful, but it's also something I don't want to eat too much time, like two to three minutes on that ideally, plus introductions for a total of like five minutes in the beginning is plenty.

[00:13:55] Katie Keith: Have you experimented with group calls or webinars or something where you're talking to customers en masse or have you always focused on the one-to-ones?

[00:14:06] Amanda Gorman: We've done both. So the one-to-ones is how we started and then we started introducing a group demo. So the group demo would be presented a couple of times a week at different time zones to allow for people to join around the world when they're able to. And the group demos are a smaller group. Usually we would see between like five to 10 people joining that. And that would be Definitely more scripted more intended to serve like who's there as a as a whole broad questions usually and then if somebody needs more of that hand holding like I have a really specific use case We'd encourage them for more of a one-on-one

[00:14:51] Amber Hinds: So I'm curious and I'll talk a little bit more about what we do when we do My Storytime. But one of the things we've debated is right now, if someone wants like an individualized call, they have to fill out a form. There's not like a go book a time right here. because my partner, Chris, who does all of those, he gets nervous and he's like, what if my calendar just fills up with these and this is all I'm doing? So do you have any like almost like metrics on Okay. If we look at our Google Analytics, we know that we have like 2 % of our website traffic actually, you know, like, like how would somebody, if you were starting to think about this, how would you figure out what to expect as far as demand on like how many people actually schedule those versus people that see it on your website, but never take advantage? Sure.

[00:15:43] Amanda Gorman: I think it takes a lot of experimentation, honestly, and it depends on the customer base, right? If you have a lot of questions coming into 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 experience to get their answers met before they even need to book a call, right? And even on the calls that you're having, you can provide a demo where they can see a live demo, a recorded demo. or join a webinar to answer some of those questions before needing to get to a one-on-one. As we've evolved and especially as our team has grown and our audience base has grown and as I've been trying to implement this across all of our other brands, this is a one-on-one opening up to all of the customers or all of the pre-sales is not necessarily like the goal. What my goal is is to find those opportunities that are going to be most fruitful. So the pre-sales that are reaching out that are looking at competitors that are very clearly a common use case and they're having some trouble understanding the value. There's lots of cues that can be looked out for in a ticket, in an initial ticket that would present like, hey, I think this might be a good opportunity for a call. Or like you said, having somebody submit a form. so that they're already interested, they're demonstrating that they're putting in time and energy investing in researching your product before jumping on that one-on-one. Because I agree, I think your calendar can get booked up with the same conversation back to back and that's not what you want. I think that was a necessary learning experience that we had at Give to get to the point where we're at now. And it was kind of like learning what the customer is interpreting to make improvements along the way.

[00:17:27] Amber Hinds: Yeah, I think that's so. So the way we've been handling it is the sales calls. My partner, Krista, as I mentioned, you submit a form and then he kind of filters, right? He tries to respond with them via email first. And the goal really for him to have a sales call with someone we're looking at people that want either our 25 side license. or a license that is, we do enterprise licensing, we don't have unlimited, so we'll do like anything that's custom, more than 25 sites. If they want less than that, typically he tries not to have a call with them because he's like, I 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 pricing, that 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 call. And then, and basically for those, and I don't know if you can share any of these numbers, but it's been interesting because I actually asked him today if he had like a thought from this year, like what our conversion rate looked like. And he said that when he has calls with people who want that level of license, which they're usually either agencies for us or like higher ed, sometimes really large businesses, about 30 % of them will purchase right away. like after the call same day or the next day. And then the other ones can take longer. So it's not that they don't purchase or they say no, but sometimes with the price point that we start to get at, which for us it's over 18, it's 1800 plus, and it could be much more since we don't have unlimited sites. He said that he was seeing like some, sometimes it's a couple of months and he has to do multiple sales calls with, um, multiple demos for multiple stakeholders. then the turnaround that we've seen on some of those is that there's a lot of 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 assumption is those people will renew. But have you seen anything with what conversion rates look like off yours?

[00:19:39] Amanda Gorman: Yeah, I can speak to give most because with the some of the other brands were mostly focusing on one on one calls for customer interviews. We're kind of like positioning those one on one calls to be more like the value add of like how is this customer using the product and how can we earn their renewal to make sure that we're listening and all those things for forgive in the pre salary now which we are still doing those one on one demos were typically. waiver between like a 30 to 40 % conversion rate for those folks. And it really does depend on the month and depending the volume that we're seeing. So yeah, I think 30 to 40 % is typically where we're hovering. And I often.

[00:20:23] Amber Hinds: better about our numbers because I was like, man, is that too low? No, I hear from someone else.

[00:20:28] Amanda Gorman: When we have a bigger influx of them every week, we were seeing more of like that 50, even 60%. But that was like when we were seeing more of that volume. And right now we're really reeling it in and like, they're time consuming. These calls, one-on-one pre-sales are very time consuming. So we have been more focusing on what the webinar experience looks like and the group demo experience and being able to just kind of polish our whole pre-sale funnel from a marketing perspective. given all the years of insights that we've had talking to customers.

[00:21:03] Amber Hinds: Yeah. Yeah. That was the last piece that I had for my story time and I could share that. And then maybe you could share your experience, Katie, but we, yeah, we, we do webinars a lot, but they're not really sales webinars, but we decided like, just decided the week before or two weeks before black Friday, I was like, we need to do one the week before black Friday. Cause I was like, let's see what we can do. And so that experiment was here. How that turned out for us. got 157 people who registered. 84 people attended. Almost all of them were already on our email list. When I looked at Zoom to see how they came in, they came in for one of the multiple emails that they got, or there were a couple we promoted it in. We sponsored a newsletter. And so the week before we promoted sponsored content in that newsletter. So they came out of there. But almost everyone was already people on our email list. And then Of those 157, there were 11 purchases. So currently it's about a 7 % conversion rate. I don't know. I'm hoping that there's our Black Friday sale ends tomorrow. So I'm like hoping there'll be more. One purchase the same day, but 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 or it feels like a low 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 purchases versus maybe you know, 30 minutes to get to or something. So.

[00:22:33] Amanda Gorman: Totally, yeah. And LearnDash does a meet LearnDash webinar every two weeks. And we've just been starting to track like conversions there. And I'm seeing like around 17 % conversion rate there. And that's like a big audience. Like there could be like 150 people watching that webinar. So I think, you know, the webinars is a much different experience than that one-to-one. that one-to-one, have a higher, usually typical higher experience of conversion because you're making that 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. But the webinar gets a little trickier to do that. But I think it's still that personal connection and people can present questions that can be answered in real time.

[00:23:18] Amber Hinds: So it seems like we also just go attend a LearnDash webinar and see what their format is. Katie, great experience with pre-sales calls and webinars.

[00:23:33] Katie Keith: this is really great timing for me because in the last month, well actually in the last three weeks, we've done our first two pre-sales live streams. I've been calling them. So we analyzed different ways to do it. And I talked to helpful people like Amanda about the options. And we decided that because of the nature of our customers and products, we should go for a more group setting. That's largely because unlike Amber, we don't necessarily know, we don't know how much the customers like it to spend. Our products are typically relatively low value up to about $129, but most are cheaper than that. And the vast, vast majority of our customers spend fairly low amounts like single site licenses, that kind of thing. And we thought, well, we'd like to do pre-sales for the more valuable customers, but we don't have a way to identify. what license option they're intending to buy when they send a pre-sales inquiry. So we went down the group route instead and we watched other people's webinars that they've done like Lifter LMS do a lot. So we looked at their format and talked to them about how they promote them and things. So we did our first one on the 17th of November, which was the first day of our sale. And we promoted it in various ways, like on the top of our website to the email list, that kind of thing. there was two of us because we thought the kind of conversational format would work. So it was my video, my YouTuber and myself. And it went amazingly. I couldn't believe it. I was we've done lots of preparation. What happens if nobody asks any questions? So we thought, right, we'll demo some products and we got support to tell us what are the most common questions so we could pretend that we'd had questions. But actually, there were loads. We had 50 people. register beforehand, and a lot of them pre submitted questions so we could prepare answers and demos for them and things like that and structure it a bit. But there were loads asking live questions, which I completely did not expect to happen. So it was a bit kind of chaotic in a nice way because we were like, which comments should we do and trying to multitask while doing this webinar, these new quite complex often queries would come in. But it was a really interesting experience because I'd had a lot of doubts beforehand, mainly because we are a multi-product company. We have 23 plugins at the moment, most of which are WooCommerce, but not exclusively. So we don't particularly specialize. And so I was thinking, why would anybody want to watch a live stream about products they're not interested in, just to wait for the one that they are interested in to come up? And we tried to mitigate that by doing an introduction to each product. So if there was a question about a particular plugin, then we would go on the demo site first and demonstrate the plugin to everybody and explain what it does at a high level. So we kind of used it as an opportunity to introduce our products to more customers who may not have been considering that one. But it was interesting what you just said, Amber, about looking at the sales, because I haven't done that yet. And it would be a bit of a manual task, but I'm going to do that. Look at who pre-registered and whether they made a purchase because I haven't done that work yet.

[00:27:03] Amber Hinds: Yeah, I did. did that today. was super, it was super manual. Like I was exported from zoom and then I pulled up everyone who had bought in Edd. But, and I marked, I like went through and I just searched on my spreadsheet. Yeah. Their last name. I mean, what I could be slightly off because that is one thing I've noticed with like, uh, larger license purchases, at least for us is. I only looked for their name and sometimes the person who comes or who gets interested in our plugin is not actually the buyer, which I bet is the same for give at nonprofits. Like they might have a developer or someone who's like, you should buy this. But then like, it's like the accounting department person who actually goes and purchases it. So I, yeah. Yeah. So I mean, like that's the thing that's a little bit harder to track. I think if the person who attended and made the buying decision isn't actually the one who

[00:27:55] Amanda Gorman: Yeah.

[00:28:02] Amber Hinds: completed the checkout.

[00:28:05] Amanda Gorman: Totally. Thanks to Matt Cromwell, we have a wonderful spreadsheet that does an automatic lookup as purchases are coming in to see if they've registered for a one-on-one or a group demo. So it matches in a spreadsheet for us already to say, hey, this person purchased and they registered, that's treated as a conversion. So that's really handy. But then I do have my customer success managers looking through. and saying like, okay, is this the same person? Like when we're seeing 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 awareness, but it certainly is that manual effort for sure.

[00:28:49] Amber Hinds: Okay, that's really cool. feel like we all need to follow up with Matt now. Yeah, it's tell us how your spreadsheet works.

[00:28:56] Amanda Gorman: He's watching!

[00:28:58] Katie Keith: We need a comment

[00:29:01] Amber Hinds: So what else were you going to say, Katie? think I might have interrupted you a little bit.

[00:29:06] Katie Keith: And then we did our second live stream on Cyber Monday. So that was two days ago and it was good, but it wasn't as busy as the previous one. So I think you might have been right doing one before Black Friday. I thought Cyber Monday intuitively would have been busier, but actually it was the other way round. So maybe people would pre-researching. Or maybe just there was a lot of pent up demand because we'd never done one before. So people were curious. So I think now we're going to do one a month starting in January, because there's no point in December and then just keep learning and improving from there.

[00:29:47] Amber Hinds: That is a goal we also set next year. We had had it as a goal for this year and it just didn't happen. Yeah. Sometimes you get hung up on like we we said okay we wanted to do and we identified four different audiences and we were like let's just come up with what we were thinking about was like two to four different webinars that we could repeat and we were planning to do two a month. that are just like sales webinars. Anyone can register for them and they're the same thing that we just repeat throughout the year, but targeted to different audiences. And then we got really hung up on like, okay, we have to create the slides and we have to like write a script and all this stuff. And so it never happened. And then right before 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 of made like two slides, but they were screenshots from our website.

[00:30:40] Katie Keith: No one wants a presentation, do they?

[00:30:43] Amber Hinds: And then we just got on and we have like a website that we use internally when we do demos. And I just like showed how to do some stuff on it. And I mean, I think we got good feedback and people did buy afterwards. I think like I got too much in my head about it has to be perfect. And probably what matters more is just doing it.

[00:31:07] Amanda Gorman: Absolutely, absolutely. I wanted to speak to the group demo experience a little bit and like what happens after that because you'll have the transcript of all of the comments and all the questions maybe that you didn't get to live and that happens at LearnDash quite a bit. We get so many questions in the chat, especially for folks that are brand new coming into the product deciding if it's right for them. And our customer success manager, Channey, she will go through each of those questions, write up a response to them, and then send out an email to all attendees with a list of questions and answers. And I think that extra follow-up is really valuable because not only does it show the attendees that you're actively listening to everybody that posed a question, but you're also giving the person that's doing that on your team an opportunity to really get into the feedback. of like, what is the general consensus of the people that attended this webinar? Like, what are the pain points? What's the confusion? What things can we do on our sales pages to improve our documentation? How can we submit some feature requests or anything that might be going on?

[00:32:18] Amber Hinds: Yeah, you know, actually what's interesting about that when I was looking at my numbers this morning. So we did do a follow up. didn't answer. We were able to get to all of our questions. We didn't have as many. So we didn't include that. But I did send an email out to everyone who had registered with like the Webinar on Demand link on Zoom so they could go watch the recording. And actually more of the people who purchased were people who did not attend. So they had registered.

[00:32:46] Katie Keith: I haven't done this.

[00:32:47] Amber Hinds: did not show up. And originally I was like, I'll just send it. I don't want to spam people who didn't come or whatever. But then I was like, no, maybe they knew they 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 who watched the recording later than attended live. So I think you're right, that follow up to people and not just people who attended, but everyone is really important.

[00:33:14] Katie Keith: Nice, I've written that down, I'll do that tomorrow.

[00:33:17] Amber Hinds: Yeah.

[00:33:20] Katie Keith: So we have a question. So Matt's made a comment about his love for spreadsheets. also he's got a question for Amanda. I'd love to hear about Amanda's 30 minute fundraising audits to post purchase webinars are so helpful too.

[00:33:38] Amanda Gorman: Yes, yeah. So this is specific to GiveWP. So we offer a 30 minute fundraising audit for folks that purchase a pro plan or agency plan. So it is geared towards the higher tier plans where they're investing, you know, $4.99 to $5.99 for their plan for the year. And these customers benefit from this audit to be able to take advantage of this one-on-one call that is after they've purchased. We typically send out our emails for this audit. three months after they've made a purchase is like when we really start to let them know that this would be a good opportunity to take advantage of it. We let them know in the beginning that it's there because it's a value add to their purchase. But the most people benefit is when they're further into using the product and they have some real actionable insights for us as well as we have for them. Because they've already implemented some forms and they might be looking at ways to optimize their fundraising experience and we can provide them with ways to optimize the way that donors flow on their websites from our experience and working with other customers that are doing similar work in the similar industries. So we provide lots of customer examples and some strategies for improving story, for the messaging that they're putting on their donation page, even the positioning of their donation button. Sometimes people hide their donation button and it's really hard to find in their main navigation or somewhere on their website. So we help them kind of like sort through all of these like key strategies. And especially for folks that are managing a nonprofit website that have very limited time, limited resources, they really find value in this because they can get a lot of improvements in a short period of time and go make those changes and see real changes.

[00:35:35] Amber Hinds: Yeah, we do something similar, although it's much closer to the purchase point usually, where at our top two tiers, it includes a 30 minute accessibility strategy call. it's interesting because a lot of times it's not really about how to use the plugin. Sometimes people ask questions about things they've seen 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, do 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 those pre-sales webinars, that's one of the things we've been talking about with our goals for next year with these webinars is trying to come up with, not necessarily just how to literally use the product, but talking to people about how they can use the product strategically, if that makes sense. Like building service, like in the case of agencies, like building accessibility services around our product or using it to grow recurring revenue or those sorts of things. And so I think like that's where having those face-to-face conversations, like circling back to WordPress product, or just don't always frequently do this. You start to hear like where the pain points for people or even... The few people we've had canceled this year when we follow up with them, like sometimes they've said, well, I bought it last year and I was hoping I could figure out how to sell accessibility more and I couldn't. so now I'm not right. And we're like, okay. So we need to literally teach people how to get their clients to pay them to pay us. So, so it's, kind of interesting. And I don't know if either of you have. thought about that along the same way. The pre-sales webinars are not always necessarily a literal demo of the thing.

[00:37:28] Amanda Gorman: Totally, totally. ends up, yeah, that's why I like leaving the script pretty open, like having that initial container, but then like really like having the conversation be led by the questions that the presale is coming to you with. Cause then it kind of changes the tone and like any expectations you might have had, it kind of goes out the window as they're presenting their story, their use case, and you can kind of get in touch with. All right, what is it that they actually are asking? What is their actual problem that they're trying to solve? And how does our product fit into that in a way that is honest and transparent and like, you don't need all these 50 workarounds to make this happen. No, like it can do this. It doesn't do this, but that's a great feedback. know what I mean? Like pre-sale calls just present this awesome opportunity for being super transparent about like, our audience is typically like, going to do this with our product sounds like you're looking to do that, you know, and just being really like straight up with them from the, from the front of it.

[00:38:34] Katie Keith: Yeah, I find that generally the pre-sales need is not that they necessarily want a demo of the product. They want to know how it was going to meet their very specific requirements. And even if your product can't do it, very often if your experience, and this says a lot about the person doing the calls, you can signpost them to maybe a complimentary product. So yes, they can use your plugin for 80 % of the functionality. and they can use it with this other plugin for the rest, which you've tested with and that kind of thing. So hopefully you can still meet their needs in a positive way instead of just trying to fit a square peg in a round hole and it's not going to work, which is always a problem. So, but I love the way you both have such specific audiences. So with Give, it's the charity people. you know. that increasing the donations and fundraising is a real priority for them. And with AMBA, it's the accessibility and that's the priority for them. Because I don't kind of have that in the same way. People are much more diverse. And I love what you were saying about the audits that you do for people after the sales. And in fact, Matt's also commented and said how they help make the product more sticky and they increase renewals. And so I've kind of had that challenge for our products. How can we show that extra value and help them with their websites when we don't necessarily know what their priority is? So what we do is at about 11 months, so a month before the renewal, we offer them a kind of what we call a plugin health check, where we offer to look at how they're using the plugin and make recommendations. And this is by email rather than a call at the moment. But it's interesting hearing your stories because that must be much more effective when you know so much about them.

[00:40:31] Amber Hinds: Yeah. You know, I wonder too though, because I was thinking about this earlier when you were saying you haven't done a lot of the one-to-one pre-sales because you have a hard time knowing if they're just going to buy the single site or like a multi-site license or a more expensive license. And I wonder if there's a way that you can vary into like data, right? Like if you have someone's domain, which you have from their email address, there's some CRMs that could do this, or you could even cross-reference data from somewhere else to try and see, with some businesses, you can actually get what it thinks their annual revenue is, what range it's in. And maybe from their domain alone, you could assess if this is an e-commerce store or maybe the number of products, asking them how many products are in your store. And somebody who identifies that they have you know, 500 or a thousand plus products. Well, that right there is somebody who's probably going to invest more in plugins and somebody who has five.

[00:41:37] Katie Keith: That's really interesting. You know, what we could do is look at the domain to identify are they a website owner or are they a developer slash agency? Because our customers are about 50-50 between the two, but our high value customers, the vast majority of course, are building multiple websites and coming back for multiple projects. So we could easily see if they're like something design or something in their domain. It's fairly obvious, isn't it? Yeah, that's an interesting idea.

[00:42:10] Amber Hinds: Yeah, we have rules in our CRM where we do ask people in certain instances to identify themselves and we'll ask like government education agency, like those sorts of things. But we also have automated rules if they come in via a different way, if they've got like a .gov or .edu, right? Like we can tag their industry pretty quickly off that. But I feel like if you added a, you know, a question, right, like, are you an agency owner? right? Or do you work at an agency or something like that might even help you so you don't have to do all of the manual work if you know, especially if you had it on a form like the pre sales questions form, and then you know, okay, the people that we want to get on a call with, and you can screen them with that one question, you know,

[00:42:56] Katie Keith: Yeah, and you could do it under the guise of asking them, like, what is their level of technical knowledge, because that is relevant to pre sales, isn't it? If they're a developer, you're going, ideally, you would answer in a different way to if there's a hobbyist designing their first webpress site.

[00:43:12] Amber Hinds: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

[00:43:15] Amanda Gorman: Absolutely, I love that and being able to track that as you're having conversations too. I love my spreadsheets as well as Matt and being able to see like who you're talking to and just being able to have that report to say like a number of you know, the actual we have a good healthy split at give as well like agency folks as well as nonprofits. It's kind of a middle split, but that is also a validated assumption. through these conversations that we've had with folks that we're actually able to validate. Yes, these are who our customers are that we're actually talking to and getting some insights from. And it's very different what those insights look like.

[00:43:54] Amber Hinds: So we're about at the end of our time. So I think it'd be good to transition into what our best advice is for new product owners, people who have not done pre-sales calls and webinars. Amanda, do you want to start off? What's your advice for people who are starting to think about doing these?

[00:44:13] Amanda Gorman: Sure. So given everything we've talked about today, I think the most important thing to consider or just to hold close is your why. Staying close to your why and the who you're serving. Your who, your what, your why. The reason why you're showing up to work each day, you know, and the best way to stay close to that. why, in my opinion, is to have these conversations, whatever way that is showing up for you, whether it is actively listening, even just in emails and tickets and taking the extra steps to make sure that you've got a really good feedback loop in place, taking the step towards one-on-one calls, whether that looks like a presale arena on a very selective basis or after purchase on these customer interviews. or audits, just opening up opportunities, giving your team the empowerment to say like, hey, this person would be a really good person to talk to. Maybe not even opening up the floodgates, but just having opportunities like that and opening up your calendar for those opportunities at least a couple times a week is really beneficial because then you know that you're staying close and you're staying in the active listening mode.

[00:45:35] Katie Keith: Excellent. Yeah. I think my best advice would be to think from your customer's perspective, your potential customer, what would help them to get the best possible introduction to your product and maximize the chances of buying it and finding success with it so that they remain with you. And hopefully something good will come of that, which may be individual calls, it may be group calls. Of course, that does need to be balanced against the needs and capacity of your business as well. So think about what's realistic, what your customer needs, and then try and come up with something. But overall, it's definitely something that's worth thinking about. This is also product owners just don't.

[00:46:16] Amber Hinds: Yeah, I think my best advice is 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 be perfect. And so I'm a little bit like, just try it once. Don't you don't have to plan a ton. Assumingly, you have a 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 if needed and try it again. So I think my best advice is just go for it.

[00:46:44] Katie Keith: Excellent. Well, before we finish, let's give some positive feedback for Amanda. Amanda is such a pro. I learned so much from her. Thanks for sharing with us today, Amanda. Absolutely. that's from Matt again. well, that's a wrap. And thank you for joining us. Next week, we're going to discuss podcasting as a marketing tool for product businesses with special guest, Matt Medeiros. Although I'm told we're not allowed to call him Matt because there are too many Matt's around. We'll see how that goes.

[00:47:17] Amber Hinds: Yep. of course, special thanks to Post Status for being our green room. If you enjoy these shows, do us a favor, hit like and subscribe on YouTube, share it with your friends. If you have an email newsletter and you want to link to episodes in your email newsletter or share them on social media, we very much appreciate that. And most of all, we hope to see you here next week.

[00:47:39] Katie Keith: Bye. Bye.