OPTIMIZE YOUR FUNNEL BY GETTING INSIDE YOUR BUYERS HEAD

David Skok, Matrix PartnersBlog: ForEntrepreneurs.com

3 STAGES OF A STARTUPAnd how the CEO should manage the company

Search for Product/Market Fit

Scaling the Business

Search for Repeatable & Scalable& Profitable Growth Model

WHY DO WE NEEDA SALES PROCESS?

MyProduct.com

HOW IT WORKSDESCRIPTIONOur product allows you …

BUY NOW!

Only $9,999.99

In a perfect world…

WHY DOESN’TTHIS WORK?

BUYER QUESTIONSAND CONCERNS

BUYING PROCESS

How do we respond?

Design a Sales Process

Breakdown the process into a series of stepsthat we want customers to go through

Website Free Trial Purchase

Results in a Funnel

Not all people entering the first step will get to the second, etc.

Studying Funnel Blockage Points

Suspects Suspects

Suspects

SuspectsSuspects

Suspects

Suspects Suspects

Suspects

SuspectsSuspects

Suspects

The Source of most Problems

Vendor-centric funnel design

Suspects Suspects

Suspects

SuspectsSuspects

Suspects

Suspects Suspects

Suspects

SuspectsSuspects

Suspects

NOT MOTIVATED TO DOTHAT THEY ARE

CUSTOMERS WILL DOSOMETHING

YOU ARE HOPING YOUR

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

JBOSS EXAMPLE

EMAIL ADDRESS BEFORE FREE DOWNLOAD

IMPACT

CUT THE DOWNLOAD RATE BY MORE THAN 10X

FRICTION CONCERNS

Get Inside your Customer’s Head

MOTIVATIONS

FRICTION CONCERNS

Re-design, or try to use what motivates them

JBOSS EXAMPLE• Making $27,000 a month selling documentation

• Solution:• Give away documentation

to get their email address

BUYERTHE

BUYER CENTRIC FUNNEL DESIGN

THE BUYERS JOURNEY

CONSIDERATION

AWARENESS

PURCHASE

THE BUYERS JOURNEY

CLOSEDDEAL

• Moving house• Movers, phones, cable TV, furniture, insurance, etc.

• Just lost my data in hard drive crash• Backup software/service

• Starting a new software project• Dev Tools, etc.

• Performance issues with existing app• APM tools

• Difficulties tracking bugs across multi-tier apps• Bug tracking software

TRIGGERS

Getting to know your Buyer Personae• What are their key business goals?

• How does our product help them achieve those?

• What does their Boss expect of them?

• What pain do they have that we address?• Is it latent pain, or obvious pain?

• How do they describe the pain and what they are looking for?

• (Helpful for messaging)

• Are they out there searching for solutions?• If so, how?

• Is solving this pain a high priority for them?• If not, what features would make it a higher

priority?

• What are the most important features on their checklist?

• What are their reactions to our product/company?

• What will they like? What will they not like?• What are the main questions and concerns

they will have?

• What are the steps in their purchasing process?

• What are their likely decision making criteria?• Who else has to be involved in the decision

(e.g. Business buyer, IT)?

• Who influences them? (Sites, organizations, and people)

• (Helps us figure out how to market to them)

• Other characteristics that are relevant to this purchase

• E.g. Developers:• Don't have a budget• Prefer Open Source, and don't like to pay for

software

MAP BUYERS PROCESS TO YOUR STEPS

Research ShortlistVendors Evaluation ROI &

Justification

Website Free Trial

BUYER

VENDOR

GET INSIDE YOUR BUYERS HEAD

Research ShortlistVendors Evaluation ROI &

Justification

Website Free Trial

BUYER

VENDOR

• How are they reacting as they go through our funnel steps?

• What are they thinking as they go through their process?

OPTIMIZE YOUR STEPS TO FIT

Research ShortlistVendors Evaluation ROI &

Justification

Website Free Trial ROI Calculator

CompetitiveFeatures

Matrix

BUYER

VENDOR

ADDRESS ALL DECISION CRITERIA

AddressSecurity Concerns

3rd PartySecurity Audit &

Whitepaper

BUYER

Developer Sales Processes are different

• Developers are usually not the buyer

A few characteristics of developers

• They like Free and Open Source

• They are cheap, and don’t like paying for things

• Talk to other developers to find out about the latest thing• Highly influenced by super-scale companies like FB, Netflix, Google, etc.• Can be very viral if they love your product

• Early Adopters• Typically see it as cool to work on the latest thing• They are a great entry point for startup technologies

• Have a ton of power over decisions on what goes into the stack

DEVELOPERS ARE YOUR CHAMPION

(NOTE: NOT TRUE IN ALL CASES. SOMETIMES THE DEVELOPER IS THE BUYER)

A GREAT CHANNEL TO YOUR BUYER

ADDS FRICTION TO A STEP WHERE YOU SHOULD BE OPTIMIZING FOR MAXIMUM ADOPTION

COMMON MISTAKE

TRYING TO MONETIZE THE CHANNEL

Who is the buyer?

• Head of Ops

• CTO

• VP Tech or Platform

• Dev Project or Team Leaders

• Etc.

JBoss case: Head of Ops

• Some characteristics:• Job is focused on:

• Uptime (reliability, scalability, security)• Low Latency (great user experience)• Compliance (security)• Data privacy, security, and protection

• Secondary focus:• Doing better on faster product cycles: (Continuous Delivery)

• They want a throat to choke when something goes wrong• Don’t trust that unless they are paying for it, and have a contract

Freemium, Free Trials, Open Source

• The Product is your sales person

• Great strategy• Free products have a chance of going viral

• Greatly lowers CAC, but at the expense of high engineering costs

• Other positives• Addresses the Evaluation phase, and answers a ton of questions

about the product• The customer does the work

The Tricky Thing with Freemium

• Usually have to come up with two great products

Free Product

For-payProduct

• Where things go wrong:

• The first product is not a great standalone offering• Sometimes because of fear of cannibalizing the for-pay product

• The for-pay product is not sufficiently compelling• And the free product remains its greatest competitor

MONETIZING OPEN SOURCE

• Open Core seems to be the way to go

• Two interesting places where there is willingness to pay:• Cloud and SaaS

• Even developers see the power of using SaaS applications and the cloud, and expect to pay for these

• On Prem Deployments• GitHub Enteprise• Jenkins Enterprise

WHAT IS YOUR TIME TO

WOW! ?

Thanks to Gail Goodman of Constant Contact

WOW!

DEFINING WOW!

MiniWow!

A moment where your buyer sees something cool and exciting• Motivates them to continue exploring

Full Wow!

The moment when your buyer gets excited enough to want to buy

TIME TO WOW!

• How many steps?

• How much time does it take?

• How much FRICTION is involved

REMOVE STEPS& REMOVE FRICTION

EXAMPLE

Defining Wow!

• Mini Wow! MomentSees a React component wired up to data

with very little work

• Build a GraphQL Server• Connected to their own data

• Web, iOS and Android clients connect to that data (React/React Native)

• Full Wow! Moment

Buyer Journey (partial)

Validate how easy it is to build a React app

with GraphQLReact

Developer

Play with it(Trial)

Demo/sell to others in company

CTO & Backend

Developer buy in

Play with it(Trial)

Trial involves three hard steps

Set up a GraphQL

Server that fetches our

data

Deploy so it is accessble

by URL

Create React &

ReactNativecomponent

Demo access to

data in iOS & Android

Tons of Friction in first two steps

Build a GraphQL Service

• Have Node installed

• Download a boilerplate project from GitHub

• Npm install some packages

• Run the server

• Open GraphiQL in your browser

• Edit server code

• Switch to GraphiQL in your browser

• Run the query to see the new result

To Deploy to a URL

• Hope your server boilerplate has a production deploy setup

• Identify a hosting provider

• Install the hosting CLI or tools

• Sign up for account on hosting service

• Run deploy command

• Wait for it to deploy

• Open GraphiQL in your deployed server to check it's still working

• Done

Redesign:Wow! in a matter of minutes

Launchpad "new" screen: https://launchpad.graphql.com/new

Ticketmaster ExampleLaunchpad: https://launchpad.graphql.com/9pw9nnkjrExpo client-side example: https://snack.expo.io/B1Bk_-k7-

For more details:Video of Workshop: https://github.com/stubailo/ticketmaster-workshopList of examples: https://github.com/apollographql/launchpad

To view the demo, click here:

https://www.heavybit.com/library/video/optimize-your-funnel-by-getting-inside-your-buyers-head/?23m25s

SUMMARIZING WHAT APOLLO DID:

• Clear understanding of Wow!

• Analyzed Friction and Concerns for buyer

• Redesigned, removing steps and friction

IS IT CLEAR HOW TO GET TO WOW?

WALKME SCREENSHOT

FOR MORE COMPLEX PRODUCTS

TEST USING CUSTOMER SUCCESS(OR EVEN PROFESSIONAL SERVICES)

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

Cloud Bees

Easy Onboarding & Team Collaboration

Access Control & Enterprise Security

High Availability + Elastic Pricing

CTO

Wow!

VP PLATFORM

Wow!

TEAM LEAD

Wow!

RE-THINK THE PROCESS

Source:JoshPorter– DesigningforSocialTraction

CONVENTIONALAPPROACH

SIGN UPFOR TRIAL Wow! CONVERT TO

CUSTOMER

WOW! FIRST, REGISTER LATER Wow! SIGN UP

FOR TRIALCONVERT TO CUSTOMER

USING CHROME EXTENSIONS

AWS MANAGEMENT TOOL TRIAL

Connect to your AWS Account

See Management

Console

I’m not comfortable giving you access to my production App

LOOK FOR STEPS THAT HAVE

DEPENDENCIES ON OTHER PEOPLE

Apollo GraphQL Example

Front-EndDeveloper

Wants to tryGraphQL &

Apollo Client

Needs a GraphQLService

Asks BackendDeveloper

Back-EndDeveloper

Funnel Whack-a-Mole

• Solve for blockage points• As you fix one, the problem will move elsewhere

SILOED THINKING

MARKETING SALESCUSTOMERSUCCESS

PRODUCT

THE NEW FUNNEL TEAM

MARKETING

SALES

CUSTOMERSUCCESS

PRODUCT

USE FUNNEL FLOW CHARTS

Website Free TrialHandleother

questionsProposal

High Level Overview

xx xx xxx xx xx xxx

MicroFunnels where needed

Funnel Metrics

"IF YOU CAN NOT MEASURE IT, YOU CAN NOT IMPROVE IT."

- LORD KELVIN

The Beautiful Thing about Funnels…

Governed by very simple Math

Two Key LeversTopofFunnelFlow

(Quantity)

ConversionRate

BookingsTopofFunnelLeadFlow

ConversionRate

AverageDealSize

Secondary Funnel Metrics

CAC

Time

The Key Metrics

VISITORS

CAMPAIGNS TO DRIVE TRAFFIC

TRIALS

CLOSED DEALS

CONVERSION %

CONVERSION %

OVERALL CONVERSION %

FINAL THOUGHTS

A Common Mistake

First Meeting Selling

Selling is the Worst Way to Sell

First Meeting

Build Relationship Build Trust Consultative

Selling

Build Relationship/Trust:Use something of value to the buyer

First Meeting

Build Relationship Build Trust

ConsultativeSelling

Treat your Buyer like a Bank Account

Make a deposit before you try to make a withdrawal

For more details on all these topics:visit ForEntrepreneurs.com

Presentation Slides:forentrepreneurs.com/heavybit

SAAS EXAMPLEFor those who don’t relate to developer tools

ANALYZE TRIAL STEPS AS THOUGH THEY WERE FUNNEL STEPS

Create a full profile

ImportContacts

Do a search for Prospects

See search results

Imagine a Sales Rep signing up for the old LinkedIn

Wow!

Look for blockage Points

Imagine a Sales Rep signing up for the old LinkedIn

HIGH FALL OFF RATES HERE

Create a full profile

ImportContacts

Do a search for Prospects

See search results

Wow!

For an Outlook/Exchange User

Downloadan App

Installthe App

Runthe App

Create a full profile

ImportContacts

Do a search for Prospects

See search results

Wow!

APPLY BLOCKAGE POINT THINKING

FRICTION

MOTIVATIONCONCERNS

ReplacethedownloadedAppwithrequestforemailcredentialsandgetcontactsfromExchange.

Create a full profile

ImportContacts

Do a search for Prospects

See search results

Wow!

• Concern:• I have tons of very private and confidential emails. I don’t

want anyone to read those.

You want me to give youthe password

to login to my email?!!!

APPLY BLOCKAGE POINT THINKING

FRICTION

MOTIVATIONCONCERNS

ReplacethedownloadedAppwithbyconnectingtoContactsoniOS/Android

Create a full profile

ImportContacts

Do a search for Prospects

See search results

Wow!