lead generation Archives - FastSpring eCommerce Solutions for the Digital Economy Fri, 19 Dec 2025 04:04:50 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 EP36: The Hidden Science of Email: Authentication, Deliverability, and Trust https://fastspring.com/blog/the-hidden-science-of-email-authentication-deliverability-and-trust/ Thu, 31 Jul 2025 14:00:00 +0000 https://fastspring.com/?p=30567 Hank Hoffmeier of Kickbox explains why email deliverability is no longer “set it and forget it” and how to fix common email campaign killers.

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]]> Email marketing is often hailed as the highest-ROI channel — especially for SaaS and digital product companies. But what happens when your emails don’t even make it to the inbox?

In this episode of Growth Stage, we speak with Hank Hoffmeier, email deliverability evangelist at Kickbox, about how authentication, verification, and deliverability impact your bottom line. Listen to learn:

  • Why deliverability is no longer a “set it and forget it” process.
  • How to fix common mistakes that are silently killing your campaigns.

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Transcript

Jesse Paliotto (00:04)

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Growth Stage podcast by FastSpring, where we discuss how digital product companies grow revenue, build meaningful products, increase the value of their business. I’m your host, Jesse Paliotto. I love being part of the community, and I love bringing the best of the community to you here on the podcast. Today we have with us Hank Hoffmeier from Kickbox. I’m so pumped to have him here. Email marketing is often hailed as the highest ROI channel for marketing, especially in SaaS and digital businesses.

But what happens when your emails don’t even make it to the inbox? So in this episode, we’re going to talk with Hank. He’s Director of Operations, but the email deliverability evangelist, more importantly, at Kickbox, about how authentication, verification, deliverability impacts your bottom line. So we’re going to learn why deliverability is no longer a set it and forget it process and how to fix common mistakes that could be silently killing your campaigns and communications. Hank, thanks so much for being here today, man. I really appreciate it.

Hank Hoffmeier (00:59)

Yeah, thanks for the invite. It’s exciting to be here and talk about email marketing and how it’s a crucial role for any type of company.

Jesse Paliotto (01:06)

Absolutely. I know we were joking for a second before we hit record that it can sometimes feel like the dark art off in the corner of like, how does that all happen? So today we’re gonna reveal the dark arts or whatever. I don’t know. Something like that. ⁓ Can you just to get us kind of into it, can you talk a little bit, why is email still such a high R— ROI channel? If I can spit that out, especially for SaaS companies or digital companies.

Hank Hoffmeier (01:31)

Interestingly enough, I like to do videos almost every day on various social media platforms, short form, and I did one this morning and it was a, did you know, and it was, did you know that email marketing, the first marketing email was sent in 1978 and made $13 million. And I was encouraging people, it’s Monday, but you might not make $13 million, but send an email. Yes, it is the marketing channel of choice by people that know what they’re looking at when it comes to numbers. Just the most affordable, provides the highest ROI,

and most importantly, and this is coming out more and more, I’ve heard it over the last few years, but more importantly, I’ve heard it in the last few months at conferences is it’s an owned audience. You own your audience. Of course you have to upload it to a platform to send emails, but you can take— it’s portable. If you’re on social media and you do something wrong or don’t do something wrong, but you get reported, you can have your account suspended, banned, or killed. You just lost that audience. It’s called rented land. A lot of people do marketing on rented land. On Facebook,

you know, if you’re running ads and then doing posts and boosting your posts and you get your account suspended, you just lost that audience. With email marketing, Like I said, you own that audience. You could stay in touch with them. You can make it feel like a personalized one-on-one conversation through the use of personalization and merge data. And it just, to me, it’s a no brainer to either just get started or go back and revisit what you’re doing. If you feel like that has fell off of a cliff or something.

more more I have these conversations and get people excited about bringing email back into their platforms and their marketing efforts again.

Jesse Paliotto (03:06)

Yeah, I’m curious like, has there been any changes over the last few years? Has anything kind of modified or is it still the same game as it was from 10 years ago? And is there anything that like founders or marketers should be thinking about like, hey, this is how.

Hank Hoffmeier (03:23)

there’s been changes and then there’s a lot of fundamentals that people don’t even know about. mentioned like dark arts and people don’t know. And oftentimes I go to conferences and I talk about the basics and getting things set up and doing it right so that you are successful right away. And it amazes me how many people in the audience are new to email marketing or have been doing it for a while, but just don’t know some of the things that I end up talking about. And when I started at,

Eye Contact, which is a sister company to Kickbox, both owned by Ziff Davis. You know, I went into account management. said, I know how email works, right? You get a list of subscribers, you create an email, you send it you make money. It’s not that easy. You mentioned it. First, your email needs to get to the inbox. It needs to be viewed. And first and foremost, you need to have a valid email address to send to. And that’s where Kickbox comes in is we validate email addresses.

Now lot of times people say, OK, I’ll upload a list where I’ll connect it to my HubSpot and validate my email addresses or HubSpot said, hey, my list is old, may have a lot of email addresses that are no longer valid, and they’re going to recommend that I go to kickbox to clean my list. And that happens. And sure, by all means, do that. But the missing link, as I call it, is verifying it when it first comes in. Let’s say you have a sign up form.

A lot of your audience probably have has a website. Maybe you have a sign up form or you’re looking to add one. You should be doing that on the fly. If I fill out my the form on your website and I put hank at g nail dot com and I spell it with an N by mistake. I finger it right. The form, if set up correctly with an API, can say, did you mean Gmail and automatically allow them to correct it? Or if I type in Hank FG.

At gmail.com and I didn’t mean to put the FG and it’s an invalid email address. It’ll say this is an invalid email. Just please try again. Custom like Citibank Major League Baseball and Reddit use us in that manner. Not saying only big companies can do that. We also have some partners that work with us to work with WordPress forms with gravity forms, small companies, and they’re able to do that. You can use the API. Anybody can use the API, but first and foremost.

Validate your email addresses, then decide if you want to use what’s called risky email addresses like disposable email addresses. Those are on the rise. That’s one thing that’s changing. Then there’s role email addresses like admin at and marketing at now. Why is that dangerous? If somebody signed up for marketing at whatever company.com, maybe I signed up for your email using that email address. And then three months later I leave the organization and then you, Jesse, you’re checking the emails because you got that new.

responsibility and you say I didn’t sign up for this email. I don’t remember it. You market a spam or you know unsubscribe from it. It’s up to you and the type of business you’re in whether or not that’s important and it also depends on other things as far as your engagement rates. But those are things to look for. Disposables, the role addresses and then there’s the free like do you want to accept Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft or do you not? Do you only want B2B domains? You might see that you may fill out a form and will say please provide a business email because you tried using a Gmail.

That’s another thing that providers like kickbox and other ones that do validation offer is the ability to filter those out on the fly if you want to, or in a report. Next is email authentication. And a lot of people forget this and years ago, maybe it wasn’t as important and you didn’t really have to do that. What is email authentication? It is basically showing these email providers or the recipient servers that you are safe, secure and trustable.

Jesse Paliotto (07:05)

Mm-hmm.

Hank Hoffmeier (07:06)

And I’m to go into detail here because the first one is SPF and it’s not something you put on your skin to protect you from sun damage, right? It’s called sender policy framework. Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (07:10)

Yeah, bring it.

I wanted to ask you about this because I feel like these terms

get thrown around and I’m not sure people always know truly what they are. So yeah, do this. This is great.

Hank Hoffmeier (07:21)

Let’s go through this and try to make it understandable. SPF is sender policy framework. This means let’s say I’m sending emails from hankhoffmeyer.com, but I’m using MailChimp. The recipient server is going to say, this email is being sent by Hank, but MailChimp’s actually sending it. Does MailChimp have permission to send us emails? What it’s asking for. Now MailChimp and other providers, they’re automatically going to do this SPF set up for you. And I contact our sister company who I worked for for 13 years.

Jesse Paliotto (07:43)

Mm-hmm.

Hank Hoffmeier (07:51)

They do this automatically. Now you may have another provider or you have your own server. Just make sure you have SPF set up and that would be in say your hosting provider like GoDaddy. I always mention X it’s well known. You go into GoDaddy and you go into your DNS. If you’re technical, you know what I’m talking about. If not use chat GPT, right? Or ask your email provider. How do I set this up?

And then you’re to go in and put a text record in and it’s going to be the SPF record. It’s going to identify, say MailChimp as a sender for me is what it’s doing to dumb it down. Then there’s DKIM, Domain Keys Identified Mail. Simply said, this means that the email has not been altered or changed during transmission. It hasn’t been hacked. It hasn’t been injected with malware. There’s end-to-end encryption. This is something that your provider, email provider, or you need to set up. Most times your provider will send you this information or it’ll be in your control panel.

Go to GoDaddy, whatever hosting provider you have, enter these DNS records and validate it and you can check it and make sure it’s valid. And then the last one is called DMARC, Domain Based Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance. That’s a mouthful. Really, even though it’s the longest acronym, it basically says, do you have SPF and DMARC set up? mean, DKIM set up. And if you don’t, what do we do with this email? What I always recommend is setting it up and then there is pass, fail, and ignore, right? Kind of.

And I would recommend just doing ⁓ doing no, none ⁓ fail and quarantine is what it would be right. None, rejecting quarantine is the correct terms set up as none. What this does is allow you to see if anybody is actually spoofing your emails. Maybe some company from a foreign country is sending emails on your behalf, trying to steal information from people. You can actually see this.

Jesse Paliotto (09:20)

Yes, ⁓

Hank Hoffmeier (09:35)

And a fun thing is you’ll actually see, Oh, it looks like the dev team is actually sending out a newsletter. We didn’t even know about it. And, know, cause you could see that they’re doing that and what email address they’re using and what domain they’re using, but then you can send it to quarantine or reject. And this is going to be something that’s required. The reason why I mentioned these three is these are required right now from Yahoo, Microsoft, and Gmail. If you don’t have this pretty much your emails are going to going to go to spam.

Now you might have a listener that’ll say, well, Hank, some of my recipients are still getting the email and they’re replying to it. I know they’re getting my email. What do you mean? Sure. If somebody is highly engaged and they’re opening, clicking your emails, they’ll continue to get the email. Now somebody going and going to your website and filling out a form and you’re using authentication for a kickbox. Then what happens is they don’t get that welcome email. They don’t get subsequent emails because it’s going to spam.

Another item you can add, and this is not required, optional, it’s called BIMI, brand indicators for message identification. Now, if you look and say Gmail is the perfect way to describe this, you may see either a logo or like a K for kickbox in a circle, like a red circle. The reason why it would be a logo is because BIMI is set up. Again, you have to have SPFD, Kim, and DMARC. You do have to have a verified domain.

There’s a couple options and it does cost some money anywhere from $800 to $1,500. You may need to have a what’s called a VMC certificate and then to go through this process of verifying you own the domain, right? Which is critical for this. And really what that does is it provides a way for users to trust you in the inbox that your domain showing up. OK, this is Best Buy. This is their subject line. I probably can trust them. I’ll open it. Whereas if it’s just Hank Hoffmeier and Assistant H, can you trust that? Maybe, maybe not.

But those are the authentication methods and things that you need to worry about when it comes to sending emails. Right. And I mentioned Microsoft, Yahoo and Gmail. like to call them “Yahooglesoft,” but we can also say MAGY, which would be Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Yahoo, because Apple and I can mean my phones right here. And let’s say I put it face down. I’m not even looking at it, Jesse, and you send me an email and I’m using the built in email

Jesse Paliotto (11:41)

Mm. Yeah.

Hank Hoffmeier (11:54)

app from Apple, right? And I can use that with Gmail, Yahoo, et cetera. It’s going to count as an open whether or not even looked at my email or not. I mean, never look at your email, but it’s going to count as an open. lot of people like to look at opens as a metric of success. In other words, at 20, 30, 40 % open rate where that’s kind of a almost a dead metric. It’s still OK to look at it. Realistically, you want to look at clicks and make sure that people are clicking your email

Jesse Paliotto (12:19)

Well, let me let me let me go back a paragraph. I just want to make sure that I grabbed that, because that was a lot of sort of dense definitions. But I this is my simplistic way that I heard you. So a ⁓ the SPF is a text file. In your. Domain settings the. Or. It’s the host and then.

Hank Hoffmeier (12:39)

or host that mostly most times is the host. But it could be

on the domain. It just depends on how your website set up nine times out of 10. It’s the host.

Jesse Paliotto (12:48)

And the DKIM is an encryption that’s running in order to make sure that contents are not altered during send, right? Okay, DMARC is essentially a policy that runs sort of if-thens, that if it sees these signals, do this with the email, either let it go through, possibly quarantine it, possibly put it into the spam folder. And then BIMI, in my weird brain, it’s the blue check mark on Twitter.

Hank Hoffmeier (12:54)

It’s making sure there’s encryption, yes.

Yes.

Jesse Paliotto (13:15)

You’re paying in order to get a brand trust signal that shows up right next to your message in the inbox. Is that Jesse’s dummy dumbing it down? is that where? The clip notes version. OK, so this is ⁓ before the Apple thing on the 30 % is a really interesting thing. Let me ask you really quick on a sidetrack before we come back to that. What do you see companies messing up? That’s that’s too negative. What’s the biggest opportunity you see that companies have when it comes to?

Hank Hoffmeier (13:16)

Yes.

Yes. Yeah, I like it. What do we call those Cliff Notes? Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (13:45)

getting what you just said with all those settings.

Hank Hoffmeier (13:49)

When it comes to getting the settings right is they’re not actually implementing it. They don’t have it. They don’t know that they need to implement it and then making sure it’s correct.

Jesse Paliotto (14:01)

Yeah. So just straight up awareness, just knowing that there’s these pieces that need to be put into place. Is the obstacle. Yeah.

Hank Hoffmeier (14:08)

Yep. And there’s a tool. Let me, this is important about my dot email.

If you go there and you recently set up or you want to check your authentication, that’s a good tool about my.email. It will tell you if you have SPF, DMARC and DKIM and even BIMI set up and set up correctly.

Jesse Paliotto (14:27)

that’s a great tip. ⁓ if you’re, you know, shout out to anybody that’s new to the marketing team on the operations team, trying to get a quick read on things, you could go to there and get an immediate readout on your own or potentially even competitors or somebody.

Hank Hoffmeier (14:41)

Yeah, somebody could start in a marketing team and they’re head of marketing and they were told, yeah, we set up authentication years ago or last month. You may want to verify that.

Jesse Paliotto (14:50)

Yeah, does it change over time? Is there anything that would alter ⁓ those settings or once they’re set up they’re permanent?

Hank Hoffmeier (14:57)

Maybe you change the, ⁓ the domain you’re sending from or something like that, usually they’re kind of permanent or maybe you moved from MailChimp to Constant Contact and you never updated your records, right? ⁓ that could be a huge red flag and cause it to fail. And then a lot of people tend to use Microsoft email still.

A lot of times sometimes it’s hard to set up something with what’s called IP lookups because every domain has one or more IPs and I believe that the SPF record holds only about 10. So in other words, if you use it in Microsoft, I think it automatically uses like six to eight, I think. And then if you’re adding five more, it’s going to put you over that limit and it will fail. And there’s workarounds for that. We won’t get into that because it’s like highly technical.

Jesse Paliotto (15:42)

Yeah, interesting. And I know from my experience in SaaS companies, the entire company is often not using the same email platform. So you may have marketing team using MailChimp. You may be having the product team using Railgun or something to shoot out ⁓ system messages. You could be having sales team using other outreach techniques for outbound. So I would say that’s the thing that also strikes me with that is

It’s not just validating one system. It should be across the company, I would guess.

Hank Hoffmeier (16:14)

Yeah, and if you’re using many platforms, make sure you’re synchronizing your unsubscribes because you don’t want to get in trouble there.

Jesse Paliotto (16:20)

Yeah, that’s ⁓ interesting. Yeah. Okay, let’s go back then. Thanks for letting me kind of like circle around for a second there. ⁓ Can you get us back into, so Apple with ⁓ open rates, you’re, and this is going, I’ve seen this in a number of articles, people will talk about this, that your open rate as a metric is no longer as meaningful as it was because your phone is auto opening anything it gets. ⁓ So what do we do with open rate?

Do people still quote benchmarks and say, oh, know, if you’re in this type of business, you should be having a 40 % open rate? Or do you even think about that, or do just throw the whole thing out?

Hank Hoffmeier (16:56)

You can eyeball it and it’s a good way. You know, if your list isn’t holistically changing a lot as a, you know, an informal metric, you know, if you’re steadily in the twenties or going up, then you’re doing well. But if all of a sudden there’s a big drop or a big spike, you might want to look into why that happened. Um, you know, if you added a bunch of, uh, people that may be using Apple, then you obviously know there be some jumps, but most people don’t usually steady grow over time because you should be.

using permission based email marketing. In other words, never buying a list and adding your million email addresses that you purchased because there’s a lot of issues there because not only does Yahoo Google soft require that you have this authentication, they’re also looking at your spam complaint levels. If they’re over 0.3 % or 3 % per thousand of each of these domains, not overall, you will be dinged again. And also

cause what’s called IP or domain reputation damage. The same thing with your bounces, right? And that’s why kickbox is important and validating emails. If you send too many emails to too many emails that are invalid and they bounce again, that hurts your ⁓ reputation as well. And what I’m talking about here is every time you send an email, let’s say I’m using hankhofmeyer.com and I send to a hundred Gmail subscribers. I like to use Gmail cause they’re the most strict with their algorithms, et cetera.

And then over time, 50 % or 50 of them are either bouncing, mark me a spam or worse unsubscribing and even ignoring my emails. That is a bad signal and people don’t realize that. That’s why list hygiene is important. If that starts happening and my credit score is 50, again, I’m going to run into trouble and Gmail, Yahoo, whatever server is going to say, Hank’s not a really reputable sender. Let’s send more and more of your emails.

his emails to the spam folder and that’s what happens. And you mentioned like, what is the biggest thing that marketers either have an opportunity for with authentication, but the biggest overall opportunity is value, right? Making sure that you’re sending emails that your subscribers want that they opted into that’s. Educative, informative or helpful in some way, not what you as a marketer saying, I have the best email in the world and I love it. Everybody else should love it too.

Jesse Paliotto (18:56)

Yeah.

Hank Hoffmeier (19:16)

Make sure you’re sending relevant emails and testing, know, split testing. A lot of these platforms have ways of taking a portion of your list and testing it to see if it’s going to do well because yeah, authentication is important. Verification is important and your IP and your domain reputation is important. I don’t mention IP a lot because usually smaller senders are going to be on what’s called a shared IP like MailChimp constant contact. They have a bunch of IPs that all their customers share.

Jesse Paliotto (19:38)

Mm-hmm.

Hank Hoffmeier (19:43)

But if you’re a huge center and you’re sending millions of emails a day, it might be worth looking into what’s called a dedicated IP, having your own IP address, then you’re holistically responsible for the reputation of that IP address. And how I meant like to mention this is years and years and years ago when spammers would sign up for a service, they would send out spam and it would be the IP reputation that made it an issue, right? Okay. They’re on this IP address. They’re sending spam. Any emails coming from this IP leads block.

Jesse Paliotto (19:51)

Mm-hmm.

Hank Hoffmeier (20:12)

Then they would just say, okay, well I’m leaving this ESP and I’m gonna go over here to this one now and burn their IPs. Then they burn those IPs and they go somewhere else. What happened is there’s been a change. Number one, these providers start blocking people. And then two is the powers that be said, well, let’s start looking at the domain. Okay, if they use this provider and they’re sending crappy emails, that domain reputation is gonna follow you over to this other provider. And that’s what’s happened over time.

Jesse Paliotto (20:40)

Oh, interesting. Thank you. That was a helpful summary because I know I’ve looked at that in the past and tried to track like, why did this reputation, you know, why did it persist? Can you talk a little bit about list hygiene? Because I feel like this kind of gets us into like, if I’ve got 10,000 member list or 100,000 or million, it doesn’t really matter. And I want to make sure that what you’re describing isn’t happening, that people aren’t ignoring, spamming, just throwing in junk.

then know my I’ve heard that you know well you want to clean your list and take away people that are actively not engaged but I’m getting false signals now from my phone or from their phone rather that are auto opening that how do I approach ⁓ hygiene on my list in light of all of that.

Hank Hoffmeier (21:25)

And the advice can be generic and it could also depend on what industry you’re in and how many times you’re sending an email. If you send an email once a quarter versus once a month versus once a week, your timeframes can be different. let’s say average, you want to look at six months. If somebody hasn’t opened and clicked an email in six months, it might be good to put them into a sequence and asking people if they still want to receive your emails.

Now I’ve seen this done well on people that are in our space because we all know marketers know what’s happening. And there’s a newsletter I belong to that every now and then they’ll say, Hey, we all know that Microsoft Yahoo and all these other providers want to see engagement. Please click this link if you want to still receive our emails. I actually got one from a well-known brand doing something similar saying, we noticed that you may not have engaged with our emails in a while.

If you still want to receive our emails, please click this link to let us know to keep sending you emails. Now that was great. Wonderful. The thing I think the mistake they made is I clicked on the link and I went to their homepage. That’s it. Like just dropped on their homepage. You should have a, think in my opinion, have a specific landing page. That’s simple. That just says, thank you for clicking on the link in the email or thank you for letting us know you still want to receive emails from us. Now, if you want to put an offer on that page or put something else, picture of a clown, whatever you want.

Jesse Paliotto (22:31)

Yeah, missed opportunity.

Hank Hoffmeier (22:48)

Just make it so that, like I said, it’s valuable, right? Don’t just drop somebody to homepage and maybe they’re gonna buy something or you were just lazy to set something up. Maybe you do something where you sell something that people don’t buy too often. Like you sell, I used to work with a client that sold reading glasses and also regular glasses. I don’t know if you wear glasses at all or not, but I do. How often would I buy glasses? Maybe the most once a year. Why should I be sending somebody an email once a week, which is what this client was doing?

Jesse Paliotto (23:13)

Mm-hmm.

Hank Hoffmeier (23:17)

We moved to once a month, but then we also started limiting how much promotion was in there. Started providing information like blog posts about organic health for your eyes, how to clean your glasses, repair them, gave them more value to stay in touch with them. So basically my, guess I want to give some advice. Like if you don’t send the emails too often because you say we only send once a quarter because that’s the industry we’re in.

find ways to keep in touch with them and send them an email a little bit more often so that you do have that data and those metrics. And then you use that sequence of emails, send them one email asking if they still want to receive it, waiting a week, two weeks. If they didn’t open that first email, send them a second one. It’s kind of like, are we breaking up question mark, the first one, right? Then they don’t open that. The next one’s like, here’s the divorce papers, right? And then you have some information in there. And then the last one, if they didn’t open the previous two is,

Sign sealed and delivered. We will remove you from now. Hey, maybe email is not your thing. Follow us on Facebook. Follow us on LinkedIn. You know, whatever you want to do. Try to promote that as well, because maybe they’re getting them or they got that last one and they opened it, but they still don’t want to engage with your emails. Maybe social media is their thing. Then follow through and then you can use automation to automatically remove them or manually remove them. The beauty is folks, you can add them back at any time. That’s the thing is they can come back at any time. Some companies just

Jesse Paliotto (24:37)

Yeah.

Hank Hoffmeier (24:41)

Some marketers want to hold onto those email and say, they’re going to open up at some time and we need to be in their inbox even if they don’t open. Because now we also have the AI summaries where Apple is automatically summarizing these emails for you as well. You have to fight that battle too.

Jesse Paliotto (24:56)

Can you talk about that for a second? What does that look like for people that may not have experienced that?

Hank Hoffmeier (25:01)

Right. And there’s no telltale way as to exactly how it’s going to look for each individual person. I can look at my phone right now and any emails that I’ve gotten while we’ve been talking, it would summarize it for me. And it can even summarize that one specific email if I open it at the top. Play around with your copy. Your copy is more important than ever, making sure it’s concise and valuable. This way the summary is going to reflect what you have in your content.

If you’re using a lot of fluff words and you’re not really getting to the point, keep in mind that that could be pulled into the AI summary. And, you know, there’s a lot of jokes going around because some of it’s kind of funny or, know, there’s always there’s been like two I’ve heard where somebody had a death in a family and the summary was just hilarious. And it’s still a work in progress and they’re not going to be perfect, but that is something that we’re all going to have to learn together because it’s kind of newer.

Gmail starting to summarize emails now. If I gave you my work email address and you’re sending me emails, it’s going to summary at the top. Make sure that you’re optimizing for that. It’s almost like SEO and almost.

Jesse Paliotto (26:08)

Yeah, the AI summary with the death of the family, which is very, I mean, it was probably tragic for the person experiencing that. It reminds me of the story from years ago of, I think it was Target’s auto coupons, where I think it was the woman was pregnant and that coupon or something showed up, said, looks like you’re pregnant. Do you need these products? And the husband or somebody didn’t know and that’s how they found out. And it was just like the system is trying to be so smart.

you’ve got to, it can follow you up, you’ve to be smarter than the system.

Hank Hoffmeier (26:42)

Exactly.

Jesse Paliotto (26:44)

The ⁓ with sending. I’m curious because I’ve read recently around long form being making a bit of a comeback and a lot of different channels. Have you seen that with email? know kickbox probably has access to a lot of data. I’m not sure how much of that you can share, but do you have any insights on like in terms of getting engagement so that you do have a list that stays good and people are excited to or at least accepting of receiving your emails?

Is long form back for email marketing or is that largely other content forms?

Hank Hoffmeier (27:18)

It depends. It depends on what industry you’re in, your audience. I do a monthly newsletter and it’s tools I found that made me productive. If I’m going to be speaking somewhere or takeaways from conferences I’ve been to another blog posts I’ve read, that’s a little bit more long form. And I find that people tend to like that. But if it’s something where you’re selling a product and service and it’s you only sell one or two products and service and not like Macy’s where you can put a bunch of products.

Jesse Paliotto (27:48)

Yeah. Yeah.

Hank Hoffmeier (27:48)

It’s not worth having long form. It’s not worth

putting a full product review in an email, maybe put the first two sentences and getting the click to get them to read more. I still think that FOMO wins out, especially with email because we have to get that click through to show engagement, right? Whereas we’re not looking at opens much anymore. ⁓ You could say, Hey, we recently wrote a blog post with the top three ways to whatever.

Right. you can say number one, number two, and then say to read number three, head over to our blog and get them to go over to the blog. Right. You’re giving them the summary, not AI summary, your summary, and then click here to get the third one, which helps with that engagement. I think that people are willing to do that. But to specifically answer the question, it really depends. And also make sure you’re testing and finding out if that’s what and I’m always a fan of polling your audience. Do a survey once a year and ask people.

Jesse Paliotto (28:32)

Yeah.

Hank Hoffmeier (28:39)

Hey, do you generally like longer form content or shorter form content and let them decide. And people tend to say, Oh, well, we know what our subscribers want. No, you don’t. And a lot of times you might get mixed. Then what you can do is say, okay, 50 % of our audience or 49 % of our audience wants long form and 51 want short form. Then you split that audience into two and you put them on two different lists and you react accordingly.

Jesse Paliotto (29:03)

Yeah, testing is always the answer. Like asking and testing. Yes, 100 percent. ⁓ I wanted to ask for a second about regulation or changes or anything you may see coming up in the market around this. I GDPR has been with us for a long time. For those who may not be aware of it, that’s the Europe started ⁓ legal process or not legal process, legal requirement.

For people to opt in and not get spammed to their CCPA, which is the California one which has been more recent I’m curious if you see any other kind of changes standards or whatever else coming down the pike for the world of email

Hank Hoffmeier (29:40)

I think it’s all going to move towards like what GDPR is. And I would just ⁓ plan for that. And the best advice I’ve ever heard from somebody on a legal team was always follow the most strict there is, even if it’s not in your country. In other words, follow GDPR because then you’re covered for CCPA. You’re covered for, you know, Castle Now and, ⁓ and all the other ones that are out there and every state can come up with theirs because the thing is

I can market to someone in the European Union without knowing it. And then I’m on the hook for that same thing with California is if you’re emailing somebody that resides in California and you didn’t follow the CCPA, you can get in trouble. And the punishment’s pretty serious. I would say just make sure you’re doing the right things and make sure that you’re getting those options. I mentioned in beginning, don’t ever buy a list. And more importantly to not more importantly, but also important if you go to say a conference.

and you sponsored the conference and they say, we’ll give you a list for $2,000 of everybody who’s attended. Now, how many of those are going to actually come to your table if you have a table? Not all of them, right? But then you do have the ability to email all of them. But did they specifically opt in to get your emails? Probably not, unless the conference is doing it right. Then you run into the they don’t know who you are. They don’t remember your brand.

They may mark that message as spam, ignore it, or, you know, and all those things and it may bounce. It may have provided a bad email address. That’s why it’s always good to make sure that you have the best possible quality list you can. And with those folks that you meet at conferences too, most times what I recommend is emailing them one off or reaching out through LinkedIn and asking if you can add them to your email newsletter. Not every marketer wants to hear that if they’ve been going to shows and collecting lists of hundreds and hundreds of people.

Jesse Paliotto (31:22)

Mm.

Hank Hoffmeier (31:28)

⁓ I did a talk in Birmingham, UK, and I got the list of people who opted in. I sent them a personalized email video and I personalized each one, 120 people that I got the opt in from. And I just said who I was, gave them the key takeaways and a copy of the deck and a recording of the session afterwards. And I asked them, I have a newsletter. Would you want to sign up for that? I asked them to stay in touch. It was a one and done. And I asked them to stay in touch.

I’m not saying everybody wants to do that, but that is a good tech.

Jesse Paliotto (32:00)

So those were folks that they, because you were a speaker, the event had probably had something that said, you know, if you tick this box, maybe we pre tick this box, you’re giving permission for our sponsors to email market you. But you said, I want more permission than that. And so I’m to do this video tag.

Hank Hoffmeier (32:16)

Yes.

Cause I mean, if I just said, thank you for coming to the IREX conference, the name of the conference, wanted to follow up and tell you more about what kickbox does. They might not remember all that. They may have came to my session, sat in the back and been on their phone the whole time. And they probably might not have remembered me, but majority of them may have. they, and I got a lot of replies, you know, saying it was great and all this, and he appreciated the followup, but there will be those handful that.

Don’t remember who you are. Don’t care who you are. And they’re going to market a spam, unsubscribe, ⁓ ignore it, which hurts your domain reputation, which is what we mentioned. That’s what you’re looking out for most first and foremost, staying legal price. You don’t get fined and then making sure that you are keeping your domain health in check so that your emails get to the inbox.

Jesse Paliotto (33:03)

I love that in the sense that or in multiple sense one is just that it’s true permission marketing because once somebody says actively yes no I want to hear from you I’m going to be more likely now to open your emails because I kind of made this mental decision that I want to hear from you. Also I feel like SaaS companies digital product companies are so many venues where you get that you know when you somebody registers for ⁓ filling out a review they fill out a trial they fill out they attend a trade show they do something where they’re kind of.

kind of giving third party sponsors permission to market to them, but they don’t really want it. And so there’s so many scenarios that, you know, a company may find itself where they technically have GDPR opt in, but do they really have the actual buy in to not get burned in the relationship? And so I really respect, you know, kind of going out and doing the hard work to confirm the relationship.

Hank Hoffmeier (33:54)

Yeah, I like to always say, know, if you’re using a purchase list or using these conference lists, of course you’re to get the flash in a pan moment, right? You may get some sales, you may get some opens, but you’re hurting yourself for the future. Your domain and your IP reputation and your brand reputation is going to start to sink in. Your email marketing efforts will slope downwards and you might even start wondering why, unless you’re listening to this episode, you know why, but if you didn’t, you’ll

Jesse Paliotto (34:01)

Mm-hmm.

Hank Hoffmeier (34:20)

It will start saying, why are open rates so low? Why is nobody clicking our emails? It’s because they’re not getting them.

Jesse Paliotto (34:25)

Yeah. OK, this is a big question. So you can answer to the extent you want. If you could wave a magic wand ⁓ and fix kind of one thing with how most SaaS software, digital companies, do their email, what would that one thing be?

Hank Hoffmeier (34:41)

It’s going to be looking at the program and making sure you’re providing value while sending authenticated emails. That’s simply what it is. And it’s not one simple thing, but yes, just making sure you’re looking at your program and you’re set up correctly as far as setting yourself up for success. First thing is authentication. know, I’m not, mean, sure. Verification is important, but authentication is the king. And then your content and the value you offer is going to be the queen. And after that,

Hopefully everything just goes smoothly after.

Jesse Paliotto (35:14)

Yeah, I love that. ⁓ I think you can we talk for a second. I think you’ve got an offer for the growth stage audience today. We were just chatting for a second before we hopped onto the call. Do you want to talk about that for a second?

Hank Hoffmeier (35:27)

Right. People that come to kickbox and they sign up, they get a hundred free test credits. What I’d like to offer is using growthstage as a coupon code. When you go to purchase credits, maybe after you use the a hundred, if you want to up to you, I want to offer 1000 free credits. In other words, especially if you’re a small company, it would take you a while to get through a thousand free credits. You can test out our integrations, our API upload list. There’s a way to do one. We call it single verification. You can go in and just do one at a time.

Test it out, but yeah, use the code growthstage and get 1000 free credits. I have that set through the end of the year, which is the end of December of 2025.

Jesse Paliotto (36:05)

Awesome. Thank you, man. So much for doing that for the audience. And just to kind of poke at a little bit, because I haven’t used Kickbox yet, although now I’m going to have a thousand free credits to do. The credit is the API validation of the email. So somebody is filling out my free trial form and it double checks. This is a legit email and all of that. that’s actually especially for some for a company that may be either smaller or on the B2B side where there tends to be less volume of lead generation. Yeah, that’s a that could be a substantial runway to get somebody

testing this whole methodology, right?

Hank Hoffmeier (36:36)

Yeah. And we don’t charge for unknown results. There are some servers that may be temporary issues, servers down, or they just flat out refuse to talk to us. It’s called unknown. We don’t charge for those. We also do email deliverability consulting. And if you feel like you have a domain reputation issue or you you think your authentication is not set up correctly and you feel like majority of your, or you know, a majority of your emails are going to spam. We can provide a success plan and strategy to get you back on track.

Jesse Paliotto (37:06)

Man, that is so valuable and I’m not just buttering you up because you’re on the podcast. I’ve just been in numerous scenarios where ⁓ like email deliverability for the marketing operations or sales team can be, you never think about it till it’s wrong. And then all of a sudden it’s a fire and you’re trying to figure out how do I put this out? And so that’s a great shout out for folks that may run into that in the future.

Hank Hoffmeier (37:32)

Yeah, think of it like the credit score, right? You tank your credit score. It takes a long time to come back, right? It takes a while to get down to a low level and it takes a long time to climb back up that mountain. Same thing with email deliverability. Once you know there’s a problem, it’s hard to get back on track again.

Jesse Paliotto (37:37)

Mm-hmm.

That’s so good. Where can people catch up with you, Hank, if they want to ⁓ try and catch you somewhere online after this?

Hank Hoffmeier (37:56)

I always like to say if you search Hank Hoffmeier on Google, I have really good SEO. I show up probably for like the first two pages of results with everything that has to do with me, all my social media channels. The only thing I ask if you’re going to connect on LinkedIn, just make sure you personalize the invite. I have this rule where I don’t accept blind invites, but I’m a marketer, so I will reply and ask you if we’ve met before because I have a bad memory or I’ll offer to have a call with you.

And what’s funny is I keep track of that and I think the metrics still around. I only get a 40% response to that. In other words, it’s just a lot of salespeople trying to pitch me. I even get responses to my reply saying, thank you for accepting my invite. Here’s my sales pitch when I didn’t even accept it. But if you reach out and you say, I met you on the show, I still may actually want to have a call with you because I really covet having a valuable network where I can help you. You can help me and we can have a wonderful LinkedIn relationship together. Otherwise follow me on TikTok, Instagram, all the social channels. I’m always putting stuff out. It’s not all related to email. I do a lot of tips around digital marketing. I’m still trying to get my podcast going again. Hank’s Marketing and Business Tips. There’s probably about almost 300 episodes that are there historically. I hope to definitely get that back up and running and Jesse I’ll have you on too as well.

Jesse Paliotto (39:15)

Oh, I would love that, man. Well, thanks for being here today. I really appreciate it. Thanks everybody else for joining us, for being with us here on Growth Stage. Again, Hank Hoffmeier from Kickbox. Really glad to have him here. I’m Jesse Paliotto. I’m your host. I get to be a part of the digital product community by doing this today, and I’m so pumped about that. And I hope you all have a good week, and we will catch you next time on the Growth Stage.

The post EP36: The Hidden Science of Email: Authentication, Deliverability, and Trust appeared first on FastSpring.

]]> 6 Essential Strategies for Maximizing Conversion Rates https://fastspring.com/blog/6-essential-strategies-for-maximizing-conversion-rates/ Fri, 02 Aug 2024 13:00:00 +0000 https://fastspring.com/?p=29561 Get six conversion rate optimization tips to help increase leads and sales for your SaaS, software, video game, or other digital goods business.

The post 6 Essential Strategies for Maximizing Conversion Rates appeared first on FastSpring.

]]> Once a customer has landed on your website from any marketing funnel, how can you maximize the chances for them to convert?

A good ecommerce website should be structured in a way that successfully communicates product features, value proposition, and market placement while eliminating distractions in order to reduce the time for the visitor to make up their mind.

The goal is to reduce friction in order to make it easy — or easier — to purchase. There are a few simple ways to help make this happen.

6 Tips to Increase Conversion Rates

1. Appearance and User Experience of Your Website

Websites should be easy to navigate, featuring user-friendly, branded color schemes and fonts. They should balance text, images and illustrations, and empty spaces. We recommend following industry and product-specific design trends while keeping your branding in mind.

2. Menu and Pricing Page

Your website menu should be easily identifiable, with a direct link to a product page and a pricing page. 

The pricing page is a key element to the ease of purchase. For SaaS companies, most pricing pages will offer different tiers. Each tier should clarify what features are included.

The goal is to drive customers not just to purchase, but to purchase the most suitable product, which is why sellers should also highlight a “top pick.”

Pricing pages are also where sellers can highlight testimonials, link to FAQ and cancellation policy pages, and display other elements strategic to the purchase. 

Need more pricing page recommendations and examples? Check out our blog for Pricing Strategies to Combat Stagflation or Best-in-Class SaaS Pricing Pages: 2022 Report.

3. Purchase Clicks

Reducing the number of clicks needed to complete a purchase is important for simplifying the buying process. This minimizes the time visitors take to decide by providing a seamless buying journey. 

Some sources say that the fewer clicks, the better. However, this may vary depending on your business. Experts recommend using heatmaps to understand how your audience is interacting with your website and making decisions based on that. 

4. Checkout Process

The checkout process should be simple while also increasing the buyer’s confidence in the purchase. FastSpring offers three customizable checkout options: the web storefront, the popup storefront, and our latest and more native checkout type, the embedded storefront. All checkouts allow you to add a logo, specify the amount of customer information required, and much more.

We process payments securely on your behalf, giving your buyers access to a wide range of payment options to choose from, which are displayed based on their location.

5. CTAs

Clear and strategically placed calls to action (CTAs) are also important. These buttons need to provide a clear indication of the action they will trigger when clicked. 

Single buttons are preferable to multiple buttons. For example, the most successful designs don’t include a “Go back” option but only allow users to move forward in the process.

The placement of buttons depends on what you want the user to see first. Since left-to-right reading people generally read in an F-shaped pattern, and since most users are right-handed, the button should be placed in the bottom right corner if it needs to be at the end of a section.

We recommend encouraging the buyer to make a purchase whenever feasible. Having a Buy button on the homepage — and potentially on every page — is a great way to enhance conversions.

6. Website Localization

Website localization is very important when it comes to targeting a larger audience and increasing the confidence and trust of visitors. 

  • Language Localization: Most sellers will simply route their customers to the localized website based on their IP address. Others will have a menu with the option to select a different language or region. FastSpring allows merchants to customize the checkout language (as well as the language used for buyer emails) in order to provide a localized experience. 
  • Currency Localization: It is important to rely on a partner like FastSpring that will localize the payment experience for your buyers, both on the pricing page (using our Store Builder Library options) and on the checkout (by offering the local currency and relevant payment methods options). 

You can discover more about our language and currency localization options here. 

Ongoing Conversion Rate Optimization

Once a customer arrives on your website, maximizing conversion chances is crucial. An effective ecommerce site clearly communicates product features and value propositions while minimizing distractions. By simplifying navigation, using clear CTAs, and optimizing the checkout process, you create a seamless experience that encourages quick and confident purchases. This approach enhances user satisfaction and boosts conversion rates, contributing to sustained business growth. 

Each business and customer is unique, so continuously A/B test website changes and analyze data to find the best solutions for you.

Not yet benefiting from the award-winning support FastSpring provides for software companies and their customers? FastSpring handles the entire payment process, from checkout to remitting end-of-year taxes for SaaS companies. To learn more about how FastSpring can help you scale quickly, sign up for a free account or request a demo today.

The post 6 Essential Strategies for Maximizing Conversion Rates appeared first on FastSpring.

]]> EP22: Proven A/B Test Winners for B2B CRO https://fastspring.com/blog/proven-a-b-test-winners-for-b2b-cro/ Thu, 11 Jul 2024 13:00:00 +0000 https://fastspring.com/?p=29480 Sahil Patel of Spiralyze explains special considerations for B2B CRO, winning strategies he’s found while helping major clients, and more.

The post EP22: Proven A/B Test Winners for B2B CRO appeared first on FastSpring.

]]> The most common examples of successful CRO tactics provided at many conferences tend to focus on B2C ecommerce, but what are the proven winning tactics you can use in your B2B CRO strategy?

In this episode of Growth Stage, we interview Sahil Patel of Spiralyze about his thoughts on: 

  • Special considerations for B2B CRO.
  • The best way to think about your B2B test data approach.
  • Winning strategies Sahil has found helping clients like BambooHR, Okta, and Harvest with their B2B CRO. 

If you’re scratching your head wondering what you’ll test next with your B2B CRO strategy, don’t miss this episode!

Jump to video.  |  Jump to transcript.

Podcast Full Interview: Audio

Listen on Apple Podcasts
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Listen online or find it on more podcast services.

Podcast Full Interview: Video

Transcript

David Vogelpohl (00:04)

Hello everyone and welcome to the Growth Stage podcast by FastSpring, where we discuss how digital product companies can grow revenue, build meaningful products, and increase the value of their business. I’m your host, David Vogelpohl. I support the digital product community here in my role at FastSpring. And I love to bring the best of the community to you here on Growth Stage. In this episode, we’re talking about a topic that I’m really excited about: proven AB testing winners for B2B CRO, and joining us for that conversation is Mr. Sahil Patel. Sahil, welcome to Fast — I’m sorry, welcome to Growth Stage.

Sahil Patel (00:42)

David, really glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

David Vogelpohl (00:45)

Excellent. Well, thanks for bearing with me while I stumbled over your name there a little bit in the beginning; with a last name like Vogelpohl I should be better at that. But thank you for joining. Yeah. Yeah. I love it. And so for those watching and listening, what I wanted to share with you is kind of what we’re going to talk about today, which is Sahil’s thoughts on the special considerations for B2B CRO (what’s different about B2B versus B2C),

Sahil Patel (00:54)

Hey, we’re here. It’s good.

David Vogelpohl (01:12)

the best way to think about your testing data when you’re doing B2B CRO, and winning strategies Sahil has seen with clients like Bamboo, Okta, and Harvest. And so those are some really meaty B2B puzzles, Sahil. And so I’m really curious about what you’ve seen there. So I’m going to kick it off by asking you the first question I’ve asked every guest, which is, what is the first thing you bought online?

Sahil Patel (01:41)

What a great question. I’m gonna age myself a little bit. Probably it was in the 90s.

Buying stuff was not super common…

It probably was some kind of Star Wars related collectible on eBay.

David Vogelpohl (02:04)

Nice, do you still collect Star Wars collectibles?

Sahil Patel (02:08)

I do, yeah, but I have a decent amount. So there’s like a household cap on adding new Star Wars stuff.

David Vogelpohl (02:16)

I like it. I like it. Is it like one in one out the kind of thing at this point or have you hit the cap?

Sahil Patel (02:21)

Well, it’s pretty close. My kids are into it now, which gives me a little bit of leeway, which means I can get things that are for them, but aren’t really for me.

David Vogelpohl (02:32)

Nice, nice. I like it. Well, that’s a great first thing you bought online story. Thanks for sharing.

Sahil Patel (02:37)

What about you, David? What was the first thing you bought online?

David Vogelpohl (02:39)

The first thing I bought online was a product called Zanfel. It was designed, it is still sold today, but it’s a poison ivy cure. So I was at the end of like a three or four day stint of just being miserable with poison ivy. And I Googled a cure for poison ivy. Zanfel came up and it actually did work for me. It doesn’t necessarily work for everybody, but it was like a magic cure for me. So, late nineties. So yeah.

Sahil Patel (03:03)

And when was this? How early days internet was this? Yeah.

David Vogelpohl (03:09)

I might have done something before that, but that was the first one I remember. All right, cool. Well, let’s switch gears a little bit, kind of get get closer to the topic at hand. Could you quickly tell me about what Spiralyze does and what you do there?

Sahil Patel (03:26)

Yeah, thanks. I’m the CEO of Spiralyze. We’re an A-B testing company. There are 34,000 websites that run A-B tests somewhere on their website. We scrape all of them. We find the best A-B tests in the entire internet, then we run those for our clients.

David Vogelpohl (03:43)

Nice. So you’re detecting the sites that are running those tests. And then how do you know the ones that are best from sites you don’t control? I’m just kind of curious about this.

Sahil Patel (03:52)

Yeah, great question. How do we know which ones are best? Because all we can see is that they run a test and which version of the page, the A or the B, they chose at the end of the test. The first thing. No, go ahead, please, David.

David Vogelpohl (04:06)

So you’re, go ahead. I was gonna say, so you basically detect a test that’s happening and then when you figure out which one won in the end, you mark that as like that was the better one.

Sahil Patel (04:18)

Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. We’re doing those things digitally, but that’s a really nice way to describe it. If we.

David Vogelpohl (04:20)

very cool.

Nice, nice. I like the very simple explanation I needed to understand sometimes.

Sahil Patel (04:31)

We do this thousands of times a day. So what we’re looking for is not kind of one company running one test. If they do it, so what? It’s an anecdote, I’m not running out, tell them, I gotta say, you should go run this test. But for example, if we see 10 companies all run the same test and they converge on an answer, it’s what we call a proven winner. Those are the kind of tests that we like to run for our clients.

David Vogelpohl (04:59)

Right, because things are so specific to a specific company, I guess. So if you can look at multiple data points across multiple companies and find that common factor, you could identify something that would be, kind of in a sense, universally applicable to lots and lots of companies. Is that the gist?

Sahil Patel (05:15)

That’s right. That’s right. And you don’t have to look far to find one. I’ll give you an example of something that’s actionable for everyone listening at home if they say, well, hey, I’d love to try one of these. What have you learned that I could do right away? A great one to try is to show— But here’s the context. We’re talking about B2B SaaS companies.

And the problem many of them have is go to the home page. They have a picture of a happy person at the top of the page. Marketers call this the hero section of the page. This happy person costs you a ton of conversions. It doesn’t tell you anything about the product. It’s boring. And when someone is looking at your website, they’re there to buy software, which is to be really clear. They’re there to feel good about themselves.

They’re looking for product, and they’re somewhere on their buying journey. Some are early, some are ready to buy. That’s where they are. And the answer is, the A-B test I would run is, instead of showing a picture of a happy person in the variant, I would show a screenshot of your product.

And then run that test. Our data shows that just doing that can get you about 12 % more conversions from your website, from the traffic you already get, which is the beauty of conversion rate optimization, CRO. Take the traffic you already have, you run a split test, and you have the data to show whether it works for you or not. And you’re not blindly copying. You’re running the test. You’re not just doing it. But we’ve now seen this test run hundreds of times and has a high, high likelihood of

outperforming the picture of the happy person, that stock imagery of the person with a nice looking shirt looking or peering at a laptop looking at me. Who are all these happy people, by the way? Like what makes them so happy? I guess it’s better than sad people, but happy people don’t really convert that well. Pictures of your product convert much better.

David Vogelpohl (07:23)

Yeah, this debate actually is raging and FastSpring right now, which is like, okay, do we favor product images or people images and what degrees do we do that? Which one’s in the hero? Which one’s not like that kind of thing.

Sahil Patel (07:35)

And what’s the debate? I love that you’re sharing that, because my guess is people who are listening to this podcast are probably inclined to show the product. They get it. They maybe hear some this, this anecdote for me that there’s data behind it. But the reality, the messy reality is they have to then go convince some people internally. They may not be able to unilaterally run this AB test or just make the change. So what’s that? What’s that debate like internally? What’s the other side for the people that are.

in favor of showing more people on the website.

David Vogelpohl (08:08)

I think it connects to what I’ve seen is a shift in marketers mentality around CRO relative to optimizing favoring for emotion versus optimizing favoring for information. I heard this recently at Winter Games, but folks were talking about like people are there to buy products and features, not necessarily the outcome.

And so the outcome to me is an example of an emotion, right? Rest easy, do good at your job because of our product, hit your targets because we’re going to help you do that versus I need an ad network. I need an analytics platform. And so I think internally, what I think is at the root of the debates and many of these debates I’ve been in in the past is the blend between.

optimizing for emotion versus optimizing for information. So that’s my off the cuff version. How do you think about that, Sahil?

Sahil Patel (09:10)

Well, so first of all, thank you for sharing, because I think this is the messy reality of conversion rate optimization. So we don’t operate in a vacuum of a pristine laboratory where the only thing that matters is there’s a data set that tells us you should run this test. We’re human beings with, we come with baggage, good baggage, bad baggage, prior experience, a perspective.

And changing anything in an organization is hard. You have to do the work of selling it. Here’s a couple of ways I might sell it. One is through an analogy. I think the second is putting yourself in the point of view of your audience. And both of them are helpful. The first one I would say is this is sometimes if you want to actually make an emotional win the argument or persuade people through an emotional argument, I’d say this.

Think about, and I’ll ask David, I’ll post it to you. Let’s pretend that I was on one side of this, you were on the other. And I was saying, we need to show more product. And you’re saying, no, we’re giving you motion. I ask you this. Can you think of the last car commercial you saw? What was it? And I’m asking for real. What was it?

David Vogelpohl (10:25)

You’re asking the wrong person. I probably haven’t seen a commercial in like two years.

Sahil Patel (10:28)

Okay, well, think back two years. What was the last car commercial you saw? Okay, Ford. Can you picture the commercial in your mind? Like what was happening?

David Vogelpohl (10:32)

Let’s just say Ford.

It primarily pictures images of the truck that I saw.

Sahil Patel (10:42)

Yeah, if it was an F -150, it shows the truck driving up a mountain, probably going over some water and rocks. Maybe the people are putting their stuff, their camping gear. There’s probably some emotion. Maybe it shows them doing some happy activity that they’re only able to do because the Ford truck got them there. Fair? Is that?

David Vogelpohl (11:02)

But the person is often obfuscated, which you could argue is like that gives you room to be the person in the truck basically. Yeah.

Sahil Patel (11:10)

Yep, that’s right. That’s right. Now, if you reran that commercial and you digitally erased the truck, just think about what that commercial would look like. What would it be? What would you see?

David Vogelpohl (11:25)

smiling people at the beach enjoying their outcome of a trip and a hard to reach place because they had their trucks, something like that.

Sahil Patel (11:32)

Yeah, and you get the scenery, right? You see the camera panning, the bridge, the rocks, the mountain. Now, the little subtitle at the bottom says, closed course, do not try this at home, would make absolutely no sense. And the commercial wouldn’t work. You’d be like, what is this? Is this for a camping? And the emotion is there, but people buy a car. They buy it for a lot of reasons.

functional reasons, emotional reasons, value reasons. And you don’t know on any one day who is going to watch that commercial, just like you don’t know on any one day who’s coming to your home page. But if you wouldn’t run a car ad, I mean, no one in their right mind would run a car ad without showing the car. I don’t know why anyone would, when you put it that way, would anyone do a home page for a B2B SaaS company, not show the product? So that’s the analogy.

David Vogelpohl (12:26)

Yeah.

Yeah, if I was making a web page for a truck, I’d have a picture of the truck in the hero, not a picture of a smiling person. Yeah.

Sahil Patel (12:34)

There you go. Number two, this is the more, I would say, trying to be a pragmatist. Put yourself in the perspective of the random person that comes to your website. You’ve got about one second to convince them to stay. That’s the job of the hero section of the home page. It’s not to sell the product.

It’s not to explain the value of the product. It’s not even to convince them to read and educate, much less convert. Convert here means they maybe click, see a demo.

just to get them to stay. You’ve got about a second. So it can’t be complicated. It can’t be nuanced. And it has to cut through the noise. Your brain processes images faster than words. If you just ask yourself, does the happy person, which, by the way, could appear on any website on Earth, is it going to convince someone to stay? My guess is that FastSpring, you have competitors. Every company does. It’s got to be something that’s going to be to be

I always assume that they’ve looked at five competitors before they get to my home page. There’s got to be something in under a second that tells them, OK, let’s stay.

David Vogelpohl (13:56)

And this is intuitive and it’s interesting to hear how you’re looking at multiple tests, including those you’re not personally running to determine like who’s running these kinds of tests and what is like this universal signal. And that’s interesting to hear about featuring products over people. To dial it in a little bit on the B2B side of the CRO equation, what does that mean to you? Like, what are you optimizing? What are you trying to drive when you…

run a B2B CRO test?

Sahil Patel (14:27)

What I’m optimizing, great question, is can I get more people from the traffic you already get to turn into a sales prospect?

full stop.

Now, let’s unpack what a sales prospect means. But let’s be real simple, crisp definition. Traffic you already have, get more people to turn into a sales prospect.

Sales prospect if you’re a product -led growth company it can be that sign up for that 10 -day free trial If you’re a sales led company it’s Get a demo talk to sales get a quote some variation of it that’s for your highest intent audience. It’s the most valuable audience. That’s what everyone craves. It’s the hand raisers that go Hey, I may not be ready to buy but I’m ready to move towards the purchase

David Vogelpohl (15:20)

Thanks.

Sahil Patel (15:26)

That’s what I focus on. That’s what most of my clients, that’s where the value is, it’s what moves the needle. If you fully optimize that, then you start moving higher up the funnel for things like downloading a white paper, signing up for a webinar, reading some content. You should do all those, by the way. But you should start with the highest value, highest intent conversion on your website. And B2B SaaS, it’s a good idea.

Get a demo slash talk to sales or start your free trial. It’s almost always one of those two things.

David Vogelpohl (16:03)

I’m assuming for those metrics you’re excluding disqualifieds and things like that. Like it’s obviously more than just a form fill. When you think of quote prospect.

Sahil Patel (16:09)

Yeah.

Yeah. You should rate your lift based on the quality of the lift. Getting more lift, I don’t want to say it’s easy because nothing in life is easy, but you can do parlor tricks to just get more form fill. Cut out all the fields. Make it a single field. Sure, you should get garbage. You should track first. Did you get more of your traffic to fill out the form fill? Because if you can’t do that, none of the other stuff matters.

David Vogelpohl (16:40)

You didn’t –

Sahil Patel (16:40)

Once you do that, then say how, go ahead, David, sorry, please, you’re about to ask a question.

David Vogelpohl (16:44)

I was going to say what I didn’t hear you say is like your initial thing you’re optimizing for the primary thing is the softer leads, like the webinar, ebook download type stuff. A lot of folks place a lot of value in that one. We’ll even mention that as the primary thing they’ll optimize for, for B2B CRO. Why didn’t that make your cut for your top KPI?

Sahil Patel (17:07)

It doesn’t make my cut for two reasons. I’m going to put my CEO hat on.

I’ve got a revenue and a profit target I gotta hit. That target is on my back and I wake up every day thinking about it.

demo requests, free trial starts, or account sign -ups is what gets me to my target as soon as possible. It’s the highest intent, highest value, closest to revenue conversion you have on your website. Now, if you fully optimize that and you’re hitting diminishing returns on your A-B testing efforts, by all means, work on those softer, lower intent. Use some marketing speak.

top of the funnel or tofu type of leads. Sure, you should do it. I’m not saying there’s not value. You shouldn’t do that. But always, always, always start with your most valuable, highest intent conversion.

David Vogelpohl (18:04)

Yeah, it makes sense. Like they’re the most likely to emerge as pipeline and bookings. And so even if you’re optimizing those top of the funnel leads, you’re trying to get them to spit out the pipeline and bookings eventually. And if you’re putting too much value on the top of the funnel leads, then you may not even be representing real pipeline and bookings basically. Is that kind of the gist of how you think about it?

Sahil Patel (18:29)

100%, 100%. Let’s also go back to something I love that you raised at the beginning, just a few minutes ago, which is you’re having this internal debate about showing the product versus showing the people. I think if you have to sell people on just running the test, then you have to sell them on the outcome. Like here’s the results of the test.

I think if you are a CRO person, whatever your title is or function, you’re an agency or an in -house, you’re VP of digital, you’re an analyst, at some point you have to go to the senior people and say, we ran this test, here’s the outcome. And we got.

20 % more qualified sales leads. I validated them with the sales VP or the chief revenue officer and she’s thrilled.

Her pipeline is bigger, right? Yeah. Now, no, no, no, please go ahead.

David Vogelpohl (19:20)

So validating the quality of those as well. Right, because if I’m, go ahead.

If I’m only optimizing for raw qualified leads, but they don’t, they’re not quality as the sales team sees them. Cause qualified leads typically follow like a data pattern, right? Or a DQ from a rep. But then behind that, there’s still like a quality layer. And so what you’re saying is that by having the sales leaders validate those leads even further, it can help strengthen the case for why you should go with X or Y variant.

Sahil Patel (19:40)

That’s right.

It’s a, I’ve seen it happen and it’s a cautionary tale. You’re someone that works in marketing. You take a victory lap because you had this huge lift and then the sales leader goes, yeah, but they’re sh*t leads.

takes all the air out of the balloon. It’s not a fun moment.

David Vogelpohl (20:14)

Yeah, so take, so.

Yeah, I have fun in those moments because I learned something I learned. We didn’t work so try the next thing, but I know there’s like that sunk cost fallacy thing. People feel like when they spend a bunch of time testing something and it doesn’t work like all my ideas are bad or my execution was bad. Maybe, but like sometimes it just doesn’t work and like knowing that it’s valuable.

Sahil Patel (20:26)

Of course, of course.

So that’s the first thing. The second thing is.

really your sales team, your revenue team, whatever you want to call them, ought to be the biggest proponents of conversion rate optimization for the website. They are the biggest beneficiaries. In fact, they should be not just willing, but asking to ante up and put their budget towards CRO because they’re the main benefits. What salesperson wouldn’t want 20 % more qualified leads inbound?

Now let’s go ahead, please.

David Vogelpohl (21:18)

Yeah, I mean, that makes sense. Yeah.

Sahil Patel (21:23)

If we contrast that with you, I’m going back to the root question. Why do these type of conversions versus webinar signups? Because I think if you go to the sales leader and say, hey, we got you 20 % more webinar signups, I think he or she first goes, well, great, you got me from 30 people on an average webinar to 20 to 25. I’m not super excited about that. Also, if they say, well, what was the quality of that? Well, it’s going to be.

three months because we know from webinar sign up to drip campaign to nurture to sales demo takes three months and we know like one out of 50 actually turn into an opportunity. Just who’s going to get that excited about it? You got to do it. That’s an important part of the equation. It’s just not where I would start.

David Vogelpohl (22:12)

Earlier you said that sales leaders and salespeople should be the biggest advocates of CRO. I can think of a situation where it makes them very nervous and that is where you’re optimizing around lead gen.

Versus self -serve. Like I worked at a company called WP Engine We had like self -serve signups on the website and then like, you know schedule or demo or get a quote for like bigger services and If you want to you’re gonna test the the heartiness of your team start that debate around how you should change your pricing and packaging page with the blend of self -serve versus Lead forms and that the company was great. Everybody worked with is awesome

But obviously, this creates tension. So how do you think about that? How do you think about that blend in a B2B scenario where you have both the PLG self -serve motion and the sales -led motion?

Sahil Patel (23:07)

Ooh, you’re stepping. You’re opening a door. That’s tough to walk through, but it’s a really good one. Glad you asked it.

And let’s just assume for a moment that’s the right strategy for any particular company. You want to offer both. It fits your business model. I think the first thing is, I think you run different tests on both of those. And here’s why. They have very different down funnel conversion rates.

Because what you’re trying to do most of the time with PLG is make it as easy as possible to sign up and then give people really rewarding, fulfilling experience when they’re trialing your product. And industry average, what I read is somewhere between 8%, 10 % of free trials turn into a paying customer. And if you’re in that 15 to 20, you’re an all star. And I’ve seen some companies that are in like 3 % to 5%.

That’s a very different game versus the sales motion, which trying to do is just get people to talk to sales, but you don’t want to waste the sales team’s time. And you want to be a little bit more discerning with, hey, if you’re Sahil’s laundromat, why are you signing up for this enterprise software package? You’re going to waste my sales team’s time. So very different set of tasks. The first one is almost primarily about removing friction, getting people.

into that free trial as quickly as possible. And on the sales motion, I often run tests that are much more about improving the quality of the conversions so that the sales team goes, hey, my dance card is full of great prospects, real prospects. They’re in our ICP. They want to talk to me. They’re the kind of people I want to talk to. They have the headcount. They’ve got the revenue. They’ve got the problems that we can solve for.

David Vogelpohl (25:15)

If you separate your tasks on a page like that, obviously what’s good for self -serve and what’s good for sales assisted could be two totally different things, right? The best thing for sales assisted is to just delete the self -serve tiles. And the best thing for self -service is also to do that. The other way.

Sahil Patel (25:25)

Yes.

That’s a different strategy. That’s probably outside of CR conversion rate optimization.

David Vogelpohl (25:37)

Well, I mean, I really love extreme examples in business because it shows the tension. And so then obviously the answer is in the middle, right? And so I’m just curious, like if you have seen anything in the clients you’ve worked with or had any observations, it would be helpful about how to think about that tension. Like the way I’ve approached it in the past is, well, look, it’s all a revenue game. How much revenue did the A or the B shoot out? And…

Who cares about the mix of self -serve and sales assisted? So that’s one way I’ve approached it. I’m just curious like how you’ve seen it then.

Sahil Patel (26:15)

Is the question, David, like, how do you decide whether to hide one or the other? I think I lost you there.

David Vogelpohl (26:22)

I think the question is, if you’re a CRO in a scenario where you have both self -serve and sales assisted, what are some ways to deal with your test to get the most value for the company?

Sahil Patel (26:34)

to get the most value for the company.

David Vogelpohl (26:41)

I mean, how do you make the call? How do you know which one won or lost? If you tank the sales team’s leads with a B, that increased the total revenue, do you call that test? Yeah.

Sahil Patel (26:53)

I would. I would. Now, let me say, so let’s take that use case. You run an A-B test, and it shows why you’re getting fewer conversions. The conversions you do get are higher quality. Higher quality mean they fit the ICP, and the sales team says a higher percentage of these are turning into sales accepted or sales qualified leads. I think that’s the scenario you’re talking about. Is that right? Yeah. So first of all, I think most companies will take that all day long.

David Vogelpohl (27:17)

Yeah, basically.

Sahil Patel (27:22)

and I would call it a win.

Now the answer is there’s a trade -off that you have to measure. Is 10 % fewer leads for 10 % more qualified leads better? Most salespeople will take that.

David Vogelpohl (27:40)

What if you got 10 % less everything for sales, but total revenue went up? These are the types of decisions that I feel CROs have to make. And obviously, if you tank the leads for the sales team, that probably means somebody is going to get laid off somewhere along the way. So that’s a bad thing for the business. And then if you increase revenue but decrease the number of people signing up,

Sahil Patel (27:41)

There’s some extreme though that’s not. Go ahead, please.

Yeah.

David Vogelpohl (28:06)

then your total addressable market will start going down. And so these are the pressures I felt in similar roles in the past. I’m just curious, like, if you, how you think about it. We can keep going too. I was just curious.

Sahil Patel (28:16)

That’s a good one. It’s a good one. Here, I’ll answer this one. Let’s keep going. Let’s assume you mean you can actually attribute the change in revenue to that particular AB test. Is that right? That’s what you’re saying? OK. Yeah. I mean, first of all, I would tell everyone to throw just a word of caution. The further you get from the whatever activity you measured in your CRO test, you should take it with a bigger grain of salt. So.

David Vogelpohl (28:28)

Yeah, let’s assume that I get how tricky that yeah.

Sahil Patel (28:46)

you know, the form fill total, I think 100 % attribution, the impact on sales acceptedly pretty strong. Sales qualified lead also pretty strong. Opportunity, yeah, I’d put a lot of stock in that. Now, you know, kind of the value of the deal.

the whether it closed or not and the rate at which it closed, I would want to see a really big effect size before I drew a conclusion. Like a small nudge.

David Vogelpohl (29:15)

And the further you get.

Sahil Patel (29:19)

I would be hesitant to then claim a big conclusion about the impact. Because there’s so many other things that could have affected it. Do a trade show. You got a bunch of better leads. There’s some seasonal affect, all kinds of things.

David Vogelpohl (29:26)

Yeah, that’s a real…

Yeah, it’s a really good point, especially as you get further down the funnel in those metrics. And of course, those metrics get smaller and smaller. So it makes it, yeah.

Sahil Patel (29:44)

Yeah, your n is smaller. Yeah, I mean, a word of gosh, verily is like, don’t take your statistical significance on your conversion, like the form fill, and just assume that that’s true all the way down the funnel. It’s usually not.

David Vogelpohl (30:00)

Yeah, it definitely gets tricky, especially if you have like wildly different pipeline amounts or something per deal, like average deal size is like some whale will come in and you’re like our B1 and you’re like, well, not really. Just look at the op. You just got lucky. Yeah. So,

Sahil Patel (30:12)

is heavily tilted by this one. Yeah. Great point.

David Vogelpohl (30:19)

So that kind of brings up my next question, which what are the benefits or drawbacks of actually using pipeline and bookings? Like if I go to our CEO and ask about some test, he’s always like, well, how much pipeline and bookings sped out the other side of it? And rightfully so. But like, what are some other drawbacks and benefits to using those down funnel metrics?

Sahil Patel (30:38)

Well, I think that the main benefit is it gets the attention of the C -suite and it increases the likelihood that they will invest in CRO activities on an ongoing basis. That’s, I think, the most important thing and the best reason for using what CRO people call down funnel metrics. The impact not just on the form fill, but on sales, qualified lead, activation, account sign -up, whatever those things are, eventually revenue.

And you got to do it, and you should do it, and you shouldn’t shy away from it. I would lead with it, number one. And number two, the more you talk about it, the more you present it, the more space you have to then put caveats and just say, hey, let’s be realistic about what we know and what we think we know is the impact. And some of this is we have to speculate.

or we have to make a lot of assumptions for these realistic assumptions. But I would not shy away from it. When we do, I’ll say when I work with my clients, the impact on pipeline and on revenue is one of the first things we show them.

David Vogelpohl (31:53)

Yeah, it’s so important because there’s the politics of getting your testing invested in, getting the resources you need, the attention you need. And then as you pointed out earlier, kind of selling the results internally. And if your CEO or other leaders are asking about pipeline or bookings, it’s great to lead with that. I like that. Kind of reminds me of the trick of using Google’s PageSpeed Insights to convince your boss your website should be faster. See, Google thinks it’s slow. Yeah.

Sahil Patel (32:19)

Yes.

It’s good. It’s objective. It’s good. And I think that maybe the lesson learned, the actual insight I would tell everyone is spend a lot of time, maybe more than you think you need to, on testing the assumptions behind your estimated impact of an experiment on pipeline and revenue.

David Vogelpohl (32:44)

So earlier, you had mentioned that in your tests you’ve done and the kind of analysis you do of the 30 ,000 sites doing A-B testing, that product images are beating people images. You tend to. Yeah, I get it’s not absolute. Thank you for that clarification. What are a couple of other winning tactics you’ve detected that people could write down and go try on their own?

Sahil Patel (32:58)

They tend to, yes. They tend to.

Yeah, great question. Let’s do some actionable insights that people can take away. The second one I would do is, this is a great one to do on a home page or a landing page, is a quantitative bold claim headline.

I’ll give you an example. We’re in a client’s landing page, and it said something like this. Next gen.

financial reporting software.

It was just so bland. What does next gen mean? It says what it is. There’s no hook. There’s no benefit. It’s soft. I don’t think it persuades anyone. Just as bad as, you know, the number one financial reporting software. Just number one at what to whom? And no one 10x better than everyone else. No one believes that. It’s just not credible. There’s no benefit.

Now a better headline might be like, close your books 20 % faster than with spreadsheets.

I’m talking about this financial reporting software package. It’s specific, it’s quantitative, and it’s believable because it’s clear it’s 20 % better than what. Maybe it’s 20 % faster than using SAP, if you’re allowed to say it. You may not be allowed to say that. This is a great test to run, one, because it doesn’t require a heavy investment to run the test. You don’t have to do a lot of software development or designers or fancy graphics.

And you can run these tests very quickly at a low cost. Number two, it forces you to really articulate what is the value of our product? What is the hook that gets someone to stop scrolling and say, hey, this is the value to me. It’s not the emotion. It’s the benefit. So that’s number one. Number two.

is go on your website and find anything that’s more than two lines, like two line breaks. Turn it into bullet points. We call that skimmability.

David Vogelpohl (35:26)

is the benefit that you feel there? Like I feel like, I guess you’ve seen this in test results, that there’s different schools of thought on this. One thought is there’s skimmers and there’s readers and long form content is good for the readers and bulleted bold content is good for the skimmers. And there’s tension here too, when you create a landing page, cause you’re like, well, wait a minute, some.

Sahil Patel (35:32)

Mm -hmm.

David Vogelpohl (35:52)

I know our technical buyers, they like to read, you know, things like that. How do you how do you think about that? Like that’s that’s a bold claim even even in and of itself.

Sahil Patel (36:02)

So I’ll put some context around it first. I’m talking about a landing page, a home page, product page, not a blog, which is a blog should feel a little bit more conversational, a little bit more prose. You’re trying to get some people to think. But I think for everything else, home page, pricing page, demo request page, solution page, landing page especially.

No one is reading. Exactly 0 % of your audience wants to read. They’re all skimmers. And if you have any doubt about it, just go to YouTube. Go to TikTok. There’s a place for long -form content. It’s very valuable, high engagement. That’s why they call it long -form content. That is not what people are doing on your website. You’re fooling yourself if you think that’s what people want to do. Now.

David Vogelpohl (36:56)

So it’s.

Sahil Patel (36:56)

If you want to put that, I’ll just add a part. If you want someone to skim, and they like, and they want more, then take them to a place with more detail. Put that below the fold. Find a link. Read more here. You take them to your blog page or your detail page. Yeah, there’s a part of your audience that wants that when they’re ready for it. But don’t start there. No one wants a wall of text.

David Vogelpohl (37:20)

So it seems like you’re kind of positioning, and I’m going to paraphrase a little bit, that your home page and pages like that kind of have two jobs, to give you the gist and to point you in the right direction, where.

Sahil Patel (37:31)

Actually, I might change that a little bit. Your home page is there to get people to stop scrolling.

Full stop.

Once you’ve done that, then you do those other two things.

David Vogelpohl (37:48)

Ooh, I like that variation. And then my other follow -up question real quick on your bold claim one, I thought it was interesting the way you described that, you know, close your books 20 % faster. I feel like most people think of bold claims as like representing their scale, you know, over 2 million businesses trust whoever, you know, like that kind of thing over like an outcome oriented bold stat. Did you choose that example like that on purpose or do you think, okay.

Sahil Patel (38:13)

I did. I did. Bolt claims should be a direct benefit to the user. You then support that claim with the copywriting on the page. One of those points can be social proof.

Our data shows bold claim, especially when it’s quantitative and specific, with support. And one of those support things is social proof, like 2 million happy customers, whatever, quadrant leader according to Gartner, five stars on Capterra. Those help people believe the bold claim. But the reverse is not as effective. If you lead with a,

you know, four stars on Capterra and then the sub bullet is close the books 20 % faster. It doesn’t perform as well. Yeah.

David Vogelpohl (39:05)

It doesn’t make sense as a story, even. Yeah. All right, that’s cool. Last question. If someone wants to get in touch or see what you’re up to, how should they do that?

Sahil Patel (39:17)

The best place is on LinkedIn. I post every Tuesday and Wednesday at 7 .30 AM Eastern.

David Vogelpohl (39:25)

Ooh, very scheduled there. I like it. Sounds like you.

Sahil Patel (39:28)

It is, and I try to keep everything short, sweet. You can get something from it in about 60 seconds.

David Vogelpohl (39:37)

Excellent, excellent. Well, thanks so much for joining and sharing today, Sahil. So glad to have you here.

Sahil Patel (39:43)

David, thank you for having me. This is a lot of fun.

David Vogelpohl (39:46)

If you’d like to learn more about what Sahil is up to, you can also visit spiralyze.com. Thanks everyone for joining us on the Growth Stage Podcast. Again, I’m your host David Vogelpohl. I support the digital product community here at FastSpring, and I love to bring the best of the community to you here on the Growth Stage Podcast. Thanks everybody.

The post EP22: Proven A/B Test Winners for B2B CRO appeared first on FastSpring.

]]> B2B Lead Generation: 8 Proven Strategies From My 20-Year Sales Career https://fastspring.com/blog/b2b-lead-generation/ Wed, 03 Nov 2021 18:56:00 +0000 https://fastspringstg.wpengine.com/?p=22463 B2B lead generation is more than just presenting prospects with fancy features and benefits. For example, not long ago, we were migrating the subscriptions of a new customer into our system.  This process is normally straightforward, but in this case, we ran into a delay. Even though it wasn’t our fault, the delay meant this […]

The post B2B Lead Generation: 8 Proven Strategies From My 20-Year Sales Career appeared first on FastSpring.

]]> B2B lead generation is more than just presenting prospects with fancy features and benefits.

For example, not long ago, we were migrating the subscriptions of a new customer into our system. 

This process is normally straightforward, but in this case, we ran into a delay. Even though it wasn’t our fault, the delay meant this company might not be able to process existing subscriptions for several days — a poor way to start a relationship with a new software-as-a-service company.

Now, we could’ve told them, “Figure out how to stay with your current provider for another month so you don’t lose revenue while we sort this out.”

But I’m a sales leader, and sending business to my competitor is always an option I’d prefer to avoid.

A Simple Solution: We Called Each of Their Customers

Rather than frustrating our new customer with a delay, we simply looked up how many rebills they had to process in the next few days. 

There weren’t that many, so we just called their customers on our own and asked them to enter their credit card information into the new payment system.

It was a low-tech solution, but it was effective. It showed our commitment to their success, and it kept them from losing revenue (and possibly customers!) as they switched to our payment platform. 

What does all of that have to do with B2B lead generation?

Simple: Success in sales is often about going the extra mile to serve your customers any way you can. Time after time in my career, it’s creative solutions like these that close deals, delight customers, and lock in repeat business for years to come. 

In this article, I’m going to share seven B2B lead generation strategies and tactics that I’ve found to be effective across my 20-year sales career.

Note: FastSpring is the No. 1 merchant of record service for growing SaaS and software businesses. Learn more about how FastSpring can help you grow your business worldwide.

1. Be Incredibly Curious

Many sales reps are often too quick to jump to solutions when instead, they should just be curious. With curiosity, you’ll find out details that will surprise and even benefit you in the sales process.

For example, you might discover that a prospect is on the brink of losing her job if she doesn’t solve her problem. Or maybe you learn she’s on the cusp of earning a nice family vacation if she does.

When you jump too fast to offer a solution, you overlook details that indicate your prospects’ motivations. You also run the risk of losing credibility by recommending a solution that a prospect has already tried. 

2. Measure Your Results

This might sound crazy, but I often think of B2B sales as similar to cooking scrambled eggs. Unless your eggs are 100% cooked, they won’t be any good.

The same can be said about B2B sales. Until you close the deal, everything you do before the sale doesn’t matter. 

A lot of inexperienced sales reps judge their success based on how much work they’ve done — not on the results they’ve achieved. 

A deal that’s 70% cooked is the same as 0% cooked. Whether you’ve spent five minutes or five months on a deal, it’s only when you close that you have something to show for your work.

3. Make It Easy for the Prospect to Buy

You have to make it easy for your buyers to buy — and that’s true even if it means doing something that isn’t in your standard process or scope. 

The story above about importing customer credit cards by calling people to get them to re-enter their information?

Obviously, that wasn’t in our standard process or even part of our normal scope of work. But it gave us an opening to close the deal, so we took it.

4. Leave a Footprint

I often see plenty of salespeople who are afraid to leave a message when they call a prospect. They’ll call someone three times a day yet never leave a voicemail.

Doing that is a lot like the scrambled eggs story I mentioned earlier. By calling or following up without leaving a message, you’re taking an action that doesn’t actually cook your breakfast.

You have to be purposeful with every action you take. That means leaving a footprint. 

Don’t call if you’re not going to make sure someone knows you called. Don’t send someone an email just to check in. Follow up in ways that deliver value for your prospects.

5. Call Everyone

Another way many salespeople miss the opportunity to leave a footprint is by not reaching out to everyone in an organization. 

Let’s say you’re trying to sell to a sales manager, but the only name you have is for a sales rep at the company. Don’t avoid the company waiting on the perfect information. Use what you have and call that rep so you can introduce yourself. 

You don’t even have to ask him to put you through to his manager. Just be curious.

Find out if they have a problem your software solves. Ask for their recommendation for who you should talk to. And ask how he would approach his manager if he were in your shoes.

This is how you get into a B2B prospect — by calling anyone and everyone until you gain some information, then using that information to connect with the right people.

6. Work Together With Marketing

The idea of friction between marketing and sales is completely foreign to me. For most of my career, these two departments have always been lockstep with each other.

Getting sales and marketing on the same page starts with coming from a place of genuine alignment — not KPIs. Both departments have to see themselves as siblings.

When they’re aligned, differentiating between marketing qualified leads and sales qualified leads becomes irrelevant. All that matters is finding and closing more of the right-fit customers.

Some of the most effective tactics for getting sales and marketing on the same page might not sound like rocket science. But they can feel like science fiction when they work.

They’re tactics like:

  • Encouraging sales reps to learn information from a prospect that can help marketers create more effective nurture tracks.
  • Empowering sales reps to act when a customer engages with marketing materials such as blog posts and other content. 

Don’t wait for marketing to engage your target customer. As a salesperson, that’s your responsibility too. 

7. Always Do What’s Best for the Customer (Even When It Won’t Impact This Quarter)

If it’s clear that a prospect isn’t interested in your software, change directions. Pivot to a place of education instead.

This is another area where curiosity comes into play. Start leaning into questions like:

  • What problem is the prospect trying to solve in their business?
  • What are their biggest challenges?

It might be related to the product you sell. It might not. Whatever their issues, be a resource.

You can then send them content created by your marketing team that addresses those issues. Or you could point them in the direction of other people who’ve stood in their shoes and overcome the same problems.

Having your prospects’ best interests in mind might not always lead to an immediate sale. But it can bring them one step closer to trusting you more. 

A year from now, when they are in the market for a product like yours, they’ll remember that you went out of your way to help — even when it wasn’t going to earn you a commission. 

8. Vary Your Stories, and Don’t Give Up!

Finally, a mistake that a lot of sales reps make is that they’ll engage prospects with the same message over and over again. And when it doesn’t get a response, they’ll assume those prospects aren’t interested. 

But it could just mean that the prospects don’t care about that specific message — or that specific message right now.

The most successful sales outreach cascades from one topic to another over time. 

If the concept you’re talking about now doesn’t click, wait a little bit. 

Then, move on to another topic, reach out again, and see if you get a response. 

The next thing you know, a year will have passed, and you’ll find yourself recycling the same message you started with. 

And sometimes, a year later, things will be different, and you’ll get a response this time — because now they have a need.

Never assume that a lack of interest means they’ll never become a customer. Just because they’re not interested today doesn’t mean they won’t be in the future.

So don’t give up!

Note: FastSpring is the only merchant-of-record provider with built-in tools to help you close larger B2B deals. Learn more about our Digital Invoicing and Interactive Quotes, two of our best B2B sales tools.

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