If you want to be a leader in the booming SaaS industry, you’re going to have to show up to stand out. With 30,000 SaaS companies worldwide and a whopping 17,000 in the US alone, it’s no secret that the competition is too close for comfort (and probably watching your brand’s every move). To be the first solution that catches the attention of potential clients – and ultimately turns them into paying customers – the marketing team has to be spot on with their messaging.
Is your team guilty of these copywriting sins? If so, have you reached the point of no return or are you able to bounce back?
There’s no better person to lay it all on the line than expert SaaS and sales copywriter, Alex Napier Holland.
During this episode of Evolved Sales Live, host Jonathan Fischer sits down with Alex for the second time to unpack the top five errors marketing teams make within their messaging and what steps your team can take to reverse the damage.
Don't forget to follow us on LinkedIn for more engaging sales insights and discussions! Happy watching!
Meet Alex:
Alex is the Founder & Saas Sales Copywriter of GorillaFlow. After selling SaaS and advertising solutions to multinational corporations, Alex transitioned into copywriting. He has since used results-driven copy to help launch products and boost revenue for more than 90 SaaS and technology brands including Adobe and Salesforce.
Check out the transcription of this webinar episode below!
Jonathan Fischer 0:05
Welcome back. It's once again time for evolved sales live. I'm your host, Jonathan Fischer. Glad to have you back with us again, is anybody listening to our show already knows software as a service makes up one of the most dynamic and fast growing sectors in all of business today. And by current estimates, there are some 30,000 SAS companies worldwide 17,000 of which are based in the US in such a crowded space. One of the biggest challenges for any Sass company is getting the attention of prospective customers and converting those interested prospects into buyers. This is largely a function of marketing communications, literally the words being used, and the copywriting skills of the marketing team serving your company can often make or break your results. Well, our guest today is an expert in the subject. Returning to visit with us once again is Alex Napier Holland. Alex is the founder of Gorilla flow, a boutique business services firm that specializes in creating high performance sales copy capable of driving revenue on autopilot. His work is launched products and boosted revenue from more than 90 SAS companies and technology brands. And his clients include businesses of all types and sizes on five continents, including Adobe and Salesforce. Alex, were stoked to have you on the show once again today. Welcome back.
Alex Holland 1:28
Fantastic. Thank you for having me.
Jonathan Fischer 1:31
Yeah. So real quick reminder to our live audiences. Well, please take full advantage of the fact that we're right here with you. Send in your questions at the end of the show. We're going to have some live q&a with Alex, get you some answers right here right now with our expert guest. So begin sending in your questions into the chat, even as we begin. So Alex, tell us again, for the sake of the guests that have missed you last time a little bit more about what you do in your boutique consultancy there in terms of copywriting.
Alex Holland 2:04
Yeah, so my focus nowadays is pretty much exclusively landing pages and homepage, it's a subtle distinction between the two, and advertising copy. So it's very much around web based content that's designed to achieve a specific goal. Their goal is ultimately going to be revenue based revenue measured. So we're looking to get sales, we're looking to get signups we're looking to get product demos. So essentially, it's a very bottom of the funnel when somebody's ready to convert.
Jonathan Fischer 2:36
Well, and so that's where a lot of the difference can be made in copywriting, it would seem is where folks are in the space and need to be converted, but even getting their attention to begin with all of that all the way down the funnel, there's probably a need for good copywriting skills. I'm sure you would agree. Maybe we could start where where I always like to start what's what are the issues? Now, you know, as an expert in this area of copywriting, you know, you're you're looking at the website of a client that needs your service, you're seeing a lot of mistakes being made. Why don't we start just more generally speaking? What are some of the issues going on that are problematic?
Alex Holland 3:10
I mean, there's a variety of areas we could explore. I think for today, I'd like to focus on one in particular, what I call found a copy. And I want to be really clear here that I don't want anybody to think of found a copy as being a bad thing at all. Found a copy is a necessary stage in any business lifecycle. So found a copy is, as the name suggests, copy that's typically been written by a founder. And I'd say, not just me, but probably most experienced sales, copywriters can pick up on found a copy almost instantly. It's copy that's been written by somebody who's clearly very close to the product. It's typically very technical, very feature oriented. It tells you a lot about what the product does. Although often lacking context and broader awareness, it's typically very lacking in human impact. So why'd why are we doing this? What is the problem that we're trying to solve? What does that problem feel like empathizing the problem, and then selling somebody not just for solution from a technical perspective, but both from an emotional perspective? What is the sense of reassurance that you might be getting, but also almost as well an ideological perspective in some ways, demonstrating that your values as a business are aligned with theirs? So yeah, typically, the structure of a website is often pretty good. A lot of the time when I get out when I get what I call founder copy the underlying structure and journey that the, the founder or CEO is taking somebody on is fairly legit. It's just a way that they talk to the customer and sometimes they haven't spoken to the customers enough. Quite often, though. It's not that they've spoken to the customers but they haven't sufficiently collected and organized. Via intelligence of the customers have given them and then build that into a copy. In a nutshell, by making a lot of assumptions, they assume that when they say, This is what the product does, that somebody will innately know, that's great, that's important. I know I need that. Because they're too close for product. If I was to set up a SaaS business, or if any other copywriter was to set up a SaaS business, we'd probably still experienced this issue. And in fact, actually, it's often really smart, really bright people, they're very engineering. Instead, it's even more because they they high IQ, they're smart, they know the product, they just assume people know things that they don't.
Jonathan Fischer 5:41
Yet, that is a common error among high intelligence individuals is that they, too, that makes so much sense. They don't think it needs to be mentioned again. And a lot of technical jargon can get in the way. So you've broken this down in your work with clients over the years into five copywriting sins. So a little bit of a facetious way to structure the conversation. We're not there's no moral or ethical concern that we're talking about here. But if you really want things to go well, and, you know, I guess if we're talking about, well, that means get the best results, right, that means get the best response in terms of of the digital advertising, it's being done, and getting the highest conversions of those who ended up on your landing pages or websites that first of all, do I have the definition? Pretty close? Would you did you would you add to that?
Alex Holland 6:30
No, that's pretty fair. I think that's pretty fair. I mean, you can a lot of time, people overcomplicate these things, but at the end of the day, it comes down to someone who's landing on an asset, somebody's landing on a page a piece of content, and you have a specific goal that you'd like them to complete their landing here, we need to get from there. How can we get Matt? It's pretty much that simple.
Jonathan Fischer 6:53
That's it. All right. Well, without further ado, let's begin. So you've given me these five sins. The first one is not first, talking to customers. Tell us more about that one.
Alex Holland 7:05
Yeah, as I alluded to, previously, sometimes the problem is that founders or marketers aren't talking to their customers. Sometimes they're talking to their customers, but they're not formalizing that process, and really making use of the conversations, ironically, often find support teams are better at this for marketers support teams are often if you don't regularly speak to your support team, as a founder, I would recommend doing that because they're often a wealth of knowledge. So yeah, essentially, it's about talking to your customers regularly, whether that is via surveys, or which are great for scale. But conversations too, because from a qualitative point of view, you can get deeper answers, you can get more relevant and meaningful answers. And a lot of the time, it's not necessarily sometimes you'll find someone who's using your product in a way that you didn't understand you didn't predict. That's one thing. A lot of times though, customers are using your product in a way that you might expect, that there's value tucked away in how they're using it that you hadn't anticipated. It's a benefit you knew your your day would be enjoying, but they give you Karlovy give you more organic flesh, so to speak, to put onto it, what's the business impact of having that particular feature in our lives, for example. So as I said, it's about having those conversations. But crucially, it's about having some sort of a process by which you collect that information into, say, a Google sheet. And then you break it down. And you could break it down, for example, into different stages of the purchase journey, is this customer talking about how they first encountered our brand. And what they thought is a customer talking about their evaluation process, we compared our product to somebody else's, and why they chose us, perhaps the customer is talking about their ongoing experience using the product, perhaps fair talking about their experience to our customer support team, because that's a really, that's a really big part of a SaaS product. It's not just the software itself, it's the quality of the support as well. And by collecting that information, then looking to create a hierarchy. So you can do it quantitatively. Literally going through all of the quotes and counting how many times people mentioned a particular feature. And from a quantitative perspective, saying this is the most popular feature, this is the second most popular feature. And often that hierarchy in terms of which features your product has, is pretty different to the one that you think customers might have. But then qualitatively, divvying up counting particular words that get us whatever words and phrases and expressions that customers use, and we talk about how much we love our product. And very simply you use that to sell your product. But best sales copy is when you take language and words for customers who love your product use and use that in your website. And we call that a customer voice developing Customer voice.
Jonathan Fischer 10:02
Well, on this show, we've had many conversations with those who have shared the insight that Vive, even the development of the application itself needs to be done in a direct feedback loop with the using public with the buyers. And so it sounds like you're actually saying this needs to be a round table way, the whole marketing team, not just sales, not just feedback from customer coming from the sales efforts. But even the copywriting piece itself should have some direct access to all that as well. Is that kind of a fair characterization?
Alex Holland 10:33
Yeah, I think as I alluded to, in the previous episode, as well, it's difficult as a copywriter to stay in our silo, we end up wandering into development and other areas. And when a company isn't using customer intelligence to inform its marketing, it that worries me quite a lot. Because there's two things either A, they're collecting customer intelligence in terms of their development process, which is crucial in any kind of agile development process. But they're not sharing it with marketing. So we've got a siloed Marketing and Development setup. That's not great. But that's something you can bridge. The bigger worry is that nobody's collecting customer intelligence and a product roadmap is being pulled out of thin air or so to speak, or selling a product roadmap isn't isn't based on customer feedback. And new features that are being developed aren't being put straight in front of customers. So often, what we do as copywriters can potentially point to and diagnose systemic issues within a company in terms of a breakdown between your marketing, development sales in particular, and even support.
Sorry, Jonathan, I just lost you there. I'm sorry. My Apple just came back. Yeah,
Jonathan Fischer 12:06
that's on that's on me. Okay, so yeah, copywriting sin number two. Sounds like it would segue pretty well, from what you just said there. Alex. That said, number two is not first mapping out Who are your stakeholders? Before you even get into that? Tell us more about that. Does that relate to do I have that right? Or am I off base? That that relates to kind of who are the folks that are involved in the whole process? In turn?
Alex Holland 12:31
Oh, yeah, in a sense, I mean, I'm sorry, stakeholders in terms of your client stakeholders. So it's flipping it around. This is one of my favorite topics. So when it comes to b2b and enterprise is another beast for other things to worry about of enterprise, but particularly for just for b2b sales. The big difference between b2b and b2c is that it's multi stakeholder. So back in my sales days, I spent six years in international sales for SAS brands, I have seen sales rep stand up, deliver a great presentation that was designed to the end users of a product and somebody in deployment in it, who their motivation may not have been entirely honest, that person may have just not wanted to deal with deploying and setting up and migrating to a new application, someone in deployment would say, Well, yeah, but can your product diverse? And can your product do that and fro them technical questions about its data, storage policies, for example, and make that sales rep look stupid and ruin the deal? That's one extreme example. But as you know, if I'm trying to sell a product, I'm worrying about the end user and how they use a product. I'm looking at C suite, is this product aligned with C suite strategic goals. C suite don't necessarily care if a product slightly clunky to use, they care about whether it's aligned with a long term strategy, their business, finance department and confirmed concerned about the affordability of a product and crucially from accounting purposes as well. What are the payment terms? I mean, Americans had a change in its accounting legislation or regulations just a year ago, it was mainly driven by SAS brands and recurring revenue, but also compliance or finance as well. legal compliance and then the big one it and deployment. So how is the data stored so many SAS deals get sunk? Because the data isn't stored and encrypted and kept in a manner that meets either their own internal stipulated processes or potentially even legislative frameworks as well, they have by virtue of being in the United States of the European Union, serious pressure to comply with and in terms of compliance with financial and data protection rules that only get stricter and stricter. So from a sales copy point of view, we're predominantly selling To the end user, but we need to think about how do we involve his other people on a journey? And what point will finance or what point will C suite get involved in this conversation? which pages are for them? Which contents for them? How should we talk to those people, we're going to use different language to speak to somebody in C suite, we're going to use different language to speak to an end user. And so just like any sales team would a good sales team maps out each of the people in the buying process, the things they care about, for language for us. And again, sales and marketing are aligned, that sort of conversation should be taking place naturally. But if your website for a SAS brand, particularly if it's b2b, is purely focused on the end user that might get you started, but you're more likely to run into roadblocks later. Again, as a sales guy, what I used to do was identify the people involved in a purchase process in advance. I'd call up with people in deployment in advance and work out their concerns and worries. I've sold to the IT team before I turn up and do my sales demo. Yeah. And so you need to do the same thing of your copy in your content. How can we reach these particular people and get them on board as well? So they don't just sink for products? Because they're not that fussed about the usability? They're not going to be using it directly?
Jonathan Fischer 16:22
Well, is there a similar concern with getting even the overall marketing piece aligned? There are different players there as well, right? There are the folks that are doing the art, there's somebody who's probably in charge of marketing strategically, whether that's a bizdev officer, however they might be structured, in the copywriting kind of comes in, especially in your case, you're coming in as a boutique, you know, a consultant providing this as a service. Are there issues there where there can be friction? Or there's a there can be misalignment?
Alex Holland 16:50
Yeah, absolutely, I mean, less. For me nowadays, in a fairly senior position. Definitely, when you're starting out, I mean, copy should absolutely lead copy comes before anything else copy comes before design is interesting. But actually some pretty big, expensive agencies for don't get this. But we'll spend 3040 $50,000, developing a website. And then they spend 445 $1,000, in copy of the end. And it's as if they're sprinkling, hundreds and 1000s, whatever you guys call them, they're putting sprinkles over their food afterwards of words. You know, we're not talking about words here, we're talking about a structure and a strategy and a journey each for sections, somebody lands on the hero section of a website with a specific set, set of ideas, a specific set of values and problems and a low level of understanding of your product. We want to get to the bottom, feeling stoked, excited, motivated, and crucially like they're dealing with somebody who understands and cares about and respects them. How do we get there? And so before you even think about writing the words, I mean, I always use for building a house analogy. We're not talking about interior design. Here. We're talking about architecture. A good copywriter is an architect, they're designing the foundations for building. So this thing doesn't fall over when there's high wind, in some senses, a high level copywriter, get actually hand over for writing bid to somebody else to do the bidding that we do, but it's valuable is all of this stuff leading up to the writing, the writing is about 2030, probably 30% of what I do now. And as you get more senior you do a bit less writing and a bit more strategy. And I know some copywriters I've networked with who no longer write and just use strategy and outsource and copy. So
Jonathan Fischer 18:42
that makes sense. That makes sense. It's the strategy is what wins wars. And it's not understanding the strategy that makes the big difference in business as well. So you say that the sin number three then is not first to finding the CTA for any given page that kind of speaks to understanding what are the what is the overall strategic purpose in a given application of the copywriting skill. Tell us more about that? What what do you see this code done wrong there? And what do you recommend to fix it?
Alex Holland 19:06
Yeah, this is a funny one. I've got no doubt that there are plenty of people watching this podcast who get this one right off the bat. What is the point of this page? Why does it exist? How do we want people to respond to it? But sometimes, this doesn't come up. People have this loose idea of talking about a product of presenting the product. And they've not actually I asked him okay, well, what's the call to action for CTA? And they say, Well, we haven't really thought about that. And the call to action itself will change the structure, the journey, it will change the tone of the language. It comes down a lot to risk if you're trying to ask somebody to hand over say, for example, $2,000 off the bat versus asking somebody, Hey, take something for a seven day free trial. There's a huge, there's a huge difference in risk there. And there's a lot more In case you go out saying there's a lot more, you're going to have to do a lot more ground, you'll have to cover to get someone comfortable handing over a large amount of cash. This is something fairly easy to fix. It's just well, deciding on a CTA or deciding that you need to set a CTA for each page is fairly straightforward. Choosing your CTA there's more complexity there. It depends upon your business model. Obviously, if it's a self serve SAS, if you're looking at something like a b2c like Spotify or Netflix, it's an absolute no brainer, you're going to give somebody a free trial first, it comes down to the cost to your business as well, if you are giving somebody a free trial, shortly, some ADR AWS fees, which are probably cents, there's no problem with giving a free trial. Obviously, when you're talking about a high level enterprise product where there is inherently a need for onboarding, and for talking somebody through your product, that definitely, you might think about filtering them, you might think about qualifying people and asking questions to identify if it's worth your time dealing with them. Another another actual another issue here that I've come up against when I'm using working with fairly technical products, vary some products for the very good, but you know that if you gave it to a customer, the UX probably isn't its strongest point. And if you throw a customer at a free trial, they might not really understand the benefits for somebody to get the most out of your product, you need somebody to be finished be shown around. Yes, it's a little bit clunky, about and you might not find the best features on my first go round. So in that instance, if you're doing 1015, half hour webinars, again, you might think about filtering too, as well.
Jonathan Fischer 21:50
And I think that that really applies like page by page, as you say, right? Like even even a good strong about me, or About Us page on a website can be sitting there and kind of useless like that, you know, boring three fold brochure on the on the corner table, or it can have some oomph to it if you use it properly. I'm curious what what do you find are some ways you can utilize that page on a website?
Alex Holland 22:14
Yeah, when it comes to about us pages, I think there is a way of talking about yourself and your journey, but isn't self indulgent, but helpful. You can talk about yourself and your journey, people write autobiographies that are helpful to other people. You're saying I've had this journey I've had, you know, this is where we came from. But you focus on problems that drove you to create a product that are relatable to other customers. So using your about us page to build empathy, to be relatable. And again, to demonstrate the values of your business as well. It's not just about you know, bragging or boasting or and definitely not giving people sob stories. It's about demonstrating the DNA, the ethos of your business. So for when people learn about us page, they think well, that's somebody like me, maybe a bit of humor in there as well. That's somebody I'd like to get a beer with somebody I'd like to get a drink with. Just slightly swing back as well. We were talking about CTA is one important thing to bear in mind as well, or one tip maybe we'll be having to CTA is is totally fine. To CTAs for high risk and low risk is very common. One smart tactic one One reason this works well is because when you ask somebody, yes or no. When you say to somebody, do you want to do this? There's one call to action? Essentially, the answers are yes and no. Whereas when you throw two choices at somebody, psychologically, you're giving them a choice one and a choice to some would argue some test suggests they're more likely to pick one of those two. The No, I don't want either becomes a third option at that point. So it could be by the product today, or it could be taken for a free trial, for example.
Jonathan Fischer 24:02
Are there other examples of multiple calls to action on the page?
Alex Holland 24:06
I'll keep it to two, I think there are very studies around this. Three is where it starts to freeze. When it starts to get confusing. You might have three, four or five pricing tiers. But typically I'd stick with two call to actions. You think about it for your customers, you've got the customers who are stoked and excited. They're the ones that are more likely to choose a high risk. And then those that are interested but hesitant, giving them something to slight your remove a risk without making it look like it's a better deal to put people off taking the second high risk option.
Jonathan Fischer 24:40
Yeah, yeah. Well, and you can do this either or close which salespeople talked about for many decades, right? Probably a different level all the way through working people through the funnel like even you mentioned the different rates and tiers of purchasing in on a SaaS product. There could be three to five of those, but usually they got one of them that's kind of highlighted so it still kind of makes it an either or or it's like that one or any of the others, right? It's almost still a binary. Was that do you like that? That methodology? What are your feelings on that as a professional?
Alex Holland 25:08
Yeah, it's interesting. There's things that work and things that I feel some aspects of sass pricing start to make me occasionally feel slightly uncomfortable. I mean, I'm not a SAS founder myself, I understand it's a pretty tough game. I mean, for example, one of the common strategies, you have three pricing tiers, you have decided in advance from crunching the numbers that tier two is where you see most of the growth of your business, that's best for your for you in terms of the customer lifetime value, you'll set a tier one that is slightly less expensive, but has a lot less features. So it's a complete no brainer to go from $20 a month to $25 a month and get all the features. And then you've got $75 a month for something that is it's not it's not a good product, but it will be probably not represented as good value, it will be better, there'll be some customers who might have a legitimate reason for using this particular product. But you deliberately price it highly so that the middle tier seems like the obvious logical choice. I don't know. I mean, I when it comes to pricing, I have opinions on pricing. But
Jonathan Fischer 26:20
we can circle back to some of those here. I think we'll come back to pricing in our q&a, because that is an interesting yeah, I love it. Let's, let's knock out our last two sins very quickly. So covering copywriting sin number four, this is not first considering how your customers will arrive. Customers were I guess we're being a bit assumptive. We're really talking about folks online landing on a page, right? They got there, however they got there. They got there from a paid ad they got there organically. But here they are. And I guess that I guess I already I back my way into that, didn't I? That's this is the very question you're talking about not considering that. Tell us more? Yeah. So
Alex Holland 26:57
it depends. If they're coming from paid adverts, for example. I mean, one of the cars, one of the one of the cardinal sins I did not put down on here, I think this is fairly well known. You should never ever, ever send an advertising customer to your homepage, the difference between a landing page and the home page. A homepage serves a variety of different goals, you've got your menu across the top. And to me, it's a little bit like saying to somebody, Hey, it's my birthday in Chicago, you want to come cool. And that's it. And you're hoping they find your house in Chicago, or maybe a particular street in Chicago to be more accurate, versus landing pages saying it's, you know, 27, South Boulevard, here's a map, I've drawn it for you. And I'm sending recording and pick you up in terms of taking into your goal. So if you're running a paid traffic campaign, at the very least, you're sending somebody to a purpose design page that has no hyperlinks anywhere, the only thing you can do on that page is engaged with a call to action, possibly to call to actions. Ideally, what you're doing in an ideal world, and you probably won't do this straight away. But if your marketing operations become sophisticated, if you have five or 10, different levers that you're trying to pull into, sorry, hit the microphone there. If you have five or 10 levers you're trying to pull in terms of things that people care about. You'll then have five or 10 optimized landing pages that relate to the advert, somebody has clicked on an advert because they care about that very specific thing that was in the advert copy. If you then serve them up a generic landing page, that might work. But if you give them a landing page, if it's finely tuned for that particular sub niche of sub audience that cares about that specific thing, you're likely to get better results. Going back to home pages, which are you know, again, should not be getting paid traffic sent to them. They predominantly coming from search engines, but also referrals. So are people learning there from search queries? If you look at those keywords are learning from those key words suggest? Because again, the two most important things in sales copywriting are problem awareness, and solution awareness. Problem awareness. How aware is our audience even have this problem in the first place? Typically, we don't tend to deal with people the low level of problem awareness, they don't tend to fall into our nets particularly easily and they're very hard to sell to. But we do have a lot of people that have low and high levels of solution. Awareness is somebody understands a problem. And they might have a moderate level of problem awareness, but I can push on that and increase their comprehension of how that problem is affecting their business. There's a bit of variability there, but solution awareness varies a lot. And do the key words that customers are engaging with indicate they have a very strong understanding of who's in the market, who our competitors are. Device keywords imply that they're shopping around for solutions. Am I really know what they're talking about? Or do they have a very low level awareness, they don't even understand various solutions like ours in the first place, that's going to completely change how you talk to your customers, you have to, in some sense, educate them, get them up to stay up to grade, a lot of is just empathizing with the problems are experiencing now, but then you have all the dots to the solution, about half will be different depending on my level of solution awareness.
Jonathan Fischer 30:28
This is this is some high level stuff. I mean, this is not all buyers journeys are created equal. They are they, I mean, people have a different level of awareness, different things that are triggering them to want to buy different ways you're going to make that decision to buy. And I don't think there's very many companies that have all these concerns very well integrated from your the marketing piece to the design development piece, in terms of the website itself, to the work of folks like yourself who are specialists in the language, this is a really good stuff, some very valuable stuff, probably worthy of even more time, but we're going to move on for the sake of time, copywriting sin number five, is not first deciding how to measure success. This is also done very generically, there's a lack of integration often between marketing and the sales team, in terms of what is going to lead to best results. And once again, I think you're going to agree there's a similar need for alignment here as well, that we understand what does success really mean is it clicks, it's not clicks? It's not pageviews? It's not that kind of stuff, is it? It's something much more important than that to the business. And never tell us more.
Alex Holland 31:31
Yeah, I think this is one of the most regularly discussed discussed topics in marketing is the, the need to further integrate marketing and sales. And in some senses, when I bring it up, I almost feel like it's I said, an overdone topic. But it's obviously not because this is still a massive, pervasive problem, we need to keep talking about it. So my background, I spent six years in sales before I shifted into marketing. So I was surprised when I came into marketing, how many people how much more people talk about, you know, vanity metrics may do about revenue, you know, clicks and likes and things, your clicks and likes which vanity metrics, but we've now got another layer and another tier of you know, MQL, for example, marketing qualified leads, more sophisticated marketing metrics. But nonetheless, still not cold, hard cash. Why is that? There's a problem. And there's various reasons for that. Some are cultural, some are technical. But if your business isn't able to, I mean, you can't fully quantify the real business impact of every campaign. But if you can't take some sort of stab at that, I'll be pretty worried. Yeah, I mean, a lot of this is, first of all, deciding from a strategic point of view, what are we measuring? How do we measure success, and obviously, cash is one of them. But then setting up the tools as well. And it's really surprising. Like a lot of people in your podcast, I could drop stories and name names, but I wouldn't do that, because that wouldn't be professional. There are some very, very big companies that you would imagine really have their stuff together that don't have basic tracking setup. And something else I wanted to say slightly earlier was that I don't want any base to intimidate your customers. In a sense, when I talk about more campaigns that have multiple levers for the targeting a lot of different types of user concerns and different landing pages targeting each of them. This is advanced stuff, you can get really great results with a simple marketing campaign. Don't beat yourself up if you're not doing this right now. And Don't over complicate things, try and run a simple marketing campaign and get good results. And then you get to this area for iteration and optimization. But there are some very, very big brands. I mean, I have big, big night fan. As you might have noticed, I've got a few trainers back there. I love my favorite brand. But they mark it goals close to me on Facebook. I get adverts in my feed for girls trainers. I mean part of is the fact that Nike is such a huge brand, they have so much traffic coming in so much presence. But if Nike has an underperforming Facebook campaign, it's I don't know what percentage of our business values but it's a lot smaller than if I was launching a footwear brand from scratch today as a small player, but very some really big companies running very poorly optimized campaigns.
Jonathan Fischer 34:28
Yeah, for sure. Well, we're gonna continue the conversation and we're gonna integrate some q&a here shortly, but very quickly, I want to mention our show's fantastic sponsor, and that is as always Overpass, your leading source for hiring pre vetted talent. If you need to hire a team of remote sales professionals, you got to do it fast. Overpass makes building a high quality team quick and easy. There are 1000s of qualified candidates you can choose from filter by industry and experience at lightning speed and get people interviewed and hired in just Two days, create your free account today@overpass.com Hey, before we jump into our q&a, Alex, I'd love to go ahead and share with folks who may have to depart the live portion here today. How can they do more with you after today's conversation, what's the best way to respond?
Alex Holland 35:16
You're welcome to reach out to me, my website is gorilla flow.com. There's a form there. Or you can simply email me directly Alex at gorilla flow.com. If you would like to get a quick 10 to 15 minute teardown of what I think of your homepage or landing page and potential improvements and optimizations you can make. I will be very happy to do that. You can simply pop to gorilla flow.com, skim to the bottom and use a form that form occasionally misbehaves. If it does just type in Alex accurate a flow.com. And just say three, three, tear down and pop the URL of the page if you'd like me to give you a review on and I'll be happy to send that over within seven to 10 days via loom.
Jonathan Fischer 36:03
Love it. So for the non UK oriented English speakers tear down is not a bad thing. It means he's going to break down what is good and bad could be improved and provide that in the form of a video review of your site. Is that do I have that right, Alex?
Alex Holland 36:18
Absolutely. Yep, tear downs. Quite a nasty word for a nice.
Jonathan Fischer 36:23
Not Well, I mean, it's one of those things right, the Anglosphere. We have various various ways we say these things. I love it. So let's jump into some questions here been a fantastic conversation already. And something I think we could go far deeper into. I want to go ahead and I'm going to take first dibs as the fearless host. And I want to circle back to the whole pricing thing. I want you to finish your thought on that if you would on how SAS companies are offering different tiers and their pricing structure.
Alex Holland 36:50
Yeah, so I guess as a caveat for all of us fair, our consultant to do nothing but pricing. There's a whole books written on this topic. There's complex formulas use versus my I would say my opinion on pricing is worth more than an average person walking down the street, I understand the psychology of sales reasonably well. But there's a lot to do with scalability, and that sort of thing. That's a bit out of my, my range. And I think my feeling on this is that I always try to be motivated by what's doing the customer favors, what's helping the customer, I see some tactics being used, you know, creating pricing tiers that basically probably shouldn't exist. And they're just to confuse and obfuscate my, from a kind of ideological perspective, or maybe an ethical perspective, I tend to think that when you do things in marketing, but are motivated by short term, quick returns and taking advantage of people, whatever you gain in the short term is typically outweighed by the long term negative of kind of dirty your brand about versus when you try and help people and add value. I think the long term payback for Matt is almost invariably superior. So when it comes to designing pricing tiers, yes, I come across clever tactics that you can use to push people one way or another. I'm I'm not I'm not going to tell somebody not to do that. My job isn't to decide their pricing tier for for my job is to build up engagement and excitement about a product and help people understand it. But if someone wants my five or 10 cents, I would design pricing tiers that address a based on customer feedback and give people the features they actually want. The CRM I use that I like, I am not a gold or platinum customer, but the gold and the platinum customers or enterprise brands, I'm not going to pay $5,000 a month for a one person business. Right? Candidly, I pay for pro because it's what 12 versus $15. It's not a big deal. But the pricing tier for this particular CRM and I use, I'm probably only on two out of four. They've carefully designed that pricing tier not to try and make me buy a $5,000 a month CRM, but I will never be paid for. It's purposefully designed for small businesses with one to two people. That's me. Yeah, that's perfect. Yeah.
Jonathan Fischer 39:12
Here's a question from a copywriter in the audience. Linda's asking after bio research is complete. You really have you got a good bead on who is your ICP? What are some good pointers and how to position your copy to attract your ICP? So I guess sort of some broad, maybe strategic advice?
Alex Holland 39:28
That's a great question. I think a lot of it is about So first of all, understanding the individual pain points, the individual pain points and concerns they have. I think if we're talking about b2b which is where I spend pretty much all my time nowadays, that starts from a technical place, my sense of understanding the technical problems, somebody is experiencing more of a technical framework for legislation that they're worried you know, if somebody works in accounting, they work in finance. They It's not a drone or a robot, that's someone who's worried who goes to sleep at night worrying about the fact that they might not be in a compliant with piece of legislation, and that could come back to bite them, and it could affect their career. So understanding from a technical point of view, what are the things they care about? That's sort of a framework with skeleton, building out the flesh. Oh, man, what is the language for that kind of person tends to use? What are the phrases they tend to use? You might know they're worried about not achieving compliance, for example. But how do they really express that and you'll get that by talking to as many of these people as possible. What I would recommend is a book by Jennifer habits, finding the right message, I would tell anybody who works in copywriting, frankly, and marketing, finding the right message by Jennifer, how this is an amazing purchase, for anybody who wants to swat up and develop some pretty practical, pretty easy to use, and really effective customer interview techniques and in particular techniques to sort and analyze and organize your customer, Intel, to make it useful for your business.
Jonathan Fischer 41:08
Good stuff, good stuff. Dennis was asking if you would recommend putting end users into like your agile team. What are your thoughts on?
Alex Holland 41:20
That's an interesting question. So I mean, I'm not a an agile expert or trainer, I'm just I'm, I'm a former sales guy. I spent most of my career in sales before marketing, may have been involved in Agile processes. I couldn't confidently state what the latest and greatest and most proven. Strategies are all I can say, as a salesman, turn marketer, your agile process should absolutely involve customers in an ongoing basis. I had a call just three hours ago, I am a customer of a really great tab management app. And the founder of that company has probably three, four or five times reached out to me and said, Hey, I'm developing some new another new feature. Can you take a look at him? There's I think three different SAS brands at the moment three different SaaS products for I mean, I'm one of our, in their pool of people that I like to put these features in front of, and honestly, I really don't care about the $20 amazon gift vouchers and ice. I care about the fact that I get to shape this product that I already love and use every single day. So yeah, I mean, I don't know how you build them into agile process that's outside my expertise, but you definitely need to be talking to your customers a lot.
Jonathan Fischer 42:34
Good advice. Final question. We have some good eyes in the audience. Michael Novick is asking is that a vendor?
Alex Holland 42:42
That is a Fender Telecaster. Yeah, yeah, I've got this in Portugal, Paul Reed Smith and barley that I left for three months has turned into two to three years courtesy of COVID and locked down and four or five in the UK. So I just build offices and lead guitars in various continents when I travel and hope vessel when I get back.
Jonathan Fischer 43:06
Well, it sounds like we know kind of entertainment we're going to have if somebody's hanging out with you. So there you go. Yeah. Well, Alex has been as as it was a previous visit. extremely informative, really good, useful, actionable nuggets for those in the area of marketing for their businesses. Thanks once again for adding value to our audience.
Alex Holland 43:26
I really enjoyed it. It was great. Thanks for having me on.
Jonathan Fischer 43:29
And thanks to all of our many audience members, you're making the show a great success. Please tell your friends come back. Same time, same station next week. That's gonna do it for today. Thanks again for being here, signing off.
