SaaS Breakthrough – Featuring Tarah Darge

demio saas breakthrough featuring tarah darge About Tarah Darge:

Tarah Darge is a digital marketing native and Head of Marketing at timetoreply.

She has a passion for start-ups and loves helping brands to grow, creating superior brand experiences, and engaging customers through thoughtful content that adds value.

 

Isn't it time to level up your scrappy marketing team with a weekly dose of high-octane content?!? ?


Show Notes:
03:00
Giving The Ability To Measure And Report On Business Email Reply Times
05:30
Research: Replies Timeframe Benchmark For Prime Close Rate
06:55
Finding Product-Market Fit By Using Own Support Channel
09:25
Coming In After Funding To Build Out The Marketing Plan And Team
11:10
A Different Approach To Lead Gen Using LinkedIn
"It's sequenced messaging. So that's nothing new. But what we do is we look at the trends of our current trialists and where they're coming from in terms of geography, their job titles, their functions in the companies, the size of the company. And we look at those trends, we look at where our customers are coming from, and then we take that information and we extrapolate it and we go, Hey, well, you know, if well travel's not doing well now, when travel was doing well. If the travel industry is doing really well and we're seeing a lot of trialists coming in from the travel industry, can we go and tackle some other guys in the travel industry and use that as kind of a social proof? And so we use this GrowthX tool to reach out to very segmented, targeted groups of potential customers. And we found that we all use it and we find that, if I'm reaching out to somebody, I'll reach out to somebody in marketing or my kind of role. And if our head of sales and head of support doing it, they'll use different, they'll reach out to somebody else. And if our CEO was doing a tool reach out to like the directors or the partners. So we really tried to keep it very targeted, very personalized, even though it is a mass sequenced messaging, it's we tried to kind of micro-targeted it. And then once we connect with somebody, we pull that connection into our CRM and we try to take the conversation to email."
13:45
Crafting The Initial Outreach Emails
"I totally believe that like sales and selling should be super, fairly low key, initial reachout is a very, very much a normal conversation. So we played around with the harder hitting stuff and we played around with this stuff to style messaging and we kind of land somewhere in between. I think the most important thing is to really know who you're talking to and if there's any kind of nuggets of like personableness, you can throw in there that helps a lot. But we find that the initial reach out should be nice, short and sweet, like, Hey, a little brief introduction. I noticed XYZ about you guys, if you've done some research on this company, and then can we connect and chat more? And then from there, we kind of in our second message, we explain a small bit about the product, but really we ask a lot of questions as well. And we try to kind of lead them into a potential meeting or we'll take the conversations to email, but it totally, it depends on your targeted audience and who you're talking to in terms of narrowing down that language as well."
15:55
Real-Time Learning And Culling Campaigns Ruthlessly Following Benchmarks
18:10
Webinars: Going Past The Usual One-On-One Demos
"We've really perfected our one-on-one demos as well. Apparently 17 minutes is the ideal time. I don't know why, but it just is."
19:40
Deciding To Do More Themed Webinars
"We haven't been doing that for very long but we've maintained the momentum now for a fair number of weeks and it's been great. It's a lot easier than having this one-on-one demo with a customer who may or may not feel intimidated and a bit pushed to buy your product and then opt out of the demo or something. I mean, these weekly webinars are very low key. They're very no pressure. And we've actually seen a good increase in the amount of people attending them and then you've got those guys as hot leads as well. So we feed that into our sales team and it seems to be working pretty well."
21:40
Using A Combination Of Tactics To Drive Webinar Registrations
23:01
Experimenting With On-Demand Webinars
"Something I'd like to try more of going forward, but yeah, we've done a little bit of that. So we actually ran, we ran our first on demand one, I think it was three weeks ago. And that was great. Cause it was also, you know, it also meant that our guys could prerecord it and really edited until they were super happy with it. And then it was just there. It was great."
24:00
Hard Lesson: The Need To Really Clarify Language Around The Product And Target
"Because our product is fairly niche because the idea of measuring and analyzing your business, email reply times, your business email volumes, the importance thereof, all of the kind of knowledge that is needed around a product to even educate the markets. It's not an easy thing to communicate with a one shot kind of social media campaign. And so the guys who were signing up were maybe confusing us with a CRM or a you know, different kind of an email automation tool (...). And so it was a good lesson in terms of really clarifying our language around our product and clarifying who we target. You know, it's not that our campaign was a spray and pray type of approach at all, but it wasn't the sweet spot that we know that we have now with a customer success or customer support or sales focused team."
27:15
Next: Growing The Partner Program And Continuing To Build Relationships
29:40
The Challenge With Affiliate Marketing With A Low Price Point Product
31:20
Lightning Questions
Transcript:

DA (02:34):
Hey Tarah, how are you doing today? Thanks for joining me.

TD (02:37):
I'm good. Thank you. How are you doing?

DA (02:40):
I'm doing great. I'm doing great. I'm actually headed out to the airport later today, flying out for Thanksgiving week, which is obviously a crazy time to travel with, with COVID going on. But having a good one and you're joining me from South Africa, right?

TD (02:54):
I am indeed. Yes, all the way at the tip of Africa in Cape tofiwn.

DA (02:59):
Wow. Incredible. Would love to go visit one day. Just seems like a wonderful place, but appreciate you joining me and excited to have you here and to talk about timetoreply. Before we get into some of the amazing initiatives and experiments you guys are doing over there. Why don't you give us a little bit of a background when the company was founded, who the customers are and what you all are doing uniquely in the marketplace?

TD (03:21):
Sure. So timetoreply was founded in 2013 by a South African Dane Spear. He's still our head of product. It was actually born out of another lead gen business in which Dane realized that while he was generating thousands of like really high quality leads for his clients, there was a huge disparity in the close ratio. So he'd have some guys who were closing a bunch of the leads and like doing really, really well with this product and other guys who were just not seeing any success at all or very, very little success. And he kind of wondered why that was when the quality of his sales leads were pretty much the same across the board. So he started digging into their sales habits and what they were doing with their leads and how quickly they were actually responding to them.

TD (04:15):
And he found that the guys who were closing the leads really quickly or closing them well and had a good close ratio, were the guys who were responding first. And the guys who weren't really seeing success with the guys who were taking too long to respond to their leads or were just kind of a bit wishy-washy about the consistency of their responses. So he dug into that a little bit more and wanted to develop a tool that could track the time it would take for his clients to respond to leads and then display that response time, like a kind of badge on the company's website. So that was the origin of timetoreply. And the idea was that it was this like imbedded widget that you would have either on your website or on your sales teams kind of email logos and slogans and it grew from there. So yeah, I think that was, that was seven years ago and now it measures a whole bunch of other things, but at the core of what we do is all centered around our ability to measure and report on business email reply times, which is really a black box for so many businesses still, despite the fact that email is the most widely used communication tool.

DA (05:32):
When you guys are doing this, like, is there a metric that you're trying to track on? Is there a number that you want your team ultimately to get to, that you know, people should know about as far as getting that the prime response rates or prime close rate?

TD (05:45):
Sure. Well, there's a lot of research out there that says that if you reply within one hour, you are seven times more successful in terms of your contact success rate than two hours and 60 more successful than if you reply just 24 hours later. The industry response time is still around 42 hours, which is a little shocking.

DA (06:08):
That seems so slow.

TD (06:09):
I mean, of course we do see it quite a big desire to (inaudible) in terms of industries. And, and there are reasons behind that, of course. But yeah, we try to encourage our customers to respond and try and keep it under the one hour mark, what our tool actually does allow our customers to do is actually set their own benchmarks as well. And they can set benchmarks for various teams within their organizations. So, you know, they can say the sales team has to respond within five minutes to an inbound lead, but their customer support team can respond within an hour, or their success team can respond within two hours and they can track and measure like that. But we do have a lot of guidelines around best practice, according to industry and according to their functions as well.

DA (06:56):
What is that kind of target market for you guys? How have you defined your product-market fit? Obviously it sounds like B2B is the segment, but have you dialed it down more than that?

TD (07:07):
Yeah, so it's definitely B2B. I would say we not too vertical specific. Our Verticals jump all over the show, but it's really any, any geography, any industry mid-market size businesses with high volumes of inbound sales inquiries, or large customer and or supplier basis. That's really our sweet spot. And that's where really we see good success with with our clients there.

DA (07:33):
Awesome. Have you guys had to develop that over time? Obviously this came from a need from your founder along the way, but have you guys had to shift or change markets based on any of the evolution of the product or the ISP itself?

TD (07:48):
Yes we have. And how we did that as we actually got really close to what we call like our legacy customers and they still are legacy customers now. We found product-market fit by using our support channel. We use Intercom a lot and built what our customers were asking for and changed our product, like really according to what our really strong and like long term customers needed at the time and still needs. So that's how we, we changed and we developed, we just try and stay very, very close to, it was kind of core group of customers who we really know have used the product for a long time and who are very invested in seeing it grow and change according to their needs. And we kind of know that if they need that kind of function, if they ask for something like a, the ability to close the conversation, for instance, or the ability to set a real-time alert, if an email hasn't been responded to within X number of minutes or hours, if they're asking for that, you know, that that's going to be a good, good market-fit.

DA (08:48):
Do you guys have identifiers in Intercom to attribute which customer feedback becomes product feedback for you guys to implement or it's kind of a case-by-case basis? Are you just adding up all that product feedback and then making decisions based on like the impact score of that industry? How'd you guys decide?

TD (09:05):
So we, we track and record all of our kind of Intercom feedback and that goes into a product trailer board, and we kind of triage what we do with that information and how are we going to action it if we're going to action it, the value it's going to add to the product, and the potential marketability of that.

DA (09:27):
Those are good scores. I like that looking at the marketability and then also the impact score of how much that's going to work for your, your business product. That's really, that's really smart. What about you? When did you join the team and come in as the head of marketing?

TD (09:41):
I joined in January this year. So January, 2020. Yeah, so it's just been, it's been a year. It's been a time.

DA (09:51):
It has been a tough year coming to start at a SaaS company. What was your job first coming in? What were you coming in to solve and then how's it been kind of navigating this year?

TD (10:01):
Yeah. So timetoreply I mean, until this year was very much a bootstrapped company and then our founders and our CEO secured funding last year in December. So it was their job to build out the team. So they brought me on as head of marketing in January to really start everything. I mean, everything up until that point had been pretty piecemeal and pretty scattered and pretty much like as, when they had time to do a bit of this and a bit of that, but there was no cohesive plan and there was no kind of tech stack or MarTech stack and no kind of follow through with with anything. I mean, the guys were just inundated with building the product, essentially. So yeah, it was starting, starting from scratch.

DA (10:50):
It's a tough role to come in for. And I only know, because it sounds like your founding team was similar to me and my co-founder who took on a lot of the marketing stuff for so many years while building the product, building the brand new, a lot of this on our shoulders and bringing that marketing role in is really tough because you have to like first learn everything, gather everything you're doing, build out the foundation and move from there. So let's kind of talk about, you know, what you built out this year, you know, I know marketing channels that have been working for you guys. One of them is, you know, LinkedIn. We've talked about LinkedIn on this podcast before around lead gen, but I know you're doing LinkedIn with a different approach. I would love to learn how you guys are using LinkedIn?

TD (11:28):
Yeah, of course. Yeah. So going, going into the beginning of this year, we really didn't have a large base of subscribers or an audience to really speak to via email or via any channels really. So this approach to LinkedIn was, was introduced to me in February and really it's a tool called GrowthX and it's sequenced messaging. So that's nothing new. But what we do is we look at the trends of our current trialists and where they're coming from in terms of geography, their job titles, their functions in the companies, the size of the company. And we look at those trends, we look at where our customers are coming from, and then we take that information and we extrapolate it and we go, Hey, well, you know, if well travel's not doing well now, when travel was doing well. If the travel industry is doing really well and we're seeing a lot of trialists coming in from the travel industry, can we go and tackle some other guys in the travel industry and use that as kind of a social proof?

TD (12:37):
And so we use this GrowthX tool to reach out to very segmented, targeted groups of potential customers. And we found that we all use it and we find that, you know, if I'm reaching out to somebody, I'll reach out to somebody in marketing or my kind of role. And if our head of sales and head of support doing it, they'll use different, they'll reach out to somebody else. And if our CEO was doing a tool reach out to like the directors or the partners. So we really tried to keep it very targeted, very personalized, even though it is a mass sequenced messaging, it's we tried to kind of micro-targeted it. And then once we connect with somebody, we pull that connection into our CRM and we try to take the conversation to email. I mean, that is what we stand for. Our product is all about email, and we want to prove it with our own behavior by email. So we try to take that offline back yeah back into our own system and take it from there. And that's how we built our subscriber base. Our trial base. Our trialist base. And yeah, a lot of, a lot of conversion from that as well.

DA (13:48):
How many variations of that initial outreach email have you guys had to write, or how do you test that? How do you know what a good benchmark is for, you know, that messages? These are all the questions that come to me because, you know, we've tried a little bit with outbound before, and I've mentioned that on the podcast before we've tried, it never used like GrowthX, never used LinkedIn sales navigator or anything like that, but I I've always wondered, like, how do you know it's a good base? How do you know what to put in that first email? What do you test with next messaging? How did you guys go through that process?

TD (14:17):
Yeah. Yeah, sure. That's a very good question. I think I have about 40 iterations of my initial reach out message. And I keep playing with it. I keep, I keep reading. I keep looking at like this practice, like keep looking at examples, you know, I'm very much of the opinion that one should steal like an artist. And if you see some great examples of an initial reachouts, I'll incorporate elements of that. I obviously try to keep it very non sleazy. I totally believe that like sales and selling should be super, fairly low key, initial reachout is a very, very much a normal conversation. So, you know, we played around with the harder hitting stuff and we played around with this stuff to style messaging and we kind of land somewhere in between. I mean, yeah, I think the most important thing is to really know who you're talking to and if there's any kind of nuggets of like personableness, you can throw in there that helps a lot.

TD (15:15):
But yeah, where we find that we find that the initial reach out should be nice, short and sweet, like, Hey, a little brief introduction. I noticed XYZ about you guys, if you've done some research on this company, and then can we connect and chat more? And then from there, we kind of in our second message, we explain a small bit about the product, but really we ask a lot of questions as well. And we try to kind of lead them into a potential meeting or we'll take the conversations to email, but I mean, it totally, it was, it depends on, on your targeted audience and who you're talking to in terms of narrowing down that language as well.

DA (15:55):
Yeah, absolutely. And when you kicked off this initiative and you were going to the founding team again, as the head of marketing, kind of building this stuff out, what did you say for like your baseline hypothesis? Was there a metric you were trying to hit? Hey, we want to bring in out of a thousand messages, we're want to get, you know, a hundred replies and get, you know, five sales from that. Like how did you guys actually approach that whole process for your leadership team?

TD (16:22):
Yeah, so we, we see a lot of success on review sites like Capterra so in terms of benchmarking stuff, that's really what we had to go with. I mean, there are obviously other benchmarks we look at all the time in the general world of SaaS and what you should be converting at. And we try to keep it in line with those. And for me, when I use GrowthX and a tool like sales navigator, I'm looking at my dashboard now actually, and I will go in and like cull campaigns ruthlessly that are not seeing either, I mean, cause we with GrowthX, you can see a connection rate and you can see a response rate and I'll just cull campaigns to just anything below about the 30% connection rate. That obviously means that whatever the audience is really active on LinkedIn, it's not really working so well so cull it.

TD (17:15):
And then in terms of response rate as well, if I see anything below around about the 30% response rate, I'll cull it to 35%. I tried to, I mean, if I see campaigns that are performing, like if, you know, looking at one now that's on a 58% response rate, which is pretty, pretty good. Then I'll duplicate that out and try and see, Hey, that initial reach out message like worked really well. Or that second one worked really well to get a connection. And try and try and keep it like that. So it's pretty much real-time learning, but in terms of, yeah, in terms of benchmarking, I had Capterra go with and we were like, Hey, this is kind of the thing that's working well for us, try and maintain this, our eye on whatever we're doing, which is difficult. Cause it's completely different. But but yeah, we looked at best practice and then we looked at like our own small number of benchmarks that we had.

DA (18:08):
No, I love that. That's a really good answer. And I think that's just a question that, you know, you have in your department is like, how do you set these benchmarks? And if you had one already set, you had a really good initiative already working. We have really good you know, ROI from Capterra too. So definitely I think that was a great answer there. Now you have subscriber lists going on and I know you guys are also looking to do live presentations, you're doing webinars using Demio which is, which is awesome, by the way. I'd love to explore, you know, what you're doing past the usual one-on-one demos, why you went the webinar route and what's been working for you?

TD (18:42):
So we have always had the ability to book a one-on-one demo. And we just, I mean, yeah, I mean, there's those trickled in nicely. They still do. And of course they're great in terms of down the funnel, we put them further down the funnel that they really help. And we've really perfected our one-on-one demos as well. Apparently 17 minutes is the ideal time. I don't know why, but it just is.

DA (19:13):
That is great feedback.

TD (19:13):
Yeah. I don't know why, 17 minutes. So that that's always there and that we pump out with Intercom, you can book a one-on-one demo through Intercom or you can book via our site, but it wasn't really working in terms of like, it's not a lead gen tool. So I've actually worked with Demio in the past before I joined timetoreply and had great success with it with the previous company I was with, even though that was B2C.

TD (19:38):
So just in terms of like, like enjoying the software, I love, I love using Demio. It's super easy to do. Yeah, so I introduced it to the team and we decided to kind of do more themed webinars. And I know, I know there are a lot out there, but we still feel like what we're saying around email and the impact on your sales and success is fairly unique. Our product is still fairly unique and so we feel like we have a good story to tell and what we did at the beginning of the year, especially when we moved to a remote working model and our product was also adapting to the needs of that. We brought on industry leaders to join us on webinars and talk about like challenges to remote teams and how best to manage a remote team.

TD (20:26):
So we, yeah, we brought on some like remote first guys who were doing it long before it became a thing and tried to just drum up some interest that . So it wasn't just us going, Hey guys, here's our product. So we tried to make it more, more valuable in that sense. And that's, that was great. I mean, obviously they're a little bit harder to put together and then because of that, we were like, Hey, well, I wonder, I wonder if we do just do product focused weekly webinars around our product, would make them super short, super sharp, if that would help. And it has, I mean, we haven't been doing that for very long but we've maintained the momentum now for a fair number of weeks and it's been great. It's it's, and it's a lot easier than, you know, having this one-on-one demo with a customer who may or may not feel intimidated and a bit pushed to buy your product and then opt out of the demo or something. I mean, this is like these weekly webinars are very low key. They're very no pressure. And we've actually seen a good increase in the amount of people attending them and yeah, andthen you've got those guys as hot leads as well. So we feed that into our sales team and yeah, it seems to be working pretty well.

DA (21:42):
That's fantastic. Are you just using Intercom to drive those leads? Is there a place on your website? How are you getting the traffic there for registration?

TD (21:50):
We use a combination of things. So I pump out invites via HubSpot weekly to guys who haven't attended yet. And to guys who have, we will invite them to more themed one or more one-on-one. And then on our sites, we actually use OptinMonster to do a little pop-up for them usually, and that works quite nicely too. And then we push it out on our own social channels. And if we've got an, if you're interviewing a guest speaker or something, or if they're jumping on the webinar with us, we'll use our own networks to per set out to, and then, so we do incorporate it into our GrowthX campaigns as well. So once we've connected with somebody on LinkedIn, we can run the acquisition campaigns to them, or we can run nurturing campaigns to them. And if we've already done an acquisition campaign to them and we've connected with them, we've had a chat, maybe not that hot on the, on the product yet. Or, you know, they're not, they're not a hot lead. We'll invite them to one of these weekly webinars. Yeah. So there's a kind of challenge we push it out on.

DA (23:01):
I love that. Have you guys explored or experimented with on-demand yet, webinars with that?

TD (23:06):
We have. Something I'd like to try more of going forward, but yeah, we've done a little bit of that. So we actually ran, we ran our first on demand one, I think it was three weeks ago. And that was great. Cause it was also, you know, it also meant that our guys could prerecord it and really edited until they were super happy with it. And then it was just there. It was great.

DA (23:33):
Exactly. I could see a balance of both things being really good. I'm just thinking of like the cold, like the cold leads are getting of LinkedIn and then just being able to have like that post-campaign like utilize on demand at some point could be really powerful, but definitely play with it. I love hearing you know, how you're using Demio, you know, it makes me ask, like, why aren't we doing more front-end webinars. I'm thinking about that right now. I think that's a really interesting thing that I think is a pretty easy win that we could do. I don't know why we're not doing that. But that's fantastic. And then I guess looking back over the past year, listen, a lot has happened this year. Any hard lessons or things you learned from that didn't work out, I'm sure you've experimented across the board and been learning all over the place.

TD (24:12):
Yeah. We absolutely have. I would say one of the hardest things that we did, we couldn't see a lot of success with in terms of converting these guys into paying customers, was a fairly large social campaign we run at the beginning of the year. And again, this is something we'd never done before. And at some point you have to throw the dots, you know, you gotta, you gotta start from somewhere and everything's a good lesson when you're new but it is, it is hard when you, when you're working with this finite budgets and you're not seeing that conversion happen like you would on some of your other platforms. But we did, we did campaigns via LinkedIn and with Facebook and a couple of other channels as well. And it was great. I mean, our traffic spiked, it was wonderful to see these guys running in, a lot of them converted into trialists and it just didn't take over into paying customers.

TD (25:10):
Which is always a bit sad when you see that happen. But I think it was, it was great in terms of understanding that because our product is fairly niche because the idea of measuring and analyzing your business, email reply times, your business email volumes, the importance thereof, all of the kind of knowledge that is needed around a product to even educate the markets. It's not an easy thing to communicate with a one shot kind of social media campaign. And so the guys who were signing up were maybe confusing us with a CRM or a you know, different kind of an email automation tool like MailChimp or something. And so it was a good lesson in terms of really clarifying our language around our product and clarifying who we target. You know, it's not that our campaign was a spray and pray type of approach at all, but it wasn't the sweet spot that we know that we have now with a customer success or customer support or sales focused team. I think we were kind of like still testing the horses with audience. And I think, yeah, another big lesson in that was, was analyzing each point of your campaign and, and really mapping that out from seeing like, Hey, where, where are the, why are we seeing the drop off? And, and why are we seeing the drop off here and tweaking stuff around that? Yeah, I mean, it was, it was all very, very good lessons to learn, but never fun when you see your budget not convert.

DA (26:48):
Yes, it's such a hard, it's like a painful lesson, but it's a good lesson because you learn fast with paid advertising. Cause you, you just like are buying the lesson basically, but it's also painful and you want to see that return obviously, but you know, every experiment is built that way. You know, there's a chance of failure across the board, but it sounds like you learned also about levels of awareness and how you message to those different levels of awareness and that you'll need some thought leadership along the way. So that's really interesting. And that's, that's helpful for you guys moving forward and then thinking about moving forward, looking at 2021, and we're all hoping for a much, much better year, I should say. What are some of the challenges or opportunities that you're looking for in the industry or for the company?

TD (27:30):
We've actually launched our partner program earlier this year as well. So that's been another huge project of ours. And hopefully we'll see it. Yeah, we'll hope we'll see a lot of traction with that going forward into 2021. It still feels like as robust as it is. And we, we worked with like some great consultants and we've got some good partners now already. It still feels like it's in its infancy, it's still a baby. So I'd love to see that grow. I'd love to onboard more partners. I'd love to see them succeed and learn more about this kind of world of SaaS partners. And resellers. It feels like a whole new, whole newness for me, which is exciting. And then I think we're starting to see the kind of grassroots of recovery in so many of our verticals or so many of our customer bases did go a bit quiet and who were hard hits and it's, it's good to see that recovery now, which is exciting and, and seeing how we can potentially build on that and help our customers through that as well.

TD (28:32):
I think it's been it's been a good year in the sense of everyone's ready banded together. I've never felt like this sense of (inaudible) to it. It feels like we're all in this together. And yeah, I mean, it's been, it's been great in terms of like a lot of collaboration and a lot of helping each other. And I've seen that with other, other SaaS companies too. I mean, we've, it's, yeah, it's been good to form relationships with guys across the board. And it's been, it's been great to see you guys be responsive to that as well, and like open to sharing and open to connecting and open to sharing one another's contents. And yeah, that's, it's, it's not being something terrible, but definitely looking forward to a more successful 2021.

DA (29:20):
Yeah. It's funny how oftentimes like really tough times bring people together, right. A shared experience like that is very beneficial, you know, to find that that unity, especially in B2B SaaS, which is where we live. And the only other question I had for you that wa just came up in your answer was you talked about the partnership program, which is amazing. And I'm assuming, talking about like some affiliate partners, reseller, stuff like that, what was the commission structure that you guys decided to go with?

TD (29:47):
So for our resellers, we start them off at what we call the gold level and we start them off with 30%, which is, which is good I feel. We also give them another 10% jumpstart margin if they close deals within the first 90 days. So we try and incentivize some, some quick, quick closing there and then on our platinum partners all the way up to 50% and more. So, we try to try to make it a very, very attractive partner program in terms of our affiliates, we are kicking that off fairly shortly. So we'll see what that looks like. I think the challenge with affiliate marketing for us is because our price point and our product is fairly low it's only 10 to $15 per mailbox per month for our product. So, you know, for an affiliate they're gonna have to, you're gonna have to pump volume, which is fine. But, but what we're trying to, we're trying to work out like, Hey, if we work with agencies, can they offer, can they package an offer service around our product that makes us more attractive? And that's kind of the route we're exploring now.

DA (30:56):
Yes. That makes sense. It is definitely difficult if you have a lower average revenue per user with the affiliate program, because then you're also splitting percentage of the commission. So yeah, I think a mix with services or like a high-end program could be good. That may not be a great fit, but it sounds like the resellers have a wonderful program. And I love the fact that you guys have that quick 90-day power program. That's, that's awesome. It's a really good idea to incentivize. But but amazing. Well, what I want to do now for the sake of time, let's just jump over to our lightning round questions. Just five quick questions that you can answer with the first, best thought that comes to mind. You ready to get started?

TD (31:30):
I'm ready.

DA (31:32):
Oh yeah, you're gonna do good. I'm excited for this. What advice do you have for early stage SaaS companies starting marketing today?

TD (31:42):
I would say do do it quickly, just do full, fast, full forward,full quickly and get up and keep going. Collaborate where you can. Reach out to guys who you admire, who you think are maybe untouchable. They're not you know, they're very willing to help. Usually they're very willing to connect, get involved in SaaS communities where you can. Join the LinkedIn groups, join the Slack channels, join the Facebook groups and kind of learn from that as well. And, and really just experiment. And if you find something that's working just double down on it, if you see stuff that's working with your customers double down hot and it's, and learn from your customers all the time, like ask them questions, really dig into what they're loving about your product, understand their pain points and speak to those in your marketing and speak to speak about those pain points to other potential customers too. Cause they're probably there.

DA (32:48):
That's great advice. That was it. That was a lot, but that was across the board. Amazing. What skill do you think is vital for marketing teams to improve and build on?

TD (33:00):
I think it's all about storytelling and about data. If you get your story right, and and how you're selling your product and you mining your data and your metrics just relentlessly for nuggets, and you're focusing on that and those two kinds of things, I think, I think you're going to do, you're going to do okay.

DA (33:20):
Yeah, no, that's a really good, really good piece of advice there. And it's always tough with data to balance getting too much data and then understanding the data for what really makes sense.

TD (33:29):
It is. It is. Yeah, it absolutely is a challenge. I mean, we were just overwhelmed. But if you can kind of pull out stuff that you're seeing across the board, then I think (inaudible) into your ability to storytelling. Yeah, I think that's good.

DA (33:44):
I love that. What about a best educational resource you'd recommend for learning about marketing growth or maybe storytelling?

TD (33:50):
Sure. I've recently enjoyed a marketing newsletter called The Click. They're a daily newsletter made specifically for digital marketers and it's a great spread of both marketing news and info on shop talk kind of stuff like for example, they'll dive hot into on-page SEO and off-page SEO and the differences between those two. And so I find that, I find that to be really, really helpful. It's always good to have something that kind of negative, but also if you want to go hard into something, they've got the resources for that too. And was also got some really awesome courses on practical things like I attended one last week called "how to write to sell" and that's, that's great as well. I mean, you always use some tips and tricks around that and they've got like other courses around lead gen mastery that I've found to be incredibly helpful as well. So that's kind of my go to on a daily basis. And then if I'm really diving hard into stuff, I'm a HubSpot fan through and through, I will mine their courses, I'll read all their blogs, I'll watch their stuff. And I find them incredibly, yeah, incredibly good on that front. And we all know,know HubSpot is great around their resources. So, yeah.

DA (35:18):
I love them. Yeah, that's two really good places to check out. I love that. What about a favorite tool you can't live without?

TD (35:26):
HubSpot and I mean every, yeah, I mean, they, IT what I love about Hubspot is the fact that it just does integrate with everything that we do use as well. So I try to centralize all of my reporting and metrics and measurements back into HubSpot. So I've just got that as a sack repository of data around even my, like my social media posting I'll do it through, through HubSpot so I can track performance in a kind of holistic way there.Yeah. I mean, the only thing they don't do is webinar software, which is why we have Demio, which, which is good. So yeah, I think there's

DA (36:09):
Do you get Intercom and HubSpot together pretty easily?

TD (36:11):
Yeah. Yeah, we do. Yeah, that's fine. We pull that, that into HubSpot as well. Yeah, we try to integrate everything into it. It's one gigantic massive all my things.

DA (36:23):
Yeah, that's one area that kind of kept us out of HubSpot was I really didn't know if we could integrate that well, so that's good advice. All right. Last question for you. And if it's HubSpot, that's totally fine. But what about a business or a team that you admire today?

TD (36:37):
Sure. I think, I mean, I'm really digging what Friends app is doing as well. In terms of their branding, their production of content. I think it's, it's looking really slick. I actually connected with the marketing director of Friendsapp a couple of weeks ago and had a good chat with her around how she creates, stretches, publishes, ideates content. I mean, how they're pumping out so much content as well. So yeah, so that was, that was cool. And I think Superoffices also nailing it from like an SEO point of view. Every time I look up a term around email analytics or customer service or customer success or sales, they seem to be right up there. So I think they're, they're definitely doing something right. And I love the guys at Close as well. I think. Yeah, they're pretty, pretty well over that from a sales point of view. So those are, those are some of the ones that I've admired.

DA (37:37):
Those are really great companies. It's really great suggestions there. And across the board and the lightning round, you crushed it. So appreciate your time today. You did a great job on here sharing so much knowledge and we appreciate it. This podcast is built around the wisdom and the pieces that we can take away from conversations like this. So thanks for joining us today.

TD (37:58):
Thank you so much for having me.

DA (38:00):
It was a real pleasure. And we'll talk to you soon.
(...)

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