Three phases of SaaS marketing: phase 2
The Factory Floor · Episode 5 · April 22, 2025 · 73 min
Transcript96 sections · auto-generated, so expect the odd wrong word
We are continuing our discussion on some of the most important things that we have discovered working in uh SAS product marketing. And we're going to be talking a little bit about our three-phase process of how we approach uh marketing. And we already covered phase one. So if you uh haven't listened to the first the episode just before this, I would listen to that one. Um or if not, we'll just give you a quick recap of phase one. And we're going to be talking about phase two today. Um so, let's talk a little bit about phase one. Do either of you want to give me Oh, wait. I should probably do this first. Uh Corey's here. He's our marketer. Zach is here. Here's our designer. And I am here. I'm the web developer. Great.
Done. Check Check that off the list. Um, Zach, would you be down to give us like a quick uh rapid fire of the phase one that we talked about uh last week? Sure. Or last episode. Um, the reason that we've broken these up into phases is because we believe like it's essentially like building a house, your marketing engine, and we've labeled them aptly. So, phase one is the foundation. So, it's laying all of the core elements of building that strong marketing engine. The key things within that are your positioning, your brand identity, doing customer research, getting a landing page. Believe there's some others in there that I'm audit missing. The audit start. Yeah. And an audit to make sure and see where you're at. So, because you
you don't know where you want to go or you might know where you want to go, but you have no idea how to get there unless you can pinpoint where you're at currently. Um, and finally, a homepage, which is the like a a final manifestation of all those elements actually being put together in something that is a marketing asset and the most crucial marketing asset from the onset. Something you could use to capture leads, to potentially get sales, and to explain who you do, kind of your storefront in the digital landscape that we work within. And then now we're on phase two, which is the base. So expanding upon that foundation and building the core assets of your marketing engine. Yep. Yeah. We um it's
kind of funny cuz we started the last episode thinking like hey we can like let's talk about all these but while we're doing it we're like there's so much meat and potatoes even in like each individual phase and specifically in the first one uh given it's like the foundation and super important and we talked at length about how almost any business should jump in if they're going to be working through a road map like this and start at the beginning because something like an audit is so valuable. and looking at customer research like you just can't do enough of and like you can always relook at your positioning and make sure your brand aligned and do all these different things. Um so we kind of got like almost stuck on that
stuff is so important. Let's just keep going. Um so now we're going to hit phase two. Um and so we'll go through phase two and we'll just kind of start at the top with like what's the first thing we do after we hit all those phase one things. You know, we did our little homepage revamp like we're we're ready to like really we dipped our toes in. Everything's ready to get, you know, we're ready to dive in. Essentially, the first thing on the list is sales pages. Um, there's a bunch of other pages on here. Competitor comparison pages, conversion pages, we call them. Uh, emailing, onboarding, all that stuff. Why do we start with sales pages, which is like feature pages, industry pages, solution pages?
Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that because I don't think that a lot of people, even a lot of marketers know the answer to that question. It's like, well, we should build those because everybody else has them. I think um you know, like I think we need feature pages. I think we need industry pages. I think we need solutions pages. And so you just kind of like build these out because it seems like that's the right thing to do, but really there's no strategy behind it. Um there to me there's two different purposes to them and you need at least one of them in order to justify building them. Ideally you would have both. The first purpose is for SEO. So you're targeting keywords that are very bottom of funnel uh sort
of like product or feature descriptions or you're targeting keywords like this type of software for this type of persona or this type of use case. Um, and you want to build pages to essentially target those keywords, right? And get that traffic from organic searches. Uh the second purpose is as sales material and sales collateral where they're essentially like these um personalized versions of the homepage that either go in more detail andor are tailored specifically to uh hey let me tell you all about how these features apply to um you know these industries, these solutions, these use cases, these personas um or let me just go more in depth on the features or any one of the features to give you a more kind of
thorough explanation of them. Ideally, you want your sales pages to have both of those purposes solved where they can rank for keywords that get you organic search traffic and their sales pages. And what I mean by sales pages is like people are exploring the website and they're trying to figure out if this is a tool for them and they see, oh, here's a page all about how this applies to marketers like me or here's a page that applies all about this specific use case that I'm looking into the whole reason why I came to this tool in the first place and now this confirms what I wanted to know and so now I feel comfortable signing up, right? Um, but ideally you want to have both of those. Yeah. You there you said something at
the beginning that I thought was interesting interesting which is like other people have feature pages so we should probably have feature pages. Um, and that being like a very common like you kind of see the same like framework on a lot of different uh people's sites. Um, how can you like distinguish like, oh, you are someone or your product actually probably doesn't need these feature pages? Like your your product is like very streamlined or it's very like straightforward and like we really don't need to add all these extra pages. we need to just like double down on use cases or case studies or we need to double down on, you know, your competitor pages or something like that and kind of funnel the traffic towards
those because those are going to have more like bang for your buck or something like that. Is there a way to like delineate when to have these types of sales pages and when not to? Yeah, I think that um just the more mature you become as a business, usually the more unnecessary these types of pages become because in in the very early days, uh you can just get away with having a single page website and just a homepage and all you need is a homepage and a pricing page and a signup page and you're good to go, right? Um, but then as you find product market fit, as you scale a little bit, as you try to widen your funnel, then you end up needing more of these types of pages that serve these different purposes of ranking for
keywords, for being sales collateral, for people who are kind of just browsing around and window shopping. Um, even just as your product expands and it becomes a more comprehensive platform, so to speak, uh, where there's multiple different features and you're not a onetrick pony anymore. And especially if you're expanding horizontally and you're appealing now to multiple personas instead of just apply, you know, instead of just uh being specifically for um, copywriters, maybe now segment. Mhm. copywriting, for SEO, for content marketers, for demand generation, so on and so forth. And maybe all those different use cases are a little bit different, then yeah, you're going to want a page that speaks
specifically to those. Um, but yeah, it it's mainly just a function of time. I feel like as your product becomes uh a mature business, then you need pages like this. Otherwise, people are going to be asking these questions in their head and trying to figure it out for themselves. Mhm. Yeah, that makes sense. What were you gonna say, Zach? I was going to say I think that from a I think you just from a purely logistical standpoint, you end up wanting to talk about these things a lot more and you just don't have the space to do it or it totally breaks the flow of the user. You can get away with it for a little bit like Corey said when you're initially launching because you don't have to describe as
much detail like who this feature is for. Um you're you just run out of real estate really. So, you need to expand into other areas and communicate that you have these tools that people need in order to make a buying decision. I do wonder if I wonder if the there there probably could be some overlap between which one you pick first as far as conversion pages and sales pages. Maybe, Corey, depending on like just how in-depth you need to go with your features and solutions. Yeah, I mean um the the conversion pages which are your your pricing page, signup page, demo page, anything that's like, "Hey, fill out this form to in order to get started or like here's the logistics of what you need in order to start
paying us." Um those are definitely going to be important. Um the likelihood that you already have something up andor that you have a signup page that kind of does the trick already um is pretty high. And so, yeah, it's a toss up between which one you you start with. Um, one more note on the sales pages, I'll just say really quick, is that uh Oh, and now I just lost it. I was like, wait, I need to say this before I forget. Um, come back to it. Yep. Oh, go ahead. I remembered. Okay. Before I forget again, one of the other things I think is great about the sales pages is that a lot of people um when their products start to expand and as their use cases expand as well and the personas they appeal to
expand, then they end up diluting their homepage more and more and more, they sort of become this like, oh well, we can do anything for anyone anytime, anyhow, any which way that you want. And now you sound like everybody else. Um I think that AI company. Yeah, exactly. Sorry, it's a little buggy for me. Um, because you think that as those things expand, then you need to keep updating the homepage. But actually, you want to think about your homepage more as like a storefront and an entry point and like the first thing that you show someone in order to hook them in and get them interested. It can be your main use case or it can be talk about your most differentiated features or it can talk about the uh the
main persona that you appeal to. But then the real use case of these sales pages is then you have dedicated places to talk about how your product applies specifically for X Y and Z. All those different features, industry, solutions, use cases, so on and so forth. Um, and but you can keep your homepage still pretty tight and pretty tailored. Yeah, I was going to ask because the the the sales pages versus the conversion pages um when I look at like what we consider like sales pages, feature feature pages, industry pages, solutions pages, those seem like they are much more they could be a lot more content dense than any of the conversion pages like a pricing page or a signup page or a demo page where you could
hypothetically turn these conversion pages uh into sections on a bunch of other pages to suffice for the time like hey I don't have a dedicated pricing page but I have a dedicated pricing section and it goes on all the pages or it goes on this page and this page and this page. Um whereas you can't really do that with like all your features necessarily or all your industries. I mean you could make something but it's not going to have the content that you need for it to be effective. And the same goes with like sign up. Like you could just have a form or a demo page. You could have like a interactive thing that goes through like an arcade. Um or those conversion pages could start out as sections and then be converted into
like, hey, here's a full scale version of this as a page. Is that maybe another reason why it would come after those sales pages? Yeah, definitely could. And he brought up a really good point which I'm glad you reminded me of too, which is that there's an opportunity to also further tailor and personalize your pricing, your signup, call to action, your demo, whatever it is, the call to action for those specific features, industry solutions, use cases, personas on each one of those pages. For example, one of our clients, audience tab, they we made them a specific uh solutions page for coffee roasters. And this worked out really really well because they also had a specific offer for coffee roasters. And so the perfect
place to put that offer of their special pricing and onboarding and migration and setup is going to be on that page. So now it doesn't just feel like another reskinned page where you know a couple of words are changed here and there. Like there's actually a really really tailored uh offer just for that persona. And now the whole page feels like a very cohesive website in and of itself if you think of it that way. And now when you're running ads to it as is ranking in Google like those people are being served in a personalized way as sales pages almost become individual landing pages in and of themselves right like and that's like they have that kind of flexibility whereas on the pricing page
you're not going to add that much detail like you're not doing any kind of problem uh problem labeling or anything like that. You're just getting somebody a place to pick a plan and buy it. Yeah, makes sense. Maybe you're fleshing out the details of the plan and that's about it. Yeah. Mhm. Definitely. Y I was going to ask about like demo type pages because we've I mean we've built a bunch of different types of these pages. Some are like, you know, it says like demo page and it's like, hey, you know, fill out this form and then we'll like schedule a call with you to give you a demo. So it's like maybe square one or something. And then square two might be like the demo page has like a booking link and you or a direct link on like a
Calendarly or Savvy Calendar you book directly or it's like an actual demo where you or an arcade where you kind of click through and it's like a simplified demo or there's like another demo where you click a link and you like get into the product in a demo version and like go through it. Um obviously all these products like everybody's products a little bit different so not it's not like a one sizefits-all solution. Um when you when we look at making a demo page um do you have like a minimum like hey it would be best if we have something like this as the demo and not just like a fill out your email and we'll reach out to you um or something like that in terms of actually like the the thing that they click to like start
this process this sales process. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Well, for a lot of these conversion pages, they all kind of fall to the same types of mistakes that people make, which is they're sort of just checking some boxes and they think that they should have this page because um it's necessary, right? And so on the pricing page, it's just sort of like here's plan A, plan B, and plan C, and then there's nothing else. And then maybe on a signup page, it's just like okay, what's your name and email and terms and conditions? Sign up. Or on a demo page, it's just like a contact form, right? and it's like contact us and we'll get back to you. And those are very those are a lot of like missed opportunities, right? Particularly on
the demo page since we asked about that. Um the like ideal flow is really you have a headline that like reinforces the main outcome people are looking for. You have a little subheader that elaborates on that. You have some objection busters. Um you have a couple of bullet points about what's going to be covered in the call or the demo. essentially just like what to expect. And then we have a form that is progressive. Uh and so it's not just like one big laundry list of fields, but it might be broken up into one or two or three different steps. And there's even a bunch of fields in there that are either being uh filled in the background and then made invisible or they're being skipped altogether because they're not relevant.
And then based on the field submissions, then you can route people to a self-s served demo, to a Savvy Caler Calendarly booking link, um, or basically telling them like, hey, we don't think it's a good fit and or you should just sign up for one of our self-s serve plans instead, possibly, right? But you get the idea that there's a couple of different routes that people can go from there. um with the addition of having a ton of social proof, maybe having some additional uh things about the way that it works or features, you know, further down down the page. Um you can imagine how you can you could take like a really barebones version of the pricing page, signup page or demo page and be like, "Oh, that works." Or you could make it
optimized for conversions and then there's actually like a lot to do. And I think that's another thing that clients don't expect always. They're like, "Hey, can you make us a a pricing page?" And we're like, "Cool." We come back with like, you know, 800 words of copy and like all these dynamic sections. And they're like, "Wow, I didn't expect that we could do that much here." But, um, but there is. Yeah. I was going to say I'm like I'm always a little shocked at like some some pages that I visit that are like pricing pages where I'm like I a lot of times if I like go to a new I see a new business or something I'm like clicking through their website, one of the first pages I'm going to click is
their pricing page. I just want to see what it looks like and see what the pricing is. Like people like numbers, people like money, they want to know what's up. Um and I'm always just like this is sometimes it's like just not there. I'm like, this is the place they go to like see if they're going to pay for your service. Like, this needs to be like like pristine. Like, okay, it's just as it needs to be to get them like if if they're the right person to click the button right here, this big glowing beautiful button that like gets the job done. I'm always surprised to see how how little time and energy is put in. I think particularly with pricing, the thing that I'm always baffled by is how difficult people make it to compare
plans, which is something I think we have a really good process for specifically from a visual standpoint where one that gets me every time is I'll see things like a like a transaction fee added as a feature and like it it follows the checklist. I'm like, why is this this isn't a feature? This is just an additional piece of information like the descending transaction fee going from like 3% to 2 and a half% to 1% based on whatever tier you pick. And so often I'll see that there's a check mark in front of it and it annoys the Jesus out of me. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, because it I think that it makes it difficult and it detracts because it's it it's about the proximity of grouping and information.
It's like this isn't a feature. It's supplemental information to help you make a purchase decision and it should be treated as such. Um, also one thing that I've been a big fan of that Corey introduced me to, which is every single one of the like compounding features that are added on top of it, you know, you always have like your your light basic and then uh like enterprise business plan or whatever. Yeah. Business plan or pro plan. We'll call it the pro plan to make things easy. and you'll do like everything in the basic plan or everything in the light plan and then like they're all bolded the same way. It's like but you're not doing a good job of highlighting the differences between these. So making it very
difficult to compare is I think one of the the challenges that I see people face with their pricing pages particularly in the way that they arrange information and not giving the those visual cues to show this these are the differences you need to pay attention to. Yeah. Yeah, even doing things like subtle, even things like highlights, too. You know, like when we were working on the uh the pricing page for Dabble, you know, they have a lifetime access one that we had to include on the page, but it couldn't be treated the same way as their other tiers because it's not the same. You know, it doesn't have the same kind of uh comparison attributes that we want to include within it. And then you can also use those visual cues to guide
people to which one you think they're most likely going to pick. like your most popular offer is probably going to have some kind of standout visual element to cue them and say, "Oh, this is most likely for you based on this." Make it pop. Make it beautiful. Um, yeah, the designer language. Can you just make this like pop? Easy peasy. Uh we we talked about Pepla and Winter maybe a couple weeks ago, but um there's a report I remember that he did on because you know the whole winter platform is all about essentially taking user testing, but then taking it to marketing pages and sales pages and all these everything else that you know someone would encounter in a marketing marketing touch point if you will to use
some more jargon. Um, and I remember he did a report where people talked about how the pricing page was far and away the most difficult to understand for everyone who went to a website and was trying to like figure out. And when they were rating like the the spectrum of like easy to understand, hard to understand, all the different pages, pricing was particularly the one that was the most difficult to understand consistently for those same reasons where people are like to me it's such a difficult balance. And what I see is people either make it way too simplistic and like the H1 on the page is pricing and then you have like your tiers 1, 2, and three. and then you just have like an FAQ section and the footer
or it's like this huge mess of, you know, you have a calculator integrated into five different tiers and the transaction percentage is one of the features and they're all duplicating across so you can't tell which one is different across each one of the tiers and it's just a mess and it's just a disaster. Um, which can actually also negatively affect things. Like it it would be better to be overly simplistic than to be difficult to understand. Yeah. You see those ones that are like there's three plans for individuals, three plans for businesses, three plans for enterprise. It's like this is like really complicated which is all about, you know, that's actually like pricing, not just like the pricing page. But
yeah, the over complication, the calculators, the the slider, that kind of stuff always they're fun to play with, you know what I mean? But it never really uh like matches in my brain that like it's necessarily a great converter. Yeah. The the other thing about it too that people don't understand is that the pricing page doesn't need to be comprehensive and they're like what what do you mean? Like isn't that misleading our customers? No, you should have a pricing or like a billing section within your app and that is a very functionally designed section where people choose exactly the right plan for what they need. your pricing page. The goal is to one help people understand the big picture of how your pricing works, but
then two to pick a plan that's the best fit for them or the lowest uh the least risky option for them and then to just get them in the product and using it. Just get them started. And we've done this a few times uh with clients where they were underemphasizing the fact that they had a premium plan and that most people start on a free plan and then once they get to use the product and they start to mess around with it and they get a better understanding what it's capable of, then they have a better understanding of what they need and which plan what would be would be best for them. But then they're presented with this big wall of information where it's like tiers one through 27, which one is the best for you? And you have to
siphon through uh so much information. When in fact, you should just have a big section at the top that says get started for free, $0 per month, you know, easy peasy bullet points one, two, three. You have most of the things that you need. Just click this big button. Um yeah, and and that actually is the most like functionally uh welldesigned pricing page for them. Mhm. It's like let the user figure out what they how much they actually need because they know what they need. We just know which plans have what, you know, things and offerings. Um we're getting really in the weeds with pricing pages. Sorry. What were you going to say, Zach? Take us further in the weeds. I was just gonna I had I had
an experience with this this week. Um, I was trying out a uh a project management tool called Motion, notion, motion with an M. Probably seen a couple YouTube ads for it. Motion maybe. Yeah. And I was just curious like, you know, I wanted to see what is inside the product. What is it like? And it was super easy for me to make a decision to get in and just try it because their pricing was very indicative of a riskfree trial. you know, like sign up right now. And all their CTAs were geared for that. It was consistent through every page. And it didn't matter that um I had to uh like sign up for it. It was a no-brainer because all I wanted to do is try. And they made it very clear that it's okay
to try and all you have to do is at least if you're somebody who thinks through this the way that I did, which is I can sign up. I will immediately cancel the plan that I am eventually going to be charged for. And then I can write out the seven-day free trial and see if I like it or not. And if I do like it, then I'll just reup. And I'm sure they're going to send me a discount anyway to try and get me to stick around. Yeah, exactly. Totally. Um, okay. Well, let's move through to the next uh section of pages. Um, which we do. Yeah. One more thing. One more thing on pricing is just if you've ever because a lot of people do. And if you've ever tried to sign up or or like figure out the pricing for
HubSpot or Salesforce or another like big CRM, just go to their pricing page. And a lot of people do because they're really popular products. And that's why so many people end up just booking a demo to talk to sales anyways because they don't understand the pricing page because it's literally impossible to understand. you have to be like given a custom quote and then like talked through it for half an hour. Um there's sort of the exception to the rule. Uh but again it's like well don't copy that though because just because HubSpot or Salesforce can get away with that doesn't mean that that's the best practice. You can yeah it doesn't Yeah. I was going to say especially it's not like the only way
that makes sense is if you're charging tens of thousands of dollars and you're going to pay tens of thousands of dollars a year for an enterprise contract and it's going to be typically set up for you and most softwares are not like that. A decent amount are, but yeah, most software is moving away from that. Um, despite that though, I think it's still good to have like transparent pricing and things like pricing calculators can make this a lot easier and I'm a huge fan of of having those on the pages. Um, but yeah, that that's also because HubSpot and Salesforce like these giant multi-product multi-tool. There's add-ons everywhere. There's services, there's packages, there's this and that and the other. Um, it's just don't make
it complicated. Mhm. Um, I want to move to competitor comparison pages. Um, because we do a fair amount of these. Um, and my experience as the the web developer and not the marketing brain is like these are likely a really good uh SEO uh SEO driven pages where people are looking for so and so product alternatives or so and so product versus so- and so product because it's trying to, you know, we're trying to basically capture any any uh traffic that might be comparing our product to another product and make sure that they are seeing the information that we, you know, want them to see, which is the benefits of using ours. Um, these to me feel, yeah, a lot more SEO driven than the conversion pages and even the sales pages, the the
feature and industry maybe. Um, could you like touch on that? Are these like purely an SEO type thing? Um, is there a lot of traffic like internal like from your current site to that page or is it more for search engines? Um yeah, I think they function exactly the same as sales pages actually and that they they have that dual purpose that are pretty equal. Um it's going to depend just on the industry and how prominent your competitors are uh for the search traffic, right? And and it matters for you as well because if no one is searching for you or for you versus a competitor, then it doesn't make a ton of sense um to capitalize on that part of it. but it can still serve the purpose of being a sales collateral,
sales material for people who navigate to it from the site once they're already there. Um, but you can also make pages on, you know, competitor verse competitor, even verse another competitor, and you can make pages just capturing like competitor alternatives as well. Uh, but yeah, I mean, there's definitely a huge SEO value. And I don't know if people actually still feel this way, but for like years and years and years, um it felt like everyone was very averse to them because they were like, "Ah, I don't want to stir the pot. I don't want to like pick a fight with my competitors. Um I don't want to say anything that's going to get me in legal trouble." So on and so forth. I don't really know if that sentiment has
changed. I've been a huge fan of them since like the very beginning basically because again these are this is like the thought process of your customers. They're going to be doing these mental comparisons uh they're going to be doing these comparisons mentally in their head anyways. You might as well kind of spell it out even more clearly than they could because you know your product better than anybody else. Um, and you don't even have to talk about your competitors super directly. You definitely don't want to disparrage them. You definitely don't want to uh mislead people. And I think people see through the checklists that are like, you know, you have all the green checks and they have all the red X's in in a
way that's like very biased, right? Like people people don't really uh respect that anyways. But if you just say, "Hey, we have this feature. Our competitor has this feature. We do it this way. They do it that way." People are like, "That's great." That was that answered my question. That's all I wanted to know, right? You don't even have to like paint it in a light of we're better and they're worse. You just have to make a comparison. Um, and they're they're so valuable. Like, and nobody really prioritizes these, but honestly, these are one of the first things that I recommend people do. In fact, I did this challenge like four years ago for this white files community and I called it the $500 MR
challenge. And based off of one half an hour call, we would talk about their marketing strategy and where their product was. And I would give them advice just from that 30-minute call. And within six months, if they couldn't add just $500 an MR to their product from that conversation, then I would give them them money back. And I think I charged them $500 too. So it was like a 500 for 500. This ends up being like way profitable for you. And competitor comparison pages were like the consistent across all of the prescriptions that I gave people. I always recommended a comparison comparison pages to them and every single one of them always hit their goal. And normally uh the biggest like driver of those signups and that new MR
were these alternative pages. It's crazy. That is super crazy. Why we need to share that statistic a lot more often. It's fantastic. Um I have there's one thing that I would want to add to this. This is actually, I think, one of the few times where the designer is actually the more sneaky person as far as trying to paint the picture in favor of uh the the brand that we are developing a competitor comparison page for because I've done this with uh like with Dabble. I remember it was something as simple as like changing the color of the checkboxes under dabbles column to be a highlighted color but then still giving checkboxes to the competitors where it was due or just like something that indicated yes but maybe yes in a
different way like instead of uh like making sure that the your product is still highlighted. And you can do that in other ways too. Especially if you are having those head-to-head comparisons of like this form builder does this thing and we do it too and you both have a check but maybe your check is branded and it's in a color. So you're still paying homage and giving the devil is due. I think that you're subtly queuing people though by means of visuals to respect your product more and see it as the solution. I'm curious, what do you think about that tactic, Corey? I love it. I'm all about it. I I still think that there's great ways to like you definitely want to shine your product in a positive light and you want
to uh you want to make it look obviously like people should choose you because otherwise if you don't think that then like why do you exist, right? You should have a story to tell and so you can emphasize that story using tactics like what you just mentioned. Yeah. Subtle sneaky ways. If you need a design snake, come see Conversion Factory. No, those are actually really good stuff. Like I know that like uh e-commerce stores especially AB test this stuff like crazy. And it's a lot of those little subtle things that actually do make a big difference. I personally love building competitor comparison pages. I know it sounds a little strange, but um there's just always like, okay, I'm going to build
all this CMS out and make these pages like kind of systematized and then uh I get to just make so many so fast and it feels great. Um let's keep going because we are we're it's all happen. It's happening again. Um um so after the pages, okay, so quick recap, we have homepage revamp, we have feature pages, industry pages, maybe solutions pages, pricing, signup, demo, competitor comparisons, maybe there's an about page. We have there's a lot of pages here now. Like this is a full-fledged website. This is not just a landing page or a super homepage. This is like, okay, we got a whole ecosystem here. Next is sales collateral. So it's saying okay to me the non-marketer I'm thinking okay we have all these like
asset this big asset now that is our website that's hopefully doing its job it's generating you know some leads for us it's bringing taking the traffic and it's converting the traffic into booked calls or free users or something like that. Now we need some sales collateral to convert those uh those people that click that button into customers. Um, is that why this is the next uh step right here? Why not put this right after like the homepage revamp? Is there a reason that it's right here right after this like big site buildout? Um, I would say it's more just that the those other core marketing pages serve more functions because they have the SEO value and the sales collateral value, the kind of the dual purpose, whereas
sales collateral normally just serves the sales collateral purpose. They're not optimized for uh Google searches or um really generate a lot of traffic by themselves. So, and it's also depending on the product because if it's a completely productled company where they have like a premium and they're just like mass signups and it's maybe a lower on the on the pricing spectrum, then they're not going to have maybe any or as many needs for sales decks and one pagers and calculators and sales tools and scripts for SDRs. they maybe even just need case studies, whereas a more salesled company is going to need the sales decks, the onepagers, yada yada yada, but those are still pretty secondary to a lot of these core pages
that we were just talking about. Um, still absolutely necessary, I would say. Like you can't get away from it. Um, and this still a pretty underinvested area of marketing for people. But, uh, yeah, I think just from like a an implementation and logistics perspective as well, these sales decks and assets are usually derived from things that you put on your website anyway. So, it's just a different form factor in a medium that you're delivering it. So, it makes I mean, there's been a handful of times where it's almost the same material. you just have to rearrange it a different way because you're limited by physical real estate of like a piece of paper or a deck compared to an infinite the infinite canvas of a web page. So I feel
like you end up having a waterfall effect of well if we put it on the website then we can easily put it into sales collateral later. The only one that is different and I'm uh curious would be like the sales scripts and email templates because those I mean I feel like they're derived quite a bit from the website but not as much. Um or like you said they're they're often just not necessary because if you have a product model it's not going to matter. Yeah. Yeah. But I do think that you made a good point that a lot of this is a waterfall effect and sales collateral is pretty downstream from a lot of the other work that you've done on explaining, you know, okay, if if we're going to take our product and tailor it
specifically to this persona, what does that look like? So now when we have a sales pro prospect who comes through, we want to give them a one pager, like we already have uh something to go off of. Like a lot of the sales collateral is derivative of the marketing pages that you're doing, even down to the sales scripts and email templates because a lot of sales scripts and templates are how do I take a pitch and really personalize it to someone? And all the sales pages and competitor comparison pages are ways of personalizing that information to that context, right? Um because a lot of especially a lot of sales scripts um are in comparison with competitors, right? It's like people are going to be asking uh uh hey are you
using Clavio because we have um Sendlane and you should care about Sunlane because of X Y and Z. And unless you've already built those competitor comparison pages, you're not going to have you're going to have to come up with those reasons in the first place. So, you might as well just start with doing the competitor comparison page and then write the sales scripts afterwards. Yeah. I mean, I feel like there's a there's a financial incentive in there as well because if you can answer as many questions as you as possible that an an SDR or an account executive would otherwise have to on a demo. If you can do all of that in place of having a demo, then you save that AE more time and they can go prospect instead and try
and land those accounts that are are a lot bigger and of more value versus it's like the people who, you know, do customer support. It's like, why can't I just find this information on your website because it doesn't exist, but it should. So, here I am with you instead. Right. Normally the the more pages and sales collateral you have on your website that's you know free and publicly available. In other words, it's not gated, the better qualified your leads are going to be who come through the door to talk to your reps because they're self-educating. And that's mainly how people like to buy these days is they're they are self-directed through the sales process. you're just sort of like looking through the glass
window that they can't see through, you know, like you see them, they don't see you, and you're watching them uh go through all the different pages and learn about you and do all these things. And then you're stepping out and greeting them just as they're ready at the right point instead of just, you know, holding their hand through the entire process and giving their spill yourself. Yeah, I I was going to say I feel like um I'm just looking at what we have to talk about next, which is uh onboarding. And so I'm just making it hard pivot right now because I was like stuck in my brain thinking about onboarding and how when I see you start working on onboarding like with a client, I'm just like this is like customer research
level. Like I'm just like people just probably did like whatever. Like they clicked sign up. like that's what feels good. So when you're working on onboarding, I'm like this is like the boring part in my brain of Corey's job, even though it's probably not. Um, and I need you to convince me otherwise. Um, because like you know, it's just like you said with customer research, like it's very important obviously like you can't really do enough of it, but it's the thing that's like most commonly neglected in that like foundation phase. um is onboarding the version of that here where it's like okay the fun part is figuring out how to get the customer to sign up. Like the not so fun part is like okay let's like make sure the
customer is like fully educated on how to use our product and like gets to the correct screens within the product and like sets up the right things and fills out the right information. Like that feels like the boring customer research of phase two. Am I wrong? No. No, not at all. Uh, it's definitely not boring. It's It's pretty intense actually. Like there's a lot of science to it. Um, the reason why it's so important is because there's virtually zero switching costs in software anymore. And so it's not just about who can acquire a customer first or who can educate the customer best, but it's who can get that customer to experience the value that they need in order to pay for your tool. compared
to every other other tool that they're shopping for and probably also simultaneously signed up for a trial for first. It's a race. It's literally a race. It's like, okay, I'm I'm in market for email marketing software. I'm going to start trials for Mailchimp, uh, Kit, uh, Sendlane, fill in the blank with like a hundred other email marketing tools out there. I'm going to at least create a free account if I can. I'm going to look at the pricing for all of them or the pricing page, right? All right, I'm going to look at all the different persona pages, all the different feature pages. I'm going to try it, whatever. But then it really just comes down to when I'm actually using this product, does this do what I want it to do? And
if you have really poor onboarding, people can come in and they're already solding our product and then they're talking themselves out of it by the time they get in there because they can't figure out how to do what they want to do in order to justify paying you money. really good onboarding is like, uh, I was on the fence between you and a competitor and I'm still not sure. And in fact, I might be even be leaning towards this competitor, but now that I'm in the product, I'm sold and I'm going to stick with you. Um, and so you have to make the sale twice. That's just kind of the reality of SAS today is like the first sale is I got them in my product or on a demo and then the second sale is now they're paying me money
because you have premium, you have trials, you have pilots, you it's just so risk-free. It it feels like the like this is the problem that I have with hobbies. Okay, just stick with me for a second. like you in order for me to take up a hobby, it has to have like a pretty low barrier to entry or a like a soft learning curve like pickle ball for example. Uh pickle ball it's not that hard to pick up and like really start to get your feet wet and like start enjoying it. And that is what good onboarding does to a product is like it is it it makes the learning curve to like getting into the product and experiencing the value closer to the customer than it is to like further. And maybe that means that like the product
isn't like over complicated to the point where it's like, hey, it's really confusing, but once you really figure it out, it's like this incredible superpower that like does everything for everyone all the time. And it's like, no, no, let's like dial it back a little bit and make and show people how to get real value out of this right away. You know, it's like I it's honestly pickle ball versus tennis. Like I can't play tennis because it's so hard to hit the ball over the net and land it on the court. Like, but pickle ball, I could do that every time. This reminds me of a section in my mentor's book, Brains and Um, where he says that the four Ps of marketing have changed. Corey, I don't I don't remember all of
them off the top of my head, but it's product positioning, pricing, and I think placement might be the Yeah, the fourth one. And I forget exactly which one. I think it was I think it might have been placement um is now replaced with accessibility. You know, the accessible how accessible your product is is what makes it a differentiator and what makes your brand stand out. And in the case of software, it's is it really difficult for someone to get joy out of your product and a sense of achievement? Because if it is, someone else is going to eat your lunch and if they can provide a better experience like even with things like um what was the Savvy Cal bought out a bunch of people that had Kalanley, right? like
they Yeah, we had a program where it was essentially like, hey, if you're locked into an annual contract, we'll buy out your contract for the remainder of your time so that you can switch to Sabal now. Yeah. So, that's a little bit different than traditional onboarding, but I would consider it part of the onboarding process nonetheless because they made the accessibility of that tool like a no-brainer. It's like, do you want to keep paying for this tool that you hate, or do you want us to pay for the remainder of your subscription and you get to use the new tool that we have forever? I mean, come on, man. The gates wide open. Let's go. Mhm. Yeah. Anything else you want to talk about with onboarding before we hit the next
one? Uh, no. Let's run it. Okay. Email marketing. This is it. Bread and butter. This is where it all starts. Yeah. cold email. Cold email outreach, dude. The amount of ads I get that like I can book a bazillion demos with you with cold email. Well, that's not what we do. We don't do that marketing. What I was going to say actually is this is basically onboarding part two because onboarding within the product is not straightforward. It's, you know, you're trying to lead people down this happy path. You have the essentially like a first run. It's it's a race where you're trying to get people to experience value out of your product as quickly as possible. Trying to make it easy, enjoyable, fun, um,
intuitive, but inevitably there's bumps in the road and there's detours that they make and they just do things wrong or they skip steps and they try to accelerate and uh, and figure out their own way. And when that happens, you need to steer them back on track. And the best way to do that is through email marketing, especially for onboarding. So there's sort of like two sides of the same coin, onboarding and email marketing. Onboarding is like what they're actually doing. And then when they don't do that thing, you use email marketing to get them to do that thing. So you need you need email marketing to educate them and keep reinforcing all the same points that you've been making on your website. You need email
marketing to nudge them to perform certain actions. You need email marketing to remind them to do things that they need to do in order to uh get value andor um can sort of finish their trial or do before their trial or any indicators of what makes for a successful user that they might not have done within the product. Um there's a bunch of other things in there as well around like retention, billing, uh re-engagement. You can use it for sales purposes as well, but I I really think actually the majority, you know, 50% plus of the value of human marketing is just in accompanying onboarding and reinforcing your onboarding flows. Yeah. Digital cattle proddding. Yeah. Yes.
Exactly. Yeah, without but in a really cool way cuz I think that what's cool about software products in comparison to other things like you know if someone buys a I don't know creatine supplement for you don't necessarily know that they open the container and you know if they liked it or how many they have whether they're running low or not. You could guess but you don't have that information. Whereas with software, you have granular like to the tea detailed information of you are here. I've seen this path before. I know exactly what kind of trajectory you're on. You're about to go over your user limit and maybe I can push you to get an incentive and have you upgrade to get these new features or you keep hitting this wall
like I can see that you keep taking this path and you keep hitting like a payment gate. maybe I can nudge you to try and u upgrade or if you never started you know right away you know exactly what stage of the game your user's at. So it makes it's not nonsensical to ignore that information um to make the experience better and the time to value more likely. I I obviously email is super important for both of these things. Um, but I have to say I've had an email for 18 years of my life and for 18 years I have been really bad at checking my email. So I personally want to hit the last piece because we're running short on time which I think will be uh more fun for me personally uh which is talking about pricing.
um pricing like actual pricing strategy is a little bit is something to me that I think people are a lot more sensitive about um than like hey let's you know rewrite and redesign our sales deck like or you know hey yeah let me let me let's work through our onboarding flow like yeah we should have two more emails one here one here that does this and that whatever pricing is a lot more like you know don't don't touch my like don't touch my pricing like that that's mine You can't touch that. Is there a reason for that? And uh how can we stop that? I guess. Well, I feel like it's just sensitive. Go ahead. I feel like I feel like we've only ever had one client where we looked at their and we're not going to name
them because we're not douchebags. Um where we looked at You guys You guys aren't douchebags. Yeah, you are. um where we looked at their pricing and we were dumbfounded like having such a hard like we couldn't reconcile if trying to put ourselves in the position of somebody who would potentially buy this product. There were so many different add-ons and switches and sliders and things that were included but then we thought would be included in the next one, but they weren't. And the language around it was super confusing and weird. And it was to the point where he asked and said, "Have you considered just examining this from a an outsers's perspective because I don't think we're stupid. This pricing
makes us feel stupid, though." Yeah. Yeah. I think actually that was like a recent update, too. It had just changed to that super complicated. It was hard to understand version. Yeah. Yeah. Which is even worse. That's what I'm It's like don't shoot yourself in the foot. It's crazy that they thought like we should make some improvements and then that's what they came up with. Yeah, that's it's a pickle syndrome. They they can't read the label on the jar. Right. Right. So, we I mean we did our best with the pricing page. Um but fundamentally, you need to have good pricing underneath in order to be able to communicate that on the page. And listen, pricing is really hard to get right. Um, and it's also one
of those things that as the business goes on, there are going to be like there's going to be more and more complexity. There's going to be more variables, more things you want to account for, more experiments where you're just trying to test stuff and see if it works. People are super sensitive about it because they know that their customers are sensitive about it because the last thing that they want is for someone to cancel because they were like, "Oh, I didn't understand why you had to increase this price or I didn't know I was going to be charged for that or I didn't know that this wasn't included or this was included." Um, and it can really make a huge difference in your conversions and your just brand
loyalty. And you, no one wants to get that kind of backlash that I've seen a few times where if you poorly handle a pricing update, it can really put a stain in people's uh or you know, bad taste in people's mouth and it can kind of stain your reputation. Um, so that's all the more uh reason to do it right in the first place, which I think we have a pretty good process for. It's it's definitely there's some science to it, but it's it's not rocket science level. Um, and there is some subjective pieces to it. I mean, our our process is more like our analysis. We go through a couple of like uh Van Wessonorf surveying and max diff analysis and things like that that are like we're crunching numbers in
spreadsheets. It's actually not as crazy as it sounds, just the names are crazy. Um, but then there's also just like a high level view of what those the Van Wesondorf analysis and the other one that you mentioned just just for I I know what they are, but you know I Yeah, I'd love it if you could just give a high level for the people who don't. Sure. So, this is the whole thing. And I'm actually I was just writing about this in the book that I'm working on because you don't need to do these things until you feel like your simple intuitive pricing is breaking for some reason. Ideally, your pricing would be super super simple and it' be anchored to a value metric or two so that as the customers um get more and more value out
of your product, you get paid more money and it feels like a win-win. And then that portion stays consistent, right? So, it never feels like, oh, I was getting a lot of value out of this tool and it seemed like a really great deal, but now I'm getting value, but I'm feel like I'm paying more than I should for that value. So it needs to scale proportionately as well. These tools like Van Wessonorf and Maxiff analysis are mathematical ways of trying to measure those proportions of the value that they're getting and the perceived bargain that people are getting out of uh your pricing structures. So Van Wessonorf basically ask a couple questions like um what's the most you would consider paying for
this? uh and it would it would be expensive but not too expensive. What's a price you think would be expensive um but you still wouldn't like really think that much about it? What's a price that feels cheap and what's a price that feels so cheap that you would question the integrity of the product? And that gives you a couple of data points, you know, $5, $15, $20, $50. And then with enough uh with a big enough sample size, you can kind of plot them all out and find a nice intersection between them where it feels like this is a happy medium between we're not charging too much. We're also not charging too little. This gets even more complicated when you layer on different plans andor different add-ons and it can get like
infinitely complex, but it's more just like a it is really like like a sampler. like this is just to get us directionally um correct. And then the max diff analysis is similar in that you're asking like um is this feature uh worth paying this much for? Is this feature paying that much for? What is the order of these features in terms of value? What is the order of features in terms of perceived cost? Things like that where you're trying to get people to quantify what exactly they do value in your product. Um, were you going to say something, Zach? Not no. Um, I did have the only thought that came to mind was I wonder cuz we have competitor pricing analysis on here as well and it's probably more of an arbitrary thing, but
how much does your competitor's price impact what price you are going to charge? because this is something that I've done as far as like positioning maps and just seeing um you know like a specific amount of features like in the automobile industry it's always like performance versus um like an an axis for performance and then one for economics and you have you know super high-end luxury cars like Ferrari or Lamborghini or Porsche and then you have more things that are more affordable like you know the Toyota Camry or a a Volkswagen Jetta that are in almost opposite corners. Uh do you think that there's merit in trying to pick a price that takes takes that into account? Like if all of your other competitors are
playing the affordability and economic route, is it stupid to just pick the luxury area because it's not it's not filled by anybody? assuming it exists and you think a need for it exists. I mean, it's all dependent on if you can fulfill on that promise of being the luxury or premium option, right? True. Um, if there are a bunch of competitors out there, again, this is why everything like this is all so philosophical and existential and why people get kind of uh the heebie-jebies talking about it because it's just hard questions to answer. But if all of your competitors are kind of cheapy, lowcost options um and the things that uh that people want them to do, they can't do and with their their
competitors, then yeah, there's absolutely an opportunity to charge a premium price and then offer premium functionality. The problem though is that a lot of people think that they're offering premium functionality and maybe that they're filling gaps that customers are wanting, but they're not actually doing that. And so now people are looking at it being like, why would I pay double for your tool when I can get everything that I need out of this this other tool because they don't actually feel the need of those gaps that you think maybe you uh created in your head and vice versa, right? for economics too. If um if a lot of your competitors are really premium, you want to offer the economics. It's like, well, but is it
too simple? Does it do enough? I don't know. Do do you think that status purchase comes into play at all? Like is that something that should be considered within software? Like it definitely exists within consumer goods where people will buy things simply as a status symbol regardless of whether the features that it has are comparable. Yeah. Um I feel like maybe we've touched on this in the past and it's a really interesting conversation, but I think status plays a much smaller role in software purchases because software inherently is very utilitarian. And it's kind of always a uh what's it called? A race to the bottom where things get commoditized. And so status plays less of a game because people don't really care what
software they use says about them. It doesn't say much about their business. It serves a a purpose and people will swap it out. You know, like is there a status game being played between Grock and, you know, Chad GBT and Claude and whatever else is out there. I don't know. It's like whichever is the best model, that's the one I'm going to use. I have zero loyalty towards it. You know what I mean? That might actually be like a philosophical battle at this point. A battle of intelligence. Yeah. Um, but you know, people aren't going to choose a $50,000 email marketing tool over a $5,000 email marketing tool just because the $50,000 one has a maybe perceived status benefit of a nicer brand or values or aesthetic or um, you know, it
kind of does come down to like, well, what does it do and do I need those things? Is it worth paying for them? I wonder if that will change with the uh the prevalence of software because I'm I'm thinking of a different market, you know, something like shoes where at the start when shoes first came on the scene, it wasn't, you know, wasn't common. There was plenty of people barefoot and now you have just like so many different layers of shoes, things that you would perceive as very utilitarian and there is a race to the bottom for them. You would have things like, you know, Pay Less or Airwalk or, you know, the the non-name brands. But then as a pendulum swing to that, you have shoes that are ridiculously stupid
and serve no purpose whatsoever other than the fact that it is a designer. Yeah, a designer like a status symbol. I'm just it more of a conjecture at this point. I don't have any hard data on it, but we're entering it's also a kind of a shifting period for SAS where it's like becoming a more mature market and the competitive landscape is getting broader and broader and broader and broader. Right. Yeah. May maybe one more comment on that is just if we took the adjacent world of physical tools and things like machinery or um household items, things like that, they're pretty pretty functional. Brand definitely comes into play because you have like the the DeWalts versus the Milwaukee Milwaukee. Oh, come on. Give
me your man card, Cory. do that. I don't have it. I have a door here. It's honestly drill. It's just like choosing your house for Hogwarts. You know, you pick one and you're stuck with it for the rest of your life. But anyway, what's crazy is it's like certain like in like electricians all use Milwaukee. It's like so weird. And then like construction people all use, you know, it's so strange how they do that. Anyway, go ahead. Well, my point in that is that I think that that's a good case of when all the like raw materials are pretty much the same and the the design has been figured out like this is the best way you can make a drill, this is the best way you can make a whatever, right? And now we're we're really just
packaging this in a different way with a brand or maybe um it's you know how it interplays or is interconnect with other other tools or plays nice with this. yada yada yada has a warranty so on and so forth but then um because you think about like I think about watches for example there's like a there's a brand play to it for sure people play a lot more for Rolex than they do for a Casio but there also is a raw material part to it where it's like yeah they're using some of the best materials in the world and it's like handcrafted instead of um you know made in in mass um there's a lot more secret sauce going on behind the scenes. And it's funny you mentioned this because there's this guy on Twitter. I
actually think he's the CEO of of Product Hunt. He's not just like some guy think. Yeah. Yeah. Um and no shade to him, but like I don't know, he just the community hasn't really clung to him that much. And I think it's for reasons like this. and he was like prediction 2026 all or people are not going to want to buy software that um was made with AI and I was like prediction every software is made with AI and no one cares like that's just not the thing that's going on in people's mind is like what tech stack is was this made with or what were the raw materials of this code or the that's not the thing I would be really curious to see if That is something that pans up. So here listen listen hear me out. Zero chance. I'm
telling you. Listen here hear me out. So like my in-laws have purposefully omitted any AI companies from like any kind of index fund investing that they partake in. Whether that actually comes to fruition or not, they're missing out. Bull move cotton. It's bull move cotton. But I do wonder. It's kind of like the um I we see this all the time. Like even as you were talking about tools, I thought of pens cuz one thing that I've like thought of is like, okay, a pen is a a tool. Um, there are very very cheap commoditized ones, but then there are other pens that are so overly priced like 100x the cost of what my Pilot G2.37 38 007 guy that's loser. Um, fine pointer bust. Anyway, there are use cases for that that like
this is what people do. And I wonder if that will ever become a thing where it's like this is handcoded by somebody else like no matter what it is, if it if that if that matters. Cuz the crazy thing is pricing is one of those elements that is so ethereal and emotional and we feel like we have a logical grasp on it. But then stuff happens like that where it's like why would somebody pay $1,000 for a pen when they could buy this one that does the same thing. This is like and I wonder I wonder if that would Sorry, Nick. I wonder if that will eventually progress like especially as people's knowledge about what goes into software becomes a little bit more u transparent and just more widespread like could that be a thing? Obviously
we're we're going down a huge rabbit hole and maybe we need up to another conversation. I have one more rebuttal. I'll tell you why it won't because of Tesla. Anytime you can make a premium product for a premium cost and and uh transfer those cost savings to the consumer, they will take that deal every single time and then that will kill all the other competition. So you take a Tesla, right? Basically, the whole premise of a Tesla was what if we took the performance of a sports car and the aesthetic of a sports car and the technology of a sports car and then we packaged it in something that was family-friendly, economic, and at the price point of a Camry or Corolla or, you know, fill in the blank with
whatever your economic car is of choice. That's why Tesla is the most valuable company in the world or at least was a couple years ago. But and why Tesla are so ubiquitous and software has been down this path for a long time. It doesn't cost hardly anything to build software anymore. In fact, the costs are dramatically dropping still and people are going to have to uh transfer those cost savings to the buyers of software because otherwise nobody would use it because somebody else would make another CRM that's going to be just as good if not even more beautiful and cost less. Zach, what you were saying reminded me of like the Starbucks uh problem where it was like in the 80s and the 90s people just like when they
got coffee they just like drove through McDonald's and they got coffee and that's all they wanted and then there was like it's like a coffee shop like you go in and it's like you shop for coffee or you like go to the thing and you order and then you like stay and drink coffee like coffee is no longer like a to- go drink and how that's what the tweet the product hunt tweet reminds me of that like no no no people are going to want to like slow down and like you know they're going to want miss that human connection to their software which no one felt ever maybe you know like I don't know if anyone like yeah that's a or people who are like obsessed with software um which someone in that position would be but I
am I am writing down another card for us to talk more about this cuz this is fascinating It is a fun the psychology of software pricing and what's ahead. We are officially way over time. Um any final words on phase two or should they just buckle up for phase three next time? Buckle up, man. It's going to be wild. Okay, I have one final question. Where should people go if they really need help with their product marketing? Shameless plug. I tell him. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. Nick, you can only do that if you're like if you're hosting guests on the podcast. Yeah. Like, so where can we find you online? Yeah, right. Yeah, you can find all of us at the same place. Uh, no, I'm just kidding. Um, okay. Sweet. Great work,
gentlemen. Uh, we'll be back for phase three next time and thanks for listening to the factory floor. See you guys. [Music]
Phase two is building the base: sales pages, conversion pages, comparison pages, collateral, onboarding flows, email.