Going from 0-100 signups per month, without content

Freshsales CRM partnered with Patrick Barnes (CEO, Advocately) for a webinar on “Going from 0-100 signups per month, without content” on March 8, 2018. In this webinar Patrick talks about:

  • Building a list of perfect customers
  • The data and technology used to execute
  • Key metrics
  • How to iterate and optimize

Going from 0-100 Signups per Month, with no content: Webinar Transcript

Nivas: Hello everyone. I hope you’re able to hear me loud and clear. Thank you, everyone, for joining us from across the globe for this exciting webinar today. I’m Nivas Ravichandran and a – of growth for Freshsales CRM at Freshworks. Freshworks is the company behind Freshdesk customer support software, Freshservice IT Service Desk software, Freshsales which is a sale CRM, Freshchat, Freshteam, Freshmarketer, and Freshcaller.

We have about seven software products today which aim mostly at small and medium businesses to improve collaboration and productivity. This webinar is being brought to you by Freshsales CRM. Freshsales is an intuitive easy-to-use sale CRM product and it’s been over a year since we’ve launched and we have about ten thousand plus users from 50 plus countries.

So today’s webinar is going to be about “Going from 0-100 signups per month without content.” There’s more of an experience sharing webinar where a Patrick CEO of Advocately, he’d be walking us through the process of how they went from zero to hundred trials and ups per month. Patrick is a great friend we use Advocately at Freshworks and they use Freshsales. And in fact, he spoke about this topic in SaaStock in Dublin, Europe.

We thought it will be really nice for our audience to listen to this content. So Advocately is a software which helps B2B SaaS companies mobilize their happiest customers to create reviews, customer testimonials, case studies; it’s more of a customer advocacy software. So Thank You, Patrick, for joining us. It is late for Patrick, it’s about two or one, what time is it Patrick?

Patrick:  2 AM for me but it is late for you too, my friends.

Nivas: Yes it’s about 11:30 in India but we’re happy to put this together for you guys. So before we begin I just want to let you know that this webinar is being recorded. So if any of you are interested in listening to the webinar again, we’ll be providing you with a link to the recording by mostly Monday.

And we’ll also be taking questions towards the end of the webinar so feel free to key in questions as and when you have them so that I could just select them for Patrick to answer. So Patrick over to you, all the best.

Patrick: Okay thank you, thank you for that introduction, I really appreciate it. And Nivas as you know we’ve covered this topic together a few times. So please feel free to if you think I’m missing something jump in at any time. As we’ve covered quickly before the webinar started for anybody who just joined, this is going to be a super tactical session exactly what we did, I’m going to show you the products we did.

Yeah, this is something that can be actioned in a very short period of time. So the subject is “From 0–100 trial sign-ups per month with no content”. So what I wanted to cover was why we decided not to do content.

Why we decided no content?

So firstly this is by no means a criticism of content as a form of distribution or acquiring trial signups or acquiring website visitors. It just wasn’t an area we had any expertise in. We wanted to start distribute to a very niche market and we weren’t familiar with the content funnel as opposed to a skill set we felt we had in our repertoire.

But we did have a really good product and we had a very good audience we wanted to distribute that to. So yes that’s why we decided to do it without content. There was just too much of a learning curve without any clear idea of what the results would be. So that’s why we decided not to do the content thing.

Build a list of customers that are perfect for the product you have now.

So the first step in our playbook for going from 0-100 signups is to build a list of the company customers that are perfect for what you have right now. So not a list of companies that you plan on being perfect for one day. 

A list of 500 companies that are absolutely perfect for what you have right now today. They should have the problem and this list should be around 500 companies long and on top of that there should be a series of parameters that bring that list together whether it’s industry, location, company size, technology they already use on their website, a series of attributes that allow them to be grouped together in a list of 500 that they all have in common.

It’s not about getting a list of 3,000 companies and taking 500 off the top. If you can only get down to 3,000 companies I would find another metric or another attribute to come up with a more specific market. So these companies are perfect for what you have right now. I can’t emphasize that enough. What I’ll do is I’m just going to explain our example. This going from 0-100 signups has nothing to do with using the Advocately product.

But I’m just going to explain what Advocately does and how we built our list. So as Nivas mentioned we help B2B SaaS company, so already niche; automate the process of generating a continual stream of new 5-star reviews online on review sites that are relevant for B2B SaaS companies. These include websites like G2 Crowd for example that I have open over here; I have our G2 Crowd profile open over here.

G2 Crowd lists Freshsales Top CRM for Small Business.

So what we looked at is we looked at B2B SaaS companies that were already leveraging those review sites. So this can involve a couple of things specifically. We were looking at companies that we’re investing in the review sites. The review sites have either a premium branding or a pay-per-click model or a combination of both.

We wanted to target the people who are investing. So let’s say if there are 20,000 or 200,000 software products listed on these sites; we wanted to target the people who were spending money on them which we could see from the outside. So that’s how we started to build and hone this list. Yeah, can’t emphasize enough that they need to be perfect for what you have right now and have something in common. So let me just go on to the next, excuse me.

Create a free product that is useful for this audience. It should be related to your main offering and take little to no dev time.

So this is something specific to us, however, there are different models. There are different ways to do this but the second thing we did after we come up with our perfect customer list, we decided to offer a free product that was useful to this audience and related to our main offering that took little to no development time.

So a free product that is useful for the audience, that is related to your main offering and basically a feature you already have you should go give away for free. This should not be hey I attended the webinar with Patrick, we do – tracking software, we’re gonna spend the next three months developing this free product. There should be an element of the time tracking software you can give away for free as an offering to the audience.

We did a free software product or an element of our product for free. But maybe some form of valuable offering that you can include in your outreach through these 500 companies that are someway meaningful and linked to the attributes that make those 500 companies the same and the value of your main offering.

Review Monitor for Slack

Going from 0-100 signups: Review Monitor for Slack

So what we decided to do is we decided to give away—we decided to offer our review what notifications in Slack. So what this involved is any time a company wrote a new review online, we would provide a notification in Slack for that business. So again these are companies who are using the review sites; we said “Hey! Anytime you get a new review on these sites we’ll notify you in Slack for free.”  And we basically just made this really clean skin, I’ll show you over here there’s just a GIF of the new review sites add to Slack two or three minutes to set up super simple.

One thing I can’t emphasize enough is that if you are going to give away a freemium product, is make the onboarding super easy and super sticky. The last thing you want is a 10% completion rate onboarding of a product you’re giving away for free.

So for us it is two click, search for your company name, choose a channel in Slack; it’s done, it set up forever.

Getting more on a tactical side right now, is these are the tools that we used and I’m going to show you them quickly to find a relevant contact to reach out to at these companies.

So the tools we used as we use both Clearbit and LeadIQ. So essentially what we are doing with these companies with these tools here Clearbit, LeadIQ is we are sending the list of the 500 companies we want to target. Yeah, uploading the list of the 500 companies we want to target and say give me a contact in marketing, give me a contact in—give me the CEO, give me a contact in customer support.

So essentially we’ve got our list of 500 companies; we’ve got our hook or our offering whether it’s a free product or consulting or whatever it is and then this is where we can actually get a relevant contact detail. So I’ll show you both of these products now. Oh just you know I’ve already prepared a list of every tool that I mentioned in this presentation and I’m going to send Nivas after this so he can send it out as well for anybody who’s interested.

Tool 1 – Clearbit & LeadIQ

I love Clearbit, I think it’s super cool, it’s a very useful product. They have a number of solutions, the one we used is a Prospector. So finding and this is essentially, this is slightly more technical but essentially via the API, you can send in a list of company domains and a job title that you think would be useful to have and they will return a contact that is a verified email from one of those domains that you can then send an email to which is what I’m going to show you next.

The second tool, so this is a slightly technical option, still very compelling though. The second tool is a product called LeadIQ. Now there are two ways of using LeadIQ; we can upload a list, upload that list of companies. I’m logged in to my LeadIQ account, upload via CSV list of accounts and then you upload a CSV with two columns.

Going from 0-100 signups: Clearbit & LeadIQ

One is the company, so the 500 companies that you’re interested in and secondly a job title. So marketing, sales or whatever it is and it will return an email that’s verified through their system to email. And I think I’ll bounce rate for both of these data provided, both of these email providers is less than 10%. So once again so this is uploading a CSV, this is via API and the third option is via, I’m gonna use myself as an example here is via leadIQ. It offers a really cool Chrome extension.

So essentially if you search for a company, let’s say that one of the 500 companies. You research for Advocately for the point of this demo. So you find the company online you look through ideally it’ll be a bigger company I imagine but you want to find the perfect contact. So you say okay I want a message the CEO, let’s again there could be a list of 25 or 200 people here and you can filter via location.

But once you find that perfect person at that one of 500 companies you get to their LinkedIn profile and then you just click this LeadIQ Chrome extension and it will get you their email and send it into the web app I showed you before into a specific campaign that you can then download as a CSV. So yeah two really good tools that I recommend that are incredibly tactical. So that’s how we get the contact details of the person at those 500 companies, very very high quality.

Tool 2 – Cold Email

So the second tool in our playbook is to send really personal cold emails to these contacts that we get.

They should look as if you went into Gmail and personally emailed the person with your offering.

It shouldn’t have pictures, it shouldn’t have HTML, it shouldn’t have buttons. It should look as if you sat at your computer, you sat at your keyboard and personally message them saying, “Hey! here is an offering.”

Going from 0-100 signups: Cold Email

It should look like a direct personal email that you spend your time on and this is where it gets a little bit interesting. So there are a number of tools to do this and we do it through Freshsales where I suppose an interesting thing, sorry I bump that by mistake.

This is where we actually made our first mistake as well. So we’ve got our 500 companies, we got our emails from LeadIQ and Clearbit, we’ve got our free product and we said, hey everyone. We sent out this personal email here I hope everybody can see it, I can send these by as well. It’s saying hey we’ve got this free product—free Slack product, it’s really good. We’re gonna give you a heads up whenever there’s a new review, click here to set it up and it was amazing. People did, our conversion rate was over 25%, possibly even 25% of people clicking through and signing up.

Mistake 1

So the mistake we made is we were then in this limbo where we had 500 people who converted to a 100 people using this free product. But then we had to really nurture those 100 people onto our other product or somehow get them onto a phone call and there’s obviously going to be conversion drop-off there.Going from 0-100 signups: Mistake 1

There’s going to be—they’re already set up, there’s no reason to talk, it was this weird—We would then go to try and book in a call over the next two weeks but they’re already kind of using it, it was this bizarre limbo. But what it was successful so that was quite a quite a funny mistake that we made.

Where it was successful though, is we did validate that our list was good, our email provider was doing a stellar job getting us relevant contacts and people did like our hook. Whether again if it’s a free product if it’s consulting if it’s whatever your hook is. So that was cool.

So what we changed it to is we changed the premise from click here to set it up to it only takes two minutes to set up on a phone call together, when would be a convenient time for you. That was what we amended it to and that perform similarly well to get people onto those calls.

Going from 0-100 signups: Mistake 1

The only thing I would just say before we get on to the next section, anybody is welcome to if they want to if they say want to try this out and they want to maybe bounce a couple of cold email drafts off me; you’re welcome to email me. I just showed you how to get my email address. If you have some drafts you’re welcome to send them over and I’m happy to provide any feedback based on our experience doing this. So yeah that was the first mistake we made and how we changed it.

This is not a bait and switch!

This is really important, this is not a bait and switch. This is not a “Hey! We’ve got this free product. What we’re going to talk about first is our main offering, our paid offering or can I send you a quote for that.” It’s not that, it’s the opposite of that.

The call starts, “Hey it’s Patrick. Thanks so much for meeting today. I appreciate my email was quite brief. It’s a very quick product to set up. Why don’t I just recap exactly how the product works before we set it up to make sure you’re okay with everything then I’ll talk you through the setup,” provide a one or two-minute explanation, answer any questions they have.

Then get the customer to share their screen with you and talk them through the setup process which as I mentioned before you should make seamless this shouldn’t be your free product shouldn’t involve importing a CSV or anything. It should be really clean and easy to set up. And then be very transparent with the customer and say okay that’s great. Thank you so much, you’ve got that free for life like that’s a free product we offer.

If you have any questions you’ve got my personal email. My phone number is in my signature, anything you need let me know. And this should only be realistically three or four minutes into your call and normally you’d block out we send a calendar invite for 15 minutes or 30 minutes. So where the call transitions to then go “Hey! Look so as I mentioned you’ve got that free forever. Please let us know any feedback, we’d love to hear from you.”

And then say “Hey! While we’re here we have another product that’s relevant to companies like you, that helps get you more reviews online or whatever your product does. Do you mind if I spend a couple of minutes telling you a little bit about that?” We’ve never had anybody say no. You know we’ve said we’re going to offer something for free that’s a value to them, they’ve expressed interest, we’ve helped them set it up they’re not done.

We’ve never had any—you’ve built so much credibility by that point, we’ve never had anybody—yeah we’ve never had anybody say no to that. And even if somebody said no, it wouldn’t be the end of the world you just keep going with it. But that was key for us. Definitely not a bait and switch, don’t do that.

Tool 3 – CRM

Okay so this is really really important, you need to have a CRM. There are a number of reasons for this, firstly we use Freshsales and I love Freshsales personally. You can never—if you’re saying these are the 500 perfect customers for you, for what you have right now; you can’t afford to let any of these leads slip through the cracks. That’s what I really like about Freshsales as I found nothing ever slipped through the cracks.

So the number of customers you can acquire is much higher. So the key here is the main problem is who you email 500 people cold email super personal it’s amazing, you’re getting responses. You’ll get responses that say yes, sounds great, would love to talk. And you go amazing: so one in four people will go sounds great and you go okay amazing do these times work for you? And they will say yes and you will book a calendar meeting and they will show up.

Going from 0-100 signups: Freshsales

However, three out of four times, maybe two out of four maybe I’m being too pessimistic; the customer more say yes, I’ll be there. And you go okay amazing. How about 9:00 a.m. or 10:00 a.m. your time Tuesday next week and then the customer doesn’t respond to that email. So you need to keep chasing them up. So I definitely recommend setting up your leads in Freshsales and updating the status. Say have status for qualifying or set yourself tasks that if you email them.

So you can set up workflows in Freshsales that if you email them and you haven’t heard back in two days it will automatically set your tasks to follow up with them. Because making sure none of these people slip through the cracks is the key to this whole funnel working. You know if you’re losing you know if you email 500 people and you get 100 responses or 50 responses and 10 of those slipped through the cracks or 20 of those slips through the cracks, you’re going to perform at the end of the day which is the revenue coming out of the bottom which is why we’re doing all this at a 20% lower rate.

So very very important to keep on top of all these people who respond and diligently follow up with them. Oh, one small thing as I know, I’m in Singapore it’s 2:23 a.m. I do this every night I work till 3:00 a.m. because the majority or not on Friday but Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday I take calls till 3:00 a.m. Because an overwhelming majority of our customers are in the United States. I appreciate everybody, it sounds like we’ve got a fair few people in India have joined late as well which I’m very grateful, thank you, everyone. But one thing in terms of securing these meetings makes it as effortless for the customer as possible.

Firstly, the number one most important thing is to only talk in their time zone. That applies if you’re in Singapore like me but it also applies if you’re in Eastern time instead of Mountain Time. People don’t care about you, they don’t care where you are; always suggest times where they are. So if I was on Eastern time say for example and the customer was on Mountain time, I used this tool called every time zone; I would have a look—it’s totally free www.everytimezone.com.

I would have a look at the gaps I have in my calendar and I’d say okay great I’m free at 2:00 p.m. Eastern Time for example. So I slide this across and I’d go okay 2:00 p.m. Eastern that is 12:00 p.m. in Mountain Time and I would probably provide three or four different options of hey to any of these times mountain time work for you and then include a calendar link as well, super important.

Mid Presentation – Question & Answers

Nivas: Arvind has a question if there was a difference in conversion between the two drafts you showed us?

Patrick: A very very good question, I think funnily enough—So what I want to say is I don’t—this was a while ago. I think this one performs slightly lower let’s say this converted at—very good question. This one converted at say 20% instead of 25% like this model of asking people to talk but our conversion from to paid was much higher if that makes sense.

So I say we sent 500 people each campaign, there were multiple steps in the sales campaign. Let’s say the first one click here to set it up, had 25% conversion which was great. But maybe only had 5% paying customers after that is this one had a lower initial conversion but a much higher conversion rate on to the paid platform.

Nivas: Yep, in fact, because that’s the following question where he says isn’t scheduling a call asking for a bigger commitment up front than a user just trying out a free product?

Patrick: So it definitely is but realistically if we look at it again—excellent question by the way and I really should have brought this up. I can use the excuses at the time one more time, I think and this will be my last one. But yes, essentially what we were doing is we were taking a hit on the initial conversion for a greater conversion down the line.

But it is definitely asking for more of a commitment. We personally found that if you are giving away something for free that is so relevant to that audience, it worked quite well but yet excellent question. But were the conversion rate of let’s say 50 people to sign up for the free product and only 40 people opted in for the call in terms of and I cover this later in my call, my presentation; in terms actually proceeding down the funnel, the number of people who proceeded down the funnel to later stages was way higher. Not the percentage of people, the quantity of people was far larger from the group of 40 than the group of 50.

Nivas: We have another question from Jason especially with respect to your free product. So how can you offer a free product if you’re offering a service, like a digital marketing for example?

Patrick: Look a really excellent question. I’m not an expert on digital marketing services. I think yes, maybe you could do like a 15-minute consultation thing or offer some form of maybe something you could kind of bottle up.

So if you were doing consulting on digital ad spend maybe there is some level of expertise you could provide on a hey we provide a 15-minute analysis of your ad spend that typically saves people seven—Yeah, I’m sure there is something there I don’t know what it is. The only thing I would say is don’t go, if you’re trying to sell services don’t give away suedes of your time for free because then why would they start paying for it. It would almost be like some of the challenges that come up with Groupon and stuff. But I think that’s probably something you can do that’s expeditious of your time but I don’t know what it is.

Nivas: After releasing the free product, did you did you focus on improving the free product to improve their satisfaction or did you pitch them the second product?

Patrick: So we continue to improve the free products, absolutely and we took a lot of feedback on that. So one thing we added in, so the first bit of feedback we got was hey we want to attract competitors as well and that was great. So we started doing that. And then the third bit of feedback was good was hey we want competitors going into to be tracked separately to our own reviews. So we definitely continued to get feedback on that and iterate on that product; if that I think that answers the first component. And secondly, we did we definitely took the opportunity we had to present our main offering when we did get on that call.

Nivas: Okay cool. So, Patrick, I’m going to pause the questions for now. I’d allow you to continue the presentation.

Other plays to increase performance

Thanks, thank you, everybody. So what I might do is I might just cover the four, the number of emails in the sequence is at Advocately we decided to opt for four emails in the sequence. There are a number of reasons for that but we just felt that if we reached out to them four times, these are very personal emails that that was kind of I’d rather just instead of to continue to email the same person; I’d rather just hit the brakes, maybe go back to them with something else or try somebody else at the company rather than—Lots of people send 8-9-12-13 emails, we just decided on for that yeah, that was a decision that we made.

Going from 0-100 signups: Slack, Bonjoro, 4x, Personalisation

Because even if you’re looking at selling into especially as we do, sometimes job tenure is nowadays in 2018 18 to 24 months only. So realistically if you message somebody in that first six weeks of joining or first three months of joining depending on the job, they’re still ramping up. There is four weeks of annual leave or two weeks per year or four weeks per year annual leave in there somewhere where there won’t be responsive to email. And in the last three months, they’re probably looking for another job.

So if we’re targeting who we think is the right person with the right value proposition; if we don’t hear back we would rather move on to somebody else in the organization. Yeah, that’s what we do. But plenty of other people say more than that, we would just rather keep improving, keep going on to the next person. These are just little, these are super tactical little tricks. One thing we did is we just have an integration with Slack.

If anybody goes to our website and fills out a contact us form or signs up for a trial or starts talking to our website chat; we just get a notification in Slack. There are two, here’s a screenshot of an example of a fake email of course. There are two reasons for this; one it’s good to just get a heads up so you can actually engage with these people straight away.

You know we’re talking about our journey from 0–100 not from 1,000 to 10,000. Like if you get somebody you want to jump lead response time is key. Nivas and I actually spoke about this on LinkedIn recently; lead response time is your best friend. Get on these people as quickly as possible, so that’s a nice way of getting an immediate notification.

The second reason is as I mentioned there are four emails in the sequence. So some people won’t respond to your email but will sign up for a free trial. So getting that notification in Slack is a great way of making sure you can jump on those, to be honest, to remove those people from the campaigns. Because you’re going to look really silly somebody signed up for your product and you’ll continue to send the messages.

That’s just a small thing there. I’ll just mention personalization before you go on to Bonjoro. If these emails that go out the more personalized they are the better response rate they have. So personalization as in including company names first names that don’t even count. So you want to be mentioning content that’s relevant to the business and relevant to your offering that is can’t be done by a computer basically.

So, for example, we often include things like “PS I love this review on this review site from October last year” and actually have the content of an awesome review or something. Again this isn’t about reviews, I’m just using Advocately as the case study here but something that can’t—you don’t want to send the same emails to everybody. There is a balance with this though. You still want to be authentic.

I had a great example of this recently where somebody was saying that they received an email where the person looked on their Twitter and saw they were a big fan of some sports team in the United States and they opened the email or they sent the email “PS Go Blues” or they thought they would incorporate that into the email. But then they got on the phone call and the person didn’t know anything about that sport and didn’t care. So you don’t want to be ingenuine with your personalization either; there is a balance between the two.

The fourth little way to increase performance is a Bonjoro message. So Bonjoro is a mobile phone app or web app. I’m logged in, sorry I can’t bring up their website right now. But essentially that allows you to send small, short selfie videos recorded on your phone. So you add the email in through the web app and you receive a notification on your phone. You record the video and it gets distributed, it gets sent out to the person.

I have an example of one open for us that I can play a little bit of. So here is how they look in the Inbox. Here’s what it looks like, “Patrick Barnes from Advocately sent you a message”. You type a little thing here. They click here to watch, you get taken to a new page. So essentially what it does is people’s emails email inboxes are a busy place.

Everybody’s sending emails, I signed up. The example I used in Dublin in September was, I signed up for a Marketo trial two years ago and I still get emails all the time. So this isn’t just that something else you can use to help stand out in the prospect’s inbox and also sometimes people don’t respond to follow-up emails. It’s just another tool to drive conversion and be more human, be super personal.

So this is—you know if somebody is in that category we talked about before, where they’re in your Freshsales, they’re in your qualifying section, you keep following up; they’ve told you hey sounds good, I would love to talk. They’ve never gotten back to you, never gotten back to you, never get back to you; you’ve sent three or four follow-ups, I would send one of these messages.

And the responses are often “Hey! Thanks so much”; you want this to be personal, mention the company name, mention what you talked about in the email, mention something specific to do with their business. This is not a canned email: Hey I send this generic video to everybody, this is something you record every single time. And it’s actually super fast as well in a way faster than writing an email. So that’s another tool that you can use for the people who are perpetually in your qualifying thing.

The other option is that where they use a good is if somebody says sounds could send me some more information is I would record a personal video. It’s a little bit more enticing. So just a few little hacks. Okay so once you have all of this working, everything we have covered so far; you’ve got your list, you’ve got either your free product or your hook. You’ve got the email sequences going.

Facebook & Google Ads

Once you have all of that working I’d say a 10% conversion rate at least. We target 20% but once that’s converting, anything that comes after this in this presentation ignore until everything we’ve looked at so far is converting at least 10% from cold email to a meeting is that we then—What we started doing is uploading lists of people to Facebook and Google. So this is for retargeting.

So Facebook Ads which we’ve all seen before of course and Google Display Network ads; you can upload lists of emails and then advertise to them and pay through Facebook and pay through Google. So here are some examples and this does two things. So you can actually upload the list. So you’re choosing who’s going to be exposed to these ads. You’re choosing who’s going to be exposed to these ads and you’ll see two things.

Again don’t do this until you have 10% above. This is afterward. You’ll see two things. Sometimes people are—you can see the email response rate go up because people are exposed to your brand, there’s a bit more awareness, there’s a bit more intrigue or secondly, they’re your perfect 500 customers anyway. So you’ll actually see them clicking through to your website and maybe signing up for a free trial or filling out a contact us form or requesting a quote without ever talking to them or sending them any emails which are obviously pretty handy as well. 

Metrics we track

So here are the metrics that we choose to track. Each week we track the number of new email sequences send; the new favorable replies. I don’t care about people not being happy. Like people yeah, people who are enthusiastic about your product. So don’t get distracted by reply rate which might include people like I’m not interested. We track new leads that are generated from the ads. We track the number of meetings booked.

This is again software specific; we track the number of proof of concepts that go live. I don’t care if somebody creates a free trial. I care if somebody creates a pre-trial, sets it up and somehow achieves the desired outcome of the product during that period. So for us, it’s getting new awesome 5-star reviews that weren’t being generated before; that’s what I care about. That’s how we can drive conversion further down this 0–100 trials signup journey and obviously new customers and revenue as well.

It’s always a working progress.

And then finally the only other thing I’d say is this process that I mentioned which I think is highlighted by the last piece there on Facebook and Google advertising is this is always a working progress. There are always ways to improve it. Once you do, so for example once you start doing the Google and Facebook advertising you’re probably going to be getting a lot more mobile traffic from people clicking through on the bus or in an Uber on a Facebook ad. So you’ve gotta improve the website.

You can include a special landing page in your email signature that has a special video related to it. So if anybody clicks through from your email signature, don’t just send them to your website. Send them to a page with a video explaining exactly how what you emailed them about does. You don’t want them getting confused if there’s a gap between your email and your whole marketing website.

Target somebody else at the same company and I just have to finish– I just have a very small screenshot down here, might be a little hard to see of I first message Alex, the organizer of SaaStock – about speaking about this subject in April of last year; just over 11 months ago and we’re always still this process. So yet so it’s always a work in progress but at the same thing as Nivas and I said at the start.

You can get off this call today, figure out your list of 500 companies, figure out your list of people, offer them something for free even before you write the code as long as you’re willing to give it to them like before you can give them—We built that beautiful skin for the Slack product but we could have just let them use that feature of product without that you can really start all of this in an extremely short period of time. And that’s everything that I had Nivas.

Question & Answers

Nivas: Cool Patrick. Patrick, so I had one—I actually had two questions before I jump onto the questions. Folks feel free to keep keying in your questions if you have any. Bonjoro seems like a very interesting tool. So does it get delivered to the primary inbox in terms of Google or does it go to like the updates tab?

Patrick:  It goes to primary inbox. So it actually gets sent from your Gmail too. So I know it looks like this but this is actually from—it’s the same as the cold email. It’s from our SMTP server so very good question. No, it doesn’t get sent out from Mailjet or some generic server; it still triggers from your Gmail, very good question.

Nivas: That would be great. I mean because I was wondering if we had to send it from like say another server, it’ll probably go to the Updates tab.

Patrick: Possibly yeah, it would have the same problems that your whatever marketing automation software you use. So the open rate is very high but yeah, with these it’s kind of different; you track the open rate, the watch rate, and a reply rate as opposed to open and quick, so yeah good question.

Nivas: So there’s a question from Tejaswi – personalization and cold emailing takes a lot of time. What is the ARPA that makes sense for such effort? What are some ways to do personalization at scale?

Patrick: It’s an excellent question. I’d say it depends on case-by-case. So the way we do it is we use our own product. So we do things like we pull in from the review sites, we pull in the review site total. It’s like “Hey! I see you have 146 reviews on Capterra and G2 Crowd.” I can also see that you’re paying for pay-per-click from G2 Crowd can still publicly visible information, you can see this.

So I think it’s and then we can say a “P.S. I love this review from October of last year and the UX of this product is amazing”. So essentially I think it’s actually a way of coming up with the personalization that you want and then making that a series of placeholders in emails. So you can then fill out into a spreadsheet that when that’s populated into those emails and is grammatically correct.

One of the cool personalization that works at scale but we don’t do a lot of but for example is a Chrome extension called BuiltWith which will give you the breakdown of the technology of website uses. And what that means is like if you have a product that works with Salesforce or works with Marketo, or the other one is Datanyze it is amazing. Datanyze has some really rich data.

But yeah if you if you have a product for Shopify customers who are also using AdRoll you can go and find all the Shopify sites that have AdRoll installed or have their Facebook tracking pixel install. So hopefully there are a couple of things. But yeah, I don’t know about—the Opera is an interesting one because it affects the conversion rate. But I think I would look at it more as time and your conversion rates and it’s got to be just big fat.  There should be a way you can do it with time, with time in place.

Nivas: Patrick I also had one question with respect to the targeted Facebook ads. Is there like a minimum budget or set on it our minimum number of leads you’re supposed to upload to see some sort of results or is there like, I mean did you see an increased conversion rate for that sort of a very specific targeting?

Patrick: Yes, so it’s interesting. I think from the lead volume you want is actually around that 500 mark as well. The first time we did it, we actually uploaded everybody we’d ever emailed. Like we didn’t pre-target them, we post-targeted them to see how it did which was the list of more than 500 companies. It was closer to 1200 or 1800.

The budget, budgeting across these sites is interesting. So we had a $500 per month budget but the way you actually manage Facebook and Google Ads – is we actually had like, we had a friend of mine Denham helped us out with it. We actually had you know those images that I showed you, we had you know different headings and different subjects on each of those ads with the same images.

So it’s almost like we had 24 or 48 different ads all of which that had a budget of one dollar per day. And then he would be taking ones down that we’re not performing as well and yeah you can get super data-driven with it and we started with a paintbrush $500 per month budget and that was getting thousands and thousands of impressions.

Nivas: Cool so we have a question from Dan. He says are you using Freshsales to send out cold emails? So yeah, I think before we launched sales campaigns you were using what was the tool you were using?

Patrick: Actually, it was actually all very funny timing. I was using a tool called Sales Whale. They were doing email sequences for outbound. But he is actually successfully pivoted the company and they’re now no longer doing email signatures, sequences. So I loved it but their new product is pretty amazing as well.

So right around the time they sunset that product and stop supporting it and stop providing it, Freshsales released the email sequences (Sales Campaigns) so I was very lucky.

Nivas: So we have one question from Raag – would you recommend using LinkedIn Sales Navigator instead of LeadIQ? How do you see it?

Patrick: So I think they actually work from what I understand, I think they work really really well together. I’m not that familiar with LinkedIn Sales Navigator but say if your prospecting enterprise being able to use the more advanced filtering of LinkedIn Sales Navigator is great.

And then to use the LeadIQ Chrome extension, what that does is it pulls it into a specific campaign in LeadIQ so you can then track on a campaign level. So I’m not that familiar with LinkedIn Sales Navigator but my understanding is LinkedIn Sales Navigator times LeadIQ is a winning combination.

I’m pretty sure I saw a blog post from LeadIQ in the last four weeks “Is LinkedIn Sales Navigator worth it and he goes quick answer, it is”. And he writes about how they use LinkedIn sales navigator with LinkedIn. So I think they’re a good combination from what I understand.

Nivas: So Jay has a question saying do you use lead scoring to sort them?

Patrick: We do, we do that’s a default, we’re really lucky. Yeah, we definitely use lead scoring. And sometimes it’s funny because sometimes we cold emailed somebody like three months ago and you don’t create a free trial. Like I didn’t do anything, I haven’t emailed them in three months but it’s still really good to know the lead score ticks up.

We would already not miss them because we see every new sign up and we obviously get very excited. But it’s really good to know that they may have had some interaction with you in the past and they were already a lead.

Nivas: What happens to organic traffic if we continue to adapt to cold emails and calls; when do we think content needs to be in place or content needs to be in place?

Patrick: Look very good question, one thing I don’t have the answer. And again I wasn’t saying, I’m not saying contents bad it’s amazing, I wish I knew more about it. We just had a product, we had a customer, an audience and we wanted to get moving. So that’s why we – and we didn’t know about that area. So I don’t think there is a blanket answer for that. I think yeah, it depends on your business heading.

Number one thing is what are the search volumes, like are there search volumes of your perfect audience, of your perfect audience every month, every day? So there are like CRM software, for example, Freshsales or there’s so much search volume for that kind of content where for us what is the search volume of how do I get reviews on Capterra or how do I get reviews on the Salesforce AppExchange. The search volume is actually very small. So yeah, we should do content we will at 3:00 a.m. for me, 2:53 a.m. So we will get there but this is how we got started without it.

Nivas: I think this is going to be the last question Patrick because this is about your product. I saw your website you don’t have your pricing info. You just have to get started for free. He’s like what’s the reason behind that?

Patrick: Good question. We just looked at the conversion rate we’re still always iterating and optimizing on our pricing as well. So we’d rather capture people and we do offer a free product and yeah so that’s why there are two schools of thought which is some people want to do pricing.

The other thing is our website’s not yet that’s strong. So there is a danger that people don’t quite understand what we do and then see our pricing and we lose them. So we just try and capture the leads that make it.

Nivas: Cool. So Patrick thank you so much. So we wrap with the question and answers and I know it is around 3 a.m. in the morning for you in Singapore. So thank you so much, Patrick. Thank you all for joining us. We look forward to seeing you again. As promised all of you will be getting a recording of the webinar by next week.

Feel free to connect with us either on support@freshsales.io if you have any questions or you could reply to me via the email which I send you reminders or you could connect with Patrick or me on LinkedIn. And so as promised all if you’ll be getting a recording of the webinar. So you could even watch the webinar recording again. Thank you once again, have a great day. We look forward to seeing you folks soon. Thank you, Patrick.

Patrick: Thanks, everybody, thank you for having me Nivas. Thank you. Bye.

Nivas: Thank you.


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