Optimizing High-Intent Pages: Secrets to Streamlining Conversion Forms with Sahil Patel

Randy Wootton (00:04):

Well, hello, everybody. This is Randy Wootton, CEO of Maxio and your host of the SaaS Expert Voices Podcast, where we’re bring the experts to you to talk about what’s happening in SaaS today and what’s on the horizon for tomorrow. I am really delighted to welcome Sahil Patel to join us. He’s not a typical guest, only because he’s not a CFO or just totally involved in what it means to be a CFO, but he has been a two-time CEO, first company 11 years in the healthcare tech and currently the CEO of Spiralyze, which is a tech-enabled service that helps people design, measure and execute A/B testing across their website. Really interesting model. He’s going to give a little bit more background on that, but prior to that, he was also a consultant, he went to business school and started at Emory in Atlanta where Maxio is actually based. So we have a lot of overlaps in our background and as part of that, the focus on marketing tech as well, Sahil. But it’s great to have you. Thanks so much for joining us.

Sahil Patel (01:03):

Thank you, Randy, for having me. Really glad to be here.

Randy Wootton (01:06):

Good. Well, why don’t you just give us a little bit of background on Spiralyze because we’re going to get into what you guys do, and we’re literally going to do a teardown on the Maxio website live, first time we’ve ever done something like this. But I think it’d be helpful if you set the context for the problem that you were trying to solve. How do you approach that at Spiralyze? We’ll broaden the aperture a bit and talk about how CFOs think about CMOs and marketing and how A/B testing can slot into that. And then as I mentioned, we’ll do a teardown on the Maxio website. So help us understand a little bit more about what was the problem you were trying to solve as Spiralyze and how are you approaching that today?

Sahil Patel (01:40):

These are fun problems to solve. And I want to say, Randy, thank you in advance. Not just for having me, but also for having the guts to do a live teardown and workshop on your website. I think it’s going to be a lot of fun. For B2B SaaS, which is that’s who our customer is, the number one asset they have to drive sales is their website. Sooner or later, all roads converge on the website. That could be you are a classic PLG product-led growth type of company where people come and they sign up for that 7-day free trial and you hope to convert them into an active user and then a paid user. It could be you have a more enterprise product and there’s a form that someone fills in, [inaudible 00:02:24] sales, get a quote, see a demo, some variation on that. And then there’s a bunch of low-intent things like read a white paper, attend a webinar, do something else. But they all happen on the website and companies spend an enormous amount of money just to get the traffic there.

Randy Wootton (02:46):

Yeah. I think in our pre-brief, you described your website as being your number one sales rep. I thought that was brilliant. That’s what I talk to people is your digital storefront, but it’s more than that. It is set up to really be the compelling experience for those people who may not have an intent to buy, who you don’t know, but who are showing up and exploring. And I think in today’s world, more and more people are trying to get the information they want before they actually engage in a sales motion. But I think that whole idea of how do you make it the best? We just went through a website migration and it was a huge initiative, a huge investment. Is it going to pay off? I don’t know. So keep going. So you’ve got all of these companies that you’re working with.

Sahil Patel (03:28):

Number one, your website, it has the potential to be your number one salesperson, but it is always your most expensive salesperson. If you just say [inaudible 00:03:41] for Maxio to run its website. Now, I don’t know this to be true, but if you’re like most of my other clients, it’s somewhere between half a million and a million dollars a year if you add up your hosting, the content, the tools, the website itself, whatever you’re paying, WordPress or whomever you use, all the different pieces of technology you have to plug into. And then there’s the people time, the developers, the designers, the copywriters, the engineers to just keep it up and running and hopefully making it better along the way. No brainer half a million to a million a year.

Randy Wootton (04:17):

Well, what’s interesting about that, I’ve never thought about adding all of those costs into just the website experience. I think the CMOs out there that might be listening to this are shaking in their shoes, which we’ll talk about a little bit. The CFOs are scratching their head and saying, “Gosh, I’ve never actually codified or created a unit cost economics for the website.” But I think you’re absolutely spot on. It’s probably that order or magnitude if you put all of those initiatives in place and capture the time allocation of the people that are building content, optimizing content, etc.

Sahil Patel (04:51):

You’re doing SEO, you’re running ad campaigns all to get traffic. And by the way, if you had [inaudible 00:04:57] and you brought her in the door and you said, “This is our new salesperson,” paying her half a million dollars a year, you better believe she would carry a pretty heavy quota. And it wouldn’t go long before your CFO or your CRO, chief revenue officer, all the Cs would say, “How much did she bring it in for half a million?” By the way, your website, it’s not like a salesperson where you pay them a little if they produce a little and a lot if they produce a lot. you are paying that website, whether it’s a little or a lot. So that’s the problem statement.

Randy Wootton (05:28):

And to that point, one of the things you had said as well is your homepage should be your most productive page because it’s going to have the most traffic. Even though there may other be pages like your pricing page, your demo page may have a higher conversion rate, you’re driving the most traffic, the organic, and then the branded keyword search. And then if you’re going to webinars or doing conferences, you’re driving people to your homepage and trying to make that most efficient. So that was the problem statement that you were trying to go after with Spiralyze, and you do it a really unique way. When I was taking all these notes about how you do it, you’re crawling 34,000 web pages a day. Can you talk a little bit more about that and what that means in terms of how you’re crawling and what you’re looking for and how you apply those lessons to the companies that you help?

Sahil Patel (06:16):

So there are 34,000 websites that do this thing called A/B testing where they’ll take, say, a landing page and they’ll make two versions of it and they’ll show half of their audience one version of the page, half randomly assigned a different version, and then they’ll compare which one got more conversions. By the way, conversion here could be someone signs up for that free trial. It could be they sign up for a webinar, download a white paper or click that [inaudible 00:06:44] those are all examples of classic conversions in a B2B SaaS website.

(06:52):

A/B testing is the best way to continually get your website to perform better, to turn it into that high performing salesperson because if you don’t A/B test, you’re just doing ideas, hunches. Someone goes, “Hey, I heard [inaudible 00:07:07] button’s blue let’s make the buttons blue. Or I heard that if you put the CEO’s dog on the home page, you get more people to click.” By the way, don’t do that. Now, A/B testing as a process is the best way to do it. But what most companies do is they test meek ideas. They do things like button color changes, or they test hunches and impulses. They listen to a podcast like this one and someone says, “I got more conversions when I put a blue background.”

Randy Wootton (07:44):

We were joking about when I first started the internet, I was doing display advertising and we used to talk about, “Hey, make it pink, make it blank, and you’ll get people to interact.”

Sahil Patel (07:52):

Make it blank, yeah. By the way, if it works for one company that has little to no predictive power then it’ll work for you or anyone else. And I’ll use this example. If you went to the doctor and the doctor looks at you and she said, “Hey, Randy, I got something for [inaudible 00:08:09] I want you to try this medicine.” And you said, “Great. I’ve never heard of this. Well, is this new medicine?” She’s like, “Oh, yeah. My neighbor tried it, worked pretty well for him. So I’m doing it to you.” I think you might pause and be like, “Okay, hang on a sec. Have you tested this somewhere? Is your neighbor the only person that’s tried this and did he even have the same symptoms? How is the dosing right? Is he a big guy, small guy? What on earth?” And the doctor says, “I don’t know. It seemed like a good idea. I want you to try it too.” This is almost like pre-scientific medicine. That is the state of most websites.

Randy Wootton (08:48):

What’s interesting about that-

Sahil Patel (08:49):

There’s good ideas and hunches.

Randy Wootton (08:50):

Right. What’s interesting about that is I’ve been talking about A/B testing for 20 years. We used to do A/B testing with email. We’ve done A/B testing with websites. I think the insights that you’ve determined or drawn out from all the ones you’ve observed is the three. One is that they run anecdotes, so like make it pink, make it bleak, put the CEO’s dog on. Number two, to your point, running meek tests rather than big bets. They’re testing dumb things like button colors. And then you said the other constraint, which I thought was really interesting, was the operational bottlenecks that keep you from doing monthly tests. So if people want to get an A/B test up and going, but can you walk through when you usually go into a customer and start to talk about, “Well, how are we actually going to build a muscle around rapid A/B testing so that we can actually make it efficient and effective and informative?” Where are the bottlenecks? Where are the constraints and the execution?

Sahil Patel (09:44):

So the first bottleneck is what should you test? Because once you’ve picked the low-hanging fruit, it gets a lot harder. Number two, you decide what to test. Then there’s a whole committee of people that have to approve the tests, copywriting, branding, product, legal. By the time they’re done, you’ve burned [inaudible 00:10:08]. And then number three, you got to actually build the test. You go to your developer and say, “Give me an A/B version of this page.” And she says, “I need a spec.” So you go to the designer and the designer says, “Great,.I got four other projects. I’ll get back to you in a couple of weeks.” That’s not high-velocity testing.

(10:29):

And let’s go back to how do you decide what to test? This is the problem we solve is we crawl 34,000 websites. We find everyone else’s A/B tests, and then we look for clusters of tests that work repeatedly. One test, one company, who cares? Running out to tell my clients, “You should run this test.” But if we see 10 companies all run the same test and they converge on an answer, that’s what we call proven winner. Those are the kind of tests I like to run for my clients.

Randy Wootton (10:57):

Good. Well, maybe we shift over there. So in addition to having the data, which you’re using big machines to go out and scrape the websites, it’s not like you have a bunch of folks in the back room checking out all the websites, you’ve had to build some real tech there. And that’s part of, as we were talking about, you’re in a tech-enabled service, not an agency. You’re a tech-enabled service [inaudible 00:11:16] the design, measuring, executing of the tests informed through the data that you’re collecting by the machines that are crawling all these web pages. What are some of the other best practices that you recommend? We’ll talk about it when we do the teardown on our website in terms of what’s working, what’s not, and how you would tune it just by looking at it. But in general, the takeaways for the audience, the CFOs, well, maybe not the CFOs, but we’ll get to that in a second. Just in general, you’re talking to head of marketing or marketing team. What are the three things that you recommend them to think about?

Sahil Patel (11:45):

Yeah. Here’s three things I think everyone listening can take away as being practical and generally applicable and relevant for their website in B2B SaaS. These are not idiosyncratic. They’re not things that will only work for one company, but no one else. They’re good general advice. Okay. Number one, show your product, show your product, show your product. Now, if you think, Randy, [inaudible 00:12:10] about the last time you saw a car company ad. Can you think of what it was?

Randy Wootton (12:17):

Gosh. I mean, I don’t-

Sahil Patel (12:20):

TV, internet, somewhere.

Randy Wootton (12:22):

Sometimes it’s the actor and sometimes it’s the car. But I think a lot of them, to your point, are the car. I mean, [inaudible 00:12:30] McConaughey, the guy who’s talking as the car is going.

Sahil Patel (12:32):

Yeah, McConaughey. He’s in the Lincoln, he’s driving. But imagine that same ad. You could subtract McConaughey. It wouldn’t be as good or charming, but it would still be recognizable as a car ad. But if you subtracted the car and you just had McConaughey, what would you have?

Randy Wootton (12:52):

Cool.

Sahil Patel (12:53):

Cool. Yeah. He would be just as charming, but I don’t think anyone would go out and test drive a Lincoln Navigator.

Randy Wootton (12:59):

Right.

Sahil Patel (12:59):

Same thing is true in B2B SaaS. It turns out… By the way, the data, that actually overwhelmingly supports showing the product in a prominent, visible way gets more conversions than happy people.

Randy Wootton (13:15):

Why do you think so many B2B websites don’t do that? What’s the hesitation, or what do you think the assumption is that’s driving having a dog jumping up on a trampoline on the front page?

Sahil Patel (13:29):

Well, I think one that we have largely been, let’s go back. You and I are old enough to… We were there at the dawn of the modern internet. It was like pre-scientific medicine. Before we knew surgeons should wash their hands, people didn’t wash their hands. [inaudible 00:13:52] should they wash them with soap? Yes. Okay. So a lot of internet has been based on hearsay hunch, anecdote. The first generation, really, we are still in the first generation of people that grew up in the internet era. Today’s senior executives at the board level and the C-suite level were starting out their careers in digital let’s say 20 years ago. There wasn’t science around this. It was a lot of anecdotes. By the way, it’s not their fault. There weren’t good tools to aggregate, to analyze. That’s the first thing [inaudible 00:14:32]

(14:33):

There’s some reticence. I think it’s based on unfounded fears that, boy, if you show the product, someone will steal it. Now, let’s just step back for a moment. Even if that were true, could you imagine running the car ad [inaudible 00:14:51] Toyota is going to steal the design for the latest Lincoln Navigator if they see the ad. Really? And even if they did, why and how would they execute on this? I think even if your competitor has a screenshot, they can find it if they wanted to. So what? I think that’s number two.

(15:15):

Number three, when we write websites, we labor over every word, every image. It’s not because people don’t care, but that process is inherently inward facing. It’s about me. Our product [inaudible 00:15:30] we’re great, here’s what we offer. And often I think it loses sight of the audience. They don’t know you. Okay? Most B2B SaaS, it’s not like high brand recognition. It’s like you’re selling an iPhone with a strong brand behind it [inaudible 00:15:48] I have a problem that I need to solve. I’m going to look at three or four vendors. If I’m in the enterprise market, I know I should look at these. And if I’m in SMB, I should look at these.

(16:03):

Decision making is pretty snap judgment [inaudible 00:16:06] that’s not the buying decision. Buying absolutely is lots of detail, buying committee, all those things. But that initial… They’re probably looking at your website for five to 10 seconds and they’re making a snap judgment inside of one second, “Hey, am I even in the right place?” That’s the mindset that you want to put it in. So you got to give your brain… Here’s the fact, your brain processes images faster than words.

Randy Wootton (16:29):

That’s what you had said to me before, which I thought was fascinating. The other thing, maybe a fourth I would offer is the website is often thought of as a canvas. And so if you have designers that are trying to bring to life the brand, they want to have a brand voice, value. Just a whole narrative about it. I think before the version that you saw, we had the product, the reporting tab highlighted, but we had these hands that were on the keyboards and someone told us, “That just looks kind of ghostly. Why’d you do that?” And I thought it looked very creative, but what it did was it pulled away from the emphasis being on the reports. The other things, I think, that happens is if you don’t have a great UI or UX, people will augment the product to make it look better, flashier, cooler. We were chatting a little bit about, “Hey, it’s probably okay to do a little augmentation. But when someone sees the reports on the homepage, it better look like what the reports are they’re going to get through the application.”

Sahil Patel (17:34):

That’s exactly right. So you’ve just described all the reasons people don’t do it. I think that now once they do do it, you show them the data, they go, “Wow!” Because an A/B test, we’ve run this through more than 100 companies, 52% of the time, showing the product on a demo request page gets more conversions than the control.

Randy Wootton (17:56):

So that’s number one. Show the product, show the product.

Sahil Patel (17:58):

Not just a few, 20% more. So it’s not just a little. If you tell someone, “You want 20% more leads?” Most people say yes.

Randy Wootton (18:05):

Awesome. Second thing, you’ve talked about the copywriting, and we were talking a little bit earlier about marketers spending all this time about getting the words just right and compelling narrative. What have you found through your testing for what works on websites mostly?

Sahil Patel (18:20):

Short, short, short, short, short, short, short, bullets. Three is the magic number. No more than two lines. Don’t try to get them to buy the product. Don’t try to explain why you’re better than everyone else. Make a single bold claim that’s different from your competitors. Your main job is to get the person to stop scrolling.

Randy Wootton (18:39):

Great. And so that actually was the third point I took away was this idea of a bold claim that’s quantitative and it needs to be positive. We were chatting a little bit about how I talk about when we sell Maxio, that we help you reduce revenue leakage. What you find is most B2B SaaS companies have 7 to 9% of their revenue going out the door because they’re not invoicing correctly period. Or they get customers that are contesting invoices and you’re like, “Randy, that’s really negative. You need to have a positive claim,” but you want it quantified on the page. Is that sort of the third point or would you add anything else to that about giving the benefit?

Sahil Patel (19:17):

You’ve put it perfectly.

Randy Wootton (19:18):

Okay. Well, there we go. And the thing before we go to the teardown, which we’re going to go to in just a second, I think the other thing that you talked about with your firm in particular is once you pay for performance, and number two is you are out to really have significant performance. And one of the data points you gave me was clients, you’ve worked with one in particular, had 50% lift on their home page. So it’s not just sub 10%. This is significant improvements by using this A/B testing informed by what’s working broadly across the internet of companies, the full superset of companies that are doing A/B testing.

Sahil Patel (19:55):

That is exactly right. We’re playing for big swing [inaudible 00:20:00] for Spiralyze, but we’re playing for big swings, double digit increase in conversion rate, and you only pay if you get the lift.

Randy Wootton (20:07):

Awesome. So let’s see what you got. I did this one-

Sahil Patel (20:12):

Let’s do the fun part.

Randy Wootton (20:12):

Let’s do the fun part. This is a follow on to… We went to Pep, who’s the CEO of Winter, and he does this public teardown of people’s websites on LinkedIn. It’s a lot of fun. We put the Maxio website through his process and there were some good insights, some of which we knew and we were incorporating into our new release, which we just did on the 27th of June. But I said, “Hey, you know what? Give me your best shot. What do you think we’re doing well? What could we be working on?” And your team was able to turn around in less than 24 hours, a couple of recommendations. And so if you’re ready to shame, I’m ready to reveal.

Sahil Patel (20:48):

I absolutely am. And I want to say Pep is the best in the biz. He’s so good, so smart. He’s been doing it… I mean, he was onto this before anyone else was. Pep is listening. I think he knows. I shamelessly steal from him every chance I get. Here we go. I’m going to bring up my [inaudible 00:21:09]. Now, even before we talk about some new ideas, let’s just take a look at your home page. Randy, let’s talk about it. Now, is this the new version of your home page? You’re doing a lot of things really well here.

Randy Wootton (21:21):

Thank you. Yes. It’s the most recent. It doesn’t incorporate all the changes we want, but we had to go back. We migrated back to WordPress, and that just went live on late June. So this is hot off the presses, but not the best yet.

Sahil Patel (21:34):

It looks great. Tell me, what are the things you think it’s doing well? I think you maybe have some more changes that you have coming. Where do you think you can do better because I think that’s a good place for us to start?

Randy Wootton (21:46):

Well, I think the thing that I like about it is, to your point, around product, product, product. We do have the product captured on the page. It’s done in an augmented way, but it’s big enough that I think that when people hit the web page, they can see it and engage with it. I think we’re descriptive of what we offer. So at one point, I had an ambitious vision for what we should be doing with Maxio. We did a little bit of testing on it, not in a professional way, but what we got to was we needed to be more clear about what we offer. And the challenge is we do have two different offers. We have a billing solution and we have a financial operations solution. So it was bring those two things together and then be very clear that our focus, our ICP, is B2B SaaS.

(22:26):

So if you’re a B2B SaaS CEO or CFO, our hope is you hit the page and you’re like you’re in the right spot and the product looks kind of cool. Now, let me see what we might want to do. And you got the [inaudible 00:22:40] across the top, and we do have two different calls to action, again, informed by feedback. One was get the demo, right? We want someone to do it. The other feedback we got was, “Hey, I don’t want to interact with anybody. Could we do a tutorial?” And so we do have a tutorial option, which is a self-run tutorial. We use a company called Torial, I think. Great CEO, really fun guy. And we’ve seen real interaction on that. I think it’s kind of pick your own adventure in terms of how do you want to take the next stop, super clean on the page?

(23:11):

And then finally, it’s great to see that in your rendition that the four capabilities below, the subscription billing, the revenue management and revenue recognition are above the form. That’s one of the things I’ve been a little anxious about is how’s that showing up so that people can see exactly what do we do for B2B SaaS companies.

Sahil Patel (23:31):

Yeah, really good. So I agree with all of those. To me, I’m just going to draw a little here, see if I can make that… I don’t like that, it’s op… Never mind. [inaudible 00:23:44] your headline, really good. It tells me exactly where I am. So many companies have this broad aspirational headline, excellence defined. The number one blank in blank. It just means nothing. Dual CTA, I like that. You’ve got a high intent CTA and a lower, I wouldn’t necessarily call this low, but lower. Hey, it’s my first time here. I don’t know how I want sales rep giving me the spiel. Maybe I just want to check this thing out, make sure I’m in the right place. And then showing the product, showing the product, showing the product. Really good. And depending on this, if I’m zoomed in a little, I may see only a little bit of this, but something tells me, “Hey, there’s something worth checking out”. And it’s only a quick scroll to see, okay, here are the four things you do. I think those things are really good.

Randy Wootton (24:35):

Great.

Sahil Patel (24:36):

Okay, let’s talk about some things you could do that would get you more conversions. Number one, there’s no hook. Now, categorically, I’m in the right place, but if I looked at your top three competitors and then I looked at you, I would think great. But I don’t know what’s different. By the way, I didn’t say better. I just said different. I don’t know what’s different. The sub headline, it’s okay, it feels a little wordy. I think this product’s [inaudible 00:25:04] really strong, but there’s just not a hook. So we took a swing at this and we can go over here.

Randy Wootton (25:13):

There you go.

Sahil Patel (25:15):

And we did fourth things here. So first, we moved your headline here, which I would call this a categorical headline. By the way, categorical headline, still better than broad aspirational. We moved it into what’s called the eyebrow, billing and [inaudible 00:25:33] is it immediately tells you, “Hey, I’m in the right place.” I think this is like you’re looking at a restaurant. I wonder, “Is this food? Is this fine dining? Is this burgers? Is this pizza?” Okay? That’s not what gets you to stop. It just tells you you’re in the right place.

(25:50):

Two, we paired it with a bold headline that delivers a clear benefit and a bold but believable claim. Now, I actually don’t know to be true, is 14% the right number? Yours may be more, it may be less. It needs to be believable. When you see someone say, “Hey, increase, grow your business by 30%.” I’m like, “Wait a minute.” A single vendor that can drive 30%… I was just like, “It’s just not possible.” Maybe you can move a single metric, but you got to make it specific and believable.

(26:28):

And then third what we did is we used this thing called Hero Tiles. By the way, this is not an idea that we came up with. We scraped this from Monday.com. So Monday.com, I’m going to… Let’s not get distracted. Anyone else willing to check out Monday.com, they ran this as an A/B test and proved that it got more conversions. We have since, by the way, run this for our clients. On average, it gets 17% more conversions on the homepage by running Hero Tiles.

Randy Wootton (26:54):

And Hero Tiles being, if you go back to the other screen for a second, different than what we do have on our page where we have the four boxes; the distinction between that and the Hero Tile is just because it’s a little higher and because it’s very specific? I mean, both are going to click through to other landing pages or other pages-

Sahil Patel (27:17):

Well, that’s a little bit different. So this, first of all, it’s kind of a weak CTA, learn more. Everyone’s seen it, learn more. Reminds me of school. I’m not too excited about that. Okay? It’s also below the form. So we call them Hero Tiles here because they’re in what marketers call the hero section of the page.

Randy Wootton (27:36):

Got it.

Sahil Patel (27:37):

Above the form.

Randy Wootton (27:38):

Okay.

Sahil Patel (27:38):

The tiles, that’s just a word for boxes. But here’s where they engage people. We’re pairing them with, instead of a sub headline, we’re actually posing a question. How can we help you automate? Which spurs your audience to think about what is it they want today? They check a box, and then to actually go forward, they have to put in their email address. Now, it’s a micro-commitment. We’re not hitting them over the head with a whole form, but we’re saying, hey… By the way, I don’t know these are the four things that… You know better than I do. Hey, if I’m interested in subscription billing, I put in an email. That’s not so bad. And then I’ve got this… Your product looks great, by the way. Beautiful product screenshot right here. Now, if we were working together, I might get a couple smaller screenshots. If you have a mobile app, you have a secondary and tertiary page, I would put them over on the side. Now, we haven’t done anything… Oh, then the last thing we did is we got your logos.

Randy Wootton (28:43):

And brought them up higher, right?

Sahil Patel (28:44):

Brought them up higher.

Randy Wootton (28:44):

The credit that we have, right?

Sahil Patel (28:48):

Yeah. Today, they’re here. It’s not bad. Your social proof can do a lot of lifting. You’ve got great Chili Piper, incredible company. Instant brand recognition.

Randy Wootton (29:00):

Right. Cool kids like to be with cool kids.

Sahil Patel (29:02):

Yep. You solve problems for people like me, problems like mine.

Randy Wootton (29:07):

So that’s option one. You did three of these. So what would you call this rendition versus the other two, or was there a guiding theme for this one?

Sahil Patel (29:17):

We did three different pages. We did a home page, we did [inaudible 00:29:21] download.

Randy Wootton (29:22):

Okay, great.

Sahil Patel (29:23):

So three different use cases, three different places in the user journey.

Randy Wootton (29:28):

Okay.

Sahil Patel (29:28):

Okay. Let’s talk about your demo request page. Okay. Now your demo request page here, you’ve double stacked the fields. You’ve got this micro texture, which I really like you, you have your social proof up high. For a high intent audience, you may not need all that information because if you get that high intent audience all the way to this page, our data shows you actually get more lift by removing distractions.

Randy Wootton (29:57):

It’s one of the things everybody debates is what’s the trade off between the give the information for free versus how much information do you need to be able to engage with them productively in a sales cycle? And I guess what you’re saying is you’ve shown that if you actually ask for less at this stage of the process, you get more people submitting.

Sahil Patel (30:18):

Let me be specific. This is on a page where you’re getting mostly high intent traffic, mostly organic traffic. We’ve actually tested it. This kind of approach does not work on paid landing pages.

Randy Wootton (30:30):

Okay.

Sahil Patel (30:31):

Because that audience lower intent, or at least a mix of intent, especially if it’s a non-branded search term campaign.

Randy Wootton (30:40):

Okay, great.

Sahil Patel (30:41):

So let’s say, Randy, I typed in billing software right now. I could be looking for a lot of things there. I might be looking for something like Bill.com. I might be looking for Maxio. I might even know what I’m looking for. Just my boss said, “Hey, we need some better billing software.” I’m all over the place. And they get to Maxio maybe because they see a great ad you’re running, which has a great hook. That is a totally different strategy, and we don’t have time to go through that. It’s a great conversation for another day on how do you tailor a great landing page experience for a paid landing page.

Randy Wootton (31:15):

Okay, so you’re solving for this by pulling back for that very specific use case of the high intent and pulling back on some of the required information to be submitted?

Sahil Patel (31:25):

Well, no. I’m not.

Randy Wootton (31:26):

Oh, sorry.

Sahil Patel (31:28):

It looks like that. I’ve actually just streamlined your form to make it look shorter.

Randy Wootton (31:33):

Okay.

Sahil Patel (31:34):

So I’ve taken your form and I’ve moved the field labels inside the fields. I’ve kind of doubled stacked the form-

Randy Wootton (31:41):

Oh, great. Created more white space, right? Yep?

Sahil Patel (31:46):

The form looks less overwhelming.

Randy Wootton (31:50):

Agree totally.

Sahil Patel (31:52):

Okay. Number two, what I did do is I stripped out all the distractions, your value props, your headline, your social proof, I even removed your top nav bar. These are escape doors. And if you get the high intent audience all the way to this page, the last thing you want them doing is walking out one of those escape doors because they might not walk back in.

Randy Wootton (32:15):

But do they feel that when they’re confronted with this, that the only way forward is this one way door? I mean, the testing shows it, right? The A/B testing that they also feel kind of frustrated because they want to be able to-

Sahil Patel (32:28):

They might. When we run this test, we would only call it a winner if you get double digit gains, because, yes, there is a part of your audience. Now we won’t exactly how many it is, but if you get 5 or 6% lift on this, I would call it not a winner. It’s not a loser, but it’s not a winner. Now, what you can do to get more insight is run some heat mapping software. There’s a lot of good options out there. Some of the A/B testing tools have it built in. I would recommend to everyone, if you don’t have one of these tools, Fullstory is another. If you don’t have one of these, get one. There’s good free ones. And if you see a lot of people doing what’s called rage clicking, then it probably means you’re frustrating your users.

Randy Wootton (33:17):

All right, good. Any other sort of insights on this page that you-

Sahil Patel (33:21):

Yeah. So two things. One is it’s sensitive to the right screenshot. You want to get something that creates a wow moment. Now, easy way is go to your sales reps and just ask them, “Hey, what’s the screen that gets everyone excited when you show it in a demo?” Your sales reps know. The second thing is, let me just focus here, the second thing is you want to blur the background image.

Randy Wootton (33:47):

Yeah, I love that. I think that’s really not just tasteful, but really intriguing. It feels very modern. It shows what’s behind, and it’s intriguing in that way.

Sahil Patel (34:00):

Yeah. Now, sometimes my clients ask me, “Well, we have three products. Should we show a different product depending on what someone’s interested in? We have 30 products, we’re a big company. We’ve got not just multiple suites, we’ve got multiple platforms.” And what I tell them is, “You’re overthinking it. You actually don’t want your audience thinking about what page that is.” First of all, I don’t actually think they care or remember. By the time they fill in this form, you schedule the demo and they show up for the demo, they don’t remember what was on this page. Number two, if they’re thinking about the image, they’re probably not going to convert. What you’re looking for is an instinctive emotional response that you’re trying to evoke for them to say… I call it the tinted window effect. “Good. That looks cool. I’d like to see what’s on the other side.”

Randy Wootton (34:50):

Right, exactly.

Sahil Patel (34:51):

Okay. So we’ve now looked at the home page. I’ve shown you what you could do there. We’ve looked at a demo [inaudible 00:34:58], which is going to be a bit of a high intent, typically more advanced in the user journey. Most of the people who come to this page have done their research. They’ve looked around. They probably looked at a couple of your competitors. And if they’re here, what you want to do is just make it easy for them.

Randy Wootton (35:14):

Right. Remove [inaudible 00:35:15]

Sahil Patel (35:15):

Okay. Now, let’s look at a totally different kind of page, which is an asset download. This is a classic, what people would call a low intent or lower intent type of experience. They’re probably pretty high up in your funnel. They’re almost never ready to, I don’t even want to say buy. They’re not even ready to typically entertain a sales rep or a free trial or anything. They’ve probably just looked at you and be like, “Huh, pretty interesting. This is pretty cool.” This often sometimes is a lead magnet where you’re promoting it and just trying to get your brand out there and say, “Hey, we have a bit of intellectual capital thought leadership. We’re not trying to get you to buy our product. We’re trying to show we’re credible in the marketplace.”

Randy Wootton (36:02):

And that is exactly what this initiative was. We launched the Maxio Institute, which is a “research arm” of Maxio, but basically it’s the marketing arm. We aggregate the data of our 2,400 customers, which is anonymous billing and invoicing data, about $16 billion a year. And then we have some analysts go crank on it to talk about, well, what’s been happening? And we’re one of the largest providers of insight into the SaaS industry in terms of private companies, not public company data, to talk about what’s going on, and we break it out.

(36:33):

So your point is spot on. It’s meant to be a lead magnet. It’s meant to build credibility as a brand of Maxio. It’s meant to be one of the pillars for thought leadership. I don’t expect anyone to be clicking through and buying tomorrow when they’re reading the report. What I do hope is that the Maxio brand sticks and that they have brand preference, brand favorability. If they were to then go into market, they’d be like, “Oh, yeah, Maxio.” And they may not even remember the report. They’re kind of like, “Oh, yeah. They seem like they’ve got a great brand. I’ll give them a shout.” So it’s exactly that. Low intent, high funnel engagement and brand building exercise.

Sahil Patel (37:11):

There you go. So, Randy, let’s take stock. What do you think this page does well? What do you think it doesn’t do well? And let’s agree. The goal is to get people to engage with the lead magnet to get the report. There’s some benefit if they just look at the page, but really they need to engage with the report. That’s the goal here.

Randy Wootton (37:29):

Well, now that you’ve given me all this coaching, I’m looking at it through a different lens, and I would say it’s what I would… What I’m struck by is how many words are on the page. People probably don’t really care about the table of contents at this point. The actual image could get bigger. There’s a lot of words underneath the growth state of B2B SaaS businesses in June. Given your example on the homepage, it seems to me like there could be a bold claim like the headline on the page around what the growth was in Q1. So we knew it had increased to 19% in Q2. Between us, it’s actually gone back down to 17%, which will be part of our report. So you could definitely create more compelling call to action or insight tied to number on the page. So I get all sorts of ideas, but you’re the expert. What did you get?

Sahil Patel (38:21):

Well, first off, you hit on something that I didn’t do, but I wish I had, which is do a bold headline. So let’s take a look here. Okay? So we didn’t do much with the headline, but I kind of wish we had. I think the value props, we made them easier to skim, and we did that by bolding the first few words. So someone’s eye can hit a few keywords and go, “Okay, I get what this is about.”

Randy Wootton (38:50):

And the rule of three. You’ve got only three.

Sahil Patel (38:52):

Yeah, rule of three. We also put the form on the page.

Randy Wootton (38:58):

Yeah, I see that.

Sahil Patel (38:59):

Now, you might want to test… You could test it both ways with just the CTA and with a form. I’ve seen it work both ways. The goal of this page is to squeeze the person for their contact info.

Randy Wootton (39:13):

Yeah.

Sahil Patel (39:14):

Number one. So you might as well squeeze. Number two, you are only asking for three things: first name, last name, email. So it’s a very light ask. Now, I think if you had a form where you were asking for all kinds of stuff… By the way, it is a terrible idea on an asset download, but you actually are doing the right thing by saying, “Hey, if you just tell us who you are, and we allow you to opt in or out of hearing from us, we’re going to let you see this.” You’re doing it the right way. You’ve done yourself a favor, so take advantage of that. So that’s why I would say go ahead and put the form on the page.

Randy Wootton (39:52):

Well, I hear you. I think we have a lot of debate about what do you give before effectively a paywall, and what do you give after the paywall in terms of information-

Sahil Patel (40:01):

Healthy debate on gating it.

Randy Wootton (40:03):

What do you gate-

Sahil Patel (40:05):

Since you have decided to gate it, you’ve done this one thing by doing a very light gating. Because I look at this and I know this is… I suspect this is gated because it doesn’t say download. It says get the report. That’s code for we want your email address. What I don’t know is, is it email plus [inaudible 00:40:25]

Randy Wootton (40:27):

That’s great. And then I also love the way that you’ve maximized the image. It looks really compelling. Well, great. So I really appreciate it. This is a lot of fun. I’m going to introduce you to our head of marketing. Having been in marketing for 20 or 25 years, I do appreciate using data to influence and impact your strategy and turn it from random acts of marketing into database campaigns and execution and learning how to get people… It’s not just about manipulating your audience, it’s trying to get people the information in the way that they want it. And that value to exchange in terms of what they’re willing to give versus what you give to them. And so I think it’s just a really great value prop that you guys are offering. If people wanted to learn more, other than finding you on LinkedIn, what’s the best way to track you down? Go to your website?

Sahil Patel (41:19):

Best way to track me down personally is LinkedIn. I post multiple mornings a week at 7:30 A.M. always in short, easy to digest. In about 60 seconds or less, you can get something interesting. If you’re interested in what we do as a company, Spiralyze.com.

Randy Wootton (41:38):

Awesome. Well, Sahil, this is the first where we’ve done a teardown or interactive exercise on the podcast. I hope people have found it valuable. I really do appreciate the time you put into it and the time you spent with me today. Best of luck and I look forward to continuing the conversation.

Sahil Patel (41:54):

Likewise, Randy. Really enjoyed it. Thanks for having me.