Patrick McKenzie's talk at Microconf 2013, on how to build systems (large and small) that help you sell the things you build.

1. BUILDING THINGS
TO HELP
SELL THE THINGS
YOU BUILD
Patrick McKenzie

2. Want To Follow?
 Hashtag #MicroConf or tweet at @patio11
 Slides are available at
http://bitly.com/microconfRocks

3. Bingo Cards… Who Knew,
Right?

4. We Were All Newbies Once
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5. See My First Microconf Talk
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6. Once More, With(out) Feeling

7. Products With A Side Of Consulting
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8. 2012 Was A Very Good Year

9. Not Important Relative To Last
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10. Quick Wins To Pay For
Microconf 2014
Look for the star!
$X,000 in return for under 2 hours of work.

11. The Fundamental SaaS
Equation
 Traffic is hardest to optimize for – see Rob
Walling‟s presentation or mine from 2011.
 Conversion rate throughout funnel is easier to
optimize (A/B testing, funnel analytics, etc), but
takes weeks/months to see results.
 ARPU you can manipulate with a few minutes
of work
 Churn: run your own Operation Retention

12. Charge. More.
• Killed the $9 plan
• Added in $199
plan due to
apparent demand

13. In Which I Take My Own Darn
Advice
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Scaled Revenue for Appointment Reminder

14. Lifecycle Emails For SaaS

15. How Is This Different Than Last
Year?
 Drip email marketing is often/typically pre-
signup, lifecycle emails are post-signup.
 Lifecycle emails require more app-specific
logic.
 Very helpful: good understanding of funnel.
 Not required:
 Lots of volume
 Great copywriting

16. Get People To Upgrade To Annual
Billing
 Offer discount (“1 month
free”) if they switch to
annual billing.
 Offer it to “loyal
customers” over email
 One click + confirmation
to switch.
 Conversion rate from
10% to 25%+
 Immediate revenue of
$200 per email sent

17. Raising Your ARPU, Trivially
Consider Bob, who has
280 appointments a
month and is on Small
Business ($79).
Is Bob happy? How can
we make him happier?
We should do Bob a
solid and convince him
to upgrade to Office
($199), perhaps at a
discount.

18. Did This At A Consulting Client
 “Run my a SQL query of everyone who is
within 20% of quota on
FEATURE_1, FEATURE_2, or FEATURE_3”
(~3 minutes)
 Add in 3 extra special-offer plans, which were
equivalent to existing tiers but at a slight
(~20%) discount (2 minutes)
 Write a two paragraph email and interpolate
their account data (25 minutes)
 Made +N% of yearly recurring revenue

19. Investigating Low Conversion Rate
 Takes ~20 minutes to do in Rails or whatever
 Put it on a dashboard which you use for
Customer Support tasks, review daily-ish
 Get qualitative feedback no matter how
poor/small data is

20. What‟s The Difference?

21. Walking People Through The
Trial
They start
They
succeed
They get
confused

22. My Trial Email Sequence
 Day Zero: Auto-generated welcome
 Day Three: Personal welcome from me
 Day Twenty:
 If trial is successful: sell them hard
 If trial is unsuccessful: rescue the trial
 Day Twenty Seven: “incoming charge”

23. Welcome Mail
 Establish
expectations for
trial
 Getting started
guide
 Introduce yourself
and ask for them
to email you

24. Personalized Welcome
 Styled to look like sent one-on-one
 Announce your availability
 Ask for email
 “Sent from my iPhone” – maybe not
 Lots of folks send this automatically within an
hour, almost certainly a good idea but I don‟t do it
personally

25. Free Trial Going Well
 Simple heuristic
 Do ROI calculation
 Close sale (or
mention it is
automatic)
 Immediate incentive

26. Free Trial Not Going Well
 Simple heuristic
 Figure out why they
aren‟t doing well
 Offer a trial
extension if they
talk to you
 Great opportunity
for customer
development

27. Weekly Checkup (“Get Them
Promoted”)
 High perceived
value
 Great engagement
 Creates “ongoing
earned media” via
the option to embed
announcements/link
s/etc
 Makes ROI
discussions
academic

28. Digging Into Individual Accounts
If he cancels or has a
CC billing failure
he gets a phone call.
Everybody gets a
dunning email, sent three

29. [Action Required] Appointment Reminder
Could Not Renew Your Subscription
 Get to the point ASAP
 Prominent link to
capture updated CC
data
 Extend a 3 day grace
period, try daily within
grace
 Don‟t forget a “You
didn‟t update so we
took the liberty of
pausing your account”
email

30. How To Quit Consulting

31. But Patrick, Why Would I Quit
Consulting?
 People say consulting doesn‟t scale.
Horsepuckey.
 Ways to scale consulting:
 Move your rate up, dramatically
 Hire people
 Improve your utilization at the margin

32. So Why Really?
 Constant rat race to get new clients
 Lots of unpaid time doing prospecting /
proposal / administrative work
 You have a boss and you have to go to
work every day

33. Why Not Replace With
Software?

34. Why Not Replace With A SaaS?
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35. So What Do We Do Then?
 Productized consulting
 Your most common / most valuable consulting
engagement, delivered without the full dance
 An e-book / video course / etc
 A training event / seminar / etc
 Sell it through email
 Offer it at a variety of price points
 Make several gigs worth of money in a
repeatable, scalable, tweakable fashion… with
lead-in time of 2 weeks to 3 months, not 6 months
to 5 years

36. My Non-software Product
 Most common consulting engagement (2010):
“We send no email. Can you, like, fix that?”
 I would implement:
 Drip marketing (see Microconf 2012 presentation)
 Lifecycle emails (like two minutes ago)
 It generally required:
 Lots of sales / convincing
 A bit of coding
 Copywriting delivered by me, the non-expert

37. Goals For Productized
Consulting
 Convince people who already find me credible
that they should be doing email, too
 Teach them how to implement:
 Drip marketing (see Microconf 2012 presentation)
 Lifecycle emails (like two minutes ago)
 This generally requires:
 Lots of sales / convincing delivered at scale
 SaaS products I could recommend and glue code I
could describe in high-level detail rather than write
 Copywriting that I could teach them to do
themselves

38. Why Would You Buy That Over
Consulting?
 Because it‟s $500 versus $20,000
 Because you couldn‟t find somebody to do this
for you
 Because you‟re not sure you can get to it right
now
 Because it‟s a cheap, easy way “to test the
waters”

39. Why Not Get It Free On the
Internet?
 Because real businesses spend money on
problems
 “Free if you have two week to research it” is
not free to someone who cuts paychecks
bi-weekly
 Because paid initiatives signal quality and help
to reduce roadblocks to adoption within an
organization

40. The Key To Marketing It
 Started building an email list a few months in
advance
 Focused 75% on teaching people stuff
(pricing, selling to enterprises, A/B testing, etc)
and 25% on telling them about upcoming
product
 Sent two, count „em, two sales emails
 Sent folks to a long copy page

41. My “Squeeze Page” For Emails
http://training.kalzumeus.co
m
Promotion:
• Put a HelloBar lookalike
on blog, mentioned
occasionally in blog posts
• Tweeted once or twice
• Ended up on HN once
because the community
knows me
Not just for the “Internet
famous”: I got 5,000 signups
but total “unknowns”
routinely hit X00 in a day

42. LifecycleEmails.com Long Copy #1
Establish value
proposition very
early
Main heading and
subhead only there to
convince you “In or
out, do you want to
read more?
Note “intriguing”
copywriting like
“unreasonable

43. LifecycleEmails.com Long Copy #2
Use a case study
from your
consulting career
Copywriting wise, just
because it‟s long copy
doesn‟t mean it has to
be a Giant Wall of

44. LifecycleEmails.com Long Copy #3
Personal testimonial
from a consulting
client with graphical
call-out
Customer is more like
Jason than like you or
me

45. LifecycleEmails.com Long Copy #4
Acknowledge
prospects’
objections and
answer them
(Amy Hoy: “Can you
smell the guilt here?”)

46. LifecycleEmails.com Long Copy #5
BENEFITS OF
TAKING THIS are
more important to
the customer than
what it contains
But be explicit on
that, too.

47. LifecycleEmails.com Packaging
Pricing:
Again, charge
more, charge
more, charge more.
Multiple ways to buy
means multiple ways
for best customers to
discover ways to pay
you more money.

48. Nathan Barry Is An Effing
Genius
“Designing Web Applications”
Three packages: $249 / $99 / $39
Sales focuses on what customer
gets not on what the price is
So how did that work out for
Nathan?

49. Packaging Is A Huge Win
0
10,000
20,000
30,000
Book Alone $49Book & Videos $99Complete Package $
Nathan's Sales By
Package
0
10,000
20,000
30,000
40,000
50,000
1
Mo' Packages = Mo' Money
Complete
Package $249
Book &
Videos $99
Book Alone
$49

50. What About The Actual
Product?
 Me speaking into my webcam and a $60
microphone
 Loosely scripted. If I do it again, will add slides.
 Took ~2 weeks to record plus a video editor
(ARGH) that cost about $3,000, but added fairly
little value over $300 on oDesk.
 Hosted the videos on Wistia and rolled my own
delivery platform (you should probably use
Gumroad or similar)
 Partnered with folks with related interests:
additional value to customers at vanishingly little
work to me

51. Funny Story About The
Revenue
 Launch day (sent an email, it got on HN):
$12,862
 Next week or two: $16,576
 “Reminder: the sale ends today” : $15,579
 Total to date: $64,608

52. Keys To Product Success
 Email, email, email. Get people on it, delight
them with the things you can teach them, sell
only very occasionally.
 Target a pain point which you know there is a
demand for. Consulting = validated
market, right?
 Work on your copy. You don‟t have to be a
genius. I certainly am not. (Joanna has a
book, buy it: copyhackers.com 100X ROI
for me)
 Deliver quality products, because you only
have one reputation.

53. For more details
 Get on my email list @
training.kalzumeus.com
 Special bonus for Microconf folks: You can
have the lifecycle emails product for free if you
didn‟t already buy it, or the next one (probably
on A/B testing) if you did. Send me an email. I
trust you.

54. Thanks for Listening
 Blog at http://www.kalzumeus.com
 Slides will be posted. See @patio11
 Send me email. I love chatting about this.
patrick@kalzumeus.com