The Secrets to High-Converting SaaS Landing Pages with Sahil Patel

Welcome to the B2B Growth Blueprint podcast, where we talk with entrepreneurs, founders, and leaders at B2B services, tech, and SaaS companies to learn the systems and processes they've used to create success for their business. We'll also learn from marketing and sales experts to provide insights to help you grow your business. I'm your host, Mark Osborne, and the podcast is brought to you by Modern Revenue Strategies and their 10X ROI B2B Growth Guarantee. Schedule a free diagnostic call to learn the fastest path to double your B2B revenues in just 90 days. Hello and welcome to another episode of the B2B Growth Blueprint Podcast. I'm your host, Mark Osborne, And today I'm very excited to welcome my guest, Sahil Patel. Now I'm going to read his bio because he's done a lot of really cool stuff and I want to make sure I get it right. Sahil is the CEO of Spiralize. They're a leading company specializing in predictive conversion rate optimization. We're going to talk about what that means and how they do that. And they use data-driven landing page optimization. So you're probably familiar with that. Prior to Spiralize, Sahil was the CEO and founder of ER Express. Which was a successful SaaS company, which he led for 11 years before it sold in 2021. He's got over 23 years of experience in sales, operations, software development, and finance. And he also holds an undergraduate degree from Emory University and an MBA from Harvard. So throughout his career, Sahil has worked with renowned organizations such as Netflix, Podium, NBA, Lowe's, Harvard University, and Gusto. He specializes in landing page conversion optimization, and his company Spiralize has run over 100 130,000 A/B tests for clients, and he offers really unique insights into the best practices for efficient A/B testing. So, Sahil, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for joining us.

Well, Mark, that's like the greatest intro I've ever had, so thank you.

Well, a good way to start us off.

I should bring you everywhere I go. You could be my hype man. Really good.

Yeah, I just need one of those towels. I'll run around on stage. So tell us your story. How did you go from, you know, Emory to Harvard to, you know, the ER Express, now Spiralized? Talk to us about that.

Yeah, you know, the first thing I'd say is that it wasn't necessarily well planned out, and a lot of it happened by chance. I mean, I— after Emory, I went and worked in a big consulting company. That was probably the one and only thing that was maybe slightly planned out, in that I worked there as an intern and I really liked it. I got an offer and I got to go to New York. That's a great place to go for everyone. I think you should do it once. And then while there, what I figured out was it was interesting work, but I just that's not where I wanted to spend my, spend my life. But those companies, they're great training grounds. You meet lots of smart people doing your coursework, and they also have a nice track record of getting people to graduate school. And I definitely— that was a big, big part for me. And so I went to business school, knew that I wasn't gonna go back to consulting, and I like the idea of not just kind of advising, but actually doing. So that was my foray into healthcare. I spent 18 years in healthcare tech.

Oh, wow.

Did M&A, did operations, did all kinds of things. And then I started my first company, ER Express, in 2012. And so that's where I went from healthcare tech, like kind of small-ish, medium-ish companies, one of them got pretty big, to then starting my own thing. And that company was ER Express, ran that for 10 years, sold it in 2021. And along the way, I actually was an early customer of Spiralize. And I knew the founder, he told me about it and I was like, oh, it's kind of a cool idea. I used it, became a customer, saw the impact it had. And then when I was thinking about like, what do I do next after ER Express? I'd stayed in touch with the founder here. He had done a really nice job building the business, was a technical founder, and he was looking for a partner because he was good at some things and I was good at some other things. So it's a good, it's a good match. And I came on about 2 and a half years ago. It's been really good.

That's awesome. Yeah, I don't know if you're familiar with like EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System, but a little bit. Yeah, they talk about, you know, you need a visionary and then you need like an integrator. And the visionary says, we gotta go to Miami, like that's where the market's heading. And then the integrator figures out how to get there.

That's right. It's a good way to put it. It's a good way to put it.

Having those, having those 2 components that a company can, you know, make for a lot of success.

It's also, I think, a unique fit because one of the reasons it works is I have been a founder CEO, like I did this where I held both titles for a long time. And so I appreciate what it is to be that. And then he had held that for a while. So he kind of appreciated what it's like to do both things and then what it would be like to do, just be the founder and have the CEO as a partner.

Yeah.

Most of the time when the founder brings in a CEO, it's because they're burnt out and they want to leave, or they are, the investors do it because they just, the founder can't get it done anymore. And they're kind of dragged off stage kicking and screaming. It's a really kind of rare thing that we have. My founder, he's sitting 7 feet from me right now. So yeah, we have, I think, a unique, unique thing. Never could have planned it this way, but now it's here. It works well.

Well, it's so funny that you talk about it, you know, being dragged off stage because companies naturally, you know, go through cycles of, you know, you gotta do this at the beginning till you get product market fit and then you, You need to change gears and do something different to get from, you know, sort of the growth phase. And then you need to do something different to get to that next phase. And so, it actually makes a lot of sense to bring in different players to, you know, sort of play different roles with the company as it goes through those different cycles rather than assuming that one person is going to be excellent at every different lifecycle of the company.

It makes sense. It rarely happens.

Yeah, it makes a lot more sense that you would have different people lead different things. So you've— that's really unique experience that you've, you know, you've done both at multiple different companies and companies that got to sort of different stages and, you know, have sort of different trajectories. What are some of the lessons you've learned that you can share with, you know, our audience that maybe is—

So many. Most of them learned the hard way. That's the first lesson. Just the first time around as a CEO, you're gonna learn pretty much everything the hard way. I feel like that's like the only way I learned it. But the second time around—

Plowing the street with your face?

Like, yeah, that's, that's what it felt like. I— okay, I'll give you a few things. So just to frame this, like my first company, it was a really cool company. It's like my— like I think of it like my third kid because I probably spent as much time with it as I did my two actual kids. So it has like a place in my heart. I think every CEO, like especially if you got— had the unique privilege of doing the CEO thing more than once, like you look back on the first one as, um, kind of a— yeah, yeah, exactly. Uh, but here's the thing, it— we never found that breakthrough growth.

Okay.

Like it was very steadily, in some years we grew a lot, but we were never able to kind of stack like 50% growth year over year over year over year. It was profitable for the vast majority of it, but we never found that breakthrough growth. And at Spiral, it's not that we've figured everything out, but we have found that breakthrough growth. So some— if I, you know, contrast those 2 things, some things I learned. The first thing is having a small TAM, total addressable market, hurts you in all the obvious ways, but it also hurts you in a bunch of non-obvious ways.

Okay.

And one of the things is like, I think there are companies that can be successful in a small TAM. The combination of first-time CEO and small TAM is a really bad combination because the first-time CEO is going to make a ton of rookie mistakes. And when you have that, the TAM, a way I actually like to think about the TAM Rather than not just the upside is the TAM is your margin for error.

Interesting.

Big TAM, lots of margin for error because it's so self-referential.

And if you, if you fall off the tightrope with one client, they're going to tell others, which represents a lot of the market, or what?

It could. It could. That wasn't my experience. I don't think you're wrong, but that wasn't my experience. It's that When you have a big TAM, you can try lots of experiments. You can try, hey, we're gonna do outbound, we're gonna do just inbound, we're gonna try LinkedIn, we're going to try running ads, we're gonna not run ads, we're going to do events. And if you have a big TAM, there's lots of, there's lots of surface area to try those things.

You can find little pockets of opportunity, a little—

Exactly. And you get to an answer faster.

Yeah.

When you have a small TAM, how many things can you try? Like if you have an audience, let's say fundamentally this, like at eRxpress, healthcare tech, that audience, our buyer was, was the nursing leader of the acute care at a hospital.

Yeah.

Those people are fundamentally not on LinkedIn. Or at least they weren't back then. They are, I don't think they are today. Like there's just, there's nothing we could do. Like we couldn't, we couldn't make them go there. Just that huge channel was just locked. We were locked out of it. Number 2, what worked in the US didn't work outside of the US. Hmm.

I could see that.

So there was no portability, right? So the TAM shrunk even further. And number 3, as time goes on, like any market, you get more competitors. And if you have a small TAM and the TAM isn't growing, you're just all now fighting. It's much more of a zero-sum game and it was hard to do partnerships. And then what happened was some of our partners, they had, there's, I'm not gonna name them, but they have these kind of app stores, if you will, for B2B app stores. And exchanges where you kind of say, oh, we integrate with this platform. And then 2 years would go by and then they would very quietly announce their own knockoff product that, by the way, is free and is now like the top listing on their own app exchange. And you're like, oh, that's, that's nice. I thought we were partners. Look, it was in their self-interest to do it. I get that. There's no crying in baseball. There's no crying in business. When you have a big TAM, those things will still happen to you. But you go, okay, that's the margin for error. We're gonna go fish somewhere else. And when you have a small TAM, those things really cut into your growth.

That's, that's such an interesting perspective. And, you know, certainly one that, you know, makes a lot of sense as people think about, you know, where to, where to focus their, where to focus their marketing or where to focus their ideal customer profile and sort of building out that focus. Talk to us about what you've seen different, you know, at Spiralize and tell us a little more about what Spiralize does, because I think that'll be super interesting for the audience. But also, like, what were, you know, some of the differences of coming in with a company that— did they already have sort of product market fit? Did they already have first 100 customers, first 10 customers? And, you know, sort of Recurring revenue? Were they profitable or, you know, like what was that sort of inflection point where you—

Yeah, where was I when I came in? Because it is definitely a different ballgame and I think easier than starting from scratch. And I think I can say that because I've got to start from scratch.

Yeah, zero to one, that cold start's tough.

Okay, Spiralize, we're an A/B testing company. There are 34,000 websites that A/B test and we scrape All of them. So we find everyone else's A/B tests and then we take the best ones and we run those for our customers. We call it predictive CRO. It's different. It's unique because we have all the test data from the entire internet. We can predict which tests work and because we can predict it, we can guarantee our fees.

That's awesome.

Very different. Okay, so that's Spyralys. It's a big market. I wouldn't, go as far as to say it's everyone with a website, but it's everyone with a website. Sure.

It's just whether or not they can afford you.

Yeah. Yeah. So we have, we've carved out, I think, a really nice niche for ourselves, which is 80% of what we do is B2B SaaS companies. And, you know, the medium to larger size companies are a good fit for us. Yeah. That's Spiralize. So, so it's a, it's a big market. It's a horizontal business rather than a vertical business. And Look, if you have a website, let's say you're a cybersecurity company in Cincinnati, I'm gonna pick where I'm from, and we work with you, we can take what we learned. And let's say you're a cybersecurity company in London, we can also work with you.

Yeah.

Again, that fundamentally was not true about ER Express. You cannot take what works in the US healthcare market and export it elsewhere. A, it's regulated. B, just the dynamic is so unbelievably different. You can't even take it to Canada, by the way. There's no urgent care in Canada. Urgent care is basically— this is probably an inaccurate thing to say, but it's more or less illegal. There's no urgent care. There's 19,000 urgent cares in the US, more if you count like CVS as urgent care. It's kind of arguable whether it is or not. There's literally zero in Canada. So like Our best possible chance, English-speaking country where the guy actually goes, just closed off.

Wow.

Right? That's healthcare, healthcare IT to be specific. So Spiralife is very different, very different. And so A, it's a horizontal business. A, B, it's portable. What works in— much of which works in one place can work somewhere else. And where was it when I got there? Yes, they had gone well past 100 customers. It was profitable. It was growing. I can't reveal financials here, but it was growing. And, you know, my job was, how do we take it to the next level?

Yeah.

And it wasn't all smooth sailing. The day I arrived, like almost the day after I arrived, the recession of 2022 hit. It wasn't obvious on that day, but in about 3 months it was not looking good. And I like to joke that kind of if you plot like the arrival date of Sahil and you plot like the enterprise value of Spiralize, it's just like downhill, like perfect inverse correlation. And And by the way, we, we, we had a tough year, 2022. We had to do a layoff round and I was coming in as a growth CEO. And usually that's not what the, like, the growth CEO story was.

Not what you want to happen.

No, you don't want it to happen. And you certainly— that's not why you bring in a growth CEO. On the other hand, I think the, the, that maybe the asset I brought to the table is I had been through— I'd lived in the peaks and the valleys. As a CEO the first time around. So, you know, I had some perspective that first you gotta focus on the controllables. Number 2, if you face a tough situation, you just gotta do it and, you know, take the tough medicine.

Eat that frog.

Yeah, yeah, you gotta do it and you gotta think about you're playing the game for the people who are still there, as painful as it is at any time to reduce staff for any reason.

Yeah.

You're doing it for, to be, to be there, to live to fight another day.

So, but it did turn around.

It did.

And it took a while. Is there one thing that you would say was, you know, as you look back, what was one of the, you know, either sort of principles or strategies or, you know, sort of frameworks or, you you know, system that would you sort of hang the hat on of, you know, this was one of the things that was really helpful in that breakthrough?

Yeah, there's a couple of things and it's a good question. And now maybe it's, we've had about a year and a half since the turnaround. So I have a little bit of perspective on it. Look, I think the first thing is Personally, just to be real, we tried a lot of different things and most of them didn't work. Just—

Well, you are in the testing space.

I would only expect that you would test lots of things. Yes. Here's the first thing. I mean, if I had to say like what was the principle behind what we did is we started just at the Like the beginning. Well, first we weren't gonna— we had to return to growth. So let's just frame this as a growth problem, not a cost. And we had cut not every cost, but almost every cost that was reasonable to cut.

Yeah.

And at that point it was like, we can't cut our way back into this, solving this. We gotta get a growth. So it was a growth problem. And we started with like our sales process and then we took our sales process and we broke it into smaller pieces. And we just started at the beginning. Maybe there's other ways to do this. I just felt like, let's start with the beginning. Where does sales process start? With lead gen. Okay, let's fix lead gen. Okay, lead gen is working. Okay, let's work on how we get sales, the prospects into the funnel. Okay, what's our sales pitch like? All of those things took longer than you ever thought it would. The lead gen Wow. It took 8 months.

It's so good to hear you say that, partly because so many folks are like, oh, well, we'll knock that out in, you know, the next 6 weeks. And, you know, we do like a diagnostic working with companies where we have about 20 KPIs that, or, you know, metrics, measurables, whatever you want to call them, that we've identified That, you know, or, you know, here are some benchmarks from other companies of a similar size in a similar space. And so we break them into attraction systems. Are you attracting the right prospects and a healthy volume of them and from different channels? Are you accelerating those best opportunities to the sales pipeline? And then are you activating existing clients for fast renewals, larger upsells, more referrals? And just that exercise of looking at 20 KPIs, benchmarking them against competitors and saying, wow, we're actually okay in a few areas. But this one area, if we could just fix that, you know, sucking chest wound, it would make everything else work so much better. And just having that focus, you know, really makes a lot of difference for companies. So, it's interesting to hear you say that was, you know, one of the breakthroughs for you was creating that focus and then, you know, focusing on one area at a time and implementing the systems that improved it.

Um, look, I didn't set out and be like, guess what, we're gonna spend 8 months on lead gen.

Sure.

But, you know, when it started getting better and then, you know, at like kind of month 4 it got better and we could kind of start taking attention to elsewhere. But yeah, I'd say it took 8 months to get that right. Now, kind of then along the way we're like, okay, let's work on our sales pitch. And that took a long time To get right, I mean, I would say just all told, it took a year to to come up with what I would call kind of sales 2.0. By the way, I want to be clear: it's not that sales before was broken or our sales VP was bad. She was wonderful. She was incredible. She's still a friend, wildly successful here, wildly successful where she is today, which is not here. And we, by the way, we didn't get rid of her. She was firmly part of the answer. But by the way, one thing that happened was as we started to get things back on rails, our sales VP left and she said, hey, I've had this incredible run here, but it's time for my next chapter. Yeah, that was also not part of the plan. That's just, um, so, um, you know, I'd say principle number 2 is just focus on the controllables, like just at every step of the way. And I think you can Again, the perspective I have, having lived in the peaks and valleys one time before, is it just gives you an appreciation for— you just have to let go of the things out of your control. Yeah, I didn't do a good job of that all the first time around, and I'm not saying I'm awesome at it now, but I'm much better at it.

Sure. Well, you know, it's a muscle that has to be built. But thank you so much for sort of the candor and transparency and sharing sort of your journey and the lessons you've learned. I want to switch gears a little bit. And, you know, you have such an interesting perspective at Spiralize of seeing all of these different tests and knowing what works.

It's pretty cool.

Yeah, and knowing what works. So I'd love to get you to sort of crack open that egg for us. What are some of the things, and, you know, most of our audiences, they're, you know, in the B2B space, professional services, software as a service, software with a service, you know, sort of long contracts, you know, big, you know, average order value, which means lots of decision makers, which means a long sales cycle, the types of folks that conversion rate, you know, matters. Tell us what some of the principles that you've seen work for companies like that in executing A/B tests on landing pages. Is it— tell us what works.

Yeah. Look, I'll lay out 3 things that I've seen work over and over and over and over. And I'll say in the context of B2B SaaS. That's, that's the world I know. Some of the stuff I think works elsewhere could work, but this is the world I know. It's the context for all this. 3 big things that I've seen work over and over and over. Number 1, show the product, show the product, show the product. Number 2, make everything easy to skim.

One swipe through the page.

Yeah. And then let's focus on those 2 and then we'll come back. There's a ton of things to unpack, but even kind of those first 2 things. Now, showing the product, it seems like such a no-brainer, but you'd be— it's amazing how many B2B SaaS companies use stock imagery, happy people, their arms crossed, like a cardigan, and just like, who are these people? Why are they having so much fun? In this conference room. Why are they holding it? I had one the other day and the person had a laptop, but they were holding like— they weren't typing, they were holding the laptop like this and typing. I was just like, like, what is that? Their hand looked like Montgomery Burns, like kind of like weird spindly fingers. And I was like, what? Who uses a laptop? Why would you put that like on their homepage? Like, why would you do that? Uh, look, think about this, and I invite everyone listening to do this. Mark, let me ask you, can you think of the last car ad that you saw? Can you think of what brand it was?

Yeah, I, I happened to notice a Hyundai ad this morning.

Okay, nice. What was happening in the ad?

Driving through the city.

Yeah, driving through the city. And imagine that same— and then maybe some lifestyle stuff, and they Maybe they're appealing to the kind of the urbanites of the showing in big city. Maybe a different kind of ad might show people out, you know, if it's a Subaru, they're kayaking.

Out in the country. Yeah, they're driving.

But imagine that Hyundai ad driving through the city. And now take the same ad and just subtract the car, like erase the car. What would you be left with?

Yeah, just B-roll of, of Los Angeles.

Yeah, I mean, it's great, but who would figure out that that's a car ad?

Right.

And yet we do this over and over and over in B2B SaaS. We have a landing page and it doesn't show the price. Like, guys, they clicked on the ad. Like, why are you showing people? And furthermore, if you can show it, why are you showing stock photos of people? It looks cheap. It just doesn't communicate. It is the equivalent of running a car ad without the car. It's just show the product, show the product, show the product. Okay, number 2, write for skimmability. Skimmability, by the way, is a made-up word. And my, you know, my high school English teacher would cringe to hear me say that, but it's a thing. Skimmability is a thing. It means easy to skim. Get rid of the wall of text and bullet points. Just make it simple. And then the 3rd principle. Is start with a hook. The mistake I see again B2B SaaS companies do is A, they try to convince you to buy or why they're better. First of all, no one B2B SaaS just rarely people are making a buy decision based on your homepage in the first two seconds. Number two, you actually don't need to prove that you're better. You just need to prove why you're different. Yeah. Right. I would, I assume that before they go to your homepage, they've looked at at least 5 of your competitors. And by the time they get to you, you're the 6th, whatever company they've looked at and just, it's all going to start to look the same. So your job is to just get them to stop scrolling. And the way you do that is with a great hook. And your job is not to get investors. Your job is not to get job seekers. It's fine. There's other parts of your website to do that. But on the most valuable real estate on your website, that homepage, it's the front door to your business. A great hook, simple, is the place to start. And that's the way to judge it is, does it have instant clarity on what you do and why someone should stay? And it should accomplish that in less than 3 seconds. It's about how much time you have.

Yeah. So 2 great things that you call out there that I have to, you know, sort of amplify a little bit. And the first is this idea of, you know, converting them to buy right away. What we see is companies that really understand the buyer's journey that their customers go through from becoming problem aware, deciding whether or not to prioritize solving the problem at all, much less The way that you solve it, deciding whether to, you know, you know, which company to work with. Like, those are all different stages and having different ads to appeal to people at different stages and then different content and conversion points where you're adding value at each of those stages is the real key to success. Instead of, you know, let's get married on a, you know, first time you meet somebody, it's maybe we should, you know, have a phone call, then maybe a coffee date. Then maybe we go on a trip together. Then maybe we propose, uh, rather than trying to do it all, cram it all in.

It's a great analogy. Yeah. First date, like, don't come out with like, where should the wedding be?

Yeah, exactly. How many kids would you like?

Or even, well, I would say even worse. So it's more aggressive is like, here's why you should marry me. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I'm kind of still deciding if we're even like, Yeah, exactly.

If I want to spend 15 minutes over coffee with you.

Yeah, exactly. I got— actually, I was just— I wasn't even thinking about you. I was thinking about like, do I want a flat white or a cappuccino? It's seriously— that's kind of where people's consideration is. It's like they're not poring over your homepage like it's the Dead Sea Scrolls. That's right. Like they're probably looking at it on a phone. The kid is crying. They're making the grocery list. Yeah, someone's Amazon person's delivering a box at the front door, and they're kind of giving it a quick. And and if they have to go like, what is this? Yeah, you've lost them. And if they can just be like, oh, this is accounting software for retailers. Okay. Oh, why is it different?

Yeah, exactly.

And that I can it it starts working in one day.

Oh yeah.

Okay. That's about the level that you're going for.

Yeah, that difference is so crucial. And so often we see people talk about, you know, the benefits of the category, if they're even benefit-focused, much less feature-focused, but they'll just talk about the benefits of the category. I'm like, great, they're, you know, they've already elected to do this thing. And so you're just sounding exactly like everyone else. It's so hard, especially in B2B where, You really want, you know, sort of a longstanding engagement with folks. They can't know that you are better until after they've eaten the, you know, after they've taken a bite. You gotta convince them to order the food first. And so, the way to do that is to focus on your onlyness. Like, what's the, you know, only is so much better than better because better is almost impossible to sort of unpack.

Yes.

Well, how can I know that you were better until I've taken a bite? And by then, the whole game is over. Whereas if I know, all right, it's a chicken sandwich versus a burger, I can now decide which is better for me and then make that choice. But being better is so much tougher to prove from the outside.

You know, I love how you said it only is Is the way to do it versus better. And, and, you know, now I will tell you where I think some people go get it wrong on only is that they then look at it from their perspective and don't consider their audience's perspective. I mean, you see this the way it manifests itself is people write something like the only all-in-one CRM system. The number one rated. And I'm like, first of all, do you really think you're the only? Just kind of news reality check that. Or the all-in-one. I was like, guys, even Salesforce doesn't do everything. Now you could say they've built an ecosystem, so maybe they can make the argument, but guess what? You're not Salesforce.

Right.

There's basically 2 companies, HubSpot, Salesforce. The rest of y'all, you're not like, how could you be all in one? Um, and, or they, they give, you know, what I call kind of, you know, you know, your mom awards. You know, your mom says you're the best singer, your mom says you're the best basketball player. That's why no one else believes that. So it's just like, you wouldn't, like, you know, you would— if you're trying out for the basketball team, you wouldn't, like, lead with, hey coach, my mom thinks I'm the best player. You'd be like, You'd be like, hey, why don't you dribble? Why don't you pass? Why don't you shoot? Why don't you do some defense? Why don't you box some people out? You get a couple rebounds. Let the coach decide if you can play. Say, I think it's the same thing. You should like, don't, don't come out with like the number one. No, no, no one believes that's not the way to get to onlyness.

Yeah, that those reasons to believe are so important. And, uh, the believability, uh, of those reasons to believe and the credibility, uh, of them is oftentimes overlooked. But, you know, sometimes that's all you got. My mom says I'm, my mom says I'm a handsome boy. So that's what I got.

My mom says I'm handsome too. Now, here's what I think does work. There are some people, some companies that legitimately can be, make a claim to having gotten, being very good or maybe even top at what they do. And they have social proof that backs it up. And when you have that, I absolutely think, you know, it's a, you got it, flaunt it. kind of case. Like, so if you've got that Gartner Magic Quadrant rating, especially in the enterprise audience, that carries a lot of weight. Now, if you're SMB, you know, you're selling to the Sawhills Dry Cleaner, he doesn't give a shit about that. But if you're selling to big enterprise and you've got a buying committee and you've got IT people and they've got, you know, they're risk averse and you've got that Gartner kind of thing, You should use it. Like, I think it's a little fashionable to bash Gartner and, and Capterra and all these right now. And I, I would caution everyone, or I would say there's an audience that, that those kind of like, we call them trust badges.

Yeah.

There's an audience that those trust badges have currency, and if you use them correctly and they're legit, our data shows they can be very powerful. In terms of driving conversions and driving sales.

Well, but you hit on the key point, which is understanding your ideal customer and the different personas of the members of the buying committee and what matters to them. And, you know, what stage of the process are you trying to get through? I'm certain from things that I've seen that those trust badges are potentially great at getting you into that consideration set. So now you're in the conversation, They're maybe not that persuasive at actually closing the deal later in that decision-making process. So understanding that buyer's journey and those informational needs that they have at different stages and who that buyer really is, is really that key to success.

Yeah, well put. Yeah.

So you're obviously a font of knowledge, and I really appreciate you taking the time to unpack your experience in leading companies and also the insights that you have from Spiralize, but I gotta be mindful of your time and we're sort of getting to the end. But before we go, tell us something that's on the horizon that you're really excited about, either for you personally or for Spiralize.

Well, I'll tell you something that brings a lot of joy to what I do, which is I host a game show. It's called CRO Crimes, Conversion Rate Optimization Crimes, and It's kind of a fun way to get this very eat your veggies concept of like, how do you optimize websites and how do you get more people flowing from visitor to conversion in a fun way? And so when the guests come on, it's a little bit like if you've watched Beat Bobby Flay, they have to outcook Bobby Flay, but they both, you know, they both have to make a burger and then the judges Decide who made the best burger. So the guests come on and they have to beat me. We do like 5 rounds of different CRO things, like we look at a homepage and pick out all the things that are hurting their conversions, and we have 4 headlines, one of which is fake. They're all kind of cringy. They're all by design to be so bad you couldn't believe any of them are real, but 3 are real, one is fake, and it's a lot of fun and it's I love having people on, and when people come on, they usually say like, oh, this is, this is different than, than kind of most things. And if they win, the winner gets, uh, whoever wins, me or the challenger, uh, gets $100 to their charity. That's awesome.

CRO Crimes, is that it?

CRO Crimes. And if it sounds interesting, check me out on LinkedIn, Sahil Patel, and I post 4 mornings a week. It's not all game show, but I post CRO-related stuff, try to make it kind of 90 seconds, 2 minutes tops, something 4 days a week.

That's awesome. So for our audience that has been listening and has learned so much from you and they want to, you know, learn more about working with Spiralize, is LinkedIn the best way to get in touch or what would be the best way?

Yeah. So if you're really interested in Spiralize, please come check out spiralize.com and you can see what we do. I think we have something pretty unique. And if you want to more generally, I think, learn about conversion and best practices, check me out on LinkedIn. I share stuff regularly that's not a commercial for Spiralize. It's just, here's things we've learned.

That's awesome. Sahil, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. You've absolutely really dropped a lot of knowledge on us. I've loved our conversation. So thanks so much.

Thanks for having me, Mark.

Talk to you soon. Thank you for joining this episode of the B2B Growth Blueprint podcast. We hope you've gained insights to grow your business. If you enjoyed this discussion, please rate, comment, like on your favorite platform, and share to others who will find it useful. Do you know a CEO, founder, or leader at an early-stage B2B services, tech, or SaaS company who would like to be a guest and share their story? Send us a note. Let's schedule a conversation.